There’s plenty for art and design lovers to check out this month, with the return of Singapore Design Week; the tentpole festival promises more than 50 events that all utilise design as a medium with which to address problems. More details below.
It looks to be a busy period for design aficionados, with the return of industry tentpole event Singapore Design Week after a two-year hiatus. The event is structured around three main pillars: Design Futures (which focuses on how design can be used to build cities more adaptable and resilient to climate change and pandemics for instance), Design Marketplace (where you can expect to find a vast assortment of works by emerging and established designers from all over the world), and Design Impact (which showcases design-driven real-life solutions that address today’s most critical issues, from waste and sustainability to mental health and our ageing society).
There’s a lot to check out, with more than 50 events and 200 designers taking part in this 10-day festival, but we’d say start at ground zero: head down to National Design Centre, where the building has been transformed into N*thing is Possible, a regenerative design showcase co-curated by some pretty major lifestyle and design heavyweights – culture juggernaut Potato Head and renowned design firm OMA (aka Prada’s go-to studio), with creations by international design luminaries such as Kengo Kuma, Futura, Max Lamb, Toogood Design, Eco Mantra and Thibaut Grevet all present.
For the full list of events at Singapore Design Week, head here.
Sep 16 to Sep 25 at various locations
Whatever your perceptions of Little India, be prepared to have them challenged at Re-Route Festival – an entity that immerses visitors in an alternate storytelling of the district through a collective of creative voices, to demonstrate how design can be used as a tool to spotlight heritage. Curated by Mervin Tan and Cheryl Sim from events agency Plus Collaboratives, the festival focuses on giving renewed focus on three particular sites within the Little India district; New World Amusement Park, Race Course and Serangoon Road.
The organisers have pulled together history (did you know that New World Amusement Park was first opened in 1923 and that it’s Singapore’s first space dedicated to entertainment for the masses?) and various contemporary artists to put a new spin on the former. For example, there’s a six-course food walk helmed by chef Drew Nocente by integrating unique ingredients (such as stracciatella, pistachios, pickles and pineapple) with traditional dishes found in Little India.
Intrigued? Check out the full list of programmes here.
Sep 16 to Oct 9 at various locations
Multi-disciplinary space Appetite has been a star on the local culinary landscape since it debuted in late 2020, with their cross-cultural approach to food, art and music. Recent months have seen the space host intimate talks, workshops and surprise exhibitions, such as one focused on rare photos of seminal lensman Robert Mapplethorpe.
The current exhibition in the space is titled Mise en Place (a French term for the art of assembling ingredients and equipment before starting to cook), a tongue-in-cheek reference to Appetite’s own site as a starting point to explore the poetics of every day, subverting the familiar through humour and wit.
The exhibition brings together works by rising art stars Mauricio Alejo, Lesley-Anne Cao, Chen Wei (pictured here), Catherine Hu, Chayanin Kwangkaew, and Genevieve Leong – all of whom are known to present works that are typically highly tactile and curiously offbeat. Together, these works challenge our expectations of objects and the environments they inhabit – much like how Appetite’s concept was developed to emulate the home.
On now till Dec 31 at Appetite, 72A Amoy Street