This week, don’t miss out on Orchestral Manoeuvres the ArtScience Museum’s new blockbuster exhibition that’s a paean to the rare medium of sound art.
Over at UltraSuperNew Gallery, art consultancy Mama Magnet has curated a delightful group show called A Most Absurd Guide that promises to be a riot of self-awareness, irony and wicked satire – just the thing we need in these dreary times.
Lastly, literature fans should check out independent book publisher Epigram’s beautiful new pop-up over at Beach Road.
If you’ve been feeling existential with all the wild ongoings of the world lately, head down to UltraSuperNew Gallery, where art programming consultancy Mama Magnet is putting on a new group exhibition that uses humour as a means to combat dreary headlines.
Titled A Most Absurd Guide, the exhibition features new works by three artists across Southeast Asia – namely HelloPigu (Singapore), Krack! Studio (Indonesia) and Soika Vomiter (Philippines), each sprinkling their distinctive “pungent essence of bizarre cultural attitudes specific to their region”.
HelloPigu offers their trademark Pigubao character (expect “ancestral wisdom, irony, atrocities and psychosis”) while Krack! Studio presents hand-pulled silkscreen works that are actually life-hack manuals depicting truly ingenious Indonesian logic. Meanwhile, Cebu-based artist Soika Vomiter (PH) expresses laughter and insanity in their oil paintings of disintegrating caricatures of the self.
It all sounds like a guaranteed masterclass in satire and delightful absurdity. Uf that’s your cup of tea, RSVP here.
On now till Sept 11 at 168 Tyrwhitt Road
Independent book publisher Epigram Books has found a new home. For the uninitiated, the publisher had to unexpectedly close their existing space at Maxwell Road last month within days of notice (the reason for which has yet to be disclosed).
However, they’ve temporarily found a new home in a cosy spot on Beach Road, where they’ll be hosted for the next five months at lifestyle empire The Lo & Behold Group’s reading room space, Looksee Looksee. There’ll also be coffee on-site, courtesy of local coffee machine brand Morning.
Books, coffee and beautiful architecture? It already sounds like a hit to us.
Ongoing at 267 Beach Road
The ArtScience Museum is continuing its 10th anniversary and the latest event in their line-up is definitely a whopper.
Titled Orchestral Manoeuvres: See Sound. Feel Sound. Be Sound., the exhibition focuses on all things aural, featuring multi-media works by 32 artists and composers from eight countries, who explore sound through sculpture, installation and music.
Orchestral Manoeuvres presents sound art projects, early music notation, experimental scores, noise-making sculptures, video installations and contemporary artworks. One of the key highlights is a presentation of iconic artwork The Forty Part Motet by noted Canadian artist Janet Cardiff (pictured), which will be showing for the first time in Southeast Asia.
Presented over nine segments in which audiences are invited to tune in and absorb the vibrations through various instruments, soundtracks and installations, this is an unusual sonic landscape you’re not likely to find anywhere else.
“Most of us are swimming in an ocean of sounds that we often disregard or choose to ignore. Orchestral Manoeuvres is an intimate reflection on the relationship between art and music. It encourages us to think about the sounds around us and feel them more deeply. Some artists in the exhibition explore silence. You will also encounter singers who don’t sing and a choir of people you can’t see. This exhibition includes a piano that plays itself and instruments you’ve never seen or heard before,” says Adrian George, the museum’s director of exhibitions who co-curated the show with Amita Kirpalani, curator at ArtScience Museum.
More details here.
Opens Aug 28 at 6 Bayfront Ave