Reading Group: <em>To the Tombs</em> led by artist Luca Lum
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Participants will address the death or afterlife of a person, idea, technology, place, or community, that is connected to Singapore, through a creative form that begins with texts from the <i>Reading Room</i>. Participants approach these texts as death poems and elegies directed towards their identified object, whose presence in current reality is arguably tenuous— an endangered form or an object that is yet to come, that may have shifted the directions of our worlds, but is currently diminished in its form—and situate this towards something else within the exhibition space. Instead of focusing on built solutions, the group will examine and concoct the temporalities and topologies of loss, dispossession, longing, memorialisation, and ruin. Participants should come prepared with a brief idea of the endangered or expired object/subject/event they are addressing.
2019-08-03
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Luca Lum
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Launched in 2014 by the Singapore government, the Smart Nation initiative aims to enhance economic productivity and urban efficiency through technological streamlining and boundary-marking of both territories and bodies. Since the onset of her residency, Luca Lum has turned to the “soft architectures” and “non-events” of the city, that loose and ungraspable entanglement of sentiment and decoration, behaviours and bodies that defines urban life. Her research focuses on the diffractive relationship between two specific sites: Geylang, a little-known testbed to many Smart Nation initiatives, and Marina, Singapore’s anchoring “global” image. Understanding the optical phenomena of diffraction and iridescence as relational geometries that connect positions of proximity and distance, generate states of affection, and undergo multiple interferences, the artist is conducting repeated visits to the areas. Through her open-ended explorations, she is in the process of mapping and morphing the distinct attitudes and streaks of desires that inform the two sites. Her eclectic approach spans across various media and materializes in the form of photographs, objects, drawings, recordings, scores, and texts.
2 April – 28 September 2018
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Luca Lum
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<i>impasse to verbal</i> by Luca Lum
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Interested in the “semiotic thickness” of Geylang, an area located on the east-central side of Singapore where bustling street life, covert activities, information technologies, and data mining protocols are increasingly intertwined, Luca Lum has been observing the diffuse entanglements of bodies and surfaces, behaviours and networks that define contemporary urban life. <i>impasse to verbal</i> comes out from her continued engagement with the neighbourhood and from her speculations on the slippage between what things are, how they look, and what they do—which the artist defines as the play between description and disposition. <br /><br />The work is a visual assemblage that merges wall notices, official zoning maps, personal routes, and various extracts sampled from the urban landscape. Through an intricate interplay of stratifications and transparencies, it creates an imploded visual environment where information is simultaneously displayed and withdrawn, revealed and cloaked. Steeped in a pervasive blue glow reminiscent of the light of electronic devices, the signs are left to float and clash into leaky configurations that shatter conventional patterns of readability.
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