Curating Lab | Phase 03 exhibition

Opening Night: 17 Jan 2013
Time: 7pm

Venue: Goodman Arts Centre (map)

           90 Goodman Road

           Block B, #03-13/18/19

To RSVP, please email museum@nus.edu.sg or call 6516-8817 / 8428

Exhibition Dates: 18 Jan - 03 Feb 2013
Opening Hours: Weekdays: 4:00pm – 8:00pm
                        Weekends: 12:00pm – 8:00pm

Admission: Free

            

Please direct all enquiries to: Michelle Kuek | michellekuek@nus.edu.sg | 6516 8428

                                           Stephanie Wong | steph.wong@nus.edu.sg | 6516 8797

::: ABOUT CURATING LAB: PHASE 03

Curating Lab: Phase 03 consists of three exhibitions presented by the participants of the Curating Lab 2012 programme. Beginning with a curatorial-intensive designed as a workshop, followed by internship assignments and a regional field trip, participants were guided by facilitators and mentors in the preceding phases, working towards the presentation of this final exhibition project. Curating Lab: Phase 03 draws attention to histories and the artifactual, their relationships and disjunctions, and the curatorial mediations that condition their production and consumption; to prompt provisional readings and trajectories of inquiries. 


::: ABOUT THE EXHIBITIONS
CLICK HERE TO VIEW GALLERY IMPRESSIONS

01
A History of Curating in Singapore is a proposition examining curatorial development in Singapore traced through the undertakings of the individual, state institutions and the artist. The exhibition is predicated on unpacking the strongly-held and at times individualistic beliefs of how art and ‘culture’ intersect in society, where the manifestation of the curatorial has often teased the lines of complicity and intervention. Bringing together anecdotal histories and fragments from the repertoire of key curatorial figures in Singapore’s art history, the exhibition reflects personalities, national policies and social climates that have contributed to the emergence of the ‘curatorial’ as a state of awareness and being, where agencies are negotiated and (re)played. A History of Curating in Singapore is then precedent in its attempt to present a history of curatorial practice in Singapore.

02
after|thought interrogates the workings of the ‘Institution’ as a multifarious but coherent system that articulates and mediates  a national consciousness of 9 August 1965 - the date of Singapore’s separation from the Malaysian Federation. Isolating the museum, the media, and mass education as key instruments of mediation, it ponders how one consumes and negotiates the national narrative in relation to our personal memories of 9 August 1965; and how, does this moment of separation recur amongst contemporary generations. Deployed within a classroom setting, artists Joel Yuen, Teow Yue Han and Tse Hao Guang explore these questions, taking as their departure point archival traces of 9 August 1965 presented to them by the curators.

These undertakings into history are distanced by time and the immediacy of the contexts, but in harnessing gaps between contemporary imaginings and experience, the very act of representing something that can no longer be retrieved unfolds. after|thought provokes questions about how the institution and the individual agency becomes manifest as the spectres of separation continue to shape, reify or contradict conceptions or memories of the Singapore present.

03
Objectum explores the ambiguity of commonplace objects within museum collections. Based on the understanding that objects in the museum are cherished more so for their capacity to produce meanings rather than any innate qualities, this exhibition explores how objects lacking in fixed identification are malleable to signification. Collaborating with curator and photographer Ken Cheong,  Objectum revisits a 1995/6 exhibition at the Singapore History Museum (redeveloped into the National Museum of Singapore in 2006) titled Memories of Yesteryear, and the approximately 6000 daily life objects amassed by the Museum from 1994 to 2000. As a curatorial gesture, Objectum prompts an investigation into how easily things become embedded into discourses and therefore, how different spaces and agents, including museums, but also curators, artists and audiences, confer meanings onto objects. 


::: ABOUT CURATING LAB 2012 

Organised by NUS Museum with support from the National Arts Council, the Curating Lab 2012 programme offers final year tertiary students, recent graduates and young curators exposure into curatorial perspectives and practices. The programme centres on curatorial heterogeneities and contingencies, to be addressed as practices informed by conceptions of the nation and the global, spaces and their contexts, where modalities of practice are shaped and positions defined.