Liberation in the land of no gum chewing

Liberation in the land of no gum chewing TEASER: Critic Katrina Stuart Santiago shares her first notes on the Singapore Biennale 2011 By Katrina Stuart Santiago It was beyond me to begin with: the thought of 63 artists coming from all the world,

with mostly commissioned work for four different spaces, including an old airport, housing development flats and the night market. But maybe that’s me being Pinoy, coming from a space where government fails at caring about art.



Lisi Raskin (New York) tears off walls and puts them in flight. Katrina Santiago
The Singapore Biennale 2011 seems like a mean feat, but is not only proven doable here, it is also intelligently and critically done. A day into it and I can only be overwhelmed by the thinking that has gone into art here, the kind of project that it is, the amount of freedom(s) it allows artists not just from Singapore, but also from Southeast Asia (including the Philippines), and the rest of the world.

Yes, in this land of no gum chewing, it is most liberating to be here.

It isn’t even about race or gender; not even about representation. It’s about the kind of art that’s being done, the creative context within which these works and artists exist, the theoretical and personal, yet concretely and necessarily public spaces that art deals with. Of course it might be said that this is true for all art, except that in this year’s Singapore Biennale it feels like a conscious effort to speak of this divide and its possible convergences. It feels like a tribute to space, as it is a refusal of its specificity, a refusal to let it dictate what can be done. And how.



The latter speaks of how the artist does it of course, but also it speaks of labor, in ways that are so particularly about context and how it is the material conditions that inform our lives no matter that they are so different from each other, or just diverse, and regardless of whether we deny it or not.


Gosia Wlodarczak (Poland) draws on glass walls and windows of a room to take on that space between past and future every day articulations. Katrina Santiago
In Manila, there is a silence over art, as it nestles still in that position of power: “art" still exists as high art, if not “Art" with that capital letter A. This is always a measure of its refusal to admit to its conditions of existence, its creation not just as labor but even more so as product. The kind of discourse the Singapore Biennale fuels as such is a breath of fresh air.

It is discourse after all that’s premised on an amount of honesty about where art stands in this context, and elsewhere. As well, it forces the artist to deal with his or her own particular context, given what project is to be exhibited here. They are made to speak: tell us what is here, explain to us what that process of art making was like. And always the story is that of living in a context, of speaking with people, of looking them in the eye and thinking that their stories are worth telling.

That in effect speaks of how there are people who are part of art making, ones whose collaboration with artists are mostly unsaid, their work generally uncredited. There is silence to the kind of work that goes into these art works, extraneous to the artist’s conceptualization of it, yet tied seamlessly together with what work the artist does. In the Singapore Biennale there is an honesty about this as well: this isn’t just about the artists themselves but about who else is part of art creation, the nameless and faceless, the ones who might not know of the finished product as they do only of the part they play in the process itself. Their labor isn’t glossed over at all, their presence palpable: it’s the machine without the hands that make them, the artisans of nation who paint tacky art, the hands that cut up and carried chunks of a wall across a room.


Michael Beutler's (Germany) huge lightweight installations welcome us to the Old Kallang Airport as an artspace. Katrina Santiago
Interestingly enough, this ties together with what is also a seeming self-awareness in the artist about how he or she might be intruder in instances not just of art making and representation, but also of the spaces within which art is being created. It speaks of how the artist might be missing something, in as much as art is always a form of capture.

This honesty about art making allows for discourse that’s not just more real and grounded, but also one that’s premised on the truths that surround cultural production. The Singapore Biennale’s insistence on dealing with spaces of commerce and movement, transience and exchange, forces a look into the particularities of the identities created by / from / within art in the context of an institution like the biennale itself, and the contexts from which the artists (and their art) come.



Beutler (Germany) reveals the silence of the people who used this machine to create his work. Katrina Santiago
It seems fitting that an event that’s premised on exchange and geographical movement is actually also dependent on these concepts. That the artists are shown to be thinking about their work, to have dealt with the processes it involves even as it might have taken them beyond what’s familiar, to need to speak of it here and make sense of it as much as they can with an audience, that they are seen in the end as laborers, ones who work on art, yes, but actually do labor over it, isn’t just fitting.

In the end, given where I’m from, it can only be fantastic.

source: gma