New works by seven Singapore and Indonesian artists
Curated by Kin Chui and Mitha Budhyarto
Chapel Gallery, Objectifs
11 to 26 January 2017
Tue to Sat, 12pm to 7pm / Sun, 12pm to 4pm
Admission: Free
Featuring new works by Stephanie Burt, Fyerool Darma, Ardi Gunawan, Wu Jun Han, Ila, Eldwin Pradipta, and Evelyn Pritt.
Join us for the opening on 10 January 2017, 7pm
PUBLIC PROGRAMME
Lecture: Batam: Fantasies and Reality
By Vivienne Wee
Saturday 14 January, 2pm
Objectifs, Workshop Space
Admission: Free. Details here.
Exhibition Tour
By Mitha Budhyarto and Kin Chui
Saturday 21 January, 2pm
Objectifs, Chapel Gallery
Admission: Free.
Closing Performance-Lecture: Sea Charms and Ceremonies: Notes on Annotating Possessing Texts
By Zarina Muhammad
Thursday 26 January, 7pm – 8.30pm
Objectifs, Chapel Gallery
Admission: Free. Details here.
Talk of islands often conjures different fantasies: the excitement of travel and discovery, pure escapism, solitary confinement. The geographical condition of islands – bodies of land marked by surrounding waters – lend itself to metaphors of closure and openness, interiority and exteriority, where people, objects, ideas and histories move across their borders.
Borders – real or imagined – establish and define the relations to be woven by those who cross them. Here, desire factors in, governing our actions in setting up such borders: what do we do in this island? Who do we talk to? What would we see, and what gets hidden from view?
Fantasy Islands looks at the manifold relations between Batam and Singapore. Curated by Kin Chui and Mitha Budhyarto, presenting new works by Indonesian and Singaporean artists Stephanie Burt, Fyerool Darma, Ardi Gunawan, Wu Jun Han, Ila, Eldwin Pradipta, and Evelyn Pritt, the exhibition perceives “islandness” as a staged event, framed by the concepts of borders and desires.
Part of
Supported by
Lecture: Batam: Fantasies and Reality
By Vivienne Wee
Saturday 14 January, 2pm
Objectifs, Workshop Space
Admission: Free
Places, referred to by place names, are made into ontological realities. A process of positivist objectification makes a place into a thing that can then be shaped and reshaped. However, ontology is someone’s epistemology. This presentation explores how realities referred to by the name “Batam” were shaped and reshaped by different interests and dynamics from past to present, with different futures implied.
Vivienne Wee is an anthropologist who has done extensive field research in Singapore and Indonesia, especially the Riau Archipelago. She has a PhD in Anthropology from the Australian National University, MSocSc in Sociology from the University of Singapore, and Bachelor’s degrees in Music and Anthropology from the University of Minnesota. She was previously Associate Professor at the City University of Hong Kong and also at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Closing Performance-Lecture: Sea Charms and Ceremonies: Notes on Annotating Possessing Texts
By Zarina Muhammad
Thursday 26 January, 7pm – 8.30pm
Objectifs, Chapel Gallery
Admission: Free.
“If the sea spirits are not well fed, we will fall ill. We’ll suffer from dizziness. We’ll vomit immediately and our face will turn yellow. These are the symptoms of someone who has been harmed by the sea spirits. What we’ll have to do then is to go to the spirit’s place to see if we have made an offering. If not, we have to cast spells to say that we are good and not bad. We will have to plead with the sea spirits not to harm us. If we do not do this, we’ll be harmed because the spirits own the territory.”
-“Money, Magic and fear: Identity and Exchange Amongst the Orang Suku Laut (Sea Nomads) and Other Groups of Riau and Batam, Indonesia”, Cynthia Gek-Hua Chou, 1994
In this lecture-performance, we traverse land and sea, myth and ideology, myth and fantasy, exile and belonging, historiographies and hierophonies, the animist and anthropomorphic, sacred and profane time, itinieraries and itinerancy. We will argue with, reframe, rewrite, re-read, misread and fumble with the veracity of translations, verbatim quotations, spell-casting, spirit beliefs, poisoned histories, charm cures, the clumsy limits of fieldwork and the artist as ethnographer, stranger, voyeur, mime, mouthpiece and ventriloquist.
Zarina Muhammad is an independent researcher, arts practitioner and educator based in Singapore. Currently, she is working on a multidisciplinary research and performance-based project on cultural translations pertaining to Southeast Asian mythologies, ritual magic, sacred landscapes, magico-religious belief systems and the cross/intercultural interpretations of witchcraft. She is particularly interested in the inter-generational and inter-regional translations, appropriations, adaptations and sometimes contradictory, anachronistic and multi-headed quality of these narratives. She has presented her work in Indonesia, Cambodia, Japan, Hong Kong and Australia.