Exactly Foundation – The Hour Before She Sleeps by Mindy Tan

As the day unwinds and her make-up is removed, she is not superwoman at this point. Mindy Tan, in her Exactly residency, The Hour Before She Sleeps, records four women of Singapore’s third wave in their private lives, drawing from the intimacy of the last hours of the day. Entering this space is a search for the visual identity of a Singapore woman, a space that digs beneath the Singaporean methodology of surveys, statistics and charts, to access behind the door, the real, and the ordinary, for an alternative understanding. As policies and opportunities surrounding each generation of women change, drawing further departure from “the woman my mother was”, what roles should a woman in her 30s / 40s play? How does tradition affect her modernity? How is the Singapore woman unique from the rest of the world?

The keynote essay is a poem Women, in waves by Amanda Chong who is a lawyer trained in Cambridge and Harvard and writes poems during lunch breaks. Her first collection, Professions, was published in 2016 and shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize in 2018. Her poetry has been engraved on the Marina Bay Helix Bridge and included in the Cambridge International GCSE syllabus. She is interested in exploring themes of gender and power in her writing which has appeared in Monocle, the Harvard Journal of Law and Gender, The Straits Times and Quarterly Literary Review Singapore. She co-founded ReadAble, a non-profit organisation that runs literacy programmes for children and migrant women in a low income community.

About Mindy Tan

Mindy Tan is a Singapore-based documentary photographer who captures people in their everyday lives. She began her career in 2004 as a newspaper journalist after graduating with double degrees in theatre, sociology and graphic design. At The New Paper, she covered breaking news, migrant labour and youth community issues. She also wrote a nightlife and soccer column. After Mindy won the Society of Publishers Asia Award for Excellence in Human Rights Reporting in 2007, she turned professional as a documentary photographer. While photographing countless events, publishing and staging her exhibits internationally, Mindy is also a Fujifilm Global Ambassador under the X-Photographer’s scheme.

About Exactly Foundation

Exactly Foundation is a not-for-profit, trademarked registered label established by Li Li Chung to commission photographers to create works that stimulate discussion of social concerns in Singapore. Its goal is to produce new knowledge by having viewers engage with the photographs and share them with friends and family over a 2-3 month period.