The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...
The organisers of Singapore’s third international art biennale envisioned ‘Open House’ as an ‘invitation or “open house” onto contemporary artistic practice’.1 Led by artistic director, Matthew Ngui, the highly regarded Singaporean artist, and accompanied by leading international curators, Russell Storer (Australia) and Trevor Smith (Canada), the 2011 biennale was intended to be more about ‘the journey of making art, rather than defining its final destination … and to connect these artistic processes to what we do every day, such as working, commuting, shopping, and eating, as well as obsessive or recreational activities in private or public’.2
Ngui is well known for his installations, video and performance work that engages the local constituency and its environment. It is not surprising then that ‘Open House’ would reflect many aspects of Ngui’s own artistic practice. This was a biennale where visitors encountered hit-or-miss relational art projects, numerous installations (some site-specific) and watched hours of time-based media works, such as films and video projections. For those biennale-goers in search of the familiar object-based works (paintings, drawings, sculptures), sightings were rare, and if found, they seldom were exhibited for consideration as works in themselves. More often than not they were brought in to serve some larger purpose in an installation or film, or in the case of photography to document the artist’s creative methodology.
The Singapore Biennale 2011 (SB2011) was an ambitious undertaking with no less than one hundred and fifty works by sixty-three artists and collectives from thirty countries, with more than half of the artists creating newly commissioned works, and spread over five locations. Geographically speaking, the bulk of the artists (43%) came from Asia (including Southeast Asia, China, Japan