The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...
Displayed at no less than nineteen separate sites, this inaugural Biennale for the city-state took ‘Belief’ as its central premise. Fumio Nanjo, artistic director, explained, ‘Contemporary society is marked by complex and conflicting values and a lack of unified standards of judgment… Some people take religion as an absolute standard. To others, the consumer economy and the principles of capitalism are undoubted articles of faith.’1 To this he added the belief in human love and solidarity and also the importance of the environment. In other words, an ambitious, all-encompassing ‘take’ on where our touchstones for living are now to be found.
Exploring SB2006 (Singapore Biennale 2006) without the pressure of the opening week’s networking and hype allowed for uninterrupted viewing. Over two days it was possible to find and navigate the chief sites of the exhibition: City Hall, the National Museum and further out, Tanglin Camp. In Singapore’s central district, there were also several churches (of diverse denominations), the National Library and of course shopper’s Mecca—Orchard Road. SAM (Singapore Art Museum) held its own ‘satellite’ show Telah Terbit (Out Now), which usefully addressed Southeast Asian art practices of the 1970s; those that critiqued convention and grappled with internationalism, cross-national transactions and domestic political turmoil. Rather than serve simply as yet another venue for SB2006, this separately curated event laid foundations for the recent work found in the Biennale proper.
Statistics can be pretty misleading, yet by any standard ninety-five artists and artist collectives drawn from over thirty-eight countries is ambitious. In addition, Nanjo and his team held public platforms (‘Encounters’) ranging from curatorial dialogue sessions to interviews conducted by artists with members of the public, which were later integrated... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline