History afoot: The sixth Singapore Biennale, ‘Every Step in the Right Direction’

Hera Büyüktaşçıyan, A Study on Endless Archipelagos, 2017–19, installation detail, National Gallery Singapore, 2019–20; cement, bronze and wood, dimensions variable; courtesy the artist and Green Art Gallery, Dubai; photo: Singapore Art Museum

In Singapore, which architect Rem Koolhaas has described as ‘pure intention … a unique ecology of the contemporary … an apotheosis of urban renewal,’ history lurks just below the shiny new surfaces, waiting for artists to coax it out. Indeed, history, and its many multiple readings, is the subject of Artistic Director Patrick Flores’s current Singapore Biennale, ‘Every Step in the Right Direction’ (until 22 March).

From the six-member curatorium’s dense and eclectic offerings, centred mainly at the National Gallery and Gillman Barracks, Flores’s more personal excavations of late twentieth century Filipino art rang out most strongly, particularly in the works of Alfonso Ossorio (1916–1990) and Carlos Villa (1936–2013), and their visceral assemblages of bone, blood and feather. Their rich materiality found a contemporary echo in new commissions by Manila-born Lani Maestro and Istanbul-based Hera Büyüktaşçıyan, with both employing the translucent oyster shells from Capiz in the central islands of the Philippines, creating poetic windows and thresholds to navigate through.

Büyüktaşçıyan’s accompanying suite of cement and ceramic fragments balanced on tiny bronze feet pointed to the Biennale’s other preoccupation: walking. Inspired by the 1930s Filipina revolutionary Salud Algabre, who said that ‘no uprising fails – each one is a step in the right direction’, the Biennale’s title invoked walking as both a physical and radical act akin to the experiencing of art, and answered best by senior Singaporean artist Amanda Heng. In her ‘Let’s Walk’ series, and documented here, the action is performed with a heeled shoe placed doggedly in the mouth, and navigated by a handheld mirror, going sometimes backwards, and in a group, moving tentatively by touch and sight – a powerful metaphor for how art, and biennales like this, can meaningfully occupy space and time.

Michael Fitzgerald, Singapore

For the full article, see Art Monthly’s forthcoming March 2020 issue.