the three second recap of some of the too many things i went to last week.
1. a trio of films at the projector, of which isabelle tollenaeres’ documentary battles was the most unusual. not what i expected — i had thought from the reviews it might be something meditative and slightly haunting, which it wasn’t, actually. and ‘beautiful’, which many reviewers used, is not the right word, no. (they also call it an “essay”, but if so it is a weinberger not a montaigne.) i liked it very much, and it was far funnier than i thought it could be — but also understated. the comedy (which is that of absurdity, incongruity and irony) seeps through but never rends the fabric of sobriety. (side note: i counted 9 people who walked out during the film, most of whom only after the first hour. i am perplexed: the film is only 90 minutes long, and the kind of person who comes to the projector surely has more tolerance for unusual films than one who goes to a commercial cineplex. as it turns out, the last 20 minutes of the documentary was the most accessible.)
2. homescapes photographic exhibtion at the void deck of blk 99 old airport road. hdb life captured by five singaporeans, including darren soh and ang song nian (and with participation from the students of rgs photographic society.) what i like best is that the photographs are displayed in a void deck: almost as if the blues and oranges of the real hdb flats around us are being spliced with the photographed flats (especially the darren sohs), through the wide gaps between the pillars the one recedes and the other emerges.
3. 15 stations, augmented reality exhibition at the old tanjong pagar railway station. part of this year’s o.p.e.n. festival. the smartphone interface could do with a little more work (oversensitive touchscreens made the already un-intuitive navigation more fiddly) but when one had got the hang of things with phone in hand and earpiece tucked in we wandered around the station from waiting room to customs shed to platform and even onto the tracks themselves (wobbling gently on track ballast and sleepers) pulling up future projections and old memories, overlaid on the old station, a double-vision. but the station itself is the true centrepiece, the monument of a mode of transport long abandonned by singaporeans nearly two decades before its official closure (we are after all the nation of changi airport and singapore airlines — train what train?), the site and symbol of yet another protracted and absurd dispute with our northern neighbour. i sit in the main hall and look at the murals and feel girlish delight after so many american and european traing station — at the distinctive southeast asian painting style and their depictions of rice and coconut planting, rubber tapping and tin mining, bullock cart transport and shipping — the economic activities of 1930s malaya.
5. roy payamal talk at the independent archive. warmly-lit, homely, informal and safe space for small group discussions — some 25 people around me, mostly from the arts management or art world, perched on assorted stools and rattan armchairs. i am half-ashamed not to have heard of roy payamal before this: unpretentious, funny, talking without resentment about his 30year journey as a full-time busker (self-taught juggler and clown) and about the evolution of government policy on busking and the arts. (they’re making a short film about him by the end of this year.)
6. i confess myself totally dotty about ernest goh’s breakfast at 8, jungle at 9. hosted at the newobjectifs centre (what was the old sculpture square) until the end of the month. there shall be a standalone, extended post on it; less would be an injustice.
Best of the Transparent Hummingbird