NUS Museum
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| Left: Briefs for NUS Museum’s programme for 2015, Concrete Island; right: Brainstorming passwords for the Concrete Island reader |
I'm part of the team working on NUS Museum's year-long
programme for 2015, Concrete Island. Unlike the other two industry
immersions at NAC and the CCA where the participants are involved with
programmes that have already been charted out, those of us at the NUS Museum
are dealing with the something in its burgeoning stages. I feel really
fortunate to being able to contribute to the conceptual foundations of the
project.
During the immersion at NUS Museum I gained insights into
the following:
- a style of programming that is always in dialogue with the museum's specific history and collection, yet wide-ranging in its scope of exploration
- how creating ways for open and continual dialogue enable small kernels of thought, gestures, and procedures which build up to a full exhibition
- what a curator is and what curation entails
Concrete
Island is named after the
novel by J.G. Ballard. Ballard’s novel is a re-writing of
Robinson Crusoe for the post-industrial age, the age of hyperspeed, where isolation and being nowhere occurs within
civilisation, generated primarily by constant mobility.
Set in London, the
plot of the text involves architect Robert Maitland getting into a traffic
accident and becoming trapped on a man-made island -- a kind of urban wasteland
-- between Westway and the M4 Motorway. The title, Concrete Island,
accords with Singapore as both a concrete jungle and island. It forms a loose
frame for the works we’re exhibiting by Debbie
Ding (visual
artist), Tan
Pin Pin (film-maker), and Lilian
Chee (architect). Concrete Island
is thus a vehicle that mobilises thinking about space and time, trajectory and
speed -- where we've come from, where we are, and where we're going. It’s meant
as a kind of counter-point to SG50, the island-wide programme
scheduled to celebrate Singapore’s 50 years as a nation-state. I see Concrete
Island as an iteration of the Museum’s cartographical investigation of
place through the histories of colonial sites in the past year with Erika Tan’s Come Cannibalise Us Why Don’t You
and Charles Lim’s In Search of Raffles’ Light,
but with an interest in a much broader stretch of time and a more overt
interest in the present and future of place.
Our team's
task is to lay the foundation for the reader accompanying Concrete Island, first
by generating a list of passwords,
a concept derived from Jean Baudrillard. Passwords are key
terms that form points of entry and departure into the programme. It will be
used as prompts for short texts we are commissioning from writers (academics,
artists, etc). To some extent our own immersion feels like these passwords:
we're accumulating nodes of experience and concepts that we keep circling back
to over the course of the immersion which we feed into other trajectories, such
as our exhibition at the end of Curating Lab.
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Left: Reading up on Pulau Saigon for Debbie Ding’s project;
right: a list of archaeological artefacts found at the site of Pulau Saigon
from Jennifer Barry’s text
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We also
began research on three of the sub-programmes. I’m working on Debbie Ding’s
upcoming project, The Library of Pulau Saigon, which has to do with an
island that used to reside in the middle of the Singapore river lost to
development. Our team spent the second week researching at NLB where I dug up
some texts that dealt directly with Pulau Saigon, and then broadened my
research to texts in fields related to her work — archaeology,
psycho-geography, cartography, philosophy of waste, etc.
By now the
team has accumulated so much material we needed a way to chart and share what
we each found relevant to keep the flow of ideas going. We started a private
Facebook group and a group tumblr, which form maps of visuals and
ideas. None of us are keeping exclusively to the artist we chose to research
on, but are feeding the relationships we see between the three projects.
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Our tumblr site: thislandisourlab.tumblr.com
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Left: Installation of Safe Sea
in progress; right: paraphernalia found in the library of books
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I'm compelled by the similarities between the curator and
the translator. According to the OED, the word "translator" can mean
several things:
1a. One who translates or renders from one language into another; the author of a translation.
1b. One who renders a painting by
engraving, or the like: cf. translation n.
1c. Computing. A program that
translates from one (esp. programming) language into another.
2. One who transforms, changes, or
alters; spec. a cobbler who renovates old shoes.
3. One who transfers or transports.
(Obscure)
4a. An automatic repeater in
long-distance telegraphy. Cf.
4b. A relay set or station which
receives television signals and retransmits them without demodulating them.
The task of
the curator is much like the task of the translator in the combined definitions
and applications on the term listed above. The curator, like the translator,
tries to mobilise a thing — an idea, or an artwork — from one co-ordinate to
another, from an artist's personal oeuvre to the context of the exhibition and
new sets of relations with other works. In doing so, the act of translation
enacts transformations.
Like the telegraphers or station operators of definition 4,
curators are also sending signals from afar, from a perspective of knowledge.
But unlike these telegraphers and station operators, curators know that the
signals will undergo some form of attenuation and entropy, that sort of
scattering is to be expected and can even be productive. Curators are
transporters, creating in-roads of access and departures from the source, much
like Baudrillard's passwords, for people to arrive at and depart from — nodes
of material that work like some kind of weather vane where ideas, nebulous and
unfixable, momentarily curl around to direct our attentions somewhere.
Curation, like translation, is also an act that is never complete, but always
in the midst of transition and flux. The end of an exhibition is only a still
weather vane; sometime elsewhere, the breeze will blow again.
