Freedom Boat: Harbouring New Truths, a Project 50/100 with Maruah

 

Together with MARUAH, a Singapore Human Rights NGO, Brack is organising a full-day event that raises the topic of Freedom of Expression. The exhibition showcases socially-conscious art and also explores historically narratives of Singapore. The talk also showcases artists such as Dan Wong and Cyril Wong. The exhibition will also include a performance by Andrée Weshler.

We look forward to seeing you at the one-day only exhibition on 2 August. At Stewords Riverboat,  12 pm-9 pm. The event is open to the public.

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This public exhibition is part of Project 50/100, alternative effort to commemorate Singapore’s 50th anniversary.

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Fundraising campaign for “Our Lake of Imagination” by Ketemu Projects

Since January 2015, 75 school children in Kintamani, Bali have been working to harvest water hyacinths from Lake Batur, one of the world’s largest and most spectacular volcanic calderas, to produce an interactive art installation. This dual-nation, community art project is piloted by artist collective and social space Ketemu Project ⋅ Space

On 9 April 2015, the art installation, titled “Danau Imajinasi Kami” or “Our Lake of Imagination”, co-created by these children was completed and shipped to Singapore and displayed at the Marina Bay Sands. A selected few of the children will be travelling to Singapore – also celebrating its 50th year of independence – to represent their peers at the “Torch Up Ceremony” in the 28th SEA Games.

From now to August 2015, Ketemu Project, in collaboration with Brack, is fundraising for “Our Lake of Imagination”. Help us bring the full experience of “Our Lake of Imagination” to Singapore and to the children of Kintamani, Bali.

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A Conversation circle at Art After Dark: Multicultural Dread with Arjuna Neuman

On Friday, 20 March, Brack, with Arjuna Neuman and the Centre of Contemporary Art (CCA), will host a conversation circle for “Multicultural Dread”, a collaborative event and interactive sonic experience. The event will begin with a conversation circle on the topic of racial identity in Singapore. We’re including the synopsis of the event:

Singapore Unlimited calls for a shift in our paradigm from one of “Singapore is too small” to that of “There are no real limits or constraints in this new borderless world.”

-Masterplan 21, Singapore Tourism Board, 1996

Singapore identifies itself as having no borders and “no real limits”. This identity no longer depends on an Other, master nor slave, against which to take shape. This is twinned in the city-state’s single party rule and, more tangibly, in everyday experiences of race.

We invite you to think through and discuss together, the way race at a face-to-face level can be used as a lens to understand the different layers of social organisation in Singapore: from the everyday with its social interactions and subjectivities, to the government’s supposed non-ideological yet pragmatic position, to neoliberalism more generally.

The questions will include:

How is race understood at an everyday level? Why is race and racial categories perhaps stunted, or kept at a stereotypical level?

How is this “retarded” state of racial discourse useful to, or used by the larger organizational structures? By the Government?  And by neoliberalism?

Why might these conditions of race be philosophically, politically or economically functional for those in power?

The conversation circle is moderated by Imran Taib, Founding Member of Leftwrite Center.

Please join us in the conversation circle!

The conversation circle starts at 7 p.m. to 8.30 p.m.
20 March, 2015
Block 38, Malan Road,
Artist Studio #01-06

This event is part of the programme for the Art After Dark party at Gillman Barracks.

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Pamela Ng

Writer, Projects

Pamela Ng is a writer and  actively engaged in arts and social causes. She has managed fine art galleries such as Galerie Michael Janssen and Ode to Art. She conceptualised and curated Celebrating Women (2012), an art exhibition featuring 15 female artists, with spoken word and live music performers and a time-based work with melting ice on the opening night. In that event, more than 50 new volunteers signed up and a portion of each artwork sale was donated to AWARE. In August 2013, she co-curated a group exhibition Nostra 2, featuring new media and installation works by 13 emerging local and international artists. In Nostra 2, she exhibited her collaborative work, City Shrines, that showcased her iPhone photography and interpretative poetry that re-told intimate memories of Singapore. She also managed a theatre company that empowered 120 young people, where she was engaged in project and event management, marketing and public relations, grant applications, and workshop facilitation. Her writing covers diverse topics from lifestyle to property and has been published in the PINNACLE, ART REPUBLIK, Cohort, and SingHealth.

“Exercise Trilogy”, Chi Kai Yuen

“Triange Table” from “Exercise Trilogy”, Chi Kai Yuen

A series of three works comprising video and mixed-media installations, it instigates a deviation from the norm by changing the use of the physical body in its immediate surroundings. It was recently awarded the First Prize at the Taipei Arts Awards in 2014. Look out for more on this project soon on Brack!

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#BrackGathering

“Who gets to feel the magic?”

The quality principles reflect a view of ‘quality’ and ‘excellence’ which we encountered among those working with children and young people which is not just about creating great art but also about having an impact on people’s lives, in particular creating opportunities.  Not simply economic opportunities, but opportunities for young people to achieve their full human potential – emotionally, socially, physically and intellectually. And not just for whoever turns up, but targeted at those who stand to benefit most. (…)

Perhaps Matthew Bourne’s dance-theatre production of Lord of the Flies (one of the quality principles pilot projects) offers a glimpse of a new perspective.  The production is transgressive in many ways and deliberately hard to categorise.  The source novel is on one hand a children’s story, yet also a highly respected (by adults) in its own right.  The production mixes a cast of professional dancers with teenage amateurs who perform the roles of the younger boys – having been selected through dozens of workshops held in each of the stops on the tour. In terms of identifying as either a social project or a commercial show Matthew Bourne and his team present the production as no different from any other produced by the New Adventures company; setting the bar at the highest level of technical quality, and artistic appeal.

From Who gets to feel the magic? on the #CulturalValue Initiative blog. Ben Lee of Shared Intelligence reported on a piece of work commissioned by Arts Council England for the purpose of exploring new ways of understanding and assessing ‘quality’ and ‘excellence’, especially in projects that also have a social aim and whose ambition is to have a real impact in the lives of participants yet reject the notion that this requires compromises on the quality front.

“Al Noor ~ Fragile Vision”

Doing this for four years in Bahbrain we’ve actually seen the impact the work has had on many on the centres we’ve worked with, over the past four years. We’ve worked with kids, we’ve worked with parents, and with teachers. And we have seen the cultural shift that it has caused within these centres. (…)

This project has taken us to the Saudi-Bahraini School for the Blind, to work with young people with autism, to do an artistic residency in al Riwaq Gallery with an autistic young woman from Bahrain and an Omani professional artist, and another artist who’s a sculptor and who’s blind, from Saudi Arabia. All of us are disabled. Four female disabled artists. And we’ve done live performances. I’ve created live paintings to general audiences and mainstream audiences, so these discussions just roll out at every single level of the community so it can’t be ignored.

Al Noor – Fragile is a multi-cultural collaborative project by Rachel Gadsen, Visual and Performance Artist, between UK and Middle East communities and arts organizations which will consider perceptions as to disability, culture, diversity and openness about impairment. This short film is produced in partnership with the British Council UK.

Behind the Scenes: Making the Love Difference ice cream

Macedonian Halva with pistachio nuts – Greece
Whipping cream – France
Milk – Australia
Sugar – Malaysia
Eggs – Singapore

“Food is never about just one thing or one culture. You can see where different ingredients and different flavours come from geographically, or by traditions. And when you pull different people together to eat (such a) food, you give opportunity for dialogue about where they come from, the food comes from, and for other issues related as well. So this is the ice cream of Michelangelo Pistoletto.”

— Filippo Fabricca, Love Difference

The session was a multi-hour, multi-thread cook-out with the artist Filippo and the lovely Yoke Peng of the Tuckshop, made so much easier and fun with the Cuisineart Ice Cream Maker. As it churned the minutes away, we sat and chatted about well, the food. More seriously, by the end of the affair, energies spent and the ice cream maker whirring, we could chat freely about Love Difference’s mission (the main thread in our master class series), what makes social engagement in art, and what makes food, like the Love Difference ice cream, a conduit for gathering “in spite of” differences. We even found out Yoke Peng graduated from culinary school, so we were having two ‘chefs’ at work!

Their Pastry Shop project grew into a three-day workshop inviting 40 artists from around the Mediterranean, a process that created over fifty events in thirty different cities, where “food was the way to talk about differences, and the value of such differences”.

 

The Cuisinart ICE-100 Compressor Ice Cream and Gelato Maker was sponsored by the TOTT Store. The Tuckshop sponsored the space for this session, as well as the subsequent Post-Workshop Pop-Up. 

 

“Why Is It So Difficult to Talk Critically About Socially Engaged Art?”

This article pulls out the best threads, featuring plenty of quotable quotes, of contemporary thought, and aspiration, from artists, observers, and participant (herself) of socially engaged art. It also includes a great round up of recent such works.

As artist J. Morgan Puett of Mildred’s Lane noted in her recent lecture at the Regis Center for Art, “this work is not new, there’s just a new reaction to it.”  But why? Socially engaged practice is often framed as an alternative to an elitist, exclusionary, and capitalist art world. But the more institutionalized and professionalized social practice becomes (in predominantly wealthy, white institutions, I might add), the more I see a hierarchy emerging that separates social practice knowledge-authorities and those working on the outside. That growing divide raises an important question: Does social practice belong in art museums at all?

I had another one-on-one interaction on that same visit with dancer Dolo McComb, who is a collaborator with BodyCartography Project, a Minneapolis-based choreography/dance confab who were resident artists in thinking making living from late October to mid-November. The afternoon I visited, BodyCartography was rehearsing their piece closer, which is best described as:

a practice in being present.  It is a performance intervention for two strangers (audience and performer) in public space that evolves into a communal experience. It is an invitation for engagement and empathy.  Together we will examine how the space of connection between performer and audience can function as a site for transformation.  closer lays bare the power of live performance to facilitate a re-enchantment of physicality and presence.

For 10 minutes, I followed McComb as she moved throughout the spaces of the Nash Gallery, trying to keep a safe distance, not knowing what to expect. What began as a slightly uncomfortable, self-conscious experience became something like an intimate wordless conversation. At one, transformative moment, McComb was standing right against me, shoulder to shoulder; our breath slowly synchronized, and I felt a great empathy for this woman I’ve never met. I also had an increased awareness of the space surrounding us, particularly when McComb was stretched out on the cold lobby floor while I sat on a bench nearby.

From the article “Why Is It So Difficult to Talk Critically About Socially Engaged Art?” by Ashley Duffalo.

Deadline extended; Master Class with Love Difference: HeART OF COMMUNITY

There’s still time to sign up for the Workshop with Love Difference, our master class with Love Difference in creative approaches to community. To give us more time, we have extended the deadline for submission until 28 January 2015, midnight. We’ve also been receiving inquiries on the 50% discount for Students—yes, the Workshop cost of $60 for all card-carrying Students (this means our international friends as well)!

Join us at our upcoming Public Talk, which precedes the Workshop. We look forward to meeting you there!

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Brack is a ground-up movement. Please spread the word. #BrackGathering.