Desire is Dead
Through a playful juxtaposition of artworks, the exhibition seeked to tease out the erotic presences, complexities, and potentialities in Singapore’s midst, where a plenitude of desire surrounds us every day and everywhere, shaping the way we view the world and ourselves.
The exhibition was configured such that it is as much a visual showcase as it is a spatial exercise enacted bodily through artworks that engages audiences sensorially or require audience interaction. Watch a short video HERE to hear about the curator Adele Tan’s take and inspiration behind this.
Between the Butt and the Chair #3 (One for each butt cheek), 2020
Between the Butt and the Chair #4 (Heatsink and Longevity), 2020
Between the Butt and the Chair #7 (Double Happiness Goes Both Ways), 2022
Kray Chen's practice largely deals with lived experience and body politics, reflecting on the body and the self within the economical machine, observing the fissures and ruptures of the psyche arising from the parallel quests to progress and to conserve. His chair and stools reframed as erogenous traditional furniture suggest the contortions of the body that can happen when one allows oneself libidinous encounters.
Artist:
Kray Chen
Between the Butt and the Chair #3 (One for each butt cheek)
Wood and Aluminium
46.5 x 60.5 x 44 cm
Between the Butt and the Chair #4 (Heatsink and Longevity)
Stainless Steel
115 x 92 x 84 cm
Between the Butt and the Chair #7 (Double Happiness Goes Both Ways)
Stainless Steel
40 x 40 x 45 cm
Kray Chen
Between the Butt and the Chair #3 (One for each butt cheek)
Wood and Aluminium
46.5 x 60.5 x 44 cm
Between the Butt and the Chair #4 (Heatsink and Longevity)
Stainless Steel
115 x 92 x 84 cm
Between the Butt and the Chair #7 (Double Happiness Goes Both Ways)
Stainless Steel
40 x 40 x 45 cm
Stealth / Where Do Wounded Soldiers Go?, 2021
Where Do Prayers Go? / This Is Not The End, 2021
Where Do Desires Go When They Are Forgotten?, 2022
Where Do Thoughts Go When They Are Forgotten?, Undated
Marla Bendini is a cross-disciplinary artist and trans woman working in painting, text, sound and performance to articulate the infinitely faceted transgender experience on her own terms. Her figures in her durational wall “mural” unfold to embody trauma, anxiety, and hope, questing for the remembrance of a history and community that are tied up with Orchard Road.
Artist:
Marla Bendini
Stealth / Where Do Wounded Soldiers Go?
Oil on linen
122 x 122 cm
Where Do Prayers Go? / This Is Not The End, Where Do Desires Go When They Are Forgotten?
Oil on linen
122 x 91 cm
Where Do Thoughts Go When They Are Forgotten?
Pastel, Photographs From Artist’s Archive on All Mural
Dimensions Variable
Marla Bendini
Stealth / Where Do Wounded Soldiers Go?
Oil on linen
122 x 122 cm
Where Do Prayers Go? / This Is Not The End, Where Do Desires Go When They Are Forgotten?
Oil on linen
122 x 91 cm
Where Do Thoughts Go When They Are Forgotten?
Pastel, Photographs From Artist’s Archive on All Mural
Dimensions Variable
Stop Looking Back / You're Not Going That Way / Trust Where Life is Taking You, 2023
Marla Bendini is a cross-disciplinary artist and trans woman working in painting, text, sound and performance to articulate the infinitely faceted transgender experience on her own terms.
Artist:
Marla Bendini
Live Performance at Tanglin Shopping Centre, #01-02/03
51 Min
Marla Bendini
Live Performance at Tanglin Shopping Centre, #01-02/03
51 Min
I have your back, 2015
Khairullah Rahim is a Singapore-based artist working across mixed-media installation, object-making, painting, photography and moving images. His explorations delve into complex strategies of resourcefulness for everyday survival in environments under constant surveillance. Recurring points of departure in his work premise around themes of queerness, desire, resistance, aspiration, labour and ethics of disclosure.
Artist:
Khairullah Rahim
Courtesy of:
The Yan Collection
Acrylic on Canvas
160 x 110 cm
Khairullah Rahim
Courtesy of:
The Yan Collection
Acrylic on Canvas
160 x 110 cm
LR7-1, 2001
One of Singapore’s preeminent contemporary artists, Jimmy Ong has been noted for his large-scale, figurative charcoal works on paper. His works explore how multiple identities and perspectives – whether sexual, ethnic, national, or even generational – can coexist within the individual. His deeply personal works have taken inspiration from a stark analysis of his own experience, and indeed of his physical form, an ongoing process of what he calls “creative self-therapy".
Artist:
Jimmy Ong
Courtesy of:
Shi’ai Liang Collection
Charcoal on Paper
89 x 61cm
Jimmy Ong
Courtesy of:
Shi’ai Liang Collection
Charcoal on Paper
89 x 61cm
Malay boy (posterior) (After Cheong Soo Pieng), 2016
Zulkhairi Zulkiflee is an artist-curator committed to a practice centred on Malayness and its social ontology. His reframing and queering of Cheong Soo Pieng’s 1953 painting, Malay Boy with Bird, leads one to ask about the desiring dynamics between the painter and the pictured. The present subject’s refusal to look back also raises uncharted questions about Cheong’s painting contrary to the viewer’s expected deference.
Artist:
Zulkhairi Zulkiflee
Courtesy of:
The Yan Collection
Lightbox With Fabric Print
122 x 87 cm
Edition 1 of 3
Zulkhairi Zulkiflee
Courtesy of:
The Yan Collection
Lightbox With Fabric Print
122 x 87 cm
Edition 1 of 3