Tatzu Nishi – The Merlion Hotel (2011), artist’s rendering, construction-installation. © the artist.
On Mar 13 the third edition of the Singapore Biennale officially opened to the public at multiple venues in Singapore. Directed by artist Matthew Ngui, this year’s edition is the first to be overseen by a local art professional after the previous two in 2006 and 2008, respectively, were guided by the Japanese curator and director of Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum, Fumio Nanjo. Working with international curators Russel Storer and Trevor Smith, Ngui has pulled together a relatively tightly scaled exhibition of 60 artists and artist groups from around the world, with a focus on new commissions and site-specific installations intended to communicate the diversity of artistic approaches today. ART iT spoke with Ngui prior to the opening of the Biennale to learn more about his experience directing the exhibition and how he understands its positioning between local and international audiences.
Interview:
ART iT: Fumio Nanjo directed the first two editions of the Biennale and now you are working on your second edition after having been a member of the curatorial team in 2008. How does this situation affect your approach to organizing the Biennale? Do you feel any pressure to maintain a sense of continuity or, conversely, do you feel any pressure to strike out in a radical new direction?
MN: I think embedded within the whole framework of international biennial exhibitions – and Singapore is no exception – is the idea that new directors will include new ideas that will drive the exhibition. From that perspective I’ve not felt any pressure to follow in the footsteps of the previous two editions. As a practicing artist, though, I am particularly interested in focusing on artistic processes as opposed to presenting a strict curatorial theme that attempts to explain the zeitgeist of contemporary art.
I certainly respect how Fumio Nanjo has tried to shape the Biennale and there are a number of things that I hope to maintain. The first is the focus on the contemporary art that is now emerging from Southeast Asia and the broader region, and the second is the creative use of space in Singapore for the exhibition venues. I hope with each Biennale there will be new spaces that spring up for use in the exhibition.
ART iT: You mention looking at artistic processes more than overarching themes. Can you expand on what you bring to curation from an artistic viewpoint, and how you have interacted with your co-curators?
MN: As an artist there are particular ideas that inform one’s work and sometimes these ideas are actually quite private even though others are necessarily public in that they appear in the finished artwork. My direction to my fellow curators Russell Storer and Trevor Smith was to come up with a structure in which we could look at artistic processes and yet keep the exhibition from expanding to a point where it became meaningless – in that artistic processes are so diverse that it’s difficult to try to categorize them all.
As suggested by our title, “Open House,” we hope to open an avenue for viewers to understand artistic processes in relation to space and venue. We have tried to locate, specifically, different artistic processes within the urban environment. In Singapore we have identified four emblematic spaces: the Housing Development Board flats, which are the homes and the private spaces; spaces for transaction in the city center; international sea and air ports; and the public arena. We have aligned these conceptual spaces with our venues. Singapore Art Museum and 8Q are smaller, more intimate spaces where we’ve located works that deal with the home. In the newer and bigger National Museum of Singapore, we have works about the city, while Old Kallang Airport deals with the movements and exchanges of ports, and artist Tatzu Nishi’s Merlion Hotel project is housed in public space at Marina Bay.
In this sense we don’t have a real theme. We are guided more by an attitude of looking at a broad spectrum of artistic practices while trying to locate them in particular spaces in such a way that our public can understand the breadth of practice happening today.
ART iT: As its first Singaporean director, have you had a chance to reconsider the mission of the Biennale, and its position between local and international audiences?
MN: The two previous editions of the Biennale were organized by the National Arts Council, while this time the Biennale is organized by the National Heritage Board through the Singapore Art Museum. My hope is for the Biennale to be as critically independent as it possibly can, notwithstanding the condition that it’s essentially funded by the State.
The Biennale needs to have real independence for it to be able to create space for lateral movement in society and to provide a progressive vision. I think this begins with showing works that are challenging, which is what I’ve been trying to inculcate in this edition. And of course within this edition too are education programs that I hope can reach out to broader audiences. A new initiative this time has been to introduce a yearlong program with schools and teachers, whereby Biennale staff visit the schools and teachers visit us and we workshop ideas about drawing. Involving over 3,000 students and around 47 schools, this program has led to the creation of a long animation sequence made by students that is part of the exhibition. Although it stretched our organizational capacities I feel this was a really worthwhile project. That’s one of the ways that I, as a more local artistic director, am perhaps able to push things further. It’s now up to the audience to decide whether it’s good or not.
ART iT: Has the new organizational structure with the Biennale now supervised by the Singapore Art Museum (SAM) made a difference in the tone of the exhibition?
MN: The National Arts Council and the SAM are both government bodies, and within any government body in Singapore there are certain regulations attached. One of them is strict accountability in terms of spending. Those are things one has to live with. But as an organizational body, the NAC really hasn’t been a platform for events management. Previously it had overseen the Singapore Arts Festival but otherwise the Biennale was like a new baby for them. The transition to SAM has been interesting because obviously the museum is an events organizer with its own program, and if I were running the museum I would hope for the Biennale to be part of the program I’m trying to push.
What we can say positively about the transition is that if the Biennale is to be run by SAM it needs to be a complementary exhibition platform that is consciously international. SAM is steeped within the region and has perhaps the best collection of Southeast Asian art in the world, but the Biennale allows it to project one large exhibition onto a broad, international stage, and I hope that will remain in the mindset of the museum going forward.