The 2016 Singapore Biennale was the show’s 5th iteration. It was a mid-size biennale with 60 artists. Almost all of the work was split between two locations, the Singapore Art Museum’s main location and SAM at 8Q Plaza. It was possible to see the whole show in a single day if one skipped three films by two different Chinese filmmakers, Wen Pulin and Zang Honghua. But it would have been a shame to skip these films—they were the show’s most interesting works.
The Singapore Biennale’s main themes were atlases and mirrors, and though many of the works in the show were deeply engaged with the histories of colonialism, often it was unclear how these works reflected on the contemporary world. This meant that the show’s politics were mostly rather tame. Additionally, the biennale showed works that were occasionally illustrative and sometimes even a little derivative. These weaknesses revealed the Singapore Biennale’s reluctance to take risks, and also made the show a little underwhelming.
Often, as in PALA Pothupitiye’s charming work, the Other Map Series, when the show evoked contemporary politics it did so in ways that were not profound. Pothupitiye created his images by drawing directly on maps; the series was spread across three of the walls of a room in the exhibition space. The works on the first wall looked at the influence of colonial powers all over the world, the second wall at their influence in Sri Lanka. These images showed fortresses, warships, and soldiers firing guns. Where these two walls painted a detailed picture of the activities of the colonial powers, the third wall’s images depicted the ongoing civil war in Sri Lanka, reducing it to yawning tigers and lions’ mouths mostly drawn over the maps’ inlets and bays. Though these animals represented the civil war’s warring factions, it demoted them to natural elements of the landscape, causing this otherwise interesting work’s reflections on contemporary politics to be relatively superficial.
Similarly, Sharmiza Abu Hassan’s The Covenant focused on the past but was only able to address the present indirectly. It was based on a story from the Malay Annals in which a king broke his covenant with a young boy. The boy had devised a way to solve the kingdom’s flying swordfish problem, which had made parts of the kingdom uninhabitable. Fearing the boy’s ingenuity, the king had him murdered. In the show, a tangle of aluminum swordfish was bunched above viewers’ heads. The king and the boy were represented by a throne and a chair. The story was an allegory meant to criticize contemporary Malaysian citizens’ willing acquiescence to power. There is a long history of political work having to be allegorical in order to avoid political censorship. The Covenant may express the limits imposed on artworks in Malaysia; in Singapore, it seemed subdued.
Han Sai Por’s Black Forest also engaged contemporary politics, but pulled its punches. Black Forest was a large and beautiful installation of burnt wood meant to represent man’s destruction of the environment. But viewers were excluded from the burnt area. They were only able to appreciate it from the outside. Perhaps this was intended to create a critical distance between the viewer and the work, but experiencing the work all around us, under our feet, would have been powerful.
Occasionally, it was even unclear how a work contributed to our understanding of the colonial past. In spite of its desire to reveal overlooked histories, Agan Harahap’s series of photographs called the Mardijker Photo Studio was a little baffling. Harahap’s images featured the Mardijker, a community of freed slaves originally brought by the Portuguese to Indonesia. And though there are paintings of them, no photographs seem to exist. Harahap created photographs from scratch, using Photoshop to transform old photographic archives of Europeans and non-Europeans. These images were troubling because they were easily confused with real historical documents. Little alerted viewers to the fact that they were fake. Spectators who ignored the wall text saw them as real. On the other hand, if viewers understood that they were fake, it became unclear what they contributed to our understanding of the past. It is true that these images focused our attention on this overlooked history. But they also suggested facts about the Mardijker: how they looked, dressed, and comported themselves. And the project gave viewers no way to determine if these were accurate representations or the products of Harahap’s powerful imagination. The project’s overall effect seemed to be to create confusion about the past. This was very different than Harahap’s habitual works. He is well known for his Instagram images that frequently represent contemporary figures. These images are immediately recognizable as implausible fictions. For example, he has a photograph of Angelina Jolie being arrested in Jakarta. These works allow viewers to imagine a different present as opposed to muddling our understanding of the past.
There were other reasons that the Singapore Biennale’s works were disappointing: sometimes, as with Eddy Susanto’s work the Journey of Panji, it felt illustrative. Susanto was inspired by the Panji cycle. This was a series of stories that spread into a number of different languages before finally being written down. Susanto represented these different languages by having a pile of letters flowing out of a huge book. The book was a beautiful object, but the letters seemed to illustrate the work’s subject matter.
Occasionally, works in the biennial were derivative. Fyerool Darma’s The Most Mild Mannered Men was an example of this. The work consisted of two different pedestals, one holding the bust of Sir Stamford Raffles, while the other pedestal was empty except for a plaque bearing the name of Sultan Hussein Mua’zzam. The point of the piece was that Raffles was remembered in Singaporean history, where Mua’zzam, in spite of having played an important role, was not. But this technique of showing one full pedestal and one empty one, has a past. Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum, which was created at The Maryland Historical Society, had six pedestals. Three contained busts: Napoleon, Henry Clay, and Andrew Jackson. The other three were empty; each had a plaque, one bearing the name Harriet Tubman, another Benjamin Banneker and the third Frederick Douglass. This was Wilson’s way of pointing to important African Americans from Maryland whose busts were not included in the Museum. Using pedestals in exactly the same way as Wilson made Darma’s work seem unoriginal.
The Singapore Biennial’s flaws, the fact that its works were occasionally derivative, sometimes illustrative, and often only able to address contemporary politics superficially, are indications of the show’s unwillingness to take risks. These flaws express a desire not only to be able to predict viewers’ reactions to the work but more importantly to ensure the reaction of the powerful. Predictably, however, this tends to produce underwhelming shows.
In spite of this, the Singapore Biennale had a number of important works. There was a nice little mini-exhibition called Witness to Paradise with Nilima Sheikh, Praneet Soi, Abeer Gupta and Sanjay Kak. But my favorite works were two films by Wen Pulin and one by Zang Honghua. These three films had their own screening room. Seeing all three required almost four hours. But they were well worth it. Wen’s China Action documented the birth of performance art in China and the role that it played as a tool of resistance. His second film, Seven Performances during the 1989 China Avant-Garde Exhibition, showed the ground-breaking China Avant-Garde exhibition and seven crucial interventions made by performance artists during the show’s opening. This exhibition took place shortly before the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, and the performances were important uninvited interventions which occurred on the edge of the show. Zang’s film Ling Long Tower documents a more complex story about contemporary China, in which some artists have gained a good deal of success and position, while others continue to struggle for freedom. In a complicated landscape, viewers find themselves wondering how free these artists really are, and what it would mean for them to be free. Wen’s and Zang’s films were well worth seeing, they would have been the highlight of any show.
In spite of these three films, the Singapore Biennale was disappointing. Its interest in the colonial past did not help viewers reflect on contemporary politics. Works were sometimes illustrative and occasionally derivative. It was a show that played it safe, and playing it safe cost it dearly.
©Vincent Pruden