KVT – Biennale Ngày thứ 3 tại Bảo tàng Quốc Gia Singapore

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Lots of imaginative interpretations spit into the charged air around the fabulous construction, like rapid fire machine gun bullets… though at the conclusion you are still left with a poor bereft population being played tug of war with by exploitative hierarchies and greedy, insatiably gobbling, multinational corporations. The lethal elixir that the tug of war with the serpent churned up from the bottom of the sea …perhaps the aroma of precious natural resources…still seems to be filigreeing over a too often benighted people.

There are eight installations inside the National Museum of Singapore and one that is proving to be a huge crowd pleaser is a 3 minute, looping video installation by Kontum born Uudam Tran Nguyen even though it hasn’t been displayed to its full potential. In fact it’s probably the only exhibit in the Biennale that has been curated shabbily.

Rather than describe this marvelous choreographed motor bike ride that seems to refer to a phalanx of performing horses, I’ll encourage you to click onto this vimeo clip with your volume turned up high

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/60595735[/vimeo]

Initially it’s the music (The Second Waltz op 99 by Shostakovich) that grabs you and pulls you in and then you are all eyes and smiles as you watch the squadron loop over and over.

Shostakovich composed the music in 1955 to please Stalin and the powers that could gulag you, for a quasi propaganda love story movie for the masses to enjoy. It’s about a group of youth volunteers who go to set up a co-operative in remote Kazakhstan and revolves around a female tractor driver and the dashing Komsomol secretary.

Why do I mention all this? Well I can’t keep my febrile imagination tied down, and the Russian youth workers just might be a metaphor for the group of modern motor bike riders who are tentatively tied together by rain capes, rubber strings and clips rather than invisible ideology. When, at the end of the video the riders break apart and go their own free ways one can’t help but worry a little about if they’ll be pursued, captured and forced to keep on endlessly, repetitiously and meaninglessly performing.

The wild applause at the start of the action seems to be congratulating conformity while that at the conclusion seems to be madly applauding the escape. But when it loops all over again the fickle public has changed sides again and seems to be clap, clap, clapping that their world is unchanged and safe again

I’ve probably got it all wrong but what’s the point of being involved with something as good as this video if you can’t conjecture a little, or a lot?

The real drama started when I entered a large, dark gallery space with acid green and blue pendants and chandeliers hovering above like a poisonous galaxy.

Then my eyes peer through the gloom… and far over there was a host of familiar faces

I realized that it was the brilliant video installation by Nguyen Trinh Thi…pictured below, eating a banana, as a cast member of UNSUBTITLED…that I’d been eagerly anticipating since leaving Hanoi

All the cast members are artists who have been associated and creatively involved with the original Nha San, that inventive, creative, avant garde but officially contentious collective of artists and who are at present having a week of events to celebrate their 15th anniversary. Click Nhasan Collective’s Facebook or the post on Hanoi Grapevine.

When I first saw ‘Unsubtitled‘ in the undercroft at Nha San in 2010 when it was screened to celebrate the re-opening of Nha San after a period of enforced closure and which you can share on this You Tube clip

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XY7IecNwoy4[/youtube]

I immediately knew that its potential had barely been realized. But thanks to excellent curating in Singapore, a large, dark space has been allocated and the viewer can look at if from afar or walk in and out and through its characters and get involved with them, even with a feeling of intimacy, as they, sometimes noisily, munch, chew, slurp and nibble through commodities that each has chosen to consume endlessly as they are looped by successions of projectors

‘Unsubtitled’ now deserves the adjective, brilliant.

Thi courageously eschewed the text in the Biennale catalogue for her wall statement beside the installation. There it is described as a defiant testament to the power and fragility of one city’s art scene.

Amongst other things, the characters are subtly parodying the old cliché of self criticism and the necessity to have to officially validify their outputs and be under surveillance, by taking part in a silent protest of nonconformity, by eating what they have freely chosen in the manner they individually wish to.

It’s stunningly good, intellectual work and of a genre particular to the artist who has two recent video installations that push, further, the boundaries of insistent change in her’s and the associated artists’ worlds. These deserve to be exhibited in international spaces and places as eloquently as has been done in Singapore

Those green lights were by a Japanese couple resident in Australia and each of the 31 glowing pendants, fitted with uranium glass and UV lighting, represents a country that uses nuclear power. The size of the fitting depends on the number of nuclear power plants in each country, with the USA having the largest, most ornate chandelier.

This is a hauntingly beautiful but ultimately chilling installation as we still have with memories of Japan’s recent catastrophe still fresh in our minds and the ghosts of Chernobyl linger in the sickly glow.

A list of the 31 countries is also available.

The other three works were equally thought provoking,

Grace Tan from Malaysia who does excellent work knitting and weaving with recycled materials has installed a work in the dark that asks you to stay for awhile, and then a while longer…to stop and connect with our actual surrounds, not the virtual or technical environments that we too often utilize to subsume reality. Her work gradually grows emerald green as it interacts with ultraviolet sources and is worth waiting a while, or even coming back after awhile, to see the small miracle.

Another Malaysian, Leroy Soyfan, has extended his Whitewash series with a mall installation of floor mops, all with heads of hand made soap. The artist is attempting to spotlight those people who labor for us but who are largely ignored. Similarly he uses the work as a metaphore for countries, like Singapore, that are attempting under the guise of rational economics, to sell off cultural institutions that are used to preserve a nations memories and histories, or, like just about any country you can name, those that are attempting to be revisionist in their country’s stories so that only a too sparkling, glossy surface will be left as a reminder of the real past

Finally there’s the Motorella from Cagayan de Oro in Mindanao in the Philippines. Artist Sieto Pesos has re-constructed a motorbike taxi that is unique to the city, as a monument to all Motorellas and their drivers, but also as a requiem for the survivors of a vicious typhoon that tore the city apart in 2011.

It’s an interactive vehicle and was used as a motivating workshop for child survivors and has a video in a small console that invites you to climb in and revel in histories of its unique kind

A boat on top reminds that the previous storm will not be the last.

One day to go and if it’s anything like the past three I’ll have no pants left to piddle in…figuratively speaking!