Come by the studios to meet our Artists-in-Residence Priyageetha Dia, Fazleen Karlan, and Hilmi Johandi (all Singapore) for a special insight into their art-making process! This session of Residencies OPEN will allow you to encounter works-in-progress, browse archival materials, and encounter the heterogeneity of research references that feed these artists’ imagination. Don’t miss out on this unique opportunity to talk to the artists in person!
PRIYAGEETHA DIA
Open Studio
Saturday, 20 August, 1:00 – 7:00pm
Block 37 Malan Road, #01-02
Studio Tour with the Artist
3:00 – 3:30pm
no registration required
As the latest development of her ongoing enquiry into plantation histories in Malaya during the 19th and 20th century, Priyageetha Dia has turned to game engine software as a way to dig deeper into the questions and narratives uncovered during her research. For this Residencies OPEN, visitors can encounter the ways in which Priyageetha is exploring and experimenting with new systems and modes of thinking. From research materials to design drafts, her work-in-progress reflect two concurrent streams of research: the human and environmental exploitation inscribed in the history of Malayan plantations and the ethical implications of game engine software. Mirroring archival footage with a speculative ethno-futurist world, her work arises questions on: What does it mean to work with AI? How can an artist employ a game as a platform of representation? Can game engine software be used to return agency to the marginalised?
Spanning moving image, sculpture, as well as performative installations, Priyageetha Dia (b. 1992, Singapore) addresses identity politics by questioning dominant narratives and socio-spatial relations. In the past few years, her practice has been consistently experimenting with a variety of world-making gestures that envision alternative futures. Her works have been part of several group exhibitions including, Attention Seeker, La Trobe Art Institute, Bendigo, Australia (2022); An Exercise of Meaning in a Glitch Season, National Gallery Singapore (2020); 2219: Futures Imagined, ArtScience Museum Singapore (2019).
HILMI JOHANDI
Open Studio
Saturday, 20 August, 1:00 – 7:00 pm
Block 37 Malan Road, #01-03
Studio Tour with the Artist
4:00 – 4:30pm
no registration required
For the past five months, Hilmi Johandi has transformed his studio into a sanctuary for alternative patterns of thought outside of the usual routines and rituals that define his practice. Visitors will step into a mind map of sprawling ideas, key words, and visual inspirations that come from old films, tourism postcards, and photographs depicting a long-gone Singapore. Next to this explorative mind map, this open studio session also shows how Hilmi’s experiments with form and modes of spectatorship have led him towards stop-motion video expanding his image-making process beyond painting.
Working primarily with painting, Hilmi Johandi (b. 1987, Singapore) also explores interventions with other mediums. The core of his practice mobilises symbols and sites where memory and nostalgia, leisure and desire are deeply entangled. Drawing on archival footage, stills from old films, and sundry imagery produced for mass consumption, his body of work subtly refigures the iconography of Singapore and our relation with images. Hilmi’s recent solo exhibitions include Landscapes and Paradise: Poolscapes, Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo, Japan (2021) and Painting Archives, Rumah Lukis, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (2019).
FAZLEEN KARLAN
Open Studio
Saturday, 20 August, 1:00 – 7:00 pm
Block 37 Malan Road, #01-01
Studio Tour with the Artist
5:00 – 5:30pm
no registration required
For this Residencies OPEN, the sediments of Fazleen Karlan’s experimentations with archaeological processes come alive in the studio. Expanding her inquiry into archaeology as a speculative framework and a mode of re-imagination, during the residency Fazleen has researched the appearance of archaeology in mainstream films and other media and she has conducted a number of workshops for the public to explore concepts of ‘artefact’ and ‘relic’. Her studio presentation will also feature the work-in-progress for Obat Batu (in Malay, literally, ‘medicinal rocks’), a collaborative video animation about traditional medicinal items. These medicinal objects and their uses, which are not archived as often as their western medical equivalents, are cast in a speculative narrative wherein native flora and fauna play a significant role.
The practice of Fazleen Karlan weaves together art-making and archaeology to explore matters of time by mapping and reframing physical remains found within the landscape and socio-historical context of Singapore. By engaging the stratifications of a site and by reassessing the chronology of everyday objects through the tools of archaeology, her work generates news records of contemporary life that cast the relation between past, present, and future into a speculative framework. Her works are regularly presented in Singapore, including in exhibitions such as d3ar succ3ss0r at Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay (2022); Between the Living and the Archive and Pivot Point, Gillman Barracks (2021); and Time Passes, National Gallery of Singapore (2020). She received the Anugerah Cemerlang Mendaki Award in 2019 and the Winston Oh Travel Award in 2016.