"CONTINUITY, PERSISTENCE, LINE" Thinking Through Clay--A Selection of Works by Delia Prvacki, NUS Museum Singapore

-a review of the exhibition

by Denise Jambore

Introductory note

Drawn from the vast constellation of Delia Prvacki’s archives and private collections, “Continuity, Persistence, Line” Thinking Through Clay -A Selection of Works by Delia Prvacki, the NUS Museum’s major art exhibition unfolds as a journey through more than three decades of artistic life in Singapore. Iconic works stand alongside intimate studies never before revealed to the public, each piece carrying traces of the artist’s hand and the passage of different times. Together they chart a career as a human continuum—a river of forms and gestures that, across thirty years, has shaped the language of clay into a singular vision.

“amoeba possible shape, beginning, seed, fruit, evolution

formation, development. avoiding coincidences

multiplication of content

the form that was part of a goal

continuity

persistence

line”
De Rerum Natura by Delia Prvacki, 1982

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   Born in Romania, Delia Prvacki moved to Singapore some thirty years ago. Having moved away from the familiar, she became interested in the unknown. And that is how an invisible labyrinth was drafted on the go: her path in the art world is a homeward-looking journey through matter and memory. A self designed road where her sculptures become vessels of both historic resonance and actual becoming. Each work folds the distance between places; each adds to a language that is at once personal and truly universal. It is a path that escapes to a reconstituted “home”, as a shifted architecture of remembrance and belonging.

And part of this “home” is now hosted by the National University of Singapore Museum which might seem as a less conventional choice for an art show. But actually, the fact that “Continuity, Persistence, Line”—Thinking through Clay is presented in the NUS Museum—a space devoted largely to artifacts, historical materials, and the documentation of human knowledge—underscores the profound significance of Delia’s presence in such a context. Far from being a mere insertion of art into a space of science, the exhibition underlines that the work of a great artist belongs within the same narrative of human development that such a museum seeks to preserve and display. As Benoît de L’Estoile reminds us, museography has often been divided between the “museum of the self”, which makes the visitor wonder about who we are as human beings, and the “museum of the other”, which removes agency and frames cultures as objects of study. Delia’s work unsettles this binary: through its masterful weaving of thought and form, it asserts that a certain level of artistic creation is not a peripheral ornament but a central proof to humanity’s unfolding story. Her practice, spanning decades and continents, transforms ceramics into more than aesthetic forms—they attest to a superior type of resilience and the persistent remaking of heritage. In situating Delia’s retrospectic gaze within the NUS Museum, Singapore signals a vital recognition: that art is not separate from but integral to the broader cartography of knowledge, alongside science and cultural memory. 

           Part of the works in “The Search”, the first section of the show act like clues for “The Unknown”, the second part of the exhibition where they resolve the tension between meaning and the tactile presence of material engagement. They’re gathered by Ling Jia Le, the curator of the exhibition, in a single body as a puzzle. Displayed on shelves and plinths along the two-way corridor, there are studies, incipient pieces that furnish Delia’s universe, giving the space a certain intimacy and the sense of evolution. From sketches for large scale public works to studies of her grandmother’s lace and serial experiments with folding strips and masks, these works refer to knowledge and the effects of its presence in dialogue with clay and fire. From this point, the exhibition proceeds as an enactment of Being-in-the-world. The corridor does not simply display the artist’s process; it stages the disclosure of a world as lived and worked through—what Heidegger would call a worldhood, the complex web of references and material relations that make the works intelligible. Here, the mediums are not just substances she expresses her ideas through; they are what the philosopher names ready-to-hand—materials whose significance emerges from the very practices and histories in which they are embedded.
Viewed from this perspective, Delia’s practice reveals itself as more than a personal creative way of preserving an identity; it enacts a continuous negotiation with being-in-the-world, making visible the dynamic interplay between personal and collective memory and imagination. This corridor reaffirms that art is indispensable to the progress of humanity, for it nurtures the capacity to dwell and to remember. And that is yet another reason for which the museum that hosts this exhibition is becoming a meaningful part of it.
The fact that the passage is also used for exiting the exhibition makes it even more suggestive for the cyclicity of our existence, for the metaphoric return to roots, and the persistence in the act of search. 

“I very much wanted to show something that could connect Southeast Asia with Venice.”
Delia Prvacki

Shifting towards the second chapter of the exhibition, an ample room reveals some of the artist’s most iconic works, pieces that have been part of major solo shows throughout the years, like “The Silk Road” which through its circular shape hints back at the dual path within the previous room. But besides holding onto this recurrent concept, the work is bringing yet another aspect of the exhibition to fore–the merging of two distant worlds, and the irrational particle that makes this circular form an infinite journey. And here is where I think it’s necessary to discuss what Delia Prvacki’s work is able to achieve in general and particularly with this exhibition–it manages to serve the matter and the spirit of at least two faraway identities. “The Silk Road” is where the ancient artery of exchange is reimagined as an endless loop: a stoneware path without beginning or end, where the shadows of caravanserais marked in ceramic grog are binding territories and times into a single continuum.
      But these distances, no matter how connected they might become in her practice, are essential to understanding Delia Prvacki's practice. The material becomes a map of belonging as well as an instrument of transformation. At the same time, materiality is the one that brings us to what Jean-Hubert Martin so controversially proposed in the famous “Magiciens de la Terre”* exhibition in 1989 which can translate in this exhibition’s case into the cultural identity’s permeability to “other ways of life”.
“The notion of cultural identity” he said, “[...] is the product of a static concept of human activity, whereas culture is always the result of an ever-moving dynamic of exchanges. We might even go so far as to say that “acculturation does not exist.” I believe that art history's flow of thoughts and interests is somehow finding itself passing through a moment of re-examination of the artist’s agency–the exhibition becomes both a show of cultures and at the same time a universal exhibition of a subject. Much like Martin’s intention, Delia’s work foregrounds materials whose manual and alchemical qualities seem to embody a continuity with preindustrial worlds. Her sustained engagement with materiality might actually draw from the mineral substratum of her native mining town in Transylvania, a place that endowed her practice with an attentiveness to the ontological density of matter. How can   But while Martin’s curatorial framing tended to fetishize such processes as vestiges of an “untouched” cultural integrity, Delia’s practice is far more complex than a metaphoric excavation: her use of clay is not an ethnographic gesture but a philosophical and poetic one, a way of literally thinking through matter.
The subtitle “Thinking through Clay” emphasizes process over product, reflection over display. Where the curatorial concept of “Magiciens de la Terre” often framed the “magician” as Other—a bearer of esoteric knowledge positioned outside modernity—Delia dislodges this binary. Her “otherness” is not an exotic projection but a lived experience, shaped by displacement from her Romanian heritage and by decades of life and work in Singapore. Rather than presenting clay as a cipher of arcane knowledge, she situates it within the everyday—an ancestral medium that still carries myth and memory, but one that also speaks to contemporary conditions of migration and belonging.

        The works presented in the last room, “The Impulse”, turn these themes into a language of Being-in-the-world, a medium through which the impulse of creating opens a dialogue by inviting the viewer into the very act of thinking through material—transforming clay from an emblem of Otherness into a medium of shared world-making.

“Spirits”, a central work in this section, addresses the role of participation as a defining element that differentiates ceremony-based practices from the Western aesthetic paradigm. In Eastern European spiritual contexts, artistic practice is inseparable from the life-world of its community; it operates as a unifying principle, a mode of relation that foregrounds interdependence rather than the individuation of a singular authorial voice. The site-specific installation of suspended porcelain creatures animates this being-with—a coexistence between ancestral motifs, mythic presences, and the viewer’s own position in the space. Hanging between earth and sky, these forms evoke a tension between groundedness and openness, echoing Heideggerian vision of human existence as poised between the immediacy of the material world and the openness of possibility, all enveloped in an unsettling playfulness here.
The hanging pieces, for instance, resist objecthood; they hover as liminal presences, drawing viewers into an encounter that is neither passive observation nor ritual reenactment, but something in-between—a hybrid form of participation that refuses the closure of categories.

It is in this refusal that "The Spirits" resonates with Homi Bhabha’s theorization of the “Third Space” as it inhabits a generative in-betweenness, a space of negotiation where ancestral Transylvanian imaginaries and Singaporean cultural realities interlace, producing new possibilities of meaning. In this space, heritage is neither fixed nor exoticized but continuously remade by the audience—a process of becoming that unsettles both essentialist identity and universalist aesthetics.

Leaving this work behind, the curator chooses to conclude the exhibition not with closure but with works in progress, refusing the fixity that retrospectives often impose. This refusal is not simply a curatorial choice; it states that the artistic process is always in a state of becoming—its meaning continually unfolding through its engagement with the world. In this sense, the exhibition is an artist’s portrait, a lived topography of that Being-in-the-world, where beginnings, middles, and endings dissolve into one another, carried forward by the current of an ongoing life’s work.

“Continuity, Persistence, Line”, on one hand, carries the intimate scale of personal memory—what might be called the emotional architecture of home. In the surfaces of clay and the dense ochres of pigment and glaze, there is a quiet persistence of mythic imagery, refracted through decades of life elsewhere. These are not nostalgic recreations, but living fragments of a self’s ongoing conversation with its origins. On the other hand, the exhibition presents only works created in Singapore, a city-state where heritage is deeply entangled with questions of national identity, cultural policy, and the politics of preservation. Delia’s sustained contribution to the country’s artistic life has made her a kind of national treasure—not in the static, commemorative sense, but as an active builder of heritage through her practice. Every work, installation, and experiment extends the archive of what Singaporean art can be, expanding the textures of its collective memory. In this light, the Singaporean cultural and artistic context plays a crucial role in repositioning Delia Prvacki's practice. Unlike other major solo exhibitions where artists were framed as figures surrounded by the mystifying aura of alterity, she emerges as a singular voice whose trajectory is deeply woven into the place she has inhabited for more than three decades. Her aura rests in the slow, deliberate act of carving a path in new territory—an aura born of persistence, of intimacy with matter, and of an unceasing dialogue between ancestral memory and present ground.
In this sense, she is not only an artist of heritage but a maker of it: shaping clay into language, into the connective tissue of belonging. Through this exhibition, Singapore, with its layered histories and dynamic cultural politics, recognizes in her practice the depth of an artist who has become both witness and builder of a collective inheritance. 

The monumental ring that is "Gold Rush" stands at the entrance as well as at the exit, as a symbolic gateway, a metaphor for the eternal return, where every ending folds back into a beginning. Ultimately, Delia Prvacki's art does not conclude but continues to unfold—like a river that refuses to arrive, carrying minerals, myths, and intimations of home—an ever-unfinished offering that whispers of worlds still waiting to be revealed.

WHERE WE FIND OURSELVES: ON FRAMING AND THE OBJECTS THAT REMAIN

-a review of Marius Bercea "The New Tenant/Sunshine Noir" at Jecza Gallery

by Denise Jambore

His painterly dioramas, with their lack of movement, disclose a world imbued with meaning and relation, often under the guise of political neutrality. But just as Heidegger insists that the world is not merely a backdrop but a constitutive element of being, his installations are not a passive display of otherness in terms of traditional painting. It conditions how viewers perceive the painting as a medium and what they take as real. It’s a game of conventions and politics of situation in relation to the past and to others. The viewer, thrown into this fabricated world, becomes part of a complex act of life-disclosure—one that reveals not just the contents of the paintings, but also the cultural assumptions that structure the other objects and, eventually, its very construction.

This theatrical feeling you get when you enter the gallery is also fueled by the way light is used as if on a stage. It not only marks the way light usually behaves inside Bercea’s paintings, but it also echoes a source of inspiration for the curatorial concept. It’s Eugène Ionesco’s The New Tenant. Its arbitrariness lies in how it involves an individual being inserted into a pre-structured world—one that is already saturated with meaning, objects, and expectations beyond their control. In The New Tenant, the protagonist moves into a new apartment, but instead of establishing a clear start, he plunges into an endless parade of furniture—a suffocating accumulation of objects and their meanings. The tenant is not in control of his environment; rather, he is gradually overwhelmed by it. This dramatizes the Heideggerian idea that there is no empty beginning and neither Bercea’s paintings start from nothing— nor the viewer comes without an intellectual and emotional baggage. Everyone is thrown into his painted situation already loaded with history and language. In this case, Bercea’s furniture is an imagined accumulation of personal experiences, memories of a pre-given “world” of his own Being-in-the-world, as Heidegger formulated it. His objects are not free-floating subjects within the exhibition space, but beings already caught in webs of significance. They act as props for the two-dimensional paintings and they operate in a parallel way: they link the enclosed worlds into which the viewer is thrown, and they make sense of an already-curated reality. Like the tenant, the viewer is not offered a neutral space, but one shaped by prior decisions—what to display and what to conceal. And I believe it’s worth mentioning that the light in this exhibition plays a part in the tension between presence and control, between being-in-a-world and being overwhelmed by it. This aspect of being in the light reveals a subtle critique: our environments are never neutral, aesthetically or politically; they disclose worlds that we must navigate and interpret, or dark/noir regimes we must resist—often without having chosen them at all.

Thinking of Marius Bercea’s imagined worlds in general, from his meditative mid-century California to his Transylvanian aura, the imaginary turns spatial logic against itself. Each new painting reorganizes the visual field, collapsing freedom into illusion, echoing how the tenant (be it a character, the viewer or Heidegger’s Dasein) is thrown into a spatiality already patterned by the artist. His dioramas lend from his canvas paintings–ostensibly fixed, knowable geometries—manipulate distance and depth while framing the eye to create the illusion of total perspective. It’s an illusion that, like the play, both includes and alienates the viewer.  

Through this geometry of emotions that marks each of his works and extends to the entire show as well, Marius Bercea manages to captivate the audience in this philosophical perspective, rather than optical. The vanishing point in a painting is a metaphysical gesture: it draws the gaze into a space that is constructed, not found, promising infinity while reinforcing control. The New Tenant, too, arranges landscapes with bodies and objects along a perspectival axis—not just to be seen, but to guide attention. The way the artist builds perspectives, to the mundane yet poetry of his figurative presences is meant to shape a narrative and to impose rhythm where the darkness stops. The horizon is the metaphysical border between tenants ergo between worlds. Sometimes these worlds can suggest freedom and other times communism.
Geometry, in this context, becomes more than a system of lines and forms—it is the silent architecture of containment.

Within the exhibition space, the interplay of materialities—paintings, sculptural presences and even the wheeled wooden cases used to support paintings—forms a rhizome of objects that echoes the fragmented logic of memory. Each material speaks its own dialect: the painting delivers a luminous nostalgia like it’s a frame coming out of  a projector; the sculpted figures become flattened bodies—part prop, part proxy; modeled “californicated” elements insist on a physical presence, anchoring the viewer in a shared space; and the archive-looking moving cases, often meant to be invisible backstage tools, are recontextualized as relics of passage, thresholds between worlds. The tension between the stillness of the objects and the movable quality of the crates produces a dialectic of presence and transit. It emphasizes the viewer’s role as visitor, as the receiver at the other end of the artist’s gesture.  

And, within this environment of diffused longing and ghostly exchanges of meaning, the exhibition embodies several forms of tenancy. The works, no matter their medium, draw a scheme of cohabitation for the visitor and the artist in a space that is narrating from both ontologies. 

The shared vocabulary among works is coupled with a palette dominated by hues of blue and various depths of green that contrast the “fifty shades” of cement. It feels reminiscent of last century postcards, or at least inspired by the artist’s personal travel photographs. Aside from feeling like personal fictions that stand as historical reflections, no one can pin point to what they evoke precisely. They are reminiscent of postcards because, much like the dioramas, they are curated fragments of the world—flattened tableaux that frame space and memory within a fixed geometry. Like these cards, Bercea’s paintings offer a perspective that is both intimate and distant: a view from a certain somewhere, addressed to someone elsewhere. The works don’t necessarily mean “Wish you were here” but they are embodying a poem of absence. 

His chromatic decisions and his iconic blend of lush greenery against the monochrome cut outs is a quiet acknowledgment of the gap between presence and perception. The paintings are the “tenant” and they name the impossibility of full sharing—of fully inhabiting the same space, the same world.

         The New Tenant/Sunshine Noir is a show that builds relationality, filled with works that unleash multiple threads and the weaving of perspectives, as in the color and the metaphors dictated by the artist’s iconography are forms of polyphony. Through staging his works and assembling different materialities, Marius Bercea reminds us that the act of revealing is also an act of concealment, and that our capacity to understand art is always haunted by what lies just outside the frame. 

*The show is on view from May 17th to July 13th 2025 at Jecza Gallery-Scanteia+, Bucharest

**Image credits: Marius Poput, Jecza Gallery

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THE ART OF UNEXPECTED HARMONY

-a review of "Confluence of Culture" at 39+ Art Space

by Denise Jambore

No man is an island entire of itself,

Every man is a piece of the continent,

A part of the main.
John Donne

    With its archipelagic scenography extending across various seas, the exhibition Confluence of Culture at 39+ Art Space is opening gateways to envision and construct unexpected solidarities, while preserving the option for uniqueness. Trusting that the significance of recognizing diversity is in itself an aggregator for like-mindedness, the collective show assembles histories in an approach that is rooted in a communal reflection. It creates a moment, a gathering that is only temporary, a time-based association of artists facilitated by the deep human condition their art evokes. This meeting point is drawing inspiration from each personal artistic ecosystem of memories, elusive sensibilities and a palpable sense of impermanence. By using the interstitial spaces between the artists themselves and the audience, the exhibition creates an invisible support network for addressing the distancing effects inflicted by histories of departure or estrangement. The selection of artworks in this exhibition speaks about the rituals of care and the acts of vigilance in regards to how artists in group shows can live together. Although, paradoxically, the methods of constructive dissent are responsible for enhancing communal spaces and also for the new possibilities of understanding art emerge. 

The exhibition engages different painting avenues, including abstract art and symbolism among some of the surrealist environments. Within this framework, a surge of shared energies takes root, progressing towards the formation of unexpected kinships through a variety of collective and introspective iterations.

Transcending the boundaries of painting, the artists share this line for a joint horizon. There is a sense of collective anonymity throughout the gallery, one that comes from the contemplative nature of most of the works as well as from the non-referential titles choices. Each artist participates in the show with a personal history about the emotional toll of modern living. And I believe that this is where the true confluence of cultures happens–in the communal pervasive sense of depletion that marks contemporary life.

Through her multimedia work, Singapore based Indian born Sunaina Bhalla is crossbreeding the boundaries of textile art, and the essential elements of her artistic discourse lie in the choice of materials that connect art with medicine and philosophy. The artworks presented in this exhibition possess a capacity to change their depth of meaning depending on the viewer’s closeness to them. They can very well serve a decorative role but only from a distance, while the viewer is far enough not to be pulled closer by the delicate fabric or thread detailing. At a first sight, the works in the “Re-Growth” series might appear as aesthetic manipulations of a cartographic imaginary. But the closer one gets to the works, the more visible the medical threading of the scarlet markings gets. The more layers are pierced, a more personal connection is built. From appearing as mappings of anonymous territories, the pieces transform into depictions not of reclaimed lands but of a reclaimed life.

    Diasporic Singaporean Aki Hassan’s works, on the other hand, point to notions of permanence and equilibrium. Through their structural design they evoke a certain functional emotion, a refined and poetical support system between the work and the audience. Although not apparent to the eye, the compositions rely on an invisible anatomy that makes the whole stable. It is a way beyond the painting itself to speak about the balance that we seek in every encounter, be it with one another or with art. 

A simultaneous speech on the line-carried compositions develops on Liang Manqi’s wall where the straightforward abstractionism grabs the attention. A commanding, entrenched abstractionism captures the light in the room through the almost pattern-like filled canvases. Besides artistically manifesting a chromatic dominance, the simultaneous contrast of colors is also indirectly addressing the theme of the show. The confluence of cultures also takes place where the reminiscence of the early 20th century orphic abstractionism meets contemporary palettes and ungrounded explorations. 

Regarding these possibilities of translating this visual “simultanism” to words and politics that are relevant to contemporary practices, Pearl C. Hsiung's work offers her own arrangement of the natural world. Abstracting nature’s rhythms and gestures, her painting is creating these almost mineral-like landscapes. With their loose verticality the compositions carve into chromatically articulated blocks of painting material. In all of them a powerful wedge slices vertically, bisecting  the composition and our intuition of the space it creates. 

 For an exhibition dominated by this sense of  equilibrium and kinship, works like Sarah Lee’s are contributing a specific content. Her work is mostly fueled by Western art historic references which she filters through her bold and intense strokes. Through this immediacy of her impressionist behavior on canvas, she conjures rhythm and vitality and oscillates between depiction and conceptualization. Therefore, the flow of the exhibition is rarely interrupted and it allows for loud pieces like the one by Anna Valdez to articulate on adjacent pitches. Her picturesque collages of natural or sometimes zoomorphic occurrences and the everydayness of her color palette add a joyful roughness coming from tradition and locality. It creates a tapestry of textures and forms that outline the multidisciplinarity of the paintings in this show.

Speaking about linguistic landscapes, Özer Toraman and Cassi Namoda seem to be expanding the terrain between them and some of the others in the exhibition. Their similar quietness and melancholic vibration are contemplations of the same notions of outsiderness, of being in-between. Cassi Namoda’s Luso-African perspective on everydayness translates into her cinematic style dominated by a bisque-like texture and terracotta nuances. With a fondness for diaphanous depictions of her subjects, her paintings abstracts them to black silhouettes in meditative stances. With his silent compositions, Özer Toraman continues this depiction of a shared territory among the artists in the exhibition and highlights a paradoxical truth: while our identities may differ, the underlying impulse—the need for togetherness—is universally felt. His paintings seem to be these crystalline postcards that are never sent to anyone. They are enigmatic captures of the early afternoon light, with their vacationing subjects reading as the “poetry of being at ease”. 

Eventually, this circle closes with Song Yige’s presence. Her very subdued tonalities envelops the architectural content evoking a sense of loneliness. A domesticated inquietude juxtaposes the chirpy taxidermy making her canvases suffused with a simbolistic contrast. They showcase a seductive equilibrium between the uncanny and the commonplace.

Designed like a “safe space”, the exhibition is expanding the realm of personal experiences and artistic micro universes and brings the artists’ “inner circle” conversation to a broader platform. It puts together artists from various geographies with a (mainly) local audience. And, yet again, the underlying concept of support and confluence is manifesting in the relationship with the public as receptors and possible collectors of these works. So, what I find to be another quality of this “get together” is the way it manages to address the intuition, the emotional side of the “art of collecting” by pulling the viewer inside this deeply humane circle of artistic expressions, emphasizing on the collector as being an insider. 

The exhibition runs until the 27th of October 2024 at 39+ Art Space, Singapore 

39-plus.com

© Photo copyright belongs to 39+ Art Space

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FUTURE AS A PAST TENSE 

Review of the exhibition Echoes and Reverberations: The Interconnectedness of Being and Becoming 

by Denise Jambore           

             It’s been a while since I haven’t seen a gallery show that had this particular museum feel to it. I think it must have something to do with the artists in this one being all established and all finding satisfaction in the field of abstraction. Some find it in its past century form, some in its more recent tenses. But the question is: how does this fit into the ultra-contemporary paradigm of today’s art? Are these works made in 2023-24 truly leaving the 20th century behind; are the artists fulfilling recent past’s dreams of the future? And, most importantly, should they?
The images of Lucio Fontana’s slashed canvases popped into my head as well as his way of understanding futurism, foreseeing that humanity might find its destiny in “infinity”. In the late 1960’s he said: “Thirty years ago, we could talk about the future, and today we can't say what the future will be either (...), but during my forty years of activity, I can see that there has indeed been a future.”

For Fontana it was about the art’s capacity for conceptual renewal, one that he himself anticipated. But how might a prophecy of this kind sound now? One possible answer could be found by looking back and what better place than one’s own imaginary museum. Or at least start by exploring the (all male…) art gathered in the current exhibition “Echoes and Reverberations: The Interconnectedness of Being and Becoming” at iPreciation gallery in Singapore. 

          All of them belong to someone’s anticipation of art and that is as empowering for their art as it is contradictory to the present time. The concepts of postmodernity, materialization and dematerialization are all tapped here but what I feel could be more beneficial to the show is that the public reflects on the invisible lines that are connecting these contemporary artists to the past as a way of understanding the present. As the title of the exhibition suggests, interconnection is a key element for understanding the exhibition and it stands as the curatorial concept. It should also “reverberate”  towards the audience who must act like a fluid agent among the artworks while making up its own interpretations. 

So, it is not an accident that one of the first impressions one gets when entering the exhibition is that of being drawn into an undecided past in the history of art. To be as precise as possible, a neo-avant-garde vibe arises from the beginning thanks to most of the artists’ congruence in seeing and feeling with those from almost a century ago. Although blurred by the anxiety of the undefinable era that we’re living in, the artistic response feels the same. And I don’t think this is necessarily an artistic stagnation but rather the ungainly curatorial vagueness. The conceptual net that was meant to support the connections between the artworks feels thin and lacks rhythm, ultimately placing some of the artists outside the conversation. For example, the works of Raymond Yap and Milenko Prvački are linked by the curatorial wish but not at all as a matter of essence. They are both abstract artists but befriending two different avenues of this movement. While Prvacki is a contemporary master of his own syncretic abstract field, Raymond Yap’s painterly practice draws more from Informalism, being quite far from intentional geometries and bowing to a sort of “matter painting” and gestural randomness. His compositions are uniform and keep the viewer’s eye caught in a string of patterns. With paint being the main vibrating actor, its cracking effect plays a major role and, accidentally or not,  reminds us of Kazimir Malevich’s famous “Black Square” (1915). 

On the other hand, Prvački’s works drawn from his “Abstraction for beginners” series try to reconcile at least two concepts that are part of his practice as an abstract painter: the artistic individuality and the societal awareness. His work is more likely based on the sociological imagination as an outlook on life and uses abstraction as an opportunity for translation. It proposes an approach to understanding how one’s individual perspective on reality is a result of a historical process and occurs within a larger social and political context. And, often making trans-historical constructions, his “academic” abstraction work is able to cast formal theories on contemporary art. Through his art, Prvački is “abstracting himself away” from an affixed identity and enables a broader conversation about origins, alteration and artistic language. 

Moving forward to the other works in the show, it seems clear that the abstraction is actually the central accumulator that gathers the works and echoes the narrative outcome. Boo Sze Yang, the curator of this show, is also present in it with his works–abstract compositions that inform his curatorial endeavor on an aesthetical, less conceptual level. 

Oh Chai Hoo’s ink-scapes add an organic poetry to the show being charged with a different kind of abstract thinking: its philosophical virtue. Set against the gilded background, the variations in tonality of the ever-so-thin medium create “diaphanous” monoliths. 

A paradoxical instance which is excluded by artists like Chiew Sien Kuan for whom it seems like the bridge is an especially fertile theme as it occupies most of his exhibited works. Not sure about its contribution to the show’s semiotics but the declinations of the motif range from being overlaid on paintings in mixed media compositions to sculptural objects that bring the artist’s collector side to the fore. Interestingly enough, these pieces cut the monotony of the exhibition. 

                Therefore, I don’t know if we can ever define the relationship between “being” and “becoming” as this exhibition prompts us to. Not even if we have already passed the future as Fontana said, but I do believe in the necessity of having more exhibitions that are up-to-date in terms of curatorial thinking. Shows that are curated from a contemporary perspective (if not visionary) and keep the artists in time and in tune. Furthermore, it is mandatory to design a context for the public to be able to link the present creations to the past and be able to produce an informed opinion regarding the artistic times we are navigating now. In Singapore, as well as anywhere else, it is not solely the artists’ responsibility to enlarge the scope of societal sensibilities. The future of art is part of the audience’s precision of knowledge of art as a whole, but most importantly, the depth of one’s reasoning.

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FRIDA KAHLO. FORGET ME NOT. 

by Denise Jambore 

It is the third commonness with light and air,
A curriculum, a vigor, a local abstraction . . .
Call it, one more, a river, an unnamed flowing, 

Space-filled, reflecting the seasons, the folk-lore
Of each of the senses; call it, again and again,
The river that flows nowhere, like a sea.
“The River of Rivers in Connecticut” by Wallace Stevens  

                    One way to determine the relevance of an exhibition today is to question its temporality—precisely, how reasoning and sensibilities converge at a specific moment in time. Nowadays the curator’s authorial position is vague (at best) as it is surpassed by the practice itself, the exhibited artist(s) and, of course, the host. Many institutional exhibitions including biennials resemble streamlined statements authored by a collective consciousness in which the audience is having its moment. This slight curatorial shift of gaze towards the public is being driven mainly by social change: the widespread access to instant publicity and the fact that, basically, any member of the public might be or become famous, viral and even iconic. And what can museums and cultural producers do other than regard this as their ethical responsibility to respond to these changing conditions and demands. It is a time when museums could be redefining their democratic aspects and politics of inclusion meaning more power to the people.
Frida: The Life of an Icon and Laid Bare: Frida’s Inner World at ArtScience Museum in Singapore are a duo of exhibitions that reflect on these broader conditions that shape exhibition making and art making today while presenting one of the most famous artistic figures of modern art: Frida Kahlo. While the first is an experiential creation, an immersive recuperation of the artist’s life, the other one is a beautifully curated metaphor of repression.  

 The “Ancient Concealer”. Frida Kahlo: The Life of an Icon 

      Painter and her own model at the same time, Frida Kahlo created one of the most recognizable artistic personas of the 20th century: on one hand through art, on the other with her image. By this time, everyone knows who she was and what her legacy is. Especially because the latter was being built by the artist herself during her tormented life. But what is maybe not so obvious is how this happened and what led to her psychotic obsession with herself and her appearance. It seems it has always been related to pain, to the physical impairments she acquired since childhood and the attention and love she endlessly seeked. As Salomon Grimberg, one of the people who thoroughly researched her life and art, notes: “If, after her polio, Frida ever had the chance to separate the idea of love from the experience of pain, the accident destroyed that chance.” Apparently, he adds, she did her first self-portrait while in bed rest from that terrible accident, and that painting was meant to draw back the attention of her distant lover and recover his affection. That self-portrait was the beginning of an enormous theater of the self, one that placed her at the center of an eras-long one woman show meant to reassure her very own existence. One that is still so alive now as it was at the moment of her theatrical postmortem incineration, an enactment of one of her auto-da-fé diary entries–a blasting fire that was fiercely demanding everyone to look at her one last time. Perhaps, it is exactly this macabre sense of playfulness that she deploys in each of her self-portraits that stirs the audience into what we call today the “fear of missing out”. Each of her self-portraits feels like it could be her last one.
          Her story often seems to tell us that her lifelong struggle was not performed for her present, but for posterity. Thus, her ethereal presence echoes each multimedia environment created for this immersive exhibition. Bearing the museum’s program title–Frida Forever– the eight spaces begin with the entrance, with Floral Passage: a Tribute to Frida–a flower gate which is a commissioned work by Singapore-based Mexican artist Lidia Riveros. This installation opens the exhibition as a spiritually charged arch through which Frida’s darkness is exposed to the eternal spotlight under which her legacy still shines. The work draws from the traditional craftsmanship of Mexican flower art in dialogue with Frida Kahlo’s personal aesthetics. A gasp-inducing arch ornate with daffodils, tropical birds and butterflies–a clin d’oeil at the symbolism of the monarch butterfly in Mexican folklore, this colorful gate confronts the viewer from the beginning with the underlying theme of identity and what Okwui Enwezor called “ethnographic poetics”. The exhibition continues with the “Ofrenda”–the shrine where the visitors take a moment to acknowledge her passing and welcome her absence. It is the start of her epic portrait, spread throughout rooms, cities and imagined territories meant to map what time has transformed into an icon. Traversing the entire exhibition across the eight spaces, an invisible “guide” is being conceived within each viewer: the artist herself.
            Moving on from the altar, the expectations were somewhere in the range of a theatrical multimedia display of a repository of artifacts, arranged in a somehow chronological sequence. But the progression slowly revealed itself as not a predictable default, but rather a set of unexpected environments in which to be immersed, filled with digital accessories and artifacts as attributes. It is a mark of the ArtScience Museum to act as a catalyst of the poetical and empirical in the format of the thematic museum exhibition today and to promote a type of “curatorialization” of educational formats. This type of visual construct used for this show creates a dynamic “thought-space” where both art-historical images and augmented reality reveal how subjective and objective forces shape our understanding. As there has been a high rise in the production of immersive exhibitions worldwide, with companies that deliver a different type of curation to the masses, tech-led groups such as Layers of Reality have expanded the experience of art and technology by creating a wave of popular “fun houses'' meant to introduce a new opportunity for the creative economy. Although recent history taught us that experimentation remains temporary, maybe this type of museum show is keeping pace with the current form of knowledge transmission. From scroll to codex to printed book and now the digital, the mediological model of the art exhibition is just another language device. One that produces and also exchanges information with the audience: one always learns through a given kind of medium. Through the pictorial technologies of the image and spoken words, our thinking is both linguistic and iconic. And today it seems like the image-based information is a much more powerful and engaging tool than any other we used before. Knowledge lives in visual stories. In immersive exhibitions knowledge resides within the relationship between each individual and the display he takes part in. They prioritize sight but also encourage abstract thinking. In a way, these exhibitions based on digital environments bring back the benefits of ancient auditory or oral education to the experience of visual art. We are far less interested in building and transmitting knowledge through reading and writing and much more inclined towards the volatile image. We are much more similar in a way to a pictographic communication era than we were twenty years ago. It almost seems right to compare this image-based language used in institutions where written words have been replaced by images with what thinker Walter Ong argued about oral cultures: “[un-written words] are occurrences, events”. As he continued in “Orality and Literacy”: for an oral culture “learning or knowing means achieving close, empathetic, communal identification with the subject”. A certain participatory (personal engagement) is required in our type of visual culture as well and, perhaps, immersive exhibitions are catering to our need for inclusion and social connection.
But the assessment of this type of exhibitions should be engaged in a very sophisticated pars construens as we are still to unravel this dilemma of experiential exhibitions being too commercial and taking the museum further away from the rigorous and the academic. Mainly because it hasn’t been sufficiently rehearsed yet and, in this particular case, the experience at ArtScience Museum is a comment on the achievements of the pair experiential-intelectual. Thus, the exhibition installation oscillates between the real, the imaginary and the phantasmic, adding another layer to the powerful sense of endless discovery of who this artist was. The walk in the exhibitions is like plugging into some sort of memory bank that uses an “extended reality”. It is a dynamic act of contemplation, one that uses mnemonic techniques of associating emotionally striking images with enveloping environments, her “signature” objects or photographs with mirrors and so on. These enchanting comparative views on her are highlighting the “afterlife” of her image. Just like the monochrome hologram recreating the moment of her accident in slow motion: as distressing as this might be to imagine, this work is so in tune with Frida’s “survival” art. So eerie and rough, yet so everlasting poetic.  

Afterness. Laid Bare: Frida’s Inner World 

          This exhibition is a forensic curatorial approach to who Frida Kahlo was. The medical records in the exhibition could stand as aphoristic indications of what was actually going on in her work at that time. They can be understood as captions for her artworks in the form of encyclopedic entries – albeit an encyclopedia of artworks that are absent from the exhibition but ever present in the audience’s collective memory.

Katerina Jebb, Prosthetic Leg, 2022, digital image printed on paper. Courtesy of the artist.

                      Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait Drawing, 1937  (left)                                            Diego Rivera, La Mujer (Frida Kahlo), 1930 (right)

         The intimate sketches of her zoomorphic limbs and intimate photographs speak about her Munchausen syndrome and her exhibitionism about her medical condition (which culminated in her presence at the opening of her first solo show at Galería Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico in a four-poster bed). For the viewer, all these documents, scans and interviews serve as a set of contemporary fabrics, or perhaps a belated memory palace. A place that consolidates the overall knowledge production of this museum programming and outlines curator Circe Henestrosa’s syncretic vision. Her curatorial nexus involves a continuous space of negotiation between disciplines, contributing to other processes of visual becoming. It is her illustrative curatorial ability to contextualize that allows the “true” artist to “occur” despite, or perhaps because of, “time”. Frida was always present, but it is the powerful absence, the ambiguity of her true being that fascinates until this day. The exhibitions Frida: The Life of an Icon and Laid Bare: Frida’s Inner World manage to domesticate Frida’s pensée sauvage and situate her image in a broader and more generous perspective, that of transmission and filiation. A sensible environment that educates on what constitutes such a beloved icon. 

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Frida Kahlo: The Life of and Icon and Laid Bare: Frida's Inner World can be visited between 4th of May and 1st of September 2024 at ArtScience Museum, Singapore

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La vie en rose et vert, a review

by Denise Jambore

      A  core element of curatorial practice is that context is fundamental to the development of an exhibition and to the way we perceive the artworks that are on display in front of us. The exhibition La vie en rose et vert* created by artist Delia Prvacki together with curator Amelia Abdullahsani at Artitude Galeria gives the public a chance to escape the gallery setting and delve into a deeper conversation about our origins on Earth and how ceramic stands as a medium of “unearthing” the future. For me it was also an instance for ruminating on what echoes around these artworks that form an exhibition with such fascinating connections to the phenomenological concept of “sedimentation” and its application in archeology, geology, and, of course, art. 

What is so interesting and different about an exhibition of ceramic art is that more often than not it is perceived as closer to decorative art than other traditional artistic mediums. And that is because we tend to relate to ceramics by objectifying the piece, thus breaking that diaphanous convention, due to its common inefficacy to profoundly impact the viewer and “suspend the disbelief”. Not the case with the works of Delia Prvacki though.

Without labels or any written material containing what is usually expected for a viewer to experience an art show (without having to be a connoisseur), the exhibition manages to overarch the commercial gallery context (especially the vicinity to other artist’s works) and leave the viewer move to a level of metaphor and meaning quite easily.

A loosely woven show that strings together excerpts from a body of work produced in the past ten years, it delivers a distinctly and discordant response to the peaking genealogies of contemporary art that populate biennials and the like. Received lineages and aesthetic affinities are drawing together works that specifically shift the attention towards the artist's commitment to an artistic practice that takes a long view at the material milieu. Her ability to uncover the complexity of clay, its power to be a politically charged metaphor while so intimate in handling it, stimulates a form of physical knowledge that is as compelling as the written art historical discourse. This is something that most probably comes from one of the artist's interests which is the study of geology and archeology. Some of the works on display, like "Long hot summer" or the "Cornucopia"(s), offer an array of possibilities for ceramic to translate long forgotten forms, different imageries, scientific notions and displays of dreams through a juxtaposition of attitudes towards nature and the universe, the familiar and unfamiliar ways of existing.

The artist is one who understands ceramics as part of a long artistic tradition, which in the Western world was significantly influenced by Ancient Greece. Thus in the Cornucopia-themed artworks the artist is using the medium to tell stories by re-charting both the ancient and the immediate artistic past. These marine "horns of plenty" are both mythologically charged as much as a captivating exploration of imagined underwater faunas. In these works, heteromorphs and other imaginary bottom-dwellers that may or may not have crawled on the seafloor appear to speak about what Husserl's phenomenology defined as "sedimentation". In geology and oceanology, the concept of sedimentation describes the existence of the past in the present. This fluid string of events through which the settling particles are separated from the flowing medium by solidification and densification is represented in these works by the petrified overflowing of the horns. Different layers of sediments are formed, which testify to past events that also have structures in the present. It is art that is able to emotionally manifest this moment in a concrete piece of work. Husserl notes, “in perception something is perceived, in imagination, something is imagined, in love something loved, in hate hated, in desire desired, etc.”. One cannot simply perceive and this shows that consciousness exhibits a correlative structure where intentional acts actively manifest objects, in a particular phenomenological sense. What art brings to this intentional act is even more powerful and that is a chance at ideality.

The accumulation of small stained motifs bearing repetitive dots and etchings describe the gradual abstraction in the artistic language; the striations on each ceramic bead mark the way meaning detaches from them through language. Another work that seems to share a similar becoming draws from a "Dulcineea"-themed series in which the shape of the female breast is repeated and intervened upon allowing for other symbolism, but still true to the conventional semantics that form our ancestral understanding of beauty and life. 

From Cretaceous imagery to ancient mythology, the recurrent theme of Cornucopia is present in a work that includes the viewer as well. This work's "mezzanine"- the space between the ceramic sculpture and the mirror placed on the side wall, tilted enough to capture both presences in one image, reminds of the Greek myth where Zeus placed the horn of abundance, as well as the goat that sacrificed for him, among the stars.

"Topography of hybrid imagery" is an example of work that designs a thawed Earth resulting in an enigmatic biota. The colony of ceramic pillars adorned by phantomatic shapes of sessile organisms that live quietly on the surfaces of their imagined substrates seem so familiar, yet strangely unknown. Some of these motifs that we are able to trace from an artwork to another form a vocabulary together with Prvacki's chromatic, a pigmentation layer that dresses each one of her sculptures.

            Although assembled as a gallery show, the exhibition offers a glimpse into a stratified artistic practice that spans over many years and, worth mentioning, successfully pierced through cultural commonalities and stereotyped discourses. Without marking a narrative or a theme and foregoing the precise exploration of a certain series or artistic period, the exhibition leaves the viewer free to  correlate each piece to the other as they please. The works do coalesce, creating associations not only among themselves but with the context as well. 

At last, I think that the exhibition felt compatible with a museological gaze and made me wish for a more comprehensive institutional monographic show of Delia Prvacki's work. Something which I believe would be able to reanimate for the contemporary viewers each moment in the artist's "long hot summer".

To this end, the exhibition La vie en rose et vert presents just a fragment of what is a little more than a constellation of artistic facets of a significant artist.

Denise Jambore

*The exhibition "La vie en rose et vert" runs from January 27 to February 29, 2024 at Artitude Galeria, Singapore

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Things that make the heart grow fonder

by Denise Jambore

 The white kimono collar worn by the geiko  (Kyoto, 2011). Image: courtesy of Russel Wong 

          Part of a large tradition of curatorial practices, the "dual shows" have always been regarded as a form of exercising the art of conversation between artists or periods, something which might be considered more on the conventional side of this game. In this case, juxtaposing the old and the new left room for expectations which, at the end of the day, were mostly met.

 The "double bill" exhibition that had been hosted within the permanent exhibition of the Asian Civilizations Museum does not have a fixed parcours, or, better said, it does not impose an entry or an end, both of them deriving from one another. And I've found this to be a metaphor for the ways in which people, objects and histories become intertwined, serving as projections of national and personal identities. While the beauty and the "earthly" power plays are a recurrent theme in both shows, so too are the sacred and profane dances of belief, and the manner in which history seeks to shape (even curtail) personal intimacy and artistic expression.

Although it can be a gambit to rewrite an entire episode in art history, these exhibitions attempt a fine-drawn recuperation of a historical moment ("Life in Edo"), while revisiting a rather narrowly perceived cultural canon-- the geisha ("Russel Wong in Kyoto").

The Narrow Road to the Interior

Having a curatorial position that is clear, one more didactic ("Life in Edo"), the other one more personal and less linear ("Russel Wong in Kyoto"), what stands as the core of these two shows is the the temporality of the endeavor which operates in both past and present. The exhibitions are using the objects (the historical prints) and the experiences (the photographs) to produce ideas about beauty and the passage of time.

Using a fluid linearity in the curatorial process, the display of prints exemplified the very condition of multiplication of art while offering the same amount of territory to the poetic flow of the river of Edo. And we saw the same cursivity in the Russel Wong intimate galleries which take the audiences through narrow corridors, virtually introducing the viewer into the small alleys of Kyoto's most prestigious geisha districts.

The multiple pathways of Life in Edo led to several "tropes" dedicated to different themes and subjects, from travel to food and not-so-wild animals which aggregate the light sensitive yet visually powerful ukiyo-e woodblock prints.

For a visitor who experienced the historical show first, the structure and knowledge gathered from it translated into the second exhibition through Wong's usage of fragmentation and creative cuts. The beautiful encounter with his images of geishas was very different in the sense that it took the eye to a place of literary beauty. And that reminded me of a Japanese literary genre, contemporary to the Edo period, which combines haiku and prose-- the haibun. Just as with the writing trope, Wong's pictures meticulously record a moment in an apparent objective manner, but at the same time they're drawing the viewer into an ethereal space. They become a single metrical moment of light and grace. His rarefied eye is the haiku pulling the emotional string from the prosaic stance and that is the true quality of his 13 year long research on the subject.

In the old pond

A sunken sandal--

Falling sleet

In some images, Wong strikes as a formalist driven by his will to beauty. But just as his subjects, he uses beauty as a provocation, summoning viewers to avert their gaze from the mundane, the frailty and all the sadness.

In his search for flawlessness, he unravels the beauty that resides in the imperfection. Because his beauty is the one that can be found in the space between human and the otherworldly-- the ethereal crack in the canon. His artistic approach is dragging the viewer into a deeper understanding of geishas as it masterfully guides the eye and the mind towards the essence of this complex form of existence. He is not afraid of roving his lens over what it seems or really is broken. A body part seen so close you can feel it pulsating-- The Lips: a magnificent moment of vulnerability where the grid instructs the eye to keep a distance (as you naturally have towards history), while the depth of the details draws you inside a transient beauty.

In all the gridded pictures, the contrasting tones of light and dark divide up the oban-format frames into sparse, clean geometries. He chisels painted lips in such close-up that "decay" and grace form a partnership of style.

In other pictures-- like the ceremonial scenes-- his accuracy adds to the seemingly cool aesthetic but that is the mark of a disciplined vision that puts forward the self-composed nature of his subjects. For some photographs this translates into a feeling of theatrical emotion, a sort of serene emptiness that feels eerie. And that is part of the multilayered lens drawings that Russel Wong presents us with after his long research into the life of geishas.

Some of his interior photographs appear like dioramas built in the walls. They have this atmospheric effect as if the print is a transparent canvas behind which the subjects perform the illusion of motion and change. At the crossroads of visual art, literature and theater, this cross-disciplinary cultural icon-- the geishas photographed by Wong open a paradoxical window towards a world which exists only in relation with an audience, but at the same time is locked, just as the museum dioramas are enclosed in a display case.

What remains

What I appreciate about these exhibitions, and especially about Russel Wong's is that it has the ability to turn the dialog with art-- and photography as a world of images-- into a point of departure for aesthetic and social exploration. Nevertheless, the pairing of the two shows argue the strength and breadth of two institutions and practices-- on one hand  stands the museum as an aggregator, and on the other one there is the artist filling the shoes of an archivist of emotions.
And, moreover, it makes a case for our own blurred present which still tries to define the meaning of art institutions such as museums in a manner that would not only contribute to beauty but human dignity and social awareness as well.

Enigmatic and poetic, Wong's work sidesteps the descriptive while arriving with a strong poetical and personal ethic. Probing questions of identity and belonging-- the individuality of a maiko and a geiko, and the status of the geisha in the modern hanamachi--, property, and the role of personal relationships, he shines a light on the power structures behind the façades of contemporary societies and the fragility of our ideas about life and love.