Site, Situation, Spectator

[Gallery image: Site, Situation, Spectator, NUS Museum, 2009]

Date: 16 May 2009 - 12 July 2010

Venue: NUS Museum

Mediating around the conceptual elements of ‘site’, ‘situation’, and the ‘spectator’, this exhibition will present a discursive insight into how these elements are interplayed in relation to preserved narratives of Singapore history. Presented through mixed media and undertaken by four students from the Department of Architecture and University Scholars Programme, this exhibition aims to offer alternative articulations to seemingly “institutionalized” narratives by relying on fragmentary sources often neglected by orthodox historians.

Click here to view University Scholars Programme website on the exhibition.

Guest Curator: Nurul

Nature, Man Included

Date: 27 February – 17 May 2009 
Venue: NUS Museum

Date: 19 May  - 2 June 2009 
Venue: ArtsBuzz, NUS Central Library

How do we contemplate Nature and Man’s place in it? What are the issues in the representations of Nature reflecting contemporary social and cultural values, the self and community and their relationships with the natural landscape?  Does the environment and its conditions reflect the economic and political dynamics? Should we highlight spatial domination or explore the boundaries between the natural and cultural, the urban and the undeveloped? Or can we reflect on the philosophical ideas on Human Nature? Drawing from the diverse intellectual disciplines and interests within the University, this exhibition which is held in conjunction with NUS Arts Festival 2009 presents a range of perspectives by NUS students, staff and alumni that allows us to reflect Man's place and role in Nature through photography.

                                                      Lee Guan Wei Daniel, You are not alone (photo essay), 2008

SPACING IDENTITIES: J. Ariadhitya Prahumendra

[Gallery impression, SPACING IDENTITIES: J. Ariadhitya Prahumendra, NUS Museum, 2009]

Date: 10 – 31 May 2009

Venue: NUS Museum

Emerging from various explorations linked to conceptions of the anatomo-philosophical “self”, J. Ariadhitya Prahumendra in his most recent series dissects the seemingly monumental appeal Spacing Identities. Informed mostly by the artists’ biographical interests, the 13 large charcoal works present momentary petitions for recognition, constantly emphasizing on re-assessing the self in relation to what constitutes identity, religion, the moral and the social in contemporary Indonesia. The self simultaneously becomes a subject and object of observation and study, a liminal philosophical category, developed through investigations into artifactual constituents of memory and placed conjunctive to idealizations of artistic labour and its accompanying predicaments.

Hendra’s reflection involves not only an assessment of personal aspirations and anxieties, but is also one that seeks to feed into the relentlessness of his practice as artists marked by idealism and fraught with risks.

Curator: Mustafa
Click here for the exhibition brochure in PDF format.