SingartSensations Beyond IMAX
If you had thoroughly enjoyed bathing in, touching, listening to, sniffing and playing with Jo Darvall’s “Sensorium – The Unfurling” when it was displayed at Sculpture Square Limited in July, you will be delighted to know that you can once again indulge in an artistic interaction with your different senses at the Singapore Art Museum’s (SAM) latest exhibition; and it is 1 that definitely transcends any IMAX experience.
That is because “Sensorium 360O” carries a predominant number of fun artworks that invite you to actively explore, participate or create; and some even challenge you to detect movement, position and time, keep your balance, musically synergize, dabble in synesthesia and flow into spiritual contemplation – to ‘see’ the world through the lenses of your varied artistic, phenomenological, philosophical and psychological intelligences.
So you get your chance to ‘view’ Singaporean Alecia Neo’s “Unseen: Touch Field” with only your fingers and ears. Installed in an almost pitch black room are her braille drawings and sound recordings of the cityscapes of Taipei, created in collaboration with blind and sight-impaired participants at the Eden Social Welfare Foundation in Taiwan and Ahmad Ibrahim Secondary School in Singapore.
Consequently, you gain a sense of the adaptation the visually challenged undergo to make sense of and negotiate their way through their surroundings and a fore-taste of a gastronomical experience offered by Dining In The Dark in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, where you savour every sound, movement, taste and breath during dinner in a totally darkened restaurant.
Testing your skill at coordinating your vision, positioning and movement is Tad Ermitario’s “Twinning Machine”. The Filipino artist’s installation plays upon and subverts the expectations of your mind with respect to your eye-hand and foot coordination by capturing you on video, projecting your image onto a screen after distorting it with a time-lag. His screen immediately becomes an ‘anti-mirror’ that ‘glitches’ and puts out-of-sync your visual cues and physical sensations.
In turn, the gaming fanatic in you will be over the moon with Eugene Soh’s “The Overview Installation” as you get the delicious choice of donning on 3 different sets of modified goggles that replace your normal viewpoint of a floor-drawn maze with an image of said labyrinth streamed from close-circuit televisions.
The 1st set of eye gear you put on gives you a CCTV feed from the 3rd-person perspective (the ‘god view’). The 2nd the 2nd-person’s (the ‘vice-versa’ image) and requires you to team up with a friend to successfully negotiate the convoluted lay of the Singaporean artist’s land, while the last gives you lateral vision, which simulates the way most 4-legged animals see their world.
Your capacity at overcoming initial disorientation to successfully cognitively adapt to the task of walking through the maze, against habitual action, will heighten your sense of body and spatial awareness.
You can next unwind your now heightened sense of triumph by literally plunging your body into the depths of Pinaree Sanpitak’s comforting “noon-nom”. Comprising a room full of round, soft sculptures covered in organza, the Thai artist has once again created physical and metaphorical representations of the human female breast. This time she aims to convey its nurturing, sensual and sacred nature, symbolizing its function as nourishment and comfort to a nursing baby.
And she hopes that your time nestled in her “noon-nom” will re-ignite your keen awareness that touching and feeling are vital means of re-connecting with people and firming up human relationships.
Your now relaxed frame of mind is ripe for Linda Solay’s “Continuum of Consciousness”. The German-born, Israel-based art maker entreats you to move into quiet contemplation by allowing your body to feel and absorb the divine connection Earth has with the heavens as she submerges you in a space filled with scents of soothing spices, low drones of Bani Haykal’s composition of sounds in audible and sub-sonic frequencies, and a hypnotic shimmering floor-to-ceiling column of crystal glasses – beloved heirlooms in Solay’s family.
Getting lost in her work of art locates your body and being within the continuum of sense experience and consciousness of energy fields that converge, overlap and intersect without beginnings or endings, lifting you into the extra-sensory realms.
This in turn primes you for perceiving 1 sense via another: Filipino Christina Poblador’s “There is a tree in the heart of death” plays with the idea that musical scores and perfumes are both described as comprising high, middle and low notes, as well as being powerful triggers in conjuring up feelings and memories. Hence, it comes in a selection of songs and musical arrangements that she feels deep personal and emotional resonance, each accompanied by a corresponding specially concocted scent composition.
When you have tasted her correlated sonic and perfumed notations, Poblador invites you to recreate a score sheet of scents on a strip of paper that corresponds with 1 she has crafted for this exhibition. After which, she liberates you to use the same ‘keyboard’ or ‘palette’ of 30 perfume notes to improvise a scent creation that corresponds to your very own favourite musical score.
While you are thus creatively set free, Li Hui’s “Cage” tests the extent you can sense that freedom. The mainland Chinese artist uses green laser beams to put in place 2 gigantic virtual coops that appear in alternation: 1 moment you find yourself anxiously ‘trapped’ within 1, the next you become psychologically ‘set free’ to muse over the imaginary boundaries that you have set for yourself, based on your perception of things and issues, rather than their reality.
Your mind’s ability to piece together disparate perceived stimuli to generate a synergized whole is tested next: Singaporean Mark Wong deliberately splits a recorded musical score played on the cello, violin, er hu and bass into single channels that play 1 instrument each, and broadcasts each part in a different location at SAM.
His “Memory Rifts” thus offers you chance and repeated encounters to unconsciously hear its melodies and motifs, rhythms and rifts, points and counterpoints. What musical patterns will your mind come to recognize? What synergized refrain will eventually begin to hum in your head?
While music feeds your soul, food entices the stomach – especially when trying new eateries is Singapore’s number 1 past time, and this cosmopolitan city thrives on adapting cuisines the world over to local tastes. Yet, Vietnamese artist, Bui Cong Khanh discovers that this culinary trait is shared in his country of birth – in particular, in relation to the evolution of Hoi An chicken rice. He has come to realise that Chinese immigrants to Vietnam had adapted the Hainanese chicken rice into 1 pleasing to Hoi An’s palettes. Thus evolving it into a uniquely local Vietnamese dish.
This evolution is documented in his “Chicken Rice in the Border” and you can get a taste of the genuine Hoi An fare at Food For Thought in 8Q at SAM, along Queen Street, and make comparisons to the local Hainanese version Singaporeans absolutely love.
The final artwork that ‘invites’ your participation is Lavender Chang’s “Transcendence”. To be created during the duration of the “Sensorium 360O” exhibition, the Taiwanese artist will photographically record you as you engage with and interact with the above mentioned artworks and condense all the activities at each work of art into a single print.
The resulting series of prints will document our sense of time as we perceive it – as highly subjective and often erratic; after all your perception of it depends on whether you enjoy, detest or are bored by the activities SAM offers in this newest exhibition.
Grab this chance of having your 15 minutes of fame captured to posterity by immersing in this highly eclectic selection of surround sensations at SAM at 71 Bras Basah Road, Singapore 189555 while it runs from 31 July to 19 October this year.
Feature photo: Li Hui’s “Cage”
Right photo: Pinaree Sanpitak’s “noon-nom”
Photo credits: Singapore Art Museum
