The Environment and Korean Women at Gillman Barracks
With Singapore Art Week in January approaching, many galleries at arts precinct Gillman Barracks are in preparation mode. But visitors looking for an arts fix to close out the year can still catch two small-scale exhibitions in the former military base.
At Block 7, non-profit The Institutum brings together the ochre works of Malaysian artist Cheong See Min and Singapore-based Marvin Tang and Madhvi Subrahmanian in an exhibition titled A Seed, A Shift And A Lost Pineapple.
All three, through various mediums, relook the region’s historical relationship to land and the environment, foregrounding colonial legacies of the rubber and gambier plantation trade.
Tang has reconstructed the Wardian cases the British used to smuggle rubber seedlings from Brazil to the Malayan peninsula. Cheong’s A Cart Of Lost Pineapples references the 19th-century export of pineapple leaf fibre, weaving the material with cotton and silk yarn, as well as linen, to recreate an archival image of a pineapple-laden buffalo cart.
Subrahmanian’s clay installation A Letter From The Past quietly takes up a whole wall. These cryptic, Jawi-esque shapes were moulded in the cracks and gaps of the interior of Guan Huat Dragon Kiln in Jalan Bahar, once fired fortnightly to forge the latex cups used by labourers for rubber tapping.