Shifting Intimacies

Venue: RAW, 48 Niven Road S(228396)

In a city full of people, how do we turn strangers into meaningful encounters? Shifting Intimacies aims to navigate the ambiguities of relationships through the exploration of human intimacies. It is the unexpected eye contact over the haze of warm soup; the accidental graze of skin against skin in a cold room. What turns a stranger into a friend or a lover?

Seeking to articulate the longing for another and the bridging of lonely souls, the exhibition features works of Arella Ho, Crispin Tan, Terri Teo and Quek Jia Qi. This curation of works contains photographs, cinemagraphs and mixed-media installations made by the artists within the past two years.

In Heartstrings, Arella Ho delicately stitches black strings into white cloth in a confessional word embroidery that unweaves the process of a break-up. Love is universal; heartbreak inevitable. Some strings drape low, heavy under the weight of her honest musings, others hang freely like tracks of tears staining the surface of the fabric. The fragility of the material belie the gravity of the subject matter: we were once lovers; how did we end up as strangers? As Arella opines, “when I had nothing to say to you, I felt better, but I knew it was the end.” A print publication is paired with the work and the viewer is encouraged to take a seat by the window to experience the full extent of tugged heartstrings.

In the same vein of departures and people walking parallel paths, Crispin Tan’s Insomniac: Jurong Fishery Port examines the separate lives led by nocturnal fishmongers through the lens of a Pentax Spotmatic with Kodak Portra 400 film. His series of photographs centre around the men and women who labour under the moonlight even as the rest of the world snooze under blankets in the wee hours between 12.30am and 5.30am. The green tint of his photographs gives our city an other-worldly beauty; beyond our skyscrapers and ubiquitous HDBs, a hidden universe exists for a group of people who ring the tills for a citizenry that sleeps. It brings to fore a space overlooked by many. The stillness of his work is broken only by the accompanying cinemagraphs. There, individual characters go about their night ad infinitum as the clock ticks on and on.

In the meantime, Terri Teo’s In the Mood for [fill in the blank] is devoid of people and yet manages to convey a similar sense of presence. White cables from a famous Lover’s Bridge in Taiwan fan out across the vast sky. Red lanterns decorate the entire length of an alley. Subtle changes in the colours of the paired photographs create an almost imperceptible visual shift that transforms the experience of “looking”. In a photograph of a noodle stall, the different hues of blues felt evocative of our technicolour urban landscape and could transform an ordinary back alley into one fraught with silent lonesomeness. To other viewers however, the change in colours may create an entirely different effect.These results highlight the importance of colour composition and post-processing in nudging out the nuances of intimate moments in life that are personal for each viewer.

The final installation piece is Quek Jia Qi’s Untitled (lost and maybe not always found). It is a thoughtful attempt that bridges the artist and participant; the artist and viewer; the participant and the viewer; and conjoins disparate individuals in the universal act of apologizing. From the execution stage to the presentation stage of the work, a raw honesty permeates. Secrets and matters close to the heart are passed on from stranger to stranger. The participant shares the trust with the artist and the artist entrusts her knowledge of their affairs to the audience in the form of “found wallets”. These wallets are scattered across the room and viewers can only be roped into the sharing through the conscious and deliberate choice - a commitment of sorts - of picking up a wallet and scanning the QR code on a created receipt. It is no easy task to be emotionally frank to ourselves or others. Through experiencing this work, we can only hope to feel a little less alone in our regrets and perhaps, even feel a little better at the end.

Curated by Bernice Seow and Ryan Wong