Monday 28.01.2019

Spring exhibitions at Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore

Lost and found: imagining new worlds

Artists: Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Pamela Cevallos, Fyerool Darma, Yazan Khalili, Ismael Monticelli, Gala Porras-Kim, Rosângela Rennó, Raquel Stolf, Batia Suter, Tromarama

Guest curator: Raphael Fonseca

Guest curator Raphael Fonseca lives and works in the state of Rio de Janeiro, southeastern Brazil. His ongoing research as a curator, critic and art historian explores strategic linkages between contemporary art and history. As a conceptual basis for Lost and found, Fonseca has considered a series of questions around the idea of the collection as a repository through which to understand, communicate and utilise historical accounts, imaginative narratives and classification processes. He has selected 10 artists whose practices explore in unusual and specific ways what he describes as 'the ancient and existential acts of collecting, classifying, organising and showing things'. The majority of the presented works address collections of art and artefacts, while others, such as Gala Porras-Kim's printed texts, present evidence of processes and procedures as a way to probe collections management transparency and accountability.

Brazilian artist Ismael Monticelli has created a major installation that includes sculptures and tools associated with Brother Joseph McNally, the founder of LASALLE College of the Arts. Monticelli situates McNally's figurative sculptures along with other props and materials in front of a dramatic painted backdrop. The installation references the potent incongruity of the Poh Tiong Keng 'sunken' temple that stood against the backdrop of a then ultra-modern Toa Payoh housing block for nearly 10 years until the temple was demolished in 1977.

Artist and architect Yazan Khalili, based in Palestine, examines the politics in the constitution of art collections. Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Fyerool Darma, Raquel Stolf and Tromarama variously question museological rationales for determining what is worthy of being collected. Batia Suter, Pamela Cevallos and Rosângela Rennó explore in their exhibited works the global proliferation of images while exposing the tension in relations between an original and a copy, an organised collection and a Pandora's box.

Lost and found presents artworks never before shown in Singapore; many works have been commissioned especially for the exhibition.

Raphael Fonseca and Ismael Monticelli are LASALLE's ICA Singapore 2019 curator-in-residence and artist-in-residence respectively.

Diego Marcon: Ludwig

Ludwig is the most recent character to emerge from the work of Italian artist Diego Marcon. Marcon chose CGI (computer-generated imagery) to compose Ludwig, whose namesake protagonist is a lone blond boy with dark eyes confined to the pitch-black bowels of a ship at sea. Chiaroscuros—contrasts of light and shadow—are replayed as the animation loops endlessly. Ludwig sings an aria that observes the European Romantic musical tradition of the lied, usually a composition about lost love, death, night or dreams. The score was written by Marcon's collaborator, Federico Chiari, and sung by a boy soprano from the prestigious Coro di Voci Bianche dell'Accademia Teatro alla Scala in Milan. The images and the song's refrain each magnify the work's unsettling effect—the combination of animation and classical music is jarring.

Diego Marcon began his investigation into images, memory and the construction of emotions by looking at analogue film archives. Recently he has employed digital technologies, examining how they change an artwork's form and content. The protagonists of Marcon's films are young children—more archetypes than people—who tend to embody melancholic traits.

Ludwig, the exhibition, presents a two-metre wide, six-monitor video-wall which plays the video on a loop. The display reflects the hyper-technological forms of visual advertising that are ubiquitous in Singapore.

Artist Diego Marcon (born Busto Arsizio, Italy, 1985; lives Milan) works in drawing, film, video and installation. He has exhibited in festivals and exhibitions including Fondazione Prada, Milan (2018–19), the sixth Moscow Biennale for Young Art (2017), and Artspace, Auckland (2013). In 2018 he received the MAXXI Bulgari Prize for Ludwig.

Ludwig is supported by Q-International.