ArtReview
At National Gallery Singapore, artists probe sensitive subjects under a state-managed image of a harmonious, multi-ethnic society
Yeyoon Avis Ann,
Passage Moist Beings, 2020, 3-channel video and resin. Courtesy the artist and National Gallery Singapore
Five brown women have taken over National Gallery Singapore (NGS). In front of a Raden Saleh painting of animals escaping from a forest fire, they recite excerpts from Frank Swettenham’s
The Real Malay (1899), one of the foundational colonial British texts responsible for the myth of the ‘lazy Malay’. (Typical excerpt: ‘The leading characteristics of the Malay of every class is a disinclination to work’.) The women perform a slow exorcism of this racial malevolence. They pray, sing, ride barefoot on the escalators. They perform in front of paintings of Malay people. The performance ends with the actors speaking about declaiming the land, unfencing the beaches and freeing the seas – an allusion to the state