Get intimate with the world, Arts News & Top Stories – The Straits Times

Walk through the doors of Gajah Gallery and the first work that confronts you is an altar-like installation with iron pots with lids clinking rhythmically and fresh loaves of traditional kopitiam bread on a long table flanked by cloth drapes and red wool spelling out parts of the female body and its functions on the floor.

Singapore-born artist Suzann Victor's Promise is one of 40 works by 11 South-east Asian women artists in the gallery's new show titled Shaping Geographies | Art | Woman | Southeast Asia.

This is the first time the work has been recreated since it was shown in 1995 as part of an exhibition of 10 contemporary Asian artists in Japan.

Dr Michelle Antoinette, 42, Arc Decra fellow and lecturer at Monash University and co-curator of the show, says: "Drama is absolutely crucial to this work.

"Suzann is very interested to evoke and invoke the presence of woman, but to do so through the audience's own reading of the work. It's not an obvious figuring of the woman's body."

The show brings together a diverse range of female practitioners, ranging from youthful new voices such as Malaysia's Kayleigh Goh, 24, to the late Balinese artist I Gak Murniasih.

Dr Wulan Dirgantoro, 41, McKenzie postdoctoral fellow at Melbourne University and co-curator, adds that the works show how women artists have a different way of looking at the world. "They're not shying away from big issues, but they bring this more intimate, closer way of looking at the world."

WHERE: Gajah Gallery, 03-04, 39 Keppel Road

WHEN: Till Dec 31, 11am to 7pm (Mondays to Fridays); noon to 6pm (Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays)

ADMISSION: Free

INFO: str.sg/Jiyk

The two curators point to a lengthy work on paper that hugs two walls in the gallery.

Laotian artist Savanhdary Vongpoothorn took rubbings of the patterns on the stairs leading to a temple and these rubbings are interspersed with tanka, 31-syllable poems, by Japanese poet Noriko Tanaka.

Dr Antoinette says: "It took the eyes of an artist to stop and pay attention to these otherwise overlooked patterns."

Some of the works, the curators say, force the audience to stop, think and engage. Another work by Victor, inspired by the late mother of a friend, features paintings which are hidden behind a hemisphere of lenses.

Dr Dirgantoro points out: "The audience's body is part of the work because it's moving around, you need to be intimate with this work."

The curators note that one of the themes, which has emerged from the show, is how women artists have shifted their perspectives over the years.

In the 1980s and 1990s, works were more about self-identity, but there is a shift to narratives about other women's bodies and community perspectives as well.

Dr Antoinette points to Filipino artist Geraldine Javier's installation, comprising a pair of blue-splashed canvases and a long rectangular pit filled with what looks like blue sand.

The sand is actually made by breaking down the blue lids of mineral water bottles, rubbish collected by women in the community.

Dr Dirgantoro adds that the work, by involving members of the community, creates awareness about issues of waste and pollution in the community and involves people in art creation.

While there are resonances in the works across national boundaries and generations, Dr Antoinette acknowledges that South-east Asia is a diverse region that resists categorisation.

"Our approach to South-east Asia is not about generalising across South-east Asia.

"It's trying to attend to the particularities of artists and their practice, the stories they want to tell about particular moments and events that speak to them."

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Get intimate with the world, Arts News & Top Stories - The Straits Times