Tempo(rary) at the Singapore Festival 2020 (Yangon, Myanmar)

At the beginning of February, a handful of artists from Singapore and Myanmar (along with honorary Singaporean collaborator Nicola Anthony) came together under the curation of Marie Pierre-Mol of Intersections Gallery to showcase work around the idea of time. This was part of a larger event organised by the Singapore Tourist Board (STB) as part of their efforts to raise an awareness of various aspects of Singapore, from food, culture, and art to retail as well as to partner with local restaurants and artists as a way of forging bonds between Singapore and Myanmar.

The view from the top of Chin Tsong Palace

The event was held at the Chin Tsong Palace, a sprawling complex that was built by Lim Chin Tsong, said to have been Myanmar’s richest man at one point. The building was finished but never occupied and in the 1960s it was commandeered by drug smugglers. The Palace had a network of tunnels and secret rooms under it, and one of the tunnels was said to have led to the river. Much history, many feels.

The Chin Tsong Palace at night

Tempo(rary) is a collaboration with Burmese artist Maung Day. It consists of a dialogue in poems and photographs. Over the course of a month, I sent a poem to Maung Day and he responded with a poem or a photo. And then he sent a photo to me, and I responded in kind. We created ten pairs of work from this exchange, each one accompanied by a metronome set to a different tempo.

The photograph is from Maung Day, the poem is from me. All the poems were translated to Burmese as well. Text layout by Nicole Soh.

Part of the work in the exhibition space

Ticking at a range of tempos, the metronomes are a sonic reflection of the varying speeds of two very different cities.

Time in the city is a function of progress and growth. It is invisible; fleeting and always in scarcity.

We are always running out of time. Time is never on our hands. We need more time, we say, this commodity that can never be bought or bartered. 

We are made by time, its invisible, inevitable ticking, keeping tempo to the rhythms and reasons of our lives. Time soothes and serenades, summons and silences.

The crowds weren’t what we were led to expect, partly due to the prohibitive ticket prices. The food was also probably priced beyond the reach of the average local. But hey, at least the art was free!

Following the exhibition, I received the incredible news that Tempo(rary) has been selected to be part of the 12th Yangon Photo Festival. The work will be exhibited at the Rosewood Hotel from 19 Feb to 21 March. Do check it out if you happen to be in Yangon!

2020: Performance Notes

2019 is winding down after the usual mix of publications, performances and an extremely unique residency in Panama. We’ll be taking some time to be spectators at Wonderfruit, a music and art festival outside of Pattaya. 
Then it’s back to art-making next year with Note for Note on 10 January. This edition is rather different from the usual one poet + one musician pairing. This time, I selected 16 poems from various poets around the subject of the city and the theme of speed. The title of the show is ‘Stop, Look and Listen’ and will feature actors performing poems in three separate sets. The soundscape will be scored by Bani Haykal.

Light to Night Festival runs from 10-19 January 2020. Desmond Kon, Nuraliah Norasid and Kevin Martens Wong and I were commissioned to each pen a poem that would serve as the basis for the festival programming. Inspired by Ítalo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, my poem imagined the city as a canvas of stories both known and unknown

At the start of February, I’ll be headed to Yangon for a weekend as part of the Singapore Festival 2020. I’m doing an artistic dialogue with Burmese poet and artist Maung Day. The exhibition is called Tempo(rary) and uses a series of metronomes to map different speeds of our two cities (Singapore & Yangon) through a poems and images.

As part of Buysinglit 2020, Crispin Rodrigues and I will be doing something completely different on 8th March. We’ll be running Uncanny Yishun: A Literary Tour, melding poems, creative non-fiction pieces and torrid tales from Singapore’s most notorious neighbourhood into an entertaining two-hour walk. More details to come!

The following weekend, Handbook of Daily Movement gets its hour of fame. I’m super pleased that this labour of love with Sudhee Liao has been commissioned to be part of the Textures Festival. So we are expanding it into a full-length live performance featuring original music by Rupak George and four dancers. There will be two shows and also a screening of our original film.

And then a quick trip at the end of March to Ho Chi Minh City to sit for my third Milestone in my PhD journey. Ahhhhhhhhhhh.

From 11 June to 11 July, Alliance Française have graciously offered to exhibit the poems and photographs from Sightlines, my collaboration with Tay Tsen-Waye. The AF gallery is a lovely space, with loads of possibilities when it comes to displaying the work.

And on 13 July, I begin an Exactly Foundation residency on the nebulous yet fascinating topic of ‘offence.’ 

That’s a pretty stacked start to the year! At some point I am also hoping to squeeze in an exhibition with Cheyenne Philips of the work we created from the La Wayaka Residency in Panama. Hopefully that will come together in the usual way that exhibitions happen; a blend of serendipity, timing and opportunity.

between memory and forgetting

A photograph, perhaps more so than any poem, is something that continues to haunt me. One can describe place, deconstruct its technical aspects, but there is something haunting about the visual quality found in an image, its raw affect that straddles the space between memory and forgetting. It lodges in some limbic node and refuses to be described.

To describe carries the idea of sketching, to mark the form or figure of.

These monochrome images, taken over the years in various places, carry something of that indescribable moment to me, whether it is in gesture, the depth of a building or the way an image bisects itself; the frame drawing its own lines of meaning.

Sri Lanka (2017)

“In these all-seeing days, the traffic between memory and forgetting becomes untrackable. Photography is at the nerve center of our paradoxical memorial impulses: we need it there for how it helps us frame our losses, but we can also sense it crowding in on ongoing experience, imposing closure on what should still be open.”
– Teju Cole, from “Known and Strange Things”

India (2011)

“The photograph isn’t what was photographed, it’s something else. It’s about transformation”
– Garry Winogrand

Nottingham, UK (2012)

“All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.”
– Richard Avedon

London (2016)

Sightlines: The Launch

Sightlines launches on 23 May at 3Arts, a pottery studio in Joo Chiat Place.


It’s been a book that has been on an incredible journey, starting from Waye reaching out to me to write poems from her collection of film photographs. At that time, I was just beginning to write about collaborative processes as part of my PhD at RMIT. Here was a chance to put theory into practice. Of course, ideas are far easier than the actual work of selecting images, arranging them into a kind of arc and then writing poems that allowed for a different sightline, another way to apprehend the image. The first title that emerged was Waypoints, but eventually, we realised that while it described each image/poem pairing as a node on a journey, what we were really after was a treatise on different ways of seeing.
 
Sightlines allows for a dialogue between text and image. The reader is not bound to one particular way of seeing or reading, and the work has to be ‘read’ not just as a pair, but as a grander arc. The narrative, so to speak, begins and ends in Singapore, where both of us are from. Whilst travel is the given, there are other elements that layer the experience of travel, such as the implied female persona that moves from one space to another. Then there is the medium of the image; film. The treatment of grain, how light falls and is held on the page and the emotional resonance of an analogue process seems to cohere with the personal nature of the poem; as a space that is made intimate through a different kind of viewfinder.
 
And to add yet another layer to the experience, we are showcasing selected poem/images with pottery works made by various artists at 3Arts, a pottery studio. The pieces and the prints (A2, framed and printed on acid-free archival paper) are available for sale. 

Here’s a sample of one of the poems and images. 

Come journey with us on an evening of looking, listening and learning. 

Event details: https://www.facebook.com/events/392737178231584/

On Minimalism – Two Poems

I was invited to read at The National Gallery Singapore on 24 Feb together with a bunch of really cool poets – Momtaza Mehri, Charlene Shepherdson, Jennifer Champion and Tse Hao Guang. We were responding to Minimalism. Space. Light. Object. an ongoing exhibition at NGS, either to the individual exhibits or on themes of form/anti-form, light or space. I wrote two new pieces for the reading. The first was after Tatsuo Miyajima’s Mega Death, where I spotted a single number counting up against an entire room of descending numbers.

Stubborn 

From distance, 
a pulsing envelope of blue magic 
beckons in irregular heartbeats, 
a chorus for the clicking crowd 

Seen up close, 
one number counts upwards 
while the rest descend like a
herd reasoning down to zero

One number walks upslope
an improbable anomaly
a refugee refusing order 
a sheep swallowing the language of wolves

The other numbers blink furiously 
as they chase zero, starting over
at their own pace, making up 
the apparition of a faceless crowd, 
lights going on in a silent room. 

The lone number climbs
against the tide, against all logical proof; 
glitch in the system, broken integer. 

Like that one child in class who keeps 
raising a hand to ask question 
after question, dissatisfied, 
holding up the diminishing lesson, 
holding time itself with a clenched fist, 
wired for a different world. 

The other poem drew its inspiration from Jiro Takamatsu’s pair of 1971 artworks titled Oneness of Wood and Oneness of Concrete. I tried to embody the idea of words contained within words through a series of haiku, where the four successive haiku that followed the first one comprised of words drawn from the latter.

Containment

Here is the earth and 
here we find, body broken 
between unread lines

Here the line is broken
between 
body and earth 

Find the unread body 
broken earth 
here, and here 

Earth lines,
find the broken here, unread, 
between 

Here between the earth
and body, we unread 
lines

Frame lines

After an intense ten days at the Singapore Writers Festival I’m back to considering the role of text and image in my work in a couple of events that are coming up this weekend.

Most of the time, the image is made first. It occurs from a way of looking, an intense gaze  in search of something striking. It does not have to be spectacular or manufactured. The image is often found at the intersection between light and chance. 

The frame is always deliberate, and what is excluded is sometimes what is unnecessary; an abundance of sky which fills too much of the frame, or cropping out what’s distracting, which could be something as simple as one person too many, or simply a brightly-coloured object.

The void deck, spotless;
where not even doggies dare
to leave barks behind

The poem almost always comes afterwards, a kind of reflection to the image. The poem is a mirror held up to the image, translating that striking moment into its own composed shape.

The frame line sits between, an unused space that separates two adjacent images, or frames. If one considers the image and the poem as two successive frames, then the frame line is what divides and connects them. 

So join me this Saturday as I talk about my solo photohaiku exhibition, Slide and Tongue, at Intersections Gallery, 34 Kandahar Street at 2pm. More details here: https://www.facebook.com/events/258257094880173/

And the very next day, I’ll be speaking on Today at Apple at the Apple Store on Orchard Road! It’s a talk/photo walk where I share a few ideas and approaches to photography and then we’ll all go for a photo walk together around the Emerald Hill area to take a few images and write a poem based on them. 

Register for the session here: https://www.apple.com/sg/today/event/photo-walks-marc-nair-6464123935587211725/?sn=R669 

Vital Possessions – The Launch

Vital Possessions is my ninth (ninth!!) book of poetry. The roots of this book came about through the Gardens by the Bay residency in 2015. I had the opportunity to spend hours walking and thinking in the grounds of GBTB. Initially, I wasn’t enamoured by how planned and fake the gardens seemed to be. I am more a fan of wide-open moors and natural forests. But gradually, I came to see the gardens as that perfect synthesis between nature and nurture. It is, in many ways, the epitome of our garden city. The Supertrees are like our skyscrapers, inhabited by a variety of human flora, and the grounds of the garden are much like our planned estates, neatly segmented while still keeping a semblance of nature and enough variety to keep us sane.

The poems in the book began to be shaped by this overarching theme and along the way, they expanded as I explored and visited other green spaces. I also considered the way we interacted with our environment. Along the way, the title of the book morphed from Naturebiotics to For Yours Is The Garden to Vital Possessions. It became a treatise on what we believe and hold dear to in an age of uncertainty, where our faith is frangible and our knowledge fractured.

The book reads like one long narrative and dips in and out of the following themes: our relationship with nature and natural spaces, how technology interfaces with our lives and the votive value of nature. Haiku accompanied by photographs intersperse the poems. They function as pauses, a breath of image; quirky and quiet reminders of the unnoticed quotidian.

Ethos Books, my publisher, has been very patient with the manuscript over many moons of editing and piecing together the book. The cover proved to be especially tricky, because with such a title, it was truly difficult to find an image that would evoke a similar state of feeling.

The book launch is at the Esplanade Concourse on 11 August, at 5pm. I will be doing something rather different, and invite all of you to come and join me as Vital Possessions finally emerges into the world.

SLOW

SLOW
a photo poem from Ghim Moh estate

Time pauses in the gentle estate,

waits for a signal to move into evening

with its crevice of empty offices;

the playpen with one child; waiting

for a dinosaur to come to life

for neighbours to exercise patience

while birds mock each other; a cage

is only a perspective, bars make

a slow corridor,
a vanishing

An Afternoon in the Heartland

Toa Payoh Central is a quintessential microcosm of life in Singapore’s HDB heartland. It is a melange of commercial enterprises, peopled by older folk as well as a slew of younger people who work in the HDB Hub that links to the MRT station and the bus interchange and becomes an all encompassing multi-level strip mall.

These are common moments; pauses to buy 4D, to check messages, to while away work hours.

Starbucks is contemplated by a small group of statues of uncertain provenance. Security cameras exchange safety for privacy.

Sharp corners of buildings jut out, trying to add a touch of post-2010 into the landscape.

A row of spiral staircases are surprising spectators in a nondescript car-park.

Courts rises out of the shimmering afternoon heat, a bastion of A/C and relevant home appliances.

Older folk pause in the middle of their perambulations, stopping to think and dream, to remember what no one else sees.

Photographed with the Fuji X-T2 and Meike 28/f2.8.

Save

Intersection

nicola-anthony-to-mecca-2016-thread-paper-glass-and-mixed-media

Intersection is a project that has been three years in the making. Often, ideas are birthed from an offhanded remark in the heady rush after  a successful show or exhibition. But it takes a certain doggedness to nurture that idea, coax it to life and rally the relevant forces to keep it blooming until it finds its perfect space to breathe and bloom. This exhibition and book was the result of never letting go of that idea. Nicola and I had this grand plan to create an artistic map of three neighbourhoods in Singapore, London and Yangon. The ensuing poems are artwork would resonate across themes common to all three cities. And through this process of intersecting various threads, we would hopefully find some nexus of meaning.

As a result, we’ve created 24 poems and 33 artworks. The exhibition opens on 10 January at Intersections Gallery, 34 Kandahar Street, and runs from 11 January – 12 February and 22 February- 5 March 2017.

There will be an artist talk on 17 January and I will be running a photowriting/walking workshop at the gallery on 11 February.

The book is a 60-page, limited edition risograph print of images from Nicola’s art together with my poems. Here’s what the cover looks like!

intersection_front-cover

Here’s a sneak peek of one of the poems, accompanied by Nicola’s art.

Crowned, Colony

We used to play at founding Singapore;
someone had to be the Temenggong, ceding
everything he could see, never pushing back.

The rest of us were British, asking obvious
questions about the trees; why gelam
bark was used for sails, why frangipani trees

always grew in the cemeteries. Not once did
we think these roads and schools and
rules encircled the kampung. We believed

in the glittering crown of the colony, so we
banished rogue tigers across the water,
stooped to serve an empire of khaki and tea.

nicola-anthony-crowned-colony-2016-leaf-skeletons-gelam-tree-fibre-and-text-on-mirror