Call me a plebian, but must all modern art have to do with symbolism? The latest installation at Esplanade Concourse entitled The Loft Pavilion replaces the whale skeleton of Ikan Besar Skali. It's a collection of items neatly placed within metal frames and shelves, and partially concealed by beaded curtains.
The explanatory note by visual artist Khairullah Rahim says a lot but tells you nothing, a virtual word salad that includes phrases like "interrogates the politics of visibility and counter-surveillance strategies", and "entangled relations between bodies, objects and the everyday", and "new perspectives on queerness and marginalised lived experiences within hostile environments".
And "hypervisibility and everyday tactics of navigation", and "operating through camouflage and strategic misdirection" and "evoke aspirations toward accumulation and upward mobility", and "through excess, repetition and precarious elevation". Wow, Kamala Harris would have been mighty proud.
Can we infer that the artist feels threatened because of his race, sexual orientation and disadvantaged socio-economic status, and fears being spied upon and persecuted? And he perhaps copes and lives on by consumption, accumulating wealth and status, or so he thinks.
There is much symbolism in the installation: the pigeons, beer cans, stringed beads, durians, video screens, an odd rock, workman outfit and tennis ball. What do all these mean? This provocative exhibit greeted concertgoers attending Bela Bartok's symbolist opera Bluebeard's Castle (on 24 July), so perhaps there is some relevance here. It mean even have something to do with Dick Lee's Cantopop songs (on 25 July). Who knows?
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| Have another read of it. Maybe you'll understand it better now. |
THE LOFT PAVILION
by Khairullah Rahim
runs till 3 January 2027
(That's a long stretch, which gives
the viewer lots more time to ponder)
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