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SSQ’s Bureau One plays peek-a-boo with public art

SINGAPORE — What’s the Merlion Park without the Merlion? That spot between Timbre and Asian Civilisations Museum without the Stamford Raffles statue?

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SINGAPORE — What’s the Merlion Park without the Merlion? That spot between Timbre and Asian Civilisations Museum without the Stamford Raffles statue?

Override, the latest show at Sculpture Square, imagines that. The final presentation by Bureau One (the first group of artists under the art centre’s Bureau residency programme, comprising Ang Song Nian, Elizabeth Lim, Tan Peiling and Kamiliah Bahdar), it features eight videos tracking four public art sculptures — the two aforementioned pieces, and one apiece by Merlion artist Lim Nang Seng at Tiong Bahru and Chong Fah Cheong at Toa Payoh — and the public’s reactions to these.

The four were chosen from the 16 sculptures that were scrutinised by Bureau One for its previous exhibition, Oversight. In that show, they planted cameras around the works to check out reactions (the videos are also up at the current show, as well interviews that the group had done related to public sculpture).

Here, the group takes it a step further (while slightly echoing The Artists Village’s Artist Investigating Monuments project) by blocking out the four pieces with a screen.

It isn’t so much about “erasing” or obscuring these works (as when you cover them completely ala Christo’s or Tatzu Nishi’s works) as it is about obscuring *one* specific view that is presumably from the most advantageous, most common, and most popular vantage point. Both approaches inevitably draw attention to the objects in question, but in choosing the latter, Bureau One has emphasised the audience’s relationship to the work a bit more than the work’s relationship to its surroundings. It doesn’t interrogate the work as much as it interrogates our looking at the work.

So in the gallery, you’ve got four videos that approximate that particular vantage point and across it, four videos from a different angle that shows how the intervention works.

Perhaps it’s the choice of time and place, but I personally didn’t see how the second half works in relation to the first half — either there was no one there (especially for the heartland pieces) or the intervention was seemingly greeted by audiences with something that resembled nonchalance more than anything else. For a sculpture as well-photographed as the Merlion, a screen simply won’t be enough — it was, also, presumably put in a place that *doesn’t* have one particular mega-vantage point but multiple ones.

That Bureau One decided to show us how the project works, for me, slightly lessens the impact. Because I don’t see (or it isn’t quite clear) how the screens actually affect the public viewers (if there were any in the first place), the strength of the show is actually in the videos that force us to assume that specific vantage point — we are, after all, already held hostage by the camera’s dictatorial eye. Here, we have no other option but to see what Bureau One wants us to *not* see and, in this gallery space at least, the sculptures find its specific public as we step into the shoes of its imagined (and rather uncooperative) one.

Override runs until April 6, 11am to 7pm, Chapel Gallery, Sculpture Square, 155 Middle Road. Free admission.

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