Art review: Along The Golden Mile | John Martin, the Butcher, the Surgeon

You can call it what you like, but Golden Mile Complex is not just a visually striking building. This landmark is also a bold experiment in urban planning, blending the commercial and residential aspects of its structure in a manner calculated to stimulate a ground-up vibrancy among the building’s users.

Having evolved into the city’s unofficial Little Thailand, it’s tempting to debate whether the experiment failed or was strangely successful. Either way, there’s no denying its anachronistic, dislocated allure. And two concurrent exhibitions appear to drive home that point: Vertical Submarine’s John Martin, The Butcher And The Surgeon, and Along The Golden Mile by Darren Soh.

Finding your way to Vertical Submarine’s show can be a little tricky — the directions specify only the fourth floor, inviting the possibility of a confusing trek through the complex, in a framing device that extends beyond the boundaries of the actual gallery. The work itself takes its name from John Martin Scripps, also known as John Martin, whose brief spree of grisly murders in the region back in the ’90s made him the first Westerner to be hanged for murder in Singapore.

In this exhibition, a slice of an imaginative reconstruction (it’s not meant to be a historical document) of Martin’s hotel room is framed by quotations from three texts: An account of a murder in a novel by author Juan Jose Saer, an anguished note by Martin himself and the judge’s grimly satisfied sentence on the case — points of reference, we might suppose, in navigating the mental space occupied by this complex of events.

The installation teases out an inner sense of voyeuristic pleasure and apprehension — you’re visiting the scene of the crime, haunted by some spectre of violent death. What if, against all reason, Martin barges through the door, cleaver in hand? Without giving too much away, a number of peepholes scattered through the work provide a heightened sense of spatial unease, with the scenes within them defying what common sense might tell you about the room’s layout — which way the floor is, for one.

Interestingly, while the work is installed in Golden Mile Tower, the actual murders took place at a hotel some way away, suggesting a dream-like blending of fact, fiction and incongruous logic.

Soh’s photo installation, on the other hand, is far more concerned with presenting an accurate picture of the area, transforming the exhibition venue, Objectifs, into some kind of cross between an architectural conservationist’s Panopticon and an urban archivist’s command centre. Soh’s goal, it seems, involves the visual preservation of Singapore’s vernacular architecture — unique buildings that, for one reason or another, weren’t thought to have serious heritage value.

His installation is divided between Objectifs’ main gallery and rooftop, with the former being a wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling immersive installation of photos of the neighbourhood. It’s a fairly startling experience, having such an extent of visual saturation without the neutral framing of white gallery walls. Comparisons to be made include, say, a Google image search in real life — you might find yourself hoping that blinking would refresh the image selection, providing a never-ending kaleidoscopic snapshot of the visual characteristics of the area, in a rigorously geometric style.

The portion of the work on the rooftop is much smaller in scale, but provides a vantage point traditionally reserved for organisations with pretty deep pockets — the aerial view, now accessible through (compared with conventional aircraft, at the very least) affordable remote-controlled drones.

While there are things in common between both shows — a concern with our past, instantiated via Golden Mile — they’re ultimately very different: A hauntingly fragmented assemblage of the events and personalities of a murder, compared with a painstakingly accurate record (Soh went out of his way to make sure his photos of the sky were taken from the neighbourhood), suggesting that even with unified origins, a diversity of perspectives may still result.

John Martin, The Butcher And The Surgeon runs daily till Feb 14, noon to 7pm, at Dialogic, Golden Mile Tower (4th floor). Free.

Along The Golden Mile runs till Feb 18, 11am to 7pm (Mondays to Fridays) and noon to 6pm (Saturdays), at Objectifs Gallery, 56A Arab Street.