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Art Review: Click Candy explores the titillating nature of click baits

SINGAPORE — If the headlines saturating the online world are anything to go by, the world is rife with secrets to be revealed, weird tricks suppressed by various interests and so many jaw-dropping, shocking nuggets of information that Ripley’s Believe It or Not cannot even begin to compete.

SINGAPORE — If the headlines saturating the online world are anything to go by, the world is rife with secrets to be revealed, weird tricks suppressed by various interests and so many jaw-dropping, shocking nuggets of information that Ripley’s Believe It or Not cannot even begin to compete.

Once you have clicked on these headlines, however, the best case scenario is reading a mildly interesting listicle — while the worst probably involves an infection by so much malware that your computer chokes and dies on the spot.

In Vanessa Ban’s solo exhibition, Click Candy — she focuses on a specific strain of clickbait, that which uses thumbnail images of women to attract the attention of the male audience, regardless of whether that image is relevant to the purported subject of the clickbait.

Whether the clickbait in question is peddling voyeuristic photographs of women, improbable get-rich-quick schemes, or various forms of snake oil, Ban has collated examples that share the common theme of strategically deployed images of women.

Interestingly, Ban’s response to this commonality is its erasure — she edits each article thumbnail to remove the woman in each image. Theirs, however, is not a seamless disappearance, with each image leaving clear and apparently deliberate traces of the manipulation.

Rather than the invisible deletion of political undesirables from Soviet-era photographs, this removal is explicit, replacing the common factor of the images of women exploited for commercial gain.

Lacking the focal point of titillation, the images often turn muddy and drab, forming a stark contrast to the hyperbolic statements that accompany them. Like jokes without punchlines, they are oddly disjointed and out of place, with an odd sense of seediness that is only amplified by Ban’s conspicuous deletions.

Ban’s show is also not displayed conventionally, for example the typical nicely wall-mounted prints on specialist paper. She takes the tack of mass producing them on small pieces of paper — 380,000 of them, to be precise — stacked in neat piles that cover much of the gallery floor.

Their arrangement within the confines of the gallery encourages great care in one’s movements, lest a Godzilla-type scenario should result. This small departure from convention also finds its way into the explanatory text that typically accompanies an art exhibition — sprawling over an archway and across the floor, rather than neatly contained within a paragraph or two on a conspicuous bit of wall.

These stacked pieces are ironically tempting for visitors, much like their online counterpart. Like how we might give in to curiosity and click on a suspicious headline or image, this mode of display encourages people to take any one that strikes their fancy — there is plenty to go around, after all.

However, the reasons behind the unconventional wall text seem comparatively opaque, planting the suspicion that it is just a bit of stylistic coherence that followed in the wake of the unconventional image display.

If it is a comment on, say, the profoundly corrosive and deleterious effects of clickbait on its consumers, producers, and the entire ecosystem of publishing, it does not quite come through. Bruce Quek

Click Candy runs from Oct 5 to Nov 5, 1pm to 7pm from Wednesdays to Fridays, 1pm to 6pm on Saturdays. Closed Sundays to Tuesdays. At Grey Projects, 6B Kim Tian Road. Wednesdays to Saturdays. Free.

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