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Art review: next Sunday

SINGAPORE — The solo exhibition by artist Khairullah Rahim, titled next Sunday, is not an insight into what could happen.

SINGAPORE — The solo exhibition by artist Khairullah Rahim, titled next Sunday, is not an insight into what could happen.

Sure, the exhibition’s title could suggest a rather morose eternal deferment of leisure — fun tomorrow, but never today. But the main focus of the show is not on humdrum, everyday leisure activities. Instead, it looks at the specific transformation that takes place in public parks on Sundays — most visibly exemplified by foreign domestic and construction workers having a day off as they engage in picnicking, playing cricket, and so on.

It is, in effect a transient community consisting largely of people who are, in some form or another, on the margins in Singapore.

The photographs in the exhibition, which were taken at the Chinese Garden, bear this focus out particularly well. Each of these images features a scene from the park, featuring an assemblage of the artist’s devising — a banana tree composed of miscellaneous, pastel-hued scrap, elements of which have been dispersed in the gallery proper, cementing links between the spaces photographed, and the exhibition itself.

The subjects of these images appear to be, for the most part, South Asian or Filipino, with one notable exception: A police CCTV station, helpfully informing us that the area is under surveillance.

It is a stark reminder of the air of authoritarian mistrust which is all too common when it comes to Singapore’s relations with the army of migrant workers it has come to rely upon.

This casts a different light on having a relaxing time in a park — of doing so while having the odds stacked against you. Like the patchwork construction of a banana tree from rope, sheets of PVC, and tarpaulins, there’s a sense of improvisation and making-do. One downside of these images, though, is that their edges have been treated to look a little tattered, which seems frankly unnecessary.

As for the paintings in the exhibition, the link between them and the subject matter examined thus far seems a little more tenuous. There’s a common thread linking the photographs, the sculptural elements, and the paintings — the motif of the banana tree — but making much of it does require information not explicitly found within the artworks themselves.

It is a song titled Memori Daun Pisang, or Memoirs Of Banana Leaves, in which the shelter offered by a banana leaf is represented as a “place of love” — of respite, and more, found in the unlikeliest of places.

Without this piece of information, there is a brittle sort of cheer to be found in the paintings, perhaps exemplified by the pastel “confetti” in the paintings Oh Dear I and II.

Somewhat unusually, Smells Like Sweet Cologne incorporates a vividly pink fluorescent light immediately above the painting proper, which photographs wonderfully, but becomes rather vulnerable to changes in ambient light under normal viewing conditions.

The stark, almost graphical treatment of bananas and other tropical vegetation suggests a garden, rather than a park, and one that holds a notional existence — a timeless, ideal escape from the world.

Next Sunday runs until Oct 30. Shophouse 5, 5 Lorong 24A Geylang. Free admission. Viewings by appointment only. Call 6338 6192.

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