Joo Choon Lin
3:00 min

The video shows a plywood table that appears solid, but seconds later, tools are thrown into it and they slowly submerge into the plywood surface, which is now recognized as a mushy surface. The tools are a hand saw, screws, a screwdriver and a measuring tape. Once disposed into mushy surface, the presence and functionality of these tools are dislocated, akin to a body disappearing into quicksand. The viewer is prompted to think about salvaging them; it is at the verge of losing these objects that their presence and value seem the most visible.

Eugene Tan
3:12 min

Flower and hisses is a musing on death, identity, and loss. It is a video that combines a generative new media work from 2016, titled Recompose, with excerpts from a baptism video of a man on his deathbed. Recompose is a custom computer program that deconstructs digital images of popularised flowers for condolence, suggesting reflections on memory, impermanence and decay. Spliced with recorded moments from a deathbed conversion, Flower and hisses explores the imagery of fleeting memories and identity.

Christabel Ngoi
5:23 min

Prelude serves as an introduction to my research and travel to Tibet. It starts and ends with the use of virtual ground, placing the spectator suspended, as though gliding through with the perspective of a safe “surveillance for a distanced, superior spectator”. There’s a sense of power play between the tourist’s gaze, the mobile, disembodied gaze in photography and machines, meeting with the close surveillance imposed on locals, media, and tourists by China’s governance over Tibetan Autonomous Region. The video briefly flashes out narratives with selected footages and text. The timeline intertwines different trajectories, escaping into an open interpretation, an alternative imagination and anticipation of the place.

Rachel Tan
3:54 min

This video work is part of a larger sequence of work, “Strange Proximities and Tender Endurances”. This body of work explores bodies-in-movement as a manner of inquiring, knowing and procuring space, especially through the notion of a still or slowed-down dance. This video in particular captures the manner in which the interiority of the moving body responds somatically to forces of support, gravity, the kinetic and the still in its surrounding built environment. The camera is integrated into the movement in some scenes by securing the device to different nooks of the body while it is in motion. The resulting footage becomes a beguiling, abstract dialogue between the interior and exterior registers of the body. In most footage, body parts often obscure the camera’s lens, forming a kind of human aperture as the device traverses across the skin. The play of light on muscle, flesh and clothing renders the body an unfamiliar configuration of itself.

Moses Tan
7:58 min

The Boy Who Walked Backwards is a video based on melancholia and poetic resistance. Using an analogy, the work is framed like an interview of a participant from a fictional community of people who naturally walk backwards. Looking at ideas of shame, desynchronisation of time, space and movement, questions are asked but answers are articulated in slow moving images.