The Parkview Museum Singapore
Intriguing Uncertainties offers a slew of diverse artistic imaginings on that buried realm of the unconscious – that which is far and near, known and unknown, familiar and unfamiliar, and always with us, because it is within us. In everyone’s life and memory, in the present and in the past, there exist strange, vivid, even aggressive moments that have the potential to profoundly destabilize – occasionally, even to burn and torture. They are resistant to the passing of time; they never quit us, and they leave their mark indelibly upon the never-ending chain of events that constitutes life as we know it, emerging to shape our desires and dreams, our fear for the future and our horror of the past. As denizens of a seam of unfiltered urges and pulses lying subterranean under the daily progression of lived experience, these moments are nonetheless vital components of our anthropological reality as complex humans.
It is the artist’s imagination that performs the delicate work of excavation upon this subterranean realm. Intriguing Uncertainties explores the capacity of art “to create a secret alliance that makes dark content more accessible, more intriguing”, as Dennis Oppenheim puts it. Through the labour of the artist’s intervention, hidden realities are shaken loose from their moorings beneath the surface of experience, and buried things that are antithetical to human-forged systems of logic are exhumed. This confrontation with the obscure depths of the self is shock-provoking, for it poses a challenge to our basic systems of orientation. Yet it also triggers catharsis, for it is a revelation of that terra incognita within us, which holds sway over our entire behavior, whose government is deeply sensed but still hidden from the scrying eye of conventional categories and logical systems, the unearthing of which is a relief. The invited artists, in their concentration upon the excavation of elemental ‘dark content’, tend to ignore any demand for formalistic coherence. They focus instead on hybridity and flux, to give ‘uncertainty’ itself material, dimension, and power, and break rationalism’s hold over human existence. To succeed in breaking this hold is not to catapult the viewer into a clearly defined new terrain, but to defer certainty altogether, indefinitely, and to suspend the viewer in a state of obscurity, which, in its very unknowability, is unbearably intriguing.
Exhibiting Artists: Ruth Barabash, Radu Belcin, Anya Belyat-Giunta, Günter Brus, Davide Cantoni, Guglielmo Castelli, Tony Cragg, Gianni Dessi, Nicolas Dieterlé, Per Dybvig, Barbara Eichhorn, László Fehér, Andrea Fogli, Ugo Giletta, Kerstin Grimm, Erich Gruber, Allison Hawkins, Veronika Holcová, Marine Joatton, Tibor iski Kocsis, Nina Kovacheva, Juul Kraijer, Dirk Lange, Denisa Lehocká, Iris Levasseur, Felice Levini, Christian Lhopital, Peter Martensen, Andrei Molodkin, Alois Mosbacher, Muntean/Rosenblum, Hermann Nitsch, Dennis Oppenheim, Piero Pizzi Cannella, Qiu Zhijie, László László Révész, Bernardí Roig, Serse, Barthélémy Toguo, Sandra Vásquez de la Horra, Tinus Vermeersch, Zeng Fanzhi
Venue: The Parkview Museum Singapore
600 North Bridge Road, Parkview Square Level 3, Singapore 188778
When: 3 Sep 2018 - 5 Jan 2019, 12pm - 7pm
By: The Parkview Museum Singapore
