Shimura Nobuhiro, Japanese cattle (video still), 2015, Super-8 transferred to digital video, 4:3 aspect ratio, black and white, sound, 20 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and Yuka Tsuruno Gallery Tokyo.

Artists: Ang Song Ming, Cheng Ran, Matt Hinkley, Firenze Lai, Nabilah Nordin, Zeyno Pekünlü, Pratchaya Phinthong, Shimura Nobuhiro and Zou ZhAO

The world precedes the eye examines the work of nine emerging and mid-career artists who are pursuing new thinking about matter in time, space and history. Spanning sculpture, installation, painting, moving image and sound, the exhibition recognises that while matter, as a resource, is finite, there are material worlds beyond the boundaries of our current understanding.

Artworks in the exhibition are the product of specific encounters and new learning about material. Firenze Lai, Zeyno Pekünlü and Shimura Nobuhiro present ‘primary’ documents—paintings, found texts and a ‘factual’ film respectively—that measure natural phenomena and social precepts. Installations by Pratchaya Phinthong and Ang Song Ming calibrate matter as a limited physical resource that is increasingly difficult to extract and control. Spoken word by Zou Zhao will reverberate through the vast gallery space, and an epic nine-hour film by Cheng Ran titled In course of the miraculous (2015) will be screened offsite.

The world precedes the eye will be presented in an opened-out exhibition architecture that is intended to reproach ideas of production value and ‘the curating of culture’.

The world precedes the eye is an Affiliate Project of Singapore Biennale 2016.

Venue: Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, LASALLE College of the Arts, Gallery 1, 1 McNally Street, Singapore

Hours: 12noon – 7pm, closed on Mondays

When: 28 Oct 2016 - 1 Feb 2017,

By: LASALLE College of the Arts