The 8th edition of the Singapore Biennale prompts you to wonder whether displacement releases the wild or brings it under further control
One of the works in the Singapore Biennale is a disposable pink plastic picnic-blanket printed with texts in multiple languages and available for purchase at four Burmese shops in the Peninsula Plaza shopping mall. You can’t exactly go to one of these stores with the intention of buying it, though; the idea is that the artworks are randomly inserted among the regular stocks of picnic sheets that migrant-worker communities from Myanmar purchase on Sundays when they gather, on their day off work, to share a meal in public spaces around City Hall and nearby Fort Canning Park. In doing so, they transform those public spaces into their private space (and highlight the lack of space afforded migrant workers in the city-state). The texts on the sheet are poems written by migrants, presumably to give them visibility as individuals and as artists – although organisations such as Migrant Writers of Singapore already exist to do this. Indeed, one of this last group’s volunteers, Julie annTabigne, has contributed a poem to the picnic sheet, titled ‘Rest Day’, which chronicles the excitement and sense of community that comes on these days, together with a sense of being part of Singapore rather than working for Singapore. The pattern here, as you might have guessed, is somewhat circular.
Indeed, it’s a little unclear as to whom the text on the picnic sheet is directed – towards the people using the sheet who presumably have other, more practical, intentions in doing so; or towards the people watching the people using the sheets, who may or may not be art lovers; or towards the art collector looking for a bargain, now forced to engage with shops and communities they would normally not see; or to comfort those are worried that art, sequestered and protected in galleries festooned with security cameras, really has nothing to do with ‘real’ life. Overall, you get the sense that the picnic sheet, an artwork by Gala Porras-Kim titled Our identity is determined by our productivity (2025), is aimed at a public that’s more general than the ones sharing a meal on top of it. But whether or not that’s really the case, and to what end, is far from clear. Which is an issue that pervades this biennial as a whole.
If you believe a wall text in the biennial’s most conventional venue – the Singapore Art Museum (SAM) – the curators of this biennial, Duncan Bass, Hsu Fang-Tze, Ong Puay Khim and Selene Yap, all of whom work at SAM, planned it this way. The intention behind pure intention is to undermine the truth in each of the title’s words: ‘We are often told that purity is inherently good,’, it states. ‘Yet purity can hide bias, and intention can reinforce power… The 8th Singapore Biennale treats intention not as a virtue but as a contradiction.’ The thesis, such as it is, unfolds through the work of more than 80 artists, some housed at SAM, but most scattered around the surrounding city itself. Among the former is one part of Tanatchai Bandasak’s triptych /s/ (2025), a marine bollard ‘loaned’ (according to the wall text) from the Pasir Panjang container terminal docks outside and plonked in the museum as if it represented some sort of archaeology of the immediate present. Indeed, formally, the horn bollard might almost be the head of Nandi or some other vahana or avatar. But it’s hard to know what we are being asked to contemplate – how a functional industrial object operates when its function has been removed? Is it an attempt to convince us that many things in the ‘real’ word might be art if you look at them the right way (even if that opening wall-text suggested there is no right way)? Ultimately, you leave the object wondering whether or not sometimes a bollard is just a bollard and has no deeper meaning than that. Perhaps, of course, that is what the artist intended. The baggy premise of the introductory wall-text would certainly allow for that. The label next to the bollard suggests that it’s ‘a mooring point unmoored’, but even if you accept that, you’re left wondering why art wishes to divorce itself from reality in this way. As was the case with the picnic sheet, there is a nagging question as to whether the removal of the object from the space that gave it purpose means that something is being released into the wild or if something wild is being tamed.
Other works in a similar vein include Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Untitled 2016 (form follows function or vice versa no. two) (2016); located in the Far East Shopping Centre, it features a binload of T-shirts bearing the slogan ‘Freedom Cannot Be Simulated’, which the public are invited to expropriate. Standing in front of it, you wonder if freedom lies in choosing to pick one up or ignoring it entirely. On the evidence of my visit, some of the mall workers have chosen the former; but it’s hard to know what to make of a work that’s presented by the state (it’s part of SAM’s collection) in a place in which the price of ‘freedom’ is the seemingly willing abandonment of some civil liberties (something hinted at in Tan Pin Pin’s video diptych On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, 2025, housed in the Lucky Plaza mall, which combines archival footage of the first polar bear to be born in Singapore swimming laps of the pool in his enclosure, with a commuter’s view from the windows of a train on Singapore’s Pan Island Expressway). Think too hard about all that and Tiravanija’s gesture does become largely symbolic. More successfully disorienting is The Packet’s Water Under the Bridge/A Bridge Under Water (2025), which finds a home several floors up from the T-shirts. There, the Sri Lankan collective’s work takes the form of an internet café from the mid-2000s, complete with now antique-looking computers, which once represented a bright new connected utopia in which the past could be browsed and the future envisioned. Browse on them here and you find a video-sharing platform featuring contributions – in a range of formats, from playlists to user profiles – from 12 artists, including Indian photographer Sohrab Hura and French new-media artist Tabita Rezaire, that expand on the internet’s promise of community and the intermingling of past and present. It’s an exhibition within an exhibition, with comfortable seating provided, in some ways fulfilling the hazy promise of Porras-Kim’s tablecloth; in other ways simply doing its own thing. Pure intention indeed.
Singapore Biennale 2025 is at Singapore Art Museum and other venues, through 29 March 2026.
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