Premised on the obliquely hypothetical question “What if the world changed?”, the Singapore Biennale 2013 (SB2013) is presented as a deconstructed entity centered on allusive keywords—or “tags” in internetspeak—such as “histories,” “intervention,” and “materiality” in order to highlight the transmutative and the transformative qualities of the art produced in the region. With a collaborative team of 27 curators instead of an artistic director helming the show,[…..]

Australian artist Andrew Nicholls dredges the queasy aesthetics of sentiment for its submerged ideological content. In an ongoing thread of his practice, he locates the ideals and practices of British imperialism in the kitsch, seemingly innocuous world of 19th- and 20th-century ceramics, disrupting this historical narrative with traces of the otherness otherwise repressed in the imperial worldview. He subsumes his viewers in an unsteady undertow[…..]

#politics #statehood #borders #biennials #nationalism The Venice Biennale is fundamentally shaped by its founders’ belief in statehood. Each nation-state secures its site, much like an embassy, and asserts its self-image through the choice of curators and artists. Four pavilions at the 2013 Biennale demonstrate how the notion of the nation-state is constructed and deconstructed in the face of contemporary global pressures. For Bangladesh, the pavilion[…..]

Help Desk is an arts-advice column that demystifies practices for artists, writers, curators, collectors, patrons, and the general public. Submit your questions anonymously here. All submissions become the property of Daily Serving. Help Desk is co-sponsored by KQED.org. Could you tell me the best way for a newcomer to select an appropriate art consultant in the first place? It appears to be almost impossible in this[…..]

Darren Jones works across a wide range of forms and subjects, often displaying an adroit sense of humor in his installations, sculptures, digital images, and text based artworks. However, Jones’s work is not only a series of well-pitched interventions and re-arrangements; there is a poetic and delicate seriousness that complicates much of what he makes. Deeper Understanding (2008) turns his old broken laptop, stuck in[…..]

I first came across Montréal artist duo Séripop (Chloe Lum and Yannick Desranleau) a number of years ago when I was more embedded in the indie music scene here in Canada. In this sphere, the pair are known for their layered, DIY gig posters and refreshingly offbeat graphic design work. Despite their disregard for the formal rules of graphic design, Lum and Desranleau possess an intuitive[…..]

#gentrification #displacement #race #class #technology #industry #neo-colonialism Any conversation among artists these days is bound to turn to the question of gentrification—the process of urban renewal by private developers that ultimately displaces poor residents in favor of the upwardly mobile. Modernism in art has always accompanied displacement of poor citizens from city centers, from the time of the Impressionists when Georges-Eugène Haussmann refashioned Paris, to[…..]