Ming Wong, Devo partire. Domani / I must go. Tomorrow (still), 2010, 5 channel video installation, 12:58 minutes, colour, sound, © the artist.

The Singapore Biennale 2011: Open House threw open its doors to the public on 13 March 2011 with 63 artists from 30 countries presenting 161 works across four exhibition venues.

Predicated on the belief that contemporary artistic practices are largely driven by discursive acts of exchange and transactions, Open House records the ensuing visual dialogue and contested ways of seeing that emerge when communication channels are laid open. According to Creative Director Matthew Ngui, the focus this year is “on the city as site and as home, where art engages audiences and represents realities through unique creative processes”. With the curatorial objective of prioritizing these artistic processes (founding ideas, initial emotional compulsions and artistic intentions) – all of which inevitably function within a complex network of socio-historical and cultural spaces and discourses –, Open House engages with the local experience by hosting its works in emblematic and culturally significant sites (read: converted colonial-style buildings carrying the collective memory of the country’s history).

Such site-specific installations however, invariably demand that the works are examined in relation to the difficult spaces created by the architecture of the buildings, and it is precisely therein that the Biennale disappoints. If process-oriented site-specificity endeavors to augment several things – like emphasizing performative aspects that such charged spaces are wont to engender or constructing an enhanced community network for instance – the paucity of connections made between particular spatial dimensions and the artwork generates instead, a random walking route that feels akin to an exhaustive tourist list of sightseeing spots to tackle before the sun goes down.

Matt Mullican, That persons work with single bedsheets, 2007, bedsheets, mixed media ( 26 sheets and 22 bars), 246 x 165 cm. Installation gesamt 8 x 8m, Höhe 2,5m Photo: Lisa Rastl. Image courtesy Georg Kargl Fine Arts, Vienna.

That is not to say that the show doesn’t try to explore what happens when traditional boundaries that demarcate private and public spheres are breached. On the contrary, it makes an earnest but at times literal attempt to do so through artists such as Arin Rungjang’s research piece on Thai-migrant workers who have made their private experiences for public consumption, or through Martha Rosler’s public garden that was constructed in dialogue with students, local community groups and artists. Roslisham Ismail’s investigation into the buying and eating habits of the local population offers us intimate, transgressive moments of the degustatory sort in Secret Affair (2010 – 2011), a food installation of 6 refrigerators storing the consumables of several families.

Staples of contemporary art themes – subversion, displacement and the extent to which how much one sacrifices for art – are revisited in other contemplative pieces. For Matt Mullican, an artist whose practices have since the 1970s, been informed by the creation of art under hypnosis, That Person’s work with single bedsheets (2007) documents the devices of the hyperconscious (his trance persona is aptly called That Person) and the fluidity of fiction and reality. Scandinavian art duo of Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset known for “Drama Queens” at the Old Vic (a neat survey of 20th century art history enhanced by the voices of stage actors) and Prada Marfa in the Texan landscape, replicated an Old German Barn in the hangar of the Old Kallang Airport accompanied by hunky blokes clad in lederhosen.

Elgreem & Dragset, Installation, The German Barn, commissioned by the Singapore Biennale 2011. Image © designboom.

Ise (Roslisham Ismail), Secret Affair, (work in progress), 2010 – 2011, food installation, © the artist.

Video installations seem to dominate the Biennale and are arguably, the most exciting of the lot, though much of these works have already premiered elsewhere. The priority given to the moving image here seems to be a curatorial acknowledgement of ever-increasing expansion of the visual vocabulary of artists and of the changing relationship between spectator and the artwork. Named after Robert Rauschenberg’s near-identical paintings Factum I and Factum II (1957), Candice Breitz presents Factum (2010), a multi-channel video installation in a series of in-depth video portraits of twins – and one set of triplets, exploring forces that drive individuality and identity. Breitz films each twin in isolation from their sibling and reveals their starkly differing personalities and beliefs in a video diptych that demolishes common assumptions about twins’ ideological similarities.

Candice Breitz, Factum, 2009, six dual channel and one three channel video and sound installation, various times, © the artist.

Ryan Trecartin, Roamie View: History Enhancement (Re'Search Wait'S), 2009-2010. Duration: 28 minutes, 23 seconds HD Video. Image courtesy of Elizabeth Dee Gallery.

In a 4-part video installation Roamie View: History Enhancement (Re’Search Wait’S) (2010), Ryan Trecartin’s cast of camera-loving characters compete for attention in an overstimulated sphere where non-existent hierarchies and social rules hold the power to unleash assaultive fantasies. In this digitized, exhibitionist space of web-video sharing, re-fashioning one’s own identity is a not an act of volition but a necessity borne out of escaping repressive forces. Over-the-top emotional exchanges, androgynous dressing and fragmented scenes of image-text combination are frenetically documented in a chaotic montage amid electronica and exaggerated sound effects. Trecartin’s mismatched and effortless cast ultimately deconstruct contemporary cultural sensibilities as unstable and farcical.

Omer Fast, De Grote Boodschap (The Big Message), 2007. Image: Courtesy of the artist. Production still: Erik De Cnodder.

The fragmentation of narrative that video art permits is fully utilized in Omer Fast’s De Grote Boodschap (The Big Message) (2007). In 27 minutes, several panoramic shots of 4 scenarios create worlds marked by reversals and contradictions. Shot like a drama series with a convoluted plot that is centered on a dying elderly woman tormented by memories from the Second World War, Fast’s narrative is supercharged with racial overtones. Also exploring issues on race, identity and gender is Ming Wong’s Devo Patire. Domani (2010), an appropriation of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (1968) in which he plays all the characters in an archetypal family plunged into an identity crisis after encountering a stranger. The theatrical emphasis on the viewer’s experiential/spatial encounter with the moving image naturally engenders the need for interactivity, such as Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Frequency and Volume: Relational Architecture 9 (2003). Frequency and Volume assesses human perceptions and kinetic energies within a built environment, using the shadows of gallery viewers as a form of embodied representation.

Arin Rungjang, Big Moon and Waterfall, 2006, outdoor light installation, bamboo, Passage de Retz, Paris, © the artist.

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The Singapore Biennale 2011: Open House is the 3^rd Biennale held in Singapore since 2006 and will run until 15 May 2011. Conceived by Artistic Director Matthew Ngui and curators Russell Storer and Trevor Smith, Open House is organised by the Singapore Art Museum, the National Heritage Board and supported by the National Arts Council. It is held across several venues: Old Kallang Airport, National Museum of Singapore, SAM@8Q and the Singapore Art Museum.

Vortex 2006, Gunpowder on paper, 400 x 900 cm, Collection of Deutsche Bank Collection, commissioned by Deutsche Bank AG, Mathias Schormann © Cai Guo-Qiang

Cai Guo-Qiang began experimenting with the properties of gunpowder in his drawings in the 1980s. He used gunpowder of various grades and forms and exploded it on paper, leaving burnt and smoky charcoal-stained residue marks behind.  Born out of his desire to subject his practice to the dynamic elements, Cai’s work expresses how beauty and violence are often intertwined. Much of this experimentation has lead to a practice which encompasses the use of explosives on a massive scale, and Vortex, a drawing depicting hundreds and thousands of wolves chasing one another in a circular motion, as if sucked into a vortex, is emblematic of Cai’s work.

Head On, 99 life-sized replicas of wolves and glass wall. Wolves: gauze, resin, and painted hide, Dimensions variable, 2006 Deutsche Bank Collection, commissioned by Deutsche Bank AG. Photography by John Yuen, Fotograffiti

Cai’s work are also recognized by a strong sense of movement, weaving together the extremes of emotions and states within nature. Head On was created in the wake of the 10th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and reflects on the remaining fissures in spite of the political reunification of East and West Germany. Ninety-nine life-sized replicas of wolves are seen to be leaping in a pack towards a glass wall. While those leading the pack strike the glass wall and collapse in a heap, the wolves at the rear continue surging forward. Seen from afar, the leaping wolves form an arc of force and power, a reminder of the power of collective ideas and actions, and also, its consequence of blind pursuit.

Reflection - A Gift from Iwaki installed at MAMAC in Nice. Copyright: Crédits Ville de Nice

While Cai’s work often relies on context, it also draws on symbols and materials from Chinese culture. His works are marked by a certain theatricality and require a sizable production crew, perhaps a vestige of his background in stage design at the Shanghai Theatre Academy. His aggressive, set-like design brings together historical context and theatricality in Reflection – A Gift from Iwaki, comprised of a 15-meter long boat, excavated by ship makers of the Iwaki village in Japan where the work was created. The beauty of destruction is evident from the decaying shipwreck lying against a mountain of broken ceramic deities. The placement of broken deities in a museum was a deliberate gesture to question the point at which a religious statue relinquishes its spiritual significance, towards its function as mere artistic representations and commercial goods. First presented in 2004, Reflection – A Gift from Iwaki is reconstituted for each exhibition by seven fishermen from Iwaki.

Head on and Vortex are currently on view at Cai Guo-Qiang: Head On which runs till 31 August 2010 at the National Museum of Singapore. Reflection – A Gift from Iwaki is presented in Cai Guo-Qiang: Travels in the Mediterranean at Musée d’Art moderne et d’Art contemporain, Nice, France till 9 January 2011. Cai was born in 1957 in the city of Quanzhou, Fujian Province, China. He was awarded the Golden Lion at the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999, the 7th Hiroshima Art Prize in 2007, and the 20th Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize in 2009. He also held the title of Director of Visual and Special Effects for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. In 2008, he was the subject of a large mid-career retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. He has lived in New York since 1995.