Visual Arts Exhibition until 31 Jan 2021 @NUS Baba House.
This presentation is conceived to complement the interpretative displays in the first and second floors of the NUS Baba House, with materials and texts organised around aspects of the Straits Chinese material and social histories, and contemporary perspectives that may complicate them. To support these connections, elements are drawn from past projects developed by the House since 2007.
Collectively, they offer insights and reflections into the programmes developed by the House, its curatorial interests, and the varied approaches associated with them. Included in the presentation is a selection of artist projects from earlier exhibitions Objects & Desire (2007), A Psychotaxonomy of Home: Michael Lee Hong Hwee (2008), Of Finger Bowls & Hankies: Chris Yap Voyeurs Through the Baba House (2009).
A group of referenced quotations are also drawn from the conferences organised by the House, namely Peranakan Chinese in a Globalizing Southeast Asia (2010), and Peranakan Communities in the Era of Decolonization and Globalization (2015), and are supported by primary sources that help underpin contexts and complexities. This is to bring to attention the dynamics of heritage as a site of continuing cultural negotiations, shaped by positionings, institutionally mediated constructions, and responses.
Here, the terms, phrases, names, and events, mobilised across the galleries propose interconnections, direct or indirect, across texts and objects, each to be independently scrutinised and sustained by its own agency, yet enacting relational potentials, the unyielding processes of unmaking and becoming, as Glossaries of the Straits Chinese Homemaking.
To view this exhibition, please register for a visit to the NUS Baba House.
