Ho Tzu Nyen has long been preoccupied with the way history repeats in disguise: empire folds into empire, technologies of governance advance, and yet the conditions of control remain eerily familiar. A storm is raging in Singapore. Waves break against park benches and dash against trees.
Public housing estates are half-submerged; bobbing on the water surface are abandoned lifeboats and jackets. With Disaster-free , featuring footage generated with the help of AI, artist Ong Kian Peng has created a Singaporean disaster movie, in which rising sea levels have transformed the developed island-state into a gray, glimmering water world that we scan through the eyes of a single survivor paddling around in a kayak.
But this exhibition at C3A proceeds from the limited if hopeful assumption that they might be able to make a difference. Alongside pioneering abstract art in Indonesia, Ahmad Sadali was an influential scholar and religious thinker, a public muralist who strived to ignite the spirit of liberation during the war, a national representative at UNESCO, an observer at the Bandung Conference of , and an orator at Jummah prayers. Yet even before his death in , his legacy—like that of the Bandung School with which he was affiliated—was dogged by controversy over its relationship to western art histories.
Counterhegemonic generative AI is a fantasy […] Materially, they are dependent on arrangements established by colonialism and the ongoing concentration of wealth and intellectual resources in the hands of very few men; ideologically they require increasing alienation and the elimination of difference.
At best, these experiments offer us a pale reflection of intellectual engagement and collective social life. At worst, they contribute to the destruction of diverse communities and the very conditions for the solidarity required for real resistance. As the shortlisted artists and curators for the Australian Pavillion at the Venice Biennale, we are writing in support of the winning team; Khaled Sabsabi artist and Michael Dagostino curator , selected by industry led experts through a rigorous and professionally independent open-call process.
