Last month, THE STATE put together a meeting at the Asia Art Archive Open Platform at Art Basel Hong Kong. The theme was «Vernacular and the City State:»
We’re interested in the social and material conditions specific to city-states like Dubai and Singapore, and how they affect cultural production. These conditions include proportionally high levels of state and corporate sponsorship, stringent visa regulations, rapid urban transformation and its attendant compression of time and space, and their positions as global hubs that make them magnets for financial and cultural capital in the region. Both cities are also built on racialised mandates which privilege certain ethnicities over others. Along with high expat populations and a reliance on devalued foreign labour, this creates tense negotiations of citizenship, belonging, and identity.
Much of the work produced today in Dubai or Singapore (and perhaps Doha, Kuwait or Hong Kong too) feels like it could not have possibly been produced anywhere else. Aesthetic comparisons between Dubai and Singapore—as land art on a city scale, as the lifeworks of Lee Kuan Yew and Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum—are often made, but rarely fleshed out. At the Open Platform 2014, we would like to interrogate these unique conditions and how they are reflected in art and cultural production. Language and vernacular, including Singlish and Khalinglish, are especially relevant here, as is the idea of producing at yesterday’s margins that may well become the centres of tomorrow.
What do these cities really have in common with each other, and can we forge new direct connections and solidarities that do not need to be pipelined through old imperial centres? By bringing together artists, writers, and publishers we hope to generate a rigorous discussion to elucidate these new models and territories, not in relation to the West but entirely on their own terms.
The panel included Amanda Lee Koe, writer, Singapore, Qinyi Lim, Curator, Para Site, Raja’a Khalid, artist, Dubai, Hammad Nasar, Head of Research and Programmes, Asia Art Archive, and Lantian Xie, artist, New York and Dubai
I also contributed a clip to this Al Jazeera [Eng] Listening Post on clickbait (I’m right at the end)