Art breaks free from the white cube. In the 1980s and 1990s, radical performances, scavenged materials and site-specific installations heralded new approaches to art that challenged the gallery space as an arbiter of taste and value. “What is, or could be, art?” formed the debate.
Artists moved from modes of representation to examinations of the production and consumption of art. “Readymades” dismantled the hierarchy of high and low culture; performances engaged audiences and signalled collaborative futures; art freed itself from material forms to resist commodification. Yet artworks were archived, restaged and documented. The ephemerality of artworks and their afterlives jostled in tension. Amidst these shifting frontiers, artists formed avant-garde collectives that operated at the fringes of mainstream art institutions. Although these shifts have precedents in the 1970s, they gained momentum in this period. Euro-American centres of art also began to look to the world at large, and artists from Singapore were increasingly invited to exhibit at international platforms, throwing issues of self and identity into the global agenda.
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When: Ongoing - Where: Level 2, DBS Singapore Gallery, City Hall Wing
- General admission ticket required (free for Singaporeans and PRs)