Belief:
The First Singapore Biennale 2006

Martina Corgnati

With the promising and perplexing title [of Belief] the first Biennale of Singapore was opened September 1st 2006, under the artistic management of the Japanese Fumio Nanjo. He was assisted by an array of curators including Sharmini Pereira, Roger McDonald and Eugene Tan, and a network of curators spreading the four corners of the Earth. Among them, who is writing presented, three artists coming from the Arabian world, the Egyptians Amal Kenawi and Khaled Hafez and the Lebanese Roy Samaha.

Belief, the theme chosen by Nanjo, highlights one of the most challenging experiences of modern life: belief verses unbelief, faith verses atheism, tradition verses progress and innovation, and the individual verses the group.

"Contemporary society is marked by complex and conflicting values and a lack of a unified standard of judgment. Diverse values sometimes lead to the thread of war and terrorism, and imply fundamentally different visions of the world" wrote Nanjo in his introductory statement. "Some people take religion as an absolute standard. To others, the consumer economy and the principles of capitalism are undoubted articles of faith. There are also many people who believe in development and progress. On the other hand, many believe in the values of solidarity and love between people and the importance of nature and the environment".

To have belief requires a generalized and fundamental attitude toward existence, that affects both individual and the group.  

At first glance, the theme was perfect to include a rich representation of contributions coming from the Arabic-Islamic world, described and represented by the Other's eye (almost anyone else) as community of believers, dangerously inclined to turn their ideas into expressions of pure rival fanaticism not only towers a religious belief, but even life styles, attitudes and culture of the others.
As a matter of fact, Biennial of Belief could not exclude  the voice of  artists coming from this area of the world and this cultural dimension. To the point that Fumio Nanjo had conceived it as a platform to "make visible" the artistic production of  areas normally under represented in other biennials, specifically Asia, South America, Africa, and Middle East. These areas are referred to as " South of the World." In this radical reorganization of Euro centric geographic heirarchy, Singapore is the centre, both geographically and culturally. Thus, Singapore emerges as a new centre with different priorities.  

The show does not intend to dismiss reason, rather its aim is to investigate the area between Sense and Sensibility. The Biennial occupied 19 sites, including a diverse array of historical and religious buildings, including: the Armenian church of San Gregorio the Enlightener, the Catholic churches of San Joseph and SS. Peter and Paul, the synagog Manhain Aboth, the mosque of Masjd Sultan, il the Kwan Im Thong Temple, besides the old and glorious City Hall, buildings from the University and  the Library and the splendid area of Tangling Camp, an old military accommodation/quarter). The Biennial was a place where different ethnic, religious, and cultural communities have always lived together, tolerating each others without conflict. Singapore  is a perfect laboratory. "The great, and perhaps naive experiment of the Singapore Biennial, is to reinvestigate the fundamental foundations of people's ways of life through art", as Nanjo defined his experiment.

According to Biennial's preamble, artists were not arranged by region (except from Ebtisam Abdul Aziz whose work was hosted by the Masjd Sultan Mosque) but by aesthetic decisions and choices. Most artists were placed between the beautiful spaces of Tanglin Camp's barracks and City Hall's area.  From the very first planning sessions, curatorial styles alluding to sweeping movements and styles were avoided. Space and time were given to individual artists pursuits and interests. Emerging artists were privileged, and explains the absence of the usual Arabic Art World stars like Mona Hatoum o Ghada Amer. Younger artists, relative unknowns with little international experience were privileged. Artists were encouraged to focus on personal experience, and their unique view of their worlds. Therefore, it is no surprise a myriad of styles,  interests, languages, and working methods were represented.
 
Ebtisam Abdul Aziz (born in 1975 UAE, lives in Sharjah) rivitalized the old and traditional form of arabian ornament based on repetition of abstract modules and fascinating combinatory geometry, starting  from a mathematical assumption though (the artist has a background in mathematics and science) . A factored triangle on the base of a sequence carefully organized on exact basis and partially coloured in black and white creates apparently random and arbitrary patterns that subtend an hidden logic, similar to the one used by historical author like Max Bill or Victor Vasarely, other exponents of the more strict international historical concretism. The implied reference to aniconic decoration used by Islam confers a new unexpected raison d’ etre and to this current,  which we could say, during the whole XX century has systematically connected and let dialogue together art and science.

United Arab Emirate artistic vitality was testified at Singapore by the presence of another emerging artist, Mohammed Kazem. He was born in Dubai in 1969. He is a photographer, conceptual artist and responsible for the Summer Workshop at Dubai Art Atelier. He exhibited a collection of spatial and geographical  coordinates (date, Time, Sea Level, Latitude, Longitude, Direction) under the form of written words made of plastic characters. The recurring elements of his work served as simple criterions of orientation and navigation, finding ways to both get information about his surroundings and reconstructing the geographical and entire body-politic in reassuring numbers, abstract numerals.

The urgent problem of identity, racism, war, and discrimination represented one of the most disputed and painful topics on view. The relationship between Arabic world and "The others" was the focus of artist Nuha Asad, born in 1983 in Sharjah where she lives. Her piece is a spectacular picture of great dimension. It portays four seated people, with their head and shoulders covered by the same fiery red drape. The artist insinuates we are all the same under the veil; even if her statement is partially contradicted by the hands and the dress who is visible and give us indications on each one's racial and social identity. Moreover, these faces, denied by the fabric evoke a famous painting of René Magritte, Les Amants, from 1928, where the passionate kiss between two lovers is denied from the white veil who covers the heads of the couple and prevent any real contact. The Estrangement, in Magritte, has something really dramatic in it (many critic's associate these veiled head to the traumatic memory of the artist mother, who committed suicide drown in the river Sambre from which she was fished out with her face hidden by a nightdress that turned upside down) and a certain phantasmal dimension can be recognized, perhaps against her will, in the work of Nuha Asad too: to render us all equal  we need to be transformed in ghosts (the ghost of  strip cartoon in fact is a sheet), we need to wipe out origins, culture, social status and economic situation. But,  what is remaining then? 

Identity is a living topic for Egyptian artist Amal Kenawy. She was born in Cairo in 1974, and lives there now. Her videos, The purple artificial forest and You will be killed, address a very personal, subjective and emotionally intense dimension. She tries to bring the unseen into a visual space by sensing a metaphorical world that hides behind the physical. The videos are based on animated drawings to let each image to flow into the next, in a ceaseless movement of space, time and dramatic sequence. In such a way, memories and feelings, nightmares and dreams fall together into an animated space that remembers the automatic drawings of Surrealist.
In a more dramatic way, You will be killed broken signs, rooms transformed in spider and roots that grow through hearts and human limbs, and animals attacking corpse or lying bodies hacked on the background, composed  the huge, apparently languishing face of the artist herself. 
The unwinding grotesque ribbon may summarizes a lifetime of memories, from dust to dust, from the reality to the abyss. The origin of Amal Kenawy 's visionary estrangement suggests a language tackling questions of gender in a disturbing sensibility. The fine "perversion" which creates one of our possible imagination leading of that authenticity pursued by surrealists and above all outsider artists like Meret Oppenheim or Leonora Carrington.The convergence is probably more accidental then wanted; it points out how in the Arabian world, especially between female artists, there's a strong necessity of identifying a personal and original path, where the historical heritage of avant-garde converges and cooperates to the creation of a new feminine subject and nourishes her view turned to a context (the social and cultural reality of the contemporary arabian world) never observed by eyes like these yet.

A similar intention, glancing toward the most intimate dimensions of oneself, charactherizes the quest of young libanese video-maker Roy Samaha ( born in 1978 in Beirut where lives ans works). Pink, white, green, black noise silence insinuated is a video based on a very ambiiguous and loose narrative that leaves several implications and suggestions open. After a few seconds, with the camera pointed at an empty sky, a young man violently wraps tape around his head, isolating himself from the exterior world and/or possibly committing suicide. A series of disturbing audio-visual effects follow, which remind us of Nam June Paik’s disturbance of TV images, produced in the early years of video art, by using a magnet placed against a monitor. By quoting Nam June Paik, Samaha stresses his intentions to distinguish himself from the documentary and narrative approach so typical of young Lebanese filmmakers today, by whom memory plays an almost obsessive role. He wants to qualify his work from both a linguistic and phenomenological point of view. However, narrative survives: the protagonist possibly dies after a few minutes, during which time we see him again lying down on a bed, then getting up and exiting the screen. Isolated from the outer world, he becomes drawn into his inner world, like a shaman or a believer who draws out his inner strength and fundamental archetypes. He reaches a place where technology meets spirituality.

Pursuing a narrative space that is personal and observant of the banality of daily life. He is no stranger to the "aesthetics of the war."  On a certain level, there may be a deep need for young lebanese artists to focus on the theatre of war. Their nation perpetually stands of the precipice of armed conflict.
During the opening days of the Singapore Biennial, the " War Summer"  just ended with the temporarily suspension of hostilities between Hezbollah and Israeli Army by a UN intervention on the Israel-lebanese frontier.

Reality was breaking into the world without any place for art, making communication with Roy Samaha really difficult. He could not participate in the opening. He had to send his video to Singapore. His absence cast a ominous shadow over the Biennial.
The impossibility of political interaction between warring parties seems to intensify need of communication for artist, especially for the Moroccan Younès Rahmoun. He was born in 1975 in Tétouan, where he lives and works. For years his work has focused on the diverse intermingling of religious practises and rituals.. "Wahid", for instance, a performance and video shot in 2003, means one, only and the single one. "For me, as much as a Moslem also Allah (God) means. In Islam, God has 99 names, a Moslem chain has 99 grains", says Rahmoum. "The position which I take in this performance rather referred to Buddhism (Zen). The repetition of this word “multi-direction” in this sitting position become universal, is carrying a message of peace and tolerance, this video - performance symbolizes the opening to other cultures and religions of the world".
The project presented at Singapore has a similar intention: the reconstruction of personal space, work and meditation. The ghorfa is the preamble for the concession, the opening of it to others in exchange for a split of their time. Curator Abdellah Karroum suggests the attention to symmetry is a key-element in art as well as in Arabic science. Symmetry is shifted from a spacial level to a relational one: it becomes the principle over which laying down the swap.

The complex socio-political situation, the myths and stereotypes of contemporary Arabic world, is the center of the pictorial and video work of the egyptian Khaled Hafez. He was born in Cairo 1963, and was the last Arabic artist represented at 2006.
Revolution , one of his latest projects, was a 4 minutes video that tackles ideology as one of the strongest and most powerful forms of belief. Hammering nails (and bending most of them) and severing dolls’ heads, both the businessman and the religious fundamentalist believe they are making their own revolution in the best possible way, in order to make the world a better place. Until a third guy, an army commander as are the majority of Middle Eastern revolutionaries, shoots both of them. Each of the three represents a different form of belief: the military – promising social equity and freedom; the free market – promising prosperity and profit; the religious – promising moral value and order. Equity, liberty, unity: no one keeps his promise.

 
 
     
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