Singapore Art Week 2023 • SAW x PAssionArts

Sieve through the sands of time,
unearth lost landmarks of Singapore,
aid Temporal Displacement Agency‘s time travellers,
and reassemble ceramic artefacts in this participatory play experience!

Singapore Art Week, 6–15 Jan 2023
Performances at 11am–2.30pm & 4.30pm–8pm
Yew Tee CC Atrium, 20 Choa Chu Kang St 52, Singapore 689286

Do you recall the old Stamford National Library? Or the magnificently cantilevered National Theatre? Or Singapore’s first Oceanarium, the Van Kleef Aquarium? Did you ever play at the Great World Amusement Park?

Forgotten Fragments is a participatory interactive installation that invites audiences to reassemble jigsaw sculptures of lost places in Singapore by recalling their youth and childhood memories.

Curious attendees may sink their hands into the powdery sand and excavate fragments of landmarks and landscapes lost to urban redevelopment, colonisation and entropy. Can anyone still recall demolished sites that did not fit into the future of Singapore?

This game challenges participants to reconstruct these iconic places purely from memory, highlighting how heritage and cultural spaces will fade from retrospection if steps are not taken to preserve them for future generations.

Players must handle their archaeological finds with care. Shattered clay pieces are lost forever. This hands-on experience emphasises the fragility of these spaces, and any generation that destroys them leaves them irrevocably lost for for their descendants.

Rebuilding History Workshops
16 & 18 Dec 2022

Forgotten Fragments seeks to remind Singaporeans of our collective loss and cultural amnesia surrounding places that were once dear to our hearts. As each generation passes, memories of extinct locales fade, displacing our cultural identity from the vicissitudes of the island’s urban redevelopment.

At the Rebuilding History workshops, residents mould clay fragments representing a memory that, when fitted together, forms a community’s recollection of a lost landmark. Every citizen artist may express their unique memory, impression or interpretation in each fragment. The fusion of the fragments into a complete sculpture, beautiful and disjointed like a hazy memory, becomes the community’s memorial to places once loved and lost.

At the workshop:

• Visualise lost landmarks of your youth, and share your unique experiences
• Discover how to create angled and edged ceramic pieces with architectural qualities
• Understand the concept of clay memory
• Learn how to construct forms with hard slab and templates to minimise warping
• Suitable for families, seniors, adults, children.

Media

Singapore Art Week: Digging into art and art theory at Shoebox sculpture biennale and Yew Tee
Straits Times, 16 Jan 2023

Singapore Art Week: ‘Serious parties’ and shoebox-size sculptures in the heartland
Straits Times, 9 Jan 2023

[Video] Tiga artis Melayu tampilkan karya seni, gamit kenangan dalam Minggu Seni SG 2023
Berita (Suria), 7 Jan 2023

A full spectrum of art for Singapore Art Week
Straits Times, 5 Jan 2023

四艺术家携手社区居民 让国家剧院等已消失地标重现陶泥板上
Lianhe Zaobao, 17 Dec 2022

Top 10 highlights of Singapore Art Week 2023
Lianhe Zaobao, 19 Dec 2022

Artists

Forgotten Fragments is the brainchild of Raihan Harun, an interactive and participatory design director at Void Deck Games. Trained at the Victorian College of the Arts, Raihan tells stories, makes theatre and designs games that lure people into imaginary worlds. He believes in the power of people and the community and seeks to transform Singapore’s culture through play.

Johnny’s career as a ceramic artist began as a humble apprentice at a Ceramic Brickworks factory in 1983. He was fascinated with clay, carving discarded bricks that were unsuitable for firing, and joined the first pottery studio started at Brickworks. After 5 years, he left the factory to pursue ceramic art at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts. Johnny is a veteran ceramics educator with 33 years of teaching experience, and deeply involved with grassroots art at Tanjong Pagar CC.

Tang Chong Wing holds a certificate in Ceramics Art from Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts. A veteran arts educator, he has been teaching ceramics since 1991, while participating in various exhibitions and demonstrations. He’s highly involved with grassroots pottery, and was the chairman of the Tanjong Pagar Pottery Club until 2016. He currently teaches classes at Tanjong Pagar CC. Born during WW2, he recalls a lot more lost places in Singapore than most of us.

Trained as a multi-disciplinary designer, Joanne’s design-thinking approach informs her work as a creative. Her contributions to multi-disciplinary projects often mashes up participatory roleplaying, mixed reality performances and tactile, visually immersive sets. She is interested in the intersection between art, alternative histories, stories, and audience co-creation.

Feroz is an eccentric figure with a deep love for all art, a fresh graduate from LASALLE College of the Arts (Performance). As a performer, a writer, and as a human he possesses a powerful voice and a personality that adds poetry to everything he does. He is driven by his love for stories and wishes to tell them in any way. He is a Game Master for roleplaying games, which he finds to be a medium that allows him to incorporate his multitudinous creative ambitions into one work, especially with his interest in immersive experiences and participatory theatre.

With additional thanks to:
Beverly Liang (Set Designer)
Mark Chen (Playtester)
Liu Chang (Playtester)
Zaki Ragman (Playtester)
Wan Nurindah Wan Ahmad
William Ng
David Chew
Tasvindar “Tess” Kaur
Claudia Loo
& all the Limbangians that made various puzzle pieces for play

About Singapore Art Week

As Singapore’s signature visual arts season, Singapore Art Week (SAW) represents the unity and pride of a diverse and vibrant arts community in Singapore.

From 6 to 15 January 2023, SAW 2023 will present an array of over 130 art events featuring new works and transnational collaborations across the island and online. In its 11th edition, the ten day celebration of the visual arts will showcase two dynamic art fairs, S.E.A. Focus and the inaugural ART SG; two highlight commissions are the homecoming presentation of Pulp III: A Short Biography of the Banished Book at the recent 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia and the Singapore Biennale; as well as a vibrant Light to Night in the Civic District. SAW is a nexus for creative collaborations and audiences can look forward to an exciting line up of art experiences at our museums, galleries, independent art spaces and public spaces, and enjoy enriching discussions, talks, walks and tours.

SAW 2023, a celebration of Singapore’s vibrant art landscape, is a joint initiative by the National Arts Council (NAC) and the Singapore Tourism Board (STB).