ART CITIES:Singapore – Joan Jonas

Beginning in the late ‘60s, Joan Jonas created a groundbreaking series of works that established her as one of the pioneering forces in Body art, Performance, and Video art. Undertaking a sustained examination of the process, politics, and psychology of spectatorship, Jonas adopted numerous strategies for complicating her audience’s relationship to her staged activities.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore Archive

“They Come to Us without a Word”, is the first major exhibition in Singapore of the discipline-defining video and performance pioneer Joan Jonas’ at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore. Presented and commissioned for the US Pavilion by the MIT List Visual Arts Center at the 56th Venice Biennale, the work evokes the fragility of nature in a rapidly changing environment. In her own poetic language, Joan Jonas addresses the irreversible impact of human interference on the environmental equilibrium of our planet. Literature has always been an inspiration and source for Jonas, and the project for Venice extends her investigation into the work of Halldór Laxness and his writing on the spiritual aspects of nature, as well as other literary sources. Each room of the installation represents a particular creature (bees, fish), object (mirror), force (wind), or place (the homeroom). Fragments of ghost stories sourced from an oral tradition in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, form a nonlinear narrative linking one room of Jonas’ installation to the next. In a mirrored room full of reflections, crystal beads strung on a chandelier-like structure lie suspended from the middle of the ceiling, creating shadows that move all over the walls. These spoken fragments function partly as a reference to what remains, “Ghosts are very much alive there, as in all parts of the world”, Jonas explains. “We are haunted, the rooms are haunted”. Jonas developed the videos in New York in winter 2015, during a series of workshops with children ranging in age from 5 to 16 performing against video backdrops of landscapes shot by Jonas mostly in Nova Scotia, Canada, and Brooklyn, New York. Sources also include several early videos by Jonas. “They Come to Us without a Word” is animated by a soundtrack designed by Jonas, using excerpts of music by Jason Moran and songs by the Norwegian Sami singer Ánde Somby.

Info: NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, Gillman Barracks, 43 Malan Road, Singapore, Duration:22/1-3/4/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 12:00-19:00, http://ntu.ccasingapore.org