Thoughts

Honestly entering the Tomorrow is an Island, exhibition, my first reaction was that I was unimpressed. Mainly because the works were very visually unimpressive and the layout of the gallery and its works do not entice me to to continue to look at the rest of the exhibition.

I think the visual design of the exhibition is very appealing, the green used is super calming and enticing and I really like how the lines running through the exhibition carry the words of the letter. And this motif of the lines continue on with the rope artwork that runs through the exhibition and the colour also repeats with Monica Ursina Jager’s work. However, i think the placement of the artworks itself is very messy in my opinion. One example of this happening is with Weixin Chong’s “Winter mantid hybrids 2019”. The artwork was separated with part of it hanging in the main room and the other parts hanging on the left side of the room. However, I see no reason that this needed to be done. The artwork would’ve been much more visually interesting when clustered together because of the volume. Also I honestly think that the sound work really ruins the experience for the rest of the artworks because it is very invasive. The sound work should be put in a enclosed sound proof area in my opinion. However, Despite this, I do understand that the ADM gallery is a really small space and therefore faces a lot of constraints when dealing with how to display the artworks.

As to how this gallery fits in with the bigger picture of the biennialle, I honestly think that all the artworks only at best loosely fits with the theme of “Every Step in the Right Direction”. Because of sheer size of the bienalle, I agree that it would be virtually impossible to have all the artworks fit nicely with the theme. However this makes you question, should the curators focus more on quantity or quality? It seems to me that they have been focusing more on quantity lately, lauding over how many artist and artworks they manage to bring in for the bienalle. However, personally for me I think i would prefer a lesser amount of works, but ones that fit very nicely with the theme of the exhibition. One example I can think of would be the Minimalism exhibition at the National Art Gallery last year.