Mapping the Corporeal

[Gallery impression, Mapping the Corporeal:  Ronald Ventura, NUS Museum, 2008]

Date: 5 September 2008 – 16 November 2008
Venue: NUS Museum

Ronald Ventura in Mapping the Corporeal lays groundwork for an investigation of the commodification of the human body, paranoia and religious consciousness in modern societies. In his most recent series, the material existence of modern life becomes a terrain that marks the regulation of social life from its interior, following it, interpreting it, absorbing it, and rearticulating it as a situation where the production and reproduction of life itself is at sake. Ventura expresses these ‘tensions’ in the form of sculptures, assemblages and hyperrealist paintings which are created mainly in graphite on canvas.

Ronald Ventura was born in 1973 and studied painting at the Philippines College of Architecture and Fine Arts, University of Santo Tomas, Manila. The exhibition will be presented during the period of the Singapore Biennale 2008.      

A Psychotaxonomy of Home:Michael Lee Hong Hwee

Date: 4 September 2008 - 3 April 2009
Venue: Baba House

 This work investigates the function and representation of domestic spaces and objects. How is a house to be expressed as a statement of community and history? What symbolic attributes are emphasised and why? What does the accumulation and consumption of material items reveal about the inhabitants of the house? Lee explores a plethora of Peranakan symbols and motifs, mostly auspicious in nature and provides plausible interpretations to their readily accepted symbolic values. Visitors are invited to explore the first two floors of the house with all its decorative iconographies intact and ascend the 3rd floor Gallery to make cross references within their personal observations and general experiences. What can we ascertain about the Peranakan’s innermost or expressed desires? What sort of anxieties built up during the course of elaborate celebrations, rituals and festival observances? A question of the real and imposed, the speculative and the imagined come to a head as the artist peels away the layers of iconographic values, rich colouration and confronts the bare truths. Using book craft, Lee carefully considers Peranakan preferred psycho taxonomies within nature, the animal world included, myriad mythological characters and deity within everyday domesticities of the home.