Every year we look forward to the Curator Open Call at Objectifs Centre for Photography and Film, and this year is no exception. This year’s With You Here Between: Defamiliarizations is curated by Elaine Thanya Marie Teo and Tekad Kolectif, and it’s a show that captures that deep sense of yearning while existing in the spaces between.
This might mean different things for each of the young artists in the show: Dylan Chan, Fitri Ya’akob, Masuri Mazlan and Vimal Kumar. But every one of them approaches it with a touching sincerity that tugs at the heart.
With You Here Between: Defamiliarizations runs until 31 Oct 2021, so do check it out if you have the chance! Meanwhile, have a peek of it here first:
Vimal Kumar, Iconic and Aniconic Waterbody: Reimagining the Singapore River (2021).
Vimal Kumar imagines that a shrine to the Singapore River Goddess might look like, reintroducing a sense of divine presence into this space that was once a chapel. Take the time to pore through the details of his installation, where the artist has fictionalised history in some very thoughtful yet tongue-in-cheek ways. (There is even a 4D number hidden somewhere!)
Masuri Mazlan, Unhommely Desires II: We Can Change the Stories We Tell Ourselves (2021).
A large grotesque oblong shape intrudes on the immaculate domestic scenes that Masuri Mazlan has created. In this case, it is that of a shower stall.
The bedroom scene contains portrait photographs of the artist’s identity shrouded by fabric, pointing to the protection that can be afforded by subterfuge when identity is a nebulous territory to negotiate.
An image that’s part of Masuri Mazlan’s There’s Nothing Wrong Contemplating God (SOS d’un terrien en détresse) (2021).
Utilising a familiar domestic motif of parquet flooring, Dylan Chan invokes that which he had grown up with as a child to conceal and preserve intimate memories within the gaps. We are left standing on the outside, as an outsider looking in on slivers of a scene that we can only guess at.
Dylan Chan, I Wish to See You (2021). Images reveal themselves and then swiftly disappear as one traverses the length of the work. It is coy; it plays hide-and-seek, it reads like a flirtation.
Fitri Ya’akob”, Orang Laut (2017). The lighting in Fitri Ya’akob’s images of the Orang Laut suffuse the subjects in a glow that’s simultaneously romantic and heartbreaking.As she puts it, she is documenting “a one-sided relationship between the ocean and the people.”
Fitri Ya’akob, Akar (2020). Akar means ‘root’ in Malay – the artist laments for a return to a far-off home during this time of loss and separation, seeking spaces in Singapore to assuage this loss.
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Feature image: (from left) Vimal Kumar, Elaine Thanya Marie Teo, Dylan Chan, Masuri Mazlan and Fitri Ya’akob in front of Vimal Kumar’s Iconic and Aniconic Waterbody: Reimagining the Singapore River (2021).
