Min Wei-ting: Berlin Art Prize 2019—nominee show

About

Using slow, tranquil camera movements, filmmaker Min-Wei Ting (b. 1976, Singapore) traverses the city. His lens runs over concrete, infrastructure, and people, as if they were all objects on the metropolis’ assembly line. Yet, in the rigid rhythm of architecture and space, which are reflective of a regimenting power in Min-Wei Ting's work, moments of the uncontrolled break through: bird calls trill over the hum of ventilation systems, greenery proliferates in the clearings between skyscrapers, people lose themselves in the crowds.

If for Nothing Else than for Sunday is a cinematic passage through Singapore’s Little India District. Twice, at different times of day, Min-Wei Ting follows the same route with the camera: during the calm that announces dawn and in the midst of a Sunday evening’s hustle and bustle, when large groups of South Asian migrant workers gather in the quarter. Ting interweaves the two shots, drawing attention to the gestures, actions, lights, and sounds that are sometimes there and sometimes not, giving the space a life of its own.

In Hampshire Road, Min-Wei Ting allows his camera to trail along a single building in Singapore for seven minutes. At the Little India bus terminal, guest workers wait in a seemingly endless line at night for their shuttle back to the sleeping quarters outside the city. While the lens measures the length of the building, it increasingly detects how the architecture socially separates, monitors, and controls those that are waiting.