Sarah Choo Jing: Art of the Rehearsal

About

A.I. is pleased to announce Sarah Choo Jing (b. 1990, Singapore) will be presenting a new work titled Art of the Rehearsal in a group exhibition: Personal Structures hosted by the European Cultural Centre (organized by GAA Foundation) in the context of the 57th Venice Biennale.

Art of the Rehearsal was commissioned for the opening of the new media gallery at the National Museum of Singapore, the theme of which was traditional dance. The work comprises a panoramic video collage and individual video portraits depicting cultural dancers from three different local troupes. A short essay by Louis Ho (curator at Singapore Art Museum) will be published to mark this exhibition supporting this new video work. An excerpt taken from the essay below: 

<<Across the reach of three wall-spanning channels, a purposively staged a-spectacle unfolds in all its un-dramatic pageantry. The backdrop of the proceedings is a narrow back alley, of the sort one finds tucked away behind the ubiquitous shophouse rows that characterize the island’s heritage districts: Chinatown, Little India, Kampong Glam. Against this anonymous landscape – an oft- and deliberately overlooked terrain littered with uncovered drains and small mountains of trash bags, opening onto which are the backdoors of laundromats and bars and late-night massage parlours and eateries and other working-class establishments – several figures are depicted at work and at rest. They are members of local dance troupes: Chinese, Indian, Malay, in, again, an allusion to the main ethnic rubrics that are observed.>>

Acknowledgement & credits: The production & exhibition of this work is kindly supported by the National Arts Council Singapore and National Museum of Singapore. All artwork copyright of the artist, image courtesy: National Arts Council Singapore, National Museum of Singapore and A.I. Gallery, London.