Inventory of the Week

Artists: Tekla Aslanishvili, Anca Benera & Arnold Estefan, Alia Farid, Migrant Ecologies, Alexandra Pirici, Emilija Škarnulytė, Natasha Tontey, Mona Vătămanu & Florin Tudor, Bo Wang, Mădălina Zaharia
Curator: Anca Rujoiu
Management and production: Radu Lesevschi
Projection Screen: Atelier Ad Hoc (George Marinescu and Daria Oancea)
AV support: Justin O’Shaugnessy, Marius Costache
Graphic design: Daniel & Andrew
Translations and editing: Sorina Tomulețiu

Screenings schedule

| Thu 11 May

Alexandra Pirici – Girl Folding a Handkerchief (2021, 22 min)

AUTOMATION became the basis of modern economy, mass production and consumption. It
redefined the labouring body in terms of agency, decision-making and responsibility. Looking at ways in which the materiality and particularities of moving bodies disappear into abstraction, Alexandra Pirici’s Girl Folding a Handkerchief traces a partial history of anonymization and automation – of both physical and cognitive labor.The video takes its title from a cyclographic capture, an image translating the movement of a young woman folding a handkerchief into a geometry of light curves. Made by industrial engineer Frank Gilbreth in the beginning of the 20th century, as part of the time and motion studies developed together with his wife Lilian, it reflected a new process of visualizing, standardizing and making workers’ movements more efficient, known as the scientific management of labor. From the industrial revolution to present day forms of Artificial
Intelligence, the film shows this history overlapping with the viewing of living things as welldelimited, exploitable resource pools. But its poetic inserts also attempt to produce new metaphors for coexistence, while a goodbye-song filmed in Sala Omnia’s auditorium to an old world coming-apart hopes to announce a new one.

Migrant Ecologies – {if your bait can sing the wild one will come} Like Shadows Through Leaves (2021, 28 min)

A RAILWAY that was owned by the Malaysian state until 2011 ran through the heart of
Singapore for fifty years. This ten-meter-wide zone of indeterminate-governance hosted a
fecundity of more-than-human activities, ranging from the informal to the feral. Migrant
Ecologies Projects’s film is one part of a long-term engagement with Tanglin Halt, one of
Singapore’s oldest social housing estates, which runs alongside this former railway track.
Ornithologists have observed 105 species of birds in this patch. Once-famous modern
housing blocks are being demolished, low-income residents relocated elsewhere and
unofficial tree shrines, community farms and gathering places have been cleared.
The artists’ repeated returns to this contested site aim to trace remaining fragments of calls,
echoes, shadows, memories and transformative encounters that still animate this zone, like
shadows through leaves. The fragments of calls and voices in this film are drawn from field
recordings of birds in the area, interviews with former residents and nature activists and a
selection of species-specific, Malay bird pantuns (four-line poems), collated by writer Alfian
Sa’at. The method of representing the absent-presence of birds in this zone involved a twoway process. The artists randomly sourced online images from competitive bird groups in this
patch and returned, with OHP transparencies of these images, to the GPS locations where the
species were last seen or heard. These necessarily-impossible “restorations” involved waiting
for sunlight, in order for a fleeting shadow to be cast on a nearby leaf, tree, building or
pathway. Another approach involved printing hundreds of frames from online bird videos,
cutting out the birds by hand and re-animating them or, alternatively, re-animating the bird’s
environment, viewed through bird-shaped holes in the paper frames.

Biographies

Alexandra Pirici (born in 1982 in Bucharest, Romania) is an artist with a background in dance and choreography, working in the field of visual arts and contemporary performance art. Her work has been widely exhibited internationally, two times included in the Venice Biennale – the 59th edition of the International Art Exhibition The Milk of Dreams in 2022 and the Romanian Pavilion at the 55th edition in 2013, and in the decennial art exhibition Skulptur Projekte Munster in 2017. She had collective and solo exhibitions in contexts such as New Museum New York, Art Basel Messeplatz, The 9th Berlin Biennale, Manifesta 10, Tate Modern London, Centre Pompidou Paris, Museum Ludwig Cologne, The Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven, NTU CCA Singapore, among many others. Pirici works in museum contexts, in public spaces and sometimes in theatrical frameworks. She choreographs ongoing actions, performative monuments and performative environments that fuse dance, sculpture, spoken word and music. Her works deal with monumentality or the history of specific places and institutions in order to playfully tackle and transform existing hierarchies. They also reflect on the history and function of gestures in art and popular culture or on questions about the body, its presence, absence or image and the politics of capture. Her performative artworks are part of private and public collections as live actions. Since February, 2023, she is the first Professor for Performance in Contemporary Art at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munchen (AdBK Munich).

Migrant Ecologies Projects was founded in 2009 by Lucy Davis as an umbrella for informal, durational, transdisciplinary collaborations in and around art and ecology, primarily, but not exclusively, in Southeast Asia. Migrant Ecologies Projects bring together daughters of woodcutters, seed gatherers, memory trackers and song mappers in collective processes, situated between salvage and speculation. Our stories are drawn by soundings, echoes, shadows, spirits of more than human political movements, across this planet.

Lucy Davis is a visual artist, art writer and founder of The Migrant Ecologies Project www.migrantecologies.org. She is a British citizen who spent most of her life in Singapore. She is currently Professor of Artistic Practices in the Master’s Degree Programme in Visual Cultures, Curating and Contemporary Art at Aalto University, Finland.

Kee Ya Ting is an artist, photographer and video producer based in Singapore. Having worked with both still and moving images across the arts and commercial fields in the past decade, Ya Ting is adept in handling both mediums from conceptualisation to print or to the screen. Her photography works have been shown in the Singapore International Photography Festival (SIPF), the 5th Dali International Photography Festival in China. In 2013, she received an Emerging Young Photographer Scholarship from the Santa Fe Photographic Workshops in New Mexico, USA. Her collaborative work with NUS researcher David Tan – Feather Forensics was showcased alongside Railtrack Songmaps as part of the 2015 M1 Fringe Festival. She is also the resident photographer and cinematographer with The Migrant Ecologies Project.

Zai Tang is a multidisciplinary artist based in Singapore. Drawing influence from acoustic ecology, phenomenology and electronic & experimental music, his practice is built upon a belief that listening is an invaluable means of attuning to and forming deeper relationships with the worlds we inhabit. As a collaborator, Zai plays the role of composer, sound designer and musician across different contexts, having worked with visual artists, filmmakers, choreographers, theatre practitioners, and other musicians. Recent presentations include the Seoul Museum of Art (2022); National Gallery Singapore (2021); Thailand Biennale, Korat (2021); Busan Biennale, South Korea (2020) with Rei Hayama. {if your bait can sing the wild one will come} Like Shadows Through Leaves by The Migrant Ecologies Project won the FIPRESCI Award at ISFF Oberhausen (2021) and Best Singapore Short Film at SGIFF (2021).

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Anca Rujoiu (b.1984, Bucharest) is a curator and editor. She is part of the curatorial team for the 2024 edition of the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennial. In 2019, she was the co-curator of the third edition of the Art Encounters Biennial in Timișoara. This edition proposed the methodology of encounters as an organising principle rather than an overarching theme. As curator of exhibitions and later head of publications (2013–18), she was a member of the founding team of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, contributing to the Centre’s first exhibitions, public programs and publishing projects. As part of the curatorial initiative, FormContent in London, she worked on a nomadic project, It’s Moving from I to It (2011-13) that took the format of a script comprised of seventeen “scenes”: exhibitions, workshops, commissioned texts, and the like.

Organised by
Solitude Project in partnership with The National Center for Dance Bucharest

Co-financed by
Administration of the National Cultural Fund
The project does not necessarily represent the position of The Administration of the National Cultural Fund. The Administration of the National Cultural Fund is not responsible for the content of the project or the manner in which the results of the project may be used. These are entirely the responsibility of the funding recipient.