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Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston Upon Thames 17 February to 9 April
This extraordinary exhibition by Erika Tan is linked by two mega shows - Surrealism Beyond Borders at Tate Modern and A Century of the Artists Studio (p26) at Whitechapel Gallery - that opened simultaneously with the threat of war. The liaison found in the Tate exhibition is through an artist born in the Ukraine: Maya Deren. Her spirit of adventure and wild imagination echoes throughout Tans production, which bonds Surrealism to its diasporic paradigm. Whitechapel, meanwhile, assigns space to the studio of Kim Lim which, by coincidence or chance, informs the installation of Barang-Barang.
Susan Hiller wrote on the need for ethnographic exhibitions to make us aware of the interaction between the objects displayed and our own history. Barang-Barang is the Malay word used colloquially in Singapore to mean stuff, and Tans installation is stacked with the objects and belongings of four women, all artists, who share the geographical context of Singapore. This is the only specific fact. The rest is fiction, a fabulous scenario of invented interactions between four women who probably never met yet share so much history, both personally and politically. Tans main video presents possible conversations revealing the womens intimate experiences and ambitions. Tan describes this as an imagined constellation of celestial art historical references that stretch conventional understandings of time and space, geographical location and historical veracity.
The space in the Stanley Picker Gallery is split between a vast screen and a recreated studio space referring to Lims studio in which shelves are stacked with an eclectic mix of tools, objects, video screens, printed works and photos of coconut palms, all found or assisted readymades...