WIKICLIKI

Singapore Art Museum’s ongoing exhibition explores new ways of creating and showing artworks in a shifting world

- Racy Lim

“Wikicliki: Collecting Habits on an Earth Filled with Smartphones” is a result of close collaborations between six artist-curator pairings, who engaged in discussions and research on what it means to collect contemporary art in a digital age. The exhibition borrows its title from http://dbbd.sg/wiki — the constantly evolving work of visual artist and technologist Debbie Ding — which traces emerging issues around society’s use of digital infrastructures, linguistics and varied cultural topics.

“While most of the works are not new and have gone through processes of display, this iteration of the works takes the cue from artists’ changing modes of creating and presenting work,” curator Shabbir Hussain Mustafa shares.

Mustafa worked with Ding, who is known for creating speculative landscapes and games. Her approach to art involves reworking and reappropriating formal and qualitative approaches to what she describes in an artist biography as “assemblages of information”. Ding’s work — “Rules for the Expression of Architectural Desires” — displays ideas informed by the design and mobilisations of urban environments.

These Rules were written by Ding while on an art residency in Berlin, at the Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik. The viewer might understand these statements as an attempt to imagine new solutions — a form of speculative vision if one were to redesign a city (a website view is available at dbbd.sg/rules). One of the Rules suggests, “After a General Election, all constituencies must swap names.”