in-inhabitations— a continuation and/end
archiving the opening and closing of a space;
committing the experience to memory
by Goh Abigail
A continuation of the very first project Telok Ayer Arts Club hosted at McCallum Street 19 months ago; artist Goh Abigail returns to inhabit, mine and mark the space that the Arts Club will soon leave—a testament to the quickly changing landscapes of an urban capitalist world. In 2018, the artist saw the space transform from a room of dust and rubble to a sleek, modern bar and restaurant in just under a month. At the time, in-inhabitations attempted to capture this upheaval, and so it’s fitting that the artist returns once again in a year which has seen the most change to experience and spaces of dwelling – public spaces now empty and compromised while most make shifts to the digital and virtual space. In 2018, the artist traced her impressions of the space with different forms of drawing: organic marks made on paper that could be read as translations or scores of the sounds she heard. She also accumulated a collection of sound apparatuses that create unique listening situations in the space, creating a closed system where the poetic and physical gestures of sound, drawings and objects hover between transmission and absorption. Now, the challenge is to transpose these ideas to the virtual space. Can a webpage represent a physical space? If so, how can it perform as a receptacle of sound or an instrument in itself?
Goh Abigail (b. 1993) creates simple sonic apparatuses out of common objects of different materials, which will perform or re-enact certain interesting sounds. With drawings/collages as musical scores, and objects, electronics and space as mediums for sound, Abigail’s practice focuses on orchestrating her various performing apparatuses/instruments to create a unique listening situation while exploring the relationships between sound, space and material form.
Abigail graduated with a BA (Hons) Fine Arts from LASALLE College of the Arts in 2017. She is a recipient of both the 2017 Chan Davies Art Prize for promising young artists and the 2015 Winston Oh Travel Award for the development of artistic research and practice. She had her first solo show continuation (and rests) between spaces at Chan + Hori Contemporary in 2018, and more recently took part in studio batur’s residency programme making sense of a tiger attack in Bandung Indonesia, and Bacholerette Machines at Institute of Contemporary Art Singapore.
scroll down to experience Goh Abigail’s online artwork
