Deviations: A Group Exhibition

A self-organised exhibition that ran from 19 to 24 February 2019, featuring ten emerging artists from Singapore, all currently studying at or who have recently graduated from art institutions in the United Kingdom.

To deviate is to depart from an established course. The word ‘deviation’ connotes both ‘deviance’ and ‘defiance’—to reject and/or resist a norm. The norm must, logically, exist before the deviation. But that possibility of challenging, or even simply sidestepping, what we might otherwise assume to be an unassailable truth, declares that there are alternatives. There are different ways of looking, doing, thinking. And so, as pathways open, the power of the norm diminishes.

In Deviations, ten artists re-surface histories that defy accepted narratives, re-write the boundaries of artistic mediums, re-look the disregarded moments in our everyday. These are all artists who chose to displace themselves from their geographical norm (Singapore) in order to re-shape themselves and the ideas, images, and objects they put out into the world. Slipping in and out of photography, sculpture, installation, video, and painting, the works in this exhibition relish in the creation of new realities, resisting closure.

So we arrive here, at the unexpected.

Artists: Aki Hassan, Ashley Hi, Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee, Genevieve Leong, Jonathan Liu, Alvin Ong, Herman Rahman, Pixie Tan (in collaboration with Yingyu Tan and Maisie Sadgrove), Marvin Tang, George Wong

Read my curator’s note here.
Read more about the project in the catalogue here.
See an archive of the exhibition at our Instagram account here.

Design by Judea Faith Cheong. More about the design here.
Photos by Marvin Tang and Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee