"After independence, I searched for some dramatic way to distinguish ourselves from other Third World countries. I settled for a clean and green Singapore…”

— Lee Kuan Yew, From Third World to First

In 1963, a Mempat tree was planted by the nation’s Prime Minister. Planting has never been about trees; it’s a moment transformed into a photograph. Singapore has always shaped itself in, and after the image. Garden City is the clean and green image—think about those majestic trees that line our expressways as you emerge from Changi Airport. The Substation presents a programme of exhibition, performance and forum, through artists who resist constructed visions of nature as a singular, unchanging entity. They complicate our understanding of Nature and the Garden: from the edenic to the horrifying, from the sublime to fictions of representation. Nature, through their eyes, becomes speculative, autonomous but also charged with human trace.

Read more about The Substation's new artistic directions in response to MacRitchie Reservoir Cross Island Line discussions here.

Exhibition
5 - 15 May
12pm - 8pm daily
The Substation Gallery
(Closed for private performance & forum on 7 May, 1-4pm)

Panel discussion (Private event - by invitation only)
7 May, Saturday, 2-4pm
The Substation Gallery

At The Substation, we hope to take on the big, difficult questions that affect us, as a nation, a people, and as individuals.

Right now, one of those burning questions is the Cross Island Tunnelling tests at MacRitchie Reservoir. We all want to 'save' MacRitchie Reservoir. But maybe it shouldn't just be about MacRitchie. Or else we'll always be lurching from here to where, always fighting for the next place or cause. Yesterday it's Bukit Brown, today MacRitchie, and tomorrow who knows where? Maybe it's worthwhile to expand and deepen that conversation about our relationship with Nature. 

We — the artists, academics, and conservationists — have had barely 2 months to put this together. It's a show put up in haste, but I think that sometimes timing is everything. These cultural producers have already developed their obsessive bodies of work around different interpretations and relations with Nature. Isn't it worth our while to consider what they have been saying for a long time?

So if you care about MacRitchie Reservoir, maybe there's a larger cultural condition that troubles you. You can't quite articulate it. Well we don't intend to make it any easier. The aesthetic encounter is multifarious and difficult.

yours truly. a.