Literary Arts / Several Islands

Several Islands
Written by Ho Rui An
Published in 2011 by The Substation
Available for $15 from the box office, boxoffice@substation.org / 6337 7800

A travellers begins a journey in pursuit of a singular purpose: to seek certitude within the uncertain. Among the characters encountered, there are those who never sleep, those who cannot stop writing, those who have lost their memories and those who are too in the midst of a travel. Several Islands was written based on the memories of The Substation, the first independent contemporary arts space in Singapore.

Several Islands started out as an attempt at documenting the memories of the Substation, but the endeavour was necessarily futile; for to designate memory as a subject for recording was based on a misguided and perhaps even dangerous assumption – that memory is a thing-in-itself.

As such, the work is no longer an archive, but a novel. Taking the memories of over forty individuals who have encountered the Substation over the past two decades – artists, writers, academics, curators and bureaucrats – Several Islands re-processes these memories as fictive threads that express the tensions, confluences and potentialities that mark our contemporary condition. The chapters, discontinuous yet related, seek to form an archipelago of ideas that maps out an imagined landscape that inhabits us from within.

Ho Rui An is an artist and writer. He works primarily with film and text and is interested in probing, interrogating and dismantling the inter-nodal negotiations through which knowledge is constructed, particularly within discourses on identity, culture, memory and gender. He also writes reviews and commentaries on contemporary art, film and theatre which have been widely published.

Several Islands
226 page, softcover
ISBN: 978-981-08-9734-5
Written by Ho Rui An
Curated by Heman Chong
Designed by Joanne Pang
Printed in Singapore by First Printers

Supported by the National Arts Council