Several Islands

Several Islands
Official Book Launch and The Substation’s 21st Birthday Tea Party
As part of SeptFest 2011
Sunday 18 September 2011, 2-4pm
The Substation Theatre
Admission: Free
This is an InHouse event

Join us for a little tea-time party where friends, family and yes, even frenemies, come together to “talk shop” and reminisce about their memories of this very special home of the arts. As we indulge in a little nostalgia, we will also look forward to the future of the institution; Several Islands, a semi-fictive book about The Substation written by emergent literary talent, Ho Rui An, will be launched during this soiree! So come on down, to browse and buy the book, or just to hang out and chat with us!

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.

Published by The Substation

About SeptFest 2011

On 16 September 2011, The Substation, Singapore’s first independent arts centre, celebrates its 21st anniversary. This landmark occasion will be accompanied by a month-long celebration of performances, installations,  and exhibitions.

Other SeptFest events include

Open Call Sound Art: Within 140 Characters
Open Call Visual Art: The Hall of Mirrors
Open Call Performing Art: Loop Theory
Dance, Tree. Dance