Tomorrow is an Island, as Inland, a sin land, NTU ADM Gallery Singapore
2020, collateral event of Singapore Biennale 2019, with Jason Wee, Nicole Bachmann, Weixin Chong, Marcus Wee and Damian Christinger
Tomorrow Is An Island, as inland, a sin land is an artist-led project
that speculates on the future of islands, deep time, the fate of “crisis” as a frame of our predictions and conceptions of future time, and the exchanges between bodies and cities. The title deploys a sequence of anagrams that re-scrambles with each new phrase, suggesting the ways in which the next moment could retain recognisable components of the present but to disruptive effect.
Taking on a speculative premise, the exhibition puts forth the following questions:
What kind of future(s) can we imagine for our current conditions of precarious migrations, securitised fears and asphyxiated commons? What cultures of care could be freshly fermented amidst the poison of racialised
divisions, and what kinds of social contracts might persist between cities and their inhabitants, and between differing islands? How can the disruption of nature/culture binaries foster more-than-human entanglements?
Led by Monica Ursina Jäger and Jason Wee, Tomorrow Is An Island brings together four artists and two writers from Singapore and Switzerland to rethink presumptions of systemic change in the imagining of island futures. By close reading, careful citation and by counter-mapping the boundaries between epistemes and between techniques, the participants envision new forms of assemblage among themselves. The artworks on view are the aftermaths of dialogues and responses to text exchanges among the artists and writers over the past
fifteen months.
Switzerland and Singapore share notions of “island” in multiple ways: Geographically, politically and historically. The artists and writers challenge each other through a sequence of conversations and readings, about our responses to futurity, territory, and alterity. Over the course of several months, this archipelago
of collaborators sustain these dynamic relations between places and bodies as fluid tropes of assemblage, mobilities and multiplicities. The Tomorrow that results is an exhibition of this archipelago as inland, a sin land as well as a handbook for traveling to that tomorrow in the now.
