5th Passage: In Search of Lost Time, a group exhibition curated by John Tung
Exhibition Date: September 24 - October 17, 2021
Venue: Gajah Gallery Singapore
Artists: Chu Chu Yuan, Eve Tan, Jason Lim, John Clang, Kai Lam, Ray Langebach, Siew Kee Liong, Susie Lingham, Susie Wong, Suzann Victor
In 1991, 5th Passage was founded by a small group of emerging Singaporean artists who strived to bring the arts to the public. Setting up their space in the fifth-floor passageway of Parkway Parade, Singapore’s first major suburban mall, 5th Passage situated itself within the ‘ready-made public’ of civic centres, and became Singapore’s first corporate-sponsored artist-run initiative. A number of substantial exhibitions, events, and activities were realised while the collective operated between 1991 and 1996. They experimented with varied site-specific, contemporary mediums, such as performance art and installation, and addressed a wide range of social concerns, from race, gender and sexuality, to the environment. In doing so, they sparked urgent conversations that spoke to the lived realities of their public.
Yet, the historicisation of 5th Passage remains conspicuously absent from dominant narratives of the country’s art history. Recognising that the remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were, 5𝙩𝙝 𝙋𝙖𝙨𝙨𝙖𝙜𝙚: 𝙄𝙣 𝙎𝙚𝙖𝙧𝙘𝙝 𝙤𝙛 𝙇𝙤𝙨𝙩 𝙏𝙞𝙢𝙚 looks to memories of the collective’s existence to reconstitute a basis for establishing the initiative’s significance within the wider arc of the country’s arts and cultural development. Bringing together artists who had presented works under its auspices, this exhibition revives in the wider public consciousness the plethora of programmes that articulated the initiative’s ideals and aspirations, while intimating the passage of time that has since elapsed. As a consequence, the exhibition begs the question: to what extent did the delay in historicisation result in material harm to the corpus of 5th Passage?