CECI N'EST PAS UNE EXPOSITION
by Isabelle Desjeux
Friday 04 October 01:00 pm to Thursday 07 November 07:30 pm
La galerie , Alliance Française de Singapour
So if this is not an exhibition, what is it? The French word "expérience,” sounds like the English word “experience,” but translates to “experiment.” It is definitely both an experiment and an experience. It is also a project, comprising interactive gallery-based installations and the activation of the ideas explored in those installations through related programmes. We borrow the idea that “Ceci n’est pas…” or “this is not…what it seems to be” from the Belgian artist René Magritte (1898-1967). Hopefully, this invites us to think about what is possible when one looks beyond what seems to be, and instead thinks about what could be.
Ceci n’est pas une exhibition, but it is art, it is science, it is play, it is imagination, it is nature, it is technology, and it is, above all, an invitation, and a space to be activated by your presence and participation.
This project presents the work of Dr. Isabelle Desjeux, an artist, scientist, and educator who spent 25 years in Singapore, from 1999 to 2024. The project is simultaneously a reflection on her training as a molecular biologist, her experiences making art and building community, and a proposition for things that are yet to come. Things that she will do, and things that she hopes that you will take in new directions. Now, having recently relocated to Sweden, she is certain that some aspects of her practice in Singapore will adapt to her new environment, and some will not be transplantable.
Desjeux's interests in following questions down meandering paths, tapping into curiosity about the environment, and in sharing meaningful experiences with others are common threads throughout her work for the past 25 years. This project invites you to be part of these experiences - not by simply viewing or learning from the installation areas within the gallery, but by participating in them, and making them your own.
If you are ready to start down some meandering paths, you should stop reading here, and jump right into the experiment!
Artist(s)
Dr Isabelle Desjeux, artist-scientist
In collaboration with:
Quek See Yee, multidisciplinary designer and art practitioner
Debbie Ding, an artist-scholar
Exhibition Curator
Dr Karin G. Oen, Director of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore
Free entrance
Gallery, Level 2
Opening hours:
Tuesday to Friday: 1.00 pm - 7.30 pm
Saturday: 9.00 am - 5.00 pm
Artist Guided Tour | Details and registration here
Family guided tour [EN] | Details and registration here
Visite guidée familiale [FR] | Details and registration here
Guided Tour [EN] | Details and registration here
Visite guidée [FR] | Details and registration here
Isabelle Desjeux
Isabelle Desjeux is a Umeå (Sweden) and Singapore-based artist and researcher. Using her training in Molecular Biology, she creates new kinds of scientific method-based artworks. Working closely with scientists, she encourages others to cross the divide and take on the role of scientist in her interventions, whether in a class, during a workshop, or as part of an installation. As such her work has often been labelled as participatory, with "experiment" being a strong part of her practice.
She received her MAFA from Lasalle (2011), was the recipient of the French-Singapore New Generation Artist (2011), and of a Lasalle Research Fellowship (2017). Her work has been exhibited in museums across Singapore, in Japan and USA. She teaches regularly across disciplines from pre-school to post-graduate level, inviting students into her practice.
Karin G. Oen
Karin G. Oen is an art historian and curator based in Singapore where she is Director of NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore and Head of Art History at NTU's School of Humanities.
She is most interested in transdisciplinary and transnational art practices that resist classification, and in examining modes of writing about, displaying, and collecting art in diverse cultural contexts. Her work is characterized by attention to historiographies and genealogies, institutional power structures, and a broader project of balancing the global, the local while making space for non-canonical art histories, Recently, she was co-editor with Ute Meta Bauer and Tan Boon Hui of the 2022 book SEA: Contemporary Art in Southeast Asia. She previously served as a curator of contemporary art at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco where her exhibition projects included teamLab: Continuity (2021), Haroon Mirza: The Night Journey (2018), and Koki Tanaka: Potters and Poets (2016). She received her BA from Stanford, MA from Christie's New York, and PhD in the history, theory, and criticism of art and architecture from MIT.
Quek See Yee
Quek See Yee is a multidisciplinary designer and art practitioner who works across natural materials, furniture, landscapes, and spaces. The art practice is driven by experimentation and inquiry into our interaction with the world— both tropical and urban settings.
Quek explores the connections between tropical environments and everyday life creating drawings, building furniture, designing spaces, and reassembling elements.
Debbie Ding
Debbie Ding (born in 1984 in Singapore) is an artist-scholar working across the intersection of artistic research, technology and game studies - with professional experience as design educator, interaction designer, and game designer-developer.
Her work was shortlisted for the President's Young Talents 2018 and Impart Art Awards 2020 and is collected by the Australian War Memorial and Singapore Art Museum. Notable exhibitions include "Temporal Shifts" at Ars Electronica 2024, "Radical Gaming" at HeK Basel, "Worldbuilding" at Julia Stoschek Foundation Dusseldorf, "Wikicliki" at Singapore Biennale. Scholarship (Visual Art), and funded residencies with Australian War Memorial (Canberra), Dena Foundation (Paris). Her ongoing practice-based PhD research explores virtual worlds in games as a medium for artistic practice.
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