Trade Winds / Keine Flagge in der Sonne, 2023-2024
National Gallery Singapore
Commission Curated by Mustafa Shabbir for Tropical.Catalog Available.
A large-scale exhibition, Trade Winds, is composed of:
Tigresses, a cotton and faux leather hanging sculpture, proposed as an alternative to the third tiger mentioned in Jorge Luis Borges’s poem The Other Tiger. The orange and yellow hand-dyed opaque cotton has a complex two-sided geometric design, organized with the logic of a simulated transparent superposition, forming the word Tigresses. As anchoring points in the courtyard’s architecture, black faux leather stripes disrupt the reading of the word. The artwork employs the exact camouflage mechanism—its biological term being “disruptive coloration”—as the tiger with its black lines.
Trees, a group of six rubber, rolled painted canvas, and coconut rope sculptures. The dissociation between the name and its form provokes a series of free associations: lanterns, seahorses, echinoderms, extractive trade materials, and natural resources.
Vientos Alisios, a poem, drawings, and an ongoing experimental print project on canvas, sheer fabric, and acrylic paint. It refers to the Trade Winds or Easterlies.
Photo credits National Gallery Singapore and the artists.
