The Unfaithful Octopus | Travelling exhibition in Singapore and Thailand

Until 1 December 2023 the exhibition “The Unfaithful Octopus: Image-Thinking and Adaptation” will be showing at Singapore’s NTU ADM Gallery, before travelling to Chiang Mai’s MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum, Thailand, in early 2024. The exhibition features artists from Singapore, Thailand, Viet Nam, Spain and the Netherlands.

Guided by and departing from the ideas of Thai artist Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook and Dutch cultural theorist and video artist Mieke Bal, this exhibition reckons with artmaking as a practice of thinking. How does art think about other art? And about narrative? And about time?

Artworks tell stories, sometimes, and sometimes these stories are taken from elsewhere: from other artworks, from literary sources, from the media or from movies. Narratives are transformed by sliding between makers and gliding between different historical moments and political contexts. What kind of image-thinking happens during these processes?

Perhaps we can think of artworks as unfaithful responses to and adaptations of literary and artistic narratives and precedents. Perhaps the experience of time in artworks is not linear or cyclical, but instead like an ‘octopus’ whose tentacles reach into every dimension. These tentacles encircle stories, transforming them into thought-images and devouring them.

The artworks in this exhibition are like essays: playful and partial, intelligent and inquisitive, attentive as they make their experiments and attempts. The artists involved are: Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, CAMP, Chulayarnnon Siriphol, Diem Phung Thi remade by Thao Nguyen Phan, Fyerool Darma, Ian Tee, Mieke Bal, Ricardo de Baños and Alberto Marro

Full programme