M1 Singapore Fringe Festival 2019 open call

The M1 Singapore Fringe Festival has an international call for artists' proposals for the 2019 festival on the theme of STILL WATERS. The Festival focuses on contemporary, cutting-edge and socially engaged works. There is an emphasis on the performing arts but welcomes proposals across all genres.

For Fringe 2019, M1 has selected Still Waters, a seminal work by ground-breaking Australia-based Singaporean artist Suzann Victor. Shown widely on the international stage, Suzann has been actively pushing the envelope in the Singapore contemporary arts scene since the late 1980s. Her desire to make art accessible—even transcendental, whilst critiquing assumed structures of power and states of being, is evident in her work, which are always elegant, incisive, and thought-provoking.

Suzann Victor’s site-responsive performance of Still Waters in 1998 was presented by the artist at the façade of the Singapore Art Museum.

Still Waters poses an urgent question to us: what happens to art when it is carefully regulated and only lives in designated spaces? While the cultural conditions may seem different on the surface, more than 20 years after the ban on Performance Art, the questions and tensions—important ones acknowledged in Still Waters—not only remain, but have become ever more pertinent. In the physical and cultural context of Singapore at the time, Suzann’s work was highly charged with very specific questions about the politics of art, the body and public space in Singapore. But it is such a rich work that might invite a diversity of other investigations and responses about the fugitive, the abject; about estrangement and reconciliation in society, and about “the remaking of histories”.

We invite you to consider Suzann Victor’s work and its many ideas, layers and symbols, and respond to our call for proposals for Fringe 2019: Still Waters. Many resources will be provided on our website, to better acquaint you with Suzann, and have you engage with Still Waters (Between Estrangement and Reconciliation). We believe that you will be inspired by Still Waters, and look forward to your responses to our call.

The deadline for applications is Friday 2 March 2018, 12pm Singapore Time.