Travel Agency: A+ @ Artspace, Helutrans Singapore

A+ WORKS of ART presents Travel Agency, a group exhibition at ArtSpace@Helutrans, Singapore. Curated by Denise Lai.

Defined as a biennale with a wandering eye, ‘Natasha’ - the avatar of this year’s Singapore Biennale - is an open entity reaching for definition, a developing character inviting the interactions of artists, audiences, and ‘fellow travellers’.

Settling down next to ‘Natasha’ in Tanjong Pagar Distripark, the A+ exhibition assumes the vantage point of these fellow travellers, more specifically, artworks by Malaysian artists that have travelled to Singapore for a remote site exhibition, in parallel with the happenings of the biennale. Given its conceptual framework, the biennale raises an important question about how we, as traveller or biennale-goer, can transgress our position as mere onlookers of the spectacle.

If we were to consider a neighbouring exhibition of foreign artworks as an event with the potential to speak back, what would it pack? These choices are meaningful, and Travel Agency traces an affinity between the exhibition of foreign artists with definitions of the traveller found within the field of tourism studies: both human and non-human actors whose packing habits foreground and question our ability to move across boundaries of identity, place, and ideologies.

Having crossed the Straits of Johor, these works showcase various engagements with ideas surrounding travel, migration, and mobility. Contained within these works are stories of historical and contemporary migrants, exhibition histories, the currencies with which they make exchanges, the objects they collect on their journeys and the hopes of the traveller to in some way connect to the world, or perhaps more intimately, to ‘Natasha’.