Art event invites you to spend an afternoon with artists in their spaces

ON AN incessantly rainy first Saturday of March, small groups of art and design enthusiasts were making their way to various studios across Singapore. Upon reaching their destinations (and after drying off), they sat down for half an hour or more with the creatives working in the studio to talk about the latter’s practice and perspectives. The conversations were casual and informal, peppered with jokes, anecdotes, personal thoughts and awkward confessions – including someone admitting: “I don’t really understand much of contemporary art.” 

They’re a far cry from the kind of conversations people tend to have at art fairs, which often centre around artists’ resumes, awards, collectability, prices and waitlists. But that’s precisely what the appropriately titled event Walk Walk Don’t Run seems to be – an antidote to the phenomenal rise of art fairs around the world and the general art “fair-tigue” that results from having to rush and look at thousands of artworks by hundreds of artists in over 100 booths in a span of two to three days.   

Walk Walk Don’t Run is organised by independent art space Grey Projects, and involves over 30 creatives and collectives opening up their studio spaces for the public on a specific Saturday in March. It had its first edition in 2021 and quickly earned rave reviews among art and design enthusiasts, relieved to be able to chat in warm and friendly environments with creatives – without the mediation of curators, galleries and museums.

Jason Wee, founder and director of Grey Projects, says: “(We wanted) to offer a different view into the production and display of art. Museums and galleries are important cultural institutions, but any thriving art city must have more – more non-profit spaces like residencies and artists associations, more studio collectives, self-organised initiatives and independent projects. 

“It’s partly about differing goals, but also about different scales. For many years, the funding has flowed greatest to the establishment of mega projects like the National Gallery. Perhaps it is time to look at the small to medium-sized enterprises.”

Using only the Internet and social media (Instagram handle: greyprojectssg), Wee and his team have been able to inform and entice thousands of people to criss-cross the island in search of meaningful conversations on art, design and aesthetics. Wee says: “A lot of arts programming tends to take place in the Civic District and the downtown area. But it turns out that with the right event, folks were willing to travel all over the island to see artists and art.”

Not your usual art folk

Marla Bendini, a transgender artist with a studio in Textile Centre on Jalan Sultan, was one of the creatives showing her works to strangers on Saturday. She says: “I met some people I’d never met before and had really interesting conversations. It became a two-way street where I also got to know them – instead of just them asking me questions. I met someone in law and someone in life sciences; they both used to make art but stopped because they went into other professions.”

As a trans woman artist represented by Cuturi Gallery, she spends a lot of time thinking about her “non-conforming” body and identity, and how to create images that empower herself and her community. A lot of her paintings involve full-frontal nudity as a mediation of her complex experience.

“People who come to my exhibitions at Cuturi Gallery tend to be collectors who are aware of my practice. But in Walk Walk Don’t Run, the visitors to my home studio didn’t know very much about what I do… So we ended up talking about bodies, nudity, LGBTQ issues, self-expression, censorship and the work of women artists in general. I was almost glad it was raining because some of them ended up staying longer than they would have, and we had deep, meaningful conversations.”     

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Another participating studio was dblspce – pronounced “double space” – located unpretentiously among the sleepy mom-and-pop shops in Peninsula Shopping Centre. Founded and funded by art educators Kimberly Shen and Sab Koh, the creative laboratory offers residencies to artists, designers, architects and other creatives to dream up ideas and bring them to life to the extent that they wish to – away from the pressures of monetisation and performance targets.

Shen says: “Our residency is not outcome-driven and the participants are not obliged to give a kind of public exhibition at the end of it – as is the case with some other residencies. We offer a way for practitioners to pause, take stock and move forth to wherever they wish to go. As art educators, we offer coaching and mentoring sessions, but the people who’ve applied for the residency don’t necessarily come from the visual arts sector – we’ve had theatre practitioners, an art therapist, and someone involved in architectural photography and videography coming into this space to interact with it.”

Peninsula Shopping Centre, an older strata mall built in the 1970s, is steeped in colourful history – despite looking the worse for wear. The people who frequent the mall aren’t the typical crowd who attend museum openings. The creatives who take part in the residency often experience a jolt of clarity and inspiration from working in the space.

Small spaces are beautiful

Other artists took the opportunity during Walk Walk Don’t Run to take stock of their practice. At Aliwal Arts Centre, Dassad – a young collective created in 2021 comprising Adar Ng, Dave Lim and Woong Soak Teng – created a timeline of all the works they’ve produced since coming together, as a way of introducing visitors to what they do.

Meanwhile, their neighbours at Hothouse, a hip laboratory housing three collectives – formAxioms, Inter-Mission and Currency Design – took time to explain to complete strangers their complex practices situated at the intersection of art, technology, design and architecture. 

On the next three Saturdays of this month (Mar 11, 18 and 25), other artists, collectives and studios have been lined up for one-day-only showcases. They include Ian Tee, Jeremy Sharma, Yen Phang, Studio Swell, Allegro Print, Temporary Unit, Starch, Studio 39, Jalan Bahar Clay Studio and others. Most of the studios will be open from 11 am to 6 pm.

Grey Projects’ Wee says: “Instead of a ‘great cultural common’ that binds us all, we need to proliferate ‘uncommons’, spaces for differences and divergences that remain discomfiting to the mainstream… These divergent spaces in small cities such as Singapore are themselves small, but befits the scale of those who attend to them. These ‘uncommons’ are crucial to the often unattended-to – the economically precarious, our sexual minorities, and those with resistive cultural practices.”

For the latest information on Walk Walk Don’t Run, check out Grey Projects’ Instagram account @greyprojectssg or visit its website greyprojects.org