SIPF 2022: Enigmatic and entrancing

ON the second floor of Peace Centre (unit number #02-06), there is a nondescript room that resembles the waiting areas of clinics and offices. One takes a number, sits on one of its pristine white chairs, and waits to be called into another room. When that happens, one finds oneself face-to-face with a computer that narrates the politics and poetry of waiting, that space between anticipating and experiencing.

On a nearby shelf are several postcard-sized pictures of walls taken around Peace Centre. They show the cracks, patches, fissures and peeling paint on the building, all of which – as the computer tells us – are also metaphors of waiting. For it is not just living things that wait for things to happen or arrive, non-living things do the same too, even if they are unaware of it.

The site-specific installation titled Peace Agency is conceived by 3 artists, Geraldine Kang, Cynthia Delaney Suwito and Woong Soak Teng. The work is strange, hypnotic and unquantifiable. But if you embrace it whole-heartedly, it may prove to be a transportive experience – even a transformative one.