CIRCUIT#1 is a collection of artefacts by Singaporean independent artists working with contemporary performance. The online exhibition is curated by Dance Nucleus and supported by the National Arts Council (Singapore) through the Digital Presentation Grant.
CIRCUIT#1 is in good part a response to the 2020 ‘circuit breaker’ in Singapore, during which all residents were ordered to self-isolate and work from home for 7 weeks as a nationwide effort to counter the spread of the coronavirus. Then, as live artistic events were cancelled, artists – now literally ‘artists-in-residence’ – had to improvise novel ways of harnessing digital infrastructures, and to re-negotiate time and space in both quotidian and abstract senses, in order to continue with their research, c
The materials in this exhibition do not constitute completed works of art per se, especially when the circuit breaker had obligated many artists to deviate from their initial plans and find alternatives to their initially intended modes of operation. ‘Artefact’ is a term used here to denote what is neither documentation of the artistic process nor artistic ‘product’, but may be used as a ‘third term’ as it were, to describe the different creative outcomes (that sometimes yield fruitful surprises) from the s