About The Singapore Biennale 2019
Through the act of artistic exploration, the Singapore Biennale invites participation to transform the world around us, and to get things done the right way. Titled Every Step in the Right Direction, the 2019 edition focuses on the imperative of making choices and taking steps to consider current conditions and the human endeavour for change and betterment.
About Quora Fora: A Rehearsal
A new commission for the Singapore Biennale, ‘Quora Fora’ is equally contemporary choral music, poetry reading and theatrical performance. Appealing to fans of new music, poetry, Singapore literature, performance art and theatre, ‘Quora Fora’ is an intense, rapidly unfolding performance-installation that culminates in an open proposition to the audience.
The artist and writer Jason Wee has been pursuing a practice that encompasses his interests in architecture, poetry, and the body. With his team of collaborators, including the composer Li-Chuan Chong and the architect Quck Zhong Yi of the design practice asolidplan, Jason Wee seeks to examine the notions and ideals in the quorum required for any democratic activation. Conceived as a total performance-installation, with Wee writing the libretto, producing the installation, and creating the choreography and costumes, ‘Quora Fora: A Rehearsal’ seeks to ask, in Wee’s own words, “how do we design the shape and scale of a demos?” Drawing on the performers’ movements through space to unlock and activate considerations around the deliberative assembly, the work can be read as an ongoing search for a new symbolic form of democracy.
Jason Wee (b. 1979, Singapore) is an artist, writer and curator working between contemporary art, architecture, poetry and photography. His artistic practice contends with sources of singular authority in favour of polyphony and difference. Wee is the founder and director of Grey Projects, an artists’ space, library and residency that focuses on curatorship, new writing, design propositions and art. He has held group and solo shows in Germany, Luxembourg, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and USA. His works are in private and public collections around the world, including the Singapore Art Museum. He lives and works in Singapore.