Dominic Redfern // Khairuddin Hori

I’ve come a Long Way by Dominic Redfern

Dominic Redfern has created a new large-scale installation specifically for Chulalongkorn’s Art Centre, conceived during his time in Bangkok in 2005-06. ‘I’ve come a long way’ unites two very different places: the harsh Australian interior and the energy of Bangkok’s Chatuchak market. The work finds a still point, a potent suspended moment that fuses these two landscapes. Dominic has been performing in his work since 2001, where he is usually depicted alone, in personal spaces such as his car, kitchen or motel room. ‘I’ve come a long way’ is the first installation he has created in a new body of work that finds him transforming the natural and urban environment into psychological space in much the same way as he previously did with his domestic environment. In Dominic’s work the spaces in which he performs become extensions of the self, spaces in which the metaphoric becomes actual. His work often finds him trapped within the screen. Similarly in ‘I’ve come a long way’, he walks endlessly on, never arriving. So too the screen becomes a psychological space and allows him to explore contemporary identity as a fusion of physical and technologised selves. The seriousness of his intent is undercut by his self-deprecating humour and his practice of employing science fiction motifs to illustrate his ideas.

About Artist

Dominic Redfern is an artist and academic based in Melbourne where he has taught Media Arts at RMIT University for 10 years. Over the past decide of his artistic practice he has traced an arc from working exclusively with the abstraction of found footage to his current performance and installation work. Uniting this body of practice is an enduring interest in the power and perversion of screen language and its central place in contemporary culture. Exhibiting in festivals, galleries and live performance he utilises humour and a variety of self-reflexive devices to give expression to contemporary anxieties that attend the tele-visual medium. As well as his regular exhibitions and performances in Melbourne, over recent years his work has been shown at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, in the US at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of New Art, Detroit and Art in General in New York, Sparwasser HQ, Hamburger Bahnof and the Interface festival in Berlin; Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo, in the UK at Norwich Gallery and Bristol’s FACT, Bangkok’s Experimental Film Festival as well as several venues in Korea and Japan.

Trading Craft: A performance of curators by Khairuddin Hori

LASALLE’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) Singapore is proud to present Trading Craft, a performance of curators by Khairuddin Hori held at The Substation (Singapore) and The Art Center, Chulalongkorn University (Bangkok). Invited by the artist, the curators who will perform are Thomas Berghuis, Adeline Ooi, Mikke Susanto, Chumpon Apisuk and Wong Hoy Cheong.

What does the role of curating circumscribe, who wants to be a curator in Asia and what makes it curating? Within Asia where contemporary art has a limited foothold in the public’s mind, curating is often an act of straddling roles of integrating and introducing art practices and artists within one’s society and culture, while attempting to extend an international profile and reach out to a global community. Faced with the uncertainty of the position art occupies in contemporary culture in Asia, the question arises how should this relationship be defined and whom should it be defined by? From around 1990s, the curatorial role has shifted from an organisational and administrative capacity to one that has a curatorial identity, a particular style or signature, which may be identified with the curatorial position or strategy. The framework of Trading Craft suggests a test of transformation in the role of curating, and in the case of Asia, a question as well, of the various forces which the artist might need to negotiate.

Curated by June Yap, Deputy Director, ICA Singapore, the performance of curators by Khairuddin Hori explores what constitutes and determines the role of curators, examining the shifts and tensions in the close cooperation of the artists with the curators in the context of Asia. It invites five renowned curators from Asia to perform a new role that they will have the freedom to elaborate upon with the audience at the opening of the event.

Trading Craft is a project under the Article series created by ICA Singapore of commissioned project that form a part of the institute’s curatorial research. Each project functions as an experimental platform where the institute collaborates with the artist towards the development of a new work.

About Artist

Khairuddin Hori Born in 1974 in Singapore, Khairuddin Hori graduated with a Master of Arts from LASALLE in 2006, and attained a Diploma in Fine Arts at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in 1998. He has since explored and presented works across various medium and disciplines including theatre, painting, sculpture, installation and performance art. His multifarious practice has seen him in several incarnations, from being the Creative Director of Wunderpark, a mini-festival focusing on disenfranchised youth in Singapore Art Museum, to a regional advisor for Asiatopia 7/2005, an International Performance Art Festival and the first Southeast Asian Performance Art Symposium in Bangkok, Thailand.

He has been involved in various exhibitions in Singapore and Asia since 1993, including: Fusion Strength ’03 (2003), a collaboration of a group of artists and performance artists that was organised by The Artists Village in Benda Gallery, Yogyakarta in Indonesia; a work critiquing the films of Malay screen legend and cinema doyen, P Ramlee in Labilabu (2005) at The Esplanade Tunnel in Singapore; a collaboration with another Singaporean Malay artist, Ahmad Abu Bakar in Badang (2005), a cross-generational exhibition organised by The Substation Gallery, Singapore; and teaming with Ahmad Abu Bakar for a second time, he created K & A (2006), one of the works commissioned in The Second Dance Song: New Contemporaries, a group exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore. His recent solo exhibition I Want My F-16 was presented at Warong M Nasir in Singapore last year.

Khairuddin Hori has also organised and curated numerous shows such as Berita Harian (2003), an exhibition of nine contemporary Singapore-Malay artists, as well as collaborating with Thanavi Chotpradit in One On Other (2005), a Thailand-Singapore contemporary Art exchange at About Studio / About Café in Bangkok. He recently organised Open Sea (2006), a presentation of emerging contemporary artists from Southeast Asia at The Substation Gallery, and jointly curated Performativity (2006), a touring performance for video showcase by artists from Southeast Asia First screening at Gallery VER, Bangkok.

Dominic Redfern: I’ve Come a Long Way
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Khairuddin Hori: Trading Craft, A performance of curators