geraldinekang.info
Artist BioGeraldine Kang (b. 1988) is a visual artist working with photography, video and installation. Her work focuses on unearthing overlooked spaces and power dynamics pertaining to the living situations of precarious transient migrant workers in Singapore. She has exhibited widely in Singapore. Solo presentations include: Grey Projects (2014), the Institute for Contemporary Art Singapore (2015), and the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art (2015). She was artist-in-residence at Nau Coclea, Spain in 2013 and at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art in 2017. Kang has exhibited internationally, participating in group exhibitions at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, The Artists’ Village in Taipei, ifa-Galerie in Berlin and Stuttgart, Het Nutshuis in Den Haag, and Selasar Sunaryo in Bandung. Aside from her own work, Kang involves herself in a wide variety of projects, ranging from community-based efforts to art publications. She is based in Singapore and New York City. She is currently a MFA candidate in Fine Art at Parsons School of Design.
Live-in (Mattress provided), 2018-ongoing
Digital photographs on MDF mount, 10 x 7 x 0.5 inches
Live-in (Mattress provided) is an ongoing photography series that responds to the live-in rule adhered to by women employed as foreign domestic helpers (FDH) in Singapore. A deliberate focus on domestic space and plain mattresses --void even of the personal belongings of these women-- stands as an architectural expression of a host of systemic conundrums. Despite the obvious relationship to advocacy, the work really seeks less to incriminate, and more so to capture and understand the relational dynamics within different members of different homes. It also alludes to larger questions about the support systems in place for a country's citizens.
Live-in (Mattress provided), 2018-ongoing
Digital photographs on MDF mount, 10 x 7 x 0.5 inches
Neither In Nor Out
In collaboration with Rolinda Espanola, 2019, Video projection on print, 10:25 mins
Neither In Nor Out is co-created by Rolinda Espanola and Geraldine Kang. This collaboration began with Espanola responding to a call that Kang had sent out, asking for participants to provide witness accounts of injustices related to migrant workers in Singapore. Espanola is her own witness to her injustice, and details this in an edited interview with Kang. In the piece, Espanola’s poems and photographs are projected onto an image made by Kang, and they collectively address questions of access and opacity. Most importantly, the work hopes to create room for an individual to address systemic oppression without fear or repercussion.
Neither In Nor Out
In collaboration with Rolinda Espanola, 2019, Video projection on print, 10:25 mins
As quietly as rhythms go, 2014
UV print on aluminium
As quietly as rhythms go is a quiet introspection on the rhythms between man, machine, land and labour --perennial elements of the Singapore landscape. The work is also a reflection on privilege and distance, asking questions about how we situate ourselves in proximity to issues surrounding migrant labour, land development and a city's pulse.
As quietly as rhythms go, 2014
UV print on aluminium
Aesthetic Screening, 2017
Digital photograph
Aesthetic Screening responds to the legal and financial precariousness of migrant workers at large, but also contends with the ethics and politics of photographic inclusion. The images are deliberately quiet about the locational contexts of these centers, and refrain from featuring any identifiable human figures. They are also made during the night when the bin centers are least recognizable. It also questions the nature of dignified modes of living, and perhaps what can be done to design just spaces. Finally, it foregrounds the bin centre as a reminder of the jarring worlds that separate migrant workers and the residents they serve, made more acute by their ridiculously close proximity.
Aesthetic Screening, 2017
Digital photograph
Untitled Shore, 2018
Digital photograph
Sails flapping in the warm night,
on ships that are nowhere to be seen.
Close by, voices ring from the underground,
crying muddled tools of resistance and progress.
(Pick up the) Floor pieces, 2018
Inkjet prints, MDF, castors
(Pick up the) Floor pieces is fundamentally motivated by photography's relationship with transient and precarious migrant bodies. Instead of focusing on these bodies themselves, a reference is made to materials commonly associated with temporal or makeshift structures and existences (cardboard, foam, wheels). The individual pieces are modular and articulate both fragmentation and wholeness, ideas that are associated not only with the photograph, but also with displaced identities. When assembled in pictorial unison, the pieces occupy the area of a single mattress, resting rather shakily on a mobile base.
Artist Statement
Kang uses photography, sculpture, video and installation to allude to the systemic problems affecting migrant workers in Singapore, a population making up one-fifth of my country. She embodies a position of privilege, and strives to create awareness and evoke empathy in the viewer. Her projects combine the poetic and the didactic, and often feature unchartered or overlooked architectural spaces relating to these migrant bodies. Aesthetic Screening and Lived-in (Mattress provided) focus on a photographic index of living situations of two groups of migrant workers, while Seeing Witnesses emphasises the power and voice of the witness to acts of injustice committed against migrant workers.