Stranger Still: Grey Projects x 'Proposal for Novel Ways of Being'

[Upcoming] Series of Programmes ‘Stranger Still’

Aug 2020 — Jan 2021

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Grey Projects is proud to be one of the 12 local art institutions, independent art spaces and collectives coming together to present an unprecedented collective response to present exhibitions and programmes that imagine new ways of living in a world changed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

National Gallery Singapore and Singapore Art Museum have come together to launch a new local initiative of unprecedented scale and scope, titled Proposals for Novel Ways of Being. Proposals for Novel Ways of Being references an earlier name of the virus, “2019 Novel Coronavirus”. The title serves as a sombre yet hopeful reminder that COVID-19 is not the first pandemic or crisis the world has encountered, nor will it be the last. It is a reminder that we need new ways of being.

To read the full press release ➝

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The Arc of Grey Projects’ Programme:

The programme begins and ends with the measure of the human body, first as the porous site of encounter and amalgamation with other human and nonhuman bodies, and later as the material instance for dissipating and deconstructing the limits of our consciousness. The first we explore through a two-person exhibition on chimeras and other figures that reimagines what we consider the disordered body, and to rethink what it means for a body to transmit itself into another. The second is the subject of a sequence of photographic prints first created in Japan but completed in Singapore, that are as much depictions of organic materiality as they are of abstract categories of time, gravity, space and relativity. 

In between, we consider the inter-human infrastructures of care that sustain the conditions of hospitality, kinship, friendship and neighbourliness so necessary in times of a public health crisis. How can we simultaneously demonstrate and document the relations that are the buttresses and bricks constituting such an infrastructure? How can we create these infrastructures based on existing systems of resource distribution, or on ongoing archives? These questions preoccupy us, and are the subjects of our digital project as well as a mail art program. 

In all, we propose to organise two physical exhibitions, a digital exhibition and a community mail art programme.