Barang-Barang is a multi-faceted installation containing collected objects, materials and moving-image works produced over the course of Erika Tan’s Stanley Picker Fellowship. The project responds to local specificities, personal collections and historical connections that the artist encountered, from coconut coir mills in Kingston upon Thames to the speculative entanglements that she weaves between different events, places and people, including that of her mother Fay Tan.
Barang-Barang is a Malay word used colloquially in Singapore to mean ‘stuff’ or ‘belongings’, and the overall project explores the value and relevance given to these material traces and afterlives of objects made, collected, discarded or valued by others.
The project focuses on the legacies of four female artists – Dora Gordine (1885 Latvia, 1991 London), Georgette Chen (1906 Paris/China, 1993 Singapore), Kim Lim (1936 Singapore, 1997 London) and Fay Tan (1940 Hertfordshire UK, 2005 Singapore) – who are brought together in filmic space to explore aspects of their lives. There is no evidence, as yet, that these women ever met, but Tan’s work imagines their possible conversations and interactions as artists and as women.
Barang-Barang continues Tan’s interest in ‘minor’ histories and a process of entanglement that the making of a work can foster. The project draws lines between disparate moments in time, individuals and geographical locations to find new positions and perspectives, not only through the specifics of these histories and individuals, but also the way in which we might understand larger or more known/received histories.
Barang-Barang was previewed at Taipei Fine Arts Museum as part of Art Histories of a Forever War – Modernism Between Space and Home (Nov 21-Feb 22) in advance of its premiere at Stanley Picker Gallery and at Dorich House Museum where the main moving image work was filmed.
