I had the opportunity to attend both the talk "Two Nanyang Styles" by Kwok Kian Chow and the 100 Years of Singapore art exhibition at the Singapore Chinese Cultural Centre (SCCC) yesterday.
Kwok's lecture Two Nanyang Styles
I learnt of two 'threads' of Nanyang Style (s) which both present very different approaches to the art. It was informative and reminded me of my own language limits and the untranslatable. More work must be done to better understand the artistic landscape and the range of artistic expressions during this time.
The Q&A that followed the talk was quite interesting as it added another layer of depth to the overall session. There were a good number of questions emerging from the session. Glad to see the public interest in this subject.
The question about defining art as "Singaporean" was particularly thought-provoking. Not the question itself, but I was surprised that there was a 'need to define 'Singapore art'. I guess it was staring in my face right? This is an event 'accompanying' the 100 Years of Singapore Art. So, of course, Singapore is always at the back.
Yet, I wonder if this line of questioning is also nationalism at play. If so, the 'claim' of Nanyang Style as an expression of Singapore Identity becomes a marker of cultural identity. Something I am critical about - if nationalism and art only have this kind of relationship where art performs as a kind of marker of 'national' identity. We lose the ability to see the world in other ways.
Another question was about the 'continuity' of Nanyang Style amongst younger artists is quite worth noting here for me in relation to the Post-Nanyang art project that I am working on now. I am still exploring, so it is at this point about art and artists performing modernity, the limits and what we cannot see from the cultural worker position. I would like to know if this question has anything to do with collecting art.
I wish there were some discussions regarding the role of historians, institutions, and the broader implications of the Nanyang Style(s) in the art world.
Nanyang Style (s) is not just the work of artists but also the labour of historians and institutions. Naturally, there is an impulse for historians and institutions to unpack this further since there is increasing interest in these pioneering moments. That is worth thinking about too, but we should also be equally critical of the impulse to make history.
Has art become a tool in nation-building? (of course, it has, but at what expense?) What are the tensions that arise from this? Or trade-offs that can arise when art is instrumentalised for nation-building purposes.
What is the contemporary value and perspective we gain from understanding this idea of the past?
In addition, there is an interest from the art market since some of these artists performed well in auctions.
Auction headlines
that get into the news are sooooo about money. If you read them, they highlight
the movement of money. Most of the time, this kind of news is about how much
money the art was sold and how much it has risen in its financial value. There
will be little about art's other values. You know, pictorial value, beauty,
social value, whatever. Hence the only thing we are sure of in this kind of
news is its exponential 'surprising' - rise in financial value.
Thanks
to Jeffrey Say for highlighting this piece of news about Georgette Chen’s
auction success (Tremayne-Pengelly). This lit review is not a critique of
money and art speculation. Instead, I want to unpack thoughts around it by following
the money.
Before this auction,
somebody sold and bought 2 of Chen's paintings each for $1.6 million and nearly
$1.5 million in November (2022) and August (2022), respectively. This sale of
$1.8 million is the 3rd time Chen's auction record has been broken — the sales
total to about USD 4.9 million. There is no mention of who sold and bought the
work on these 3 auctions; we don't usually know when big sums of money are
changing hands.
Chen's painting was
auctioned at Christie's Hong Kong. Evelyn Lin, deputy chairman and co-head of
the 20th and 21st-century art department at Christie's Asia Pacific, claimed
that the May auction saw sales worth USD 160 million. Based on a quick search
on Christie's auction records, I found USD 137 million from 3 auctions on 28
& 29 May 2023. Chen's painting was auctioned in one of these auctions on 28
May at the 20th/21st Century Art Evening Sale. That auction saw consolidated sales
of art worth USD 92.5 million worth of art.
Noting the rise in
financial value, the author points out the influx of 'wealthy' immigrants
during the Covid-19 pandemic as a reason for the surging growth in its art
scene. Surging growth seems ambiguous, but I read it as rising financial
resources from new immigrants during the Covid-19 pandemic (2020 - 2023). The
author also points to increasing demand for Southeast Asia art based on
Sotheby's first auction in more than 15 years, as Southeast Asia accounted for
nearly a 75 per cent increase in its global sales over the past five years.
Some preliminary search
shows that the increase in demand is based on this 28 August 2022 auction in
Singapore which was a 'resounding' success achieving USD 18 million (Singapore). It is the highest
total for any sale held by Sotheby's in Singapore --- ever. Comparing to the
Christie’s auction of 2 days, Sotheby’s ‘demand’ in financial value (18 million
vs 132 million) is much less.
According to the
article, there is an increase in 'appetite' for million-dollar works where
Singaporean collectors spend more than $1 million on artwork rose to 25 per
cent in 2022, compared to just 4 per cent in 2019 as quoted from the report
from Art Basel and UBS. In addition, the median expenditure on artwork also
increased, with $322,000 spent last year compared to $129,000 in 2021 and
$93,000 in 2020. At the time of writing, I was unable to find and rectify the
data claimed here.
However, Singapore
is noted a few times in the report. As the review is an exercise to follow the
money. I have extracted other ‘money info’ related to Singapore. One of this is
Singapore’s double-digit growth in auction sales driven by Sotheby’s sale of
Modern and Contemporary art (McAndrew, p188). Asia (including Singapore) accounted
for almost 20% of global auction sales at USD 1.1 billion (Ibid., p150). Lastly, the
report surveyed 2700, High Net Worth
(HNW) collectors from US, the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Mainland
China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, and Brazil (Ibid., p257).
Within a year, the
sales total of Chen’s 3 paintings was sold for about USD 4.9 million. What does
USD 4.9 million mean for the Singapore art scene?
USD 4.9 million is
about SGD 6,564,520.67
5.9 years of annual
expenses of The Substation on Armenian Street (based on FY 2020)
315 years of annual expenses for The Soup Kitchen Project
4% of the annual operating
expenditure of National Art Council (based on Annual Report 2021/2022)
82% of the budget
for the inaugural Singapore Biennale (2008)
109% of the budget
for the Singapore Biennale (2011)
46% of annual
expenses of Singapore Art Museum (Annual Report 2021/2022
8.8% of annual
expenses of National Gallery (Annual Report 2021)
2,188 paintings by
young Singapore artists based on an estimates in 2013 (Huang)
2900 Kg of Rice
15 3-room HDB flats
8.9 5-room HDB Flats (prices are based on listing in June
23, 2020)
A big thank you to Grey Projects for organising Walk Walk, Don't Run, an island-wide open studio walk-about-exploration! (@jason wee aki hassan)
Wished I had more time to visit these studios (with Renew Earth Sweat Shop) but as reported by friends, lots of people walked about! Timely project in the midst of the pandemic. As usual, cherish the moment of meeting friends and strangers.
We will be participating in the West side this Saturday. If you been to the studio, it is full of things - from our projects and relics collective endeavours. Our mess is not so well curated because we rely on volunteers to do the archives and we have been busy (tien does move our treasures constantly, though). Our friend, Johnny Wong will be sharing his paintings and the show room show is still on - be lucky if you caught it.
Lastly, visit our friends in the same building - and other westies!
Peace and love can fill the world.
An island-wide open studio walk happening over four Saturdays in October and November 2021, 10.30am to 6pm. Walk Walk Don’t Run involves over 35 artists, design studios, artist-run and craft spaces across Singapore that will open their doors for public visits to share their work in progress, ongoing concerns and ideas. Walk Walk Don’t Run encourages informality, conversation, and spontaneity, and a different speed to the circulation of our words and ideas within the art scene.
Walk quickly and a lot. SAW should collaborate with the Health Promotion Board and count cultural steps or steps towards culture. Give the culture vultures a reward or something, give them an artwork! Substation next inter-ministry production for SAW!
A bowl of Rice analogy. If you are given a bowl of rice, and you eat two mouthfuls and throw the rest away. Isn't that wasteful? Going to all the events is like finishing the rice with no need to clean the bowl. I feel a little defeated at this rate - should have some rice left in the bowl.
Don't talk too much. That's my setback on the two days. Not seeing many peeps for so long was tempting to stop to say 'hallo' and find out how they are. Suppose one wants to finish the rice. Talk less and keep walking.
Jokes aside. I think so far the best part about the SAW experience is that people get into conversations about art, life and politics.
My favourite quote so far is from Lucas.
On the nice crowd at Gillman Barracks, he said:
"People realise that Art and culture are essential after the lockdown, so they are all coming to see art!"
Heard about their work some months back... but I didn't really understand what it was... but this Amnesty video shows what are some of the techniques Forensics Architecture use to investigate human rights violations.
Amazing work and different way of thinking how we can use architecture knowledge 'differently'.
Forensics Architecture is one of the nominees of Turner Prize this year.
Looking at the book commemorating the life of Thai artist Paisan Plienbangchang. There were 2 events in Singapore where friends here organised to pay tribute to him.
I remember the exhibition at Your Mother Gallery showcasing Paisan's paintings which he never exhibited. These series of events (including this video showing the funeral) reflect the connections (friendship) of the artists (here) and in Thailand.
Paisan Plienbangchang (10 March 1961 - 15 July 2015)
Paisan Plienbangchang was a renowned artist, writer, critic, activist and an avid traveller. Graduated from the College of Fine Arts in 1984, he worked in multi art disciplines including visual arts, literature and performance art.
He was one of the pioneers in performance art in Thailand and through his work he expressed social concerns and was also a prominent human rights and environmental activist. In the early 90s, Paisan Plienbangchang along with his associates came into prominence with the founding of the much-respected collective UKABAT. He continued with his performance art practice and travelled to pursue his environmental and human rights activism and is a constant regular and contributor to the ASIATOPIA festival.
Paisan Plienbangchang passed away on 15 July 2015 after fighting liver cancer for 4 years at Mayo Hospital, Bangkok. The Artists Village is saddened and sends our most sincere condolences to his wife Jittima Pholsawek, his family including Mongkol Plienbangchang, Aor Nopawan and his friends. We would like to thank Paisan Plienbangchang for his most generous and remarkable life. If you wish to make enquiries, please contact his family at: jittima.len@gmail.com (Jittima Pholsawek)
I archive this here for future reference (see below).
Suppose it might be interesting for someone to review this exhibition too for the TOC blog.
21 August 2015 - 27 March 2016 SAM at 8Q The President’s Young Talents distinguishes itself from other art awards as it is the only mentoring and commissioning exhibition programme in Singapore. PYT recognises young artists whose practices chart new dimensions in contemporary art. Inaugurated by the Singapore Art Museum (SAM) in 2001, an independent committee comprising local art professionals and a SAM curator nominates a group of local artists, aged 35 and below, for the award, based on the depth of their practice, their potential for growth, and the contributions they would potentially make to the field of contemporary art. Each artist, working closely with mentors from the committee, will present newly commissioned work for the President’s Young Talents exhibition, which culminates in a Grand Prize winner and a People’s Choice awardee. The list of finalists for this year’s President’s Young Talents are Ang Song Ming, Bani Haykal, Ezzam Rahman, Loo Zihan and Ong Kian Peng. Representing some of the most exciting strands in contemporary Singapore art, they will create works spanning the disciplines of performance, new media, sculpture and sound. The 2015 exhibition coincides with Singapore’s SG50 Jubilee Year, and marks the sixth edition of the President’s Young Talents. Aptly, it recognises and celebrates the nation’s ever evolving spirit of artistic creation and innovation. Previous President’s Young Talents artists include Boo Junfeng, Heman Chong, Liao Jiekai, Charles Lim, Lim Tzay Chuen, Donna Ong, Tan Pin Pin and Vertical Submarine, among others, who have gone on to develop outstanding artwork, both within and beyond Singapore.
The Artling interviews Singapore Art Museum curator, Louis Ho, to find out more about this year’s President’s Young Talents (PYT), a contemporary art exhibition series profiling the work of talented young artists.
What can we expect to see from this year’s edition of the PYT?
This year’s show, in keeping with the spirit of the President’s Young Talents series, encompasses both a wide-ranging breadth of media and thematic concerns, presented in shapes and forms that reflect the diverse and ever shifting boundaries of contemporary art. Loo Zihan, for instance, has moved the Singapore Art Museum’s entire resource room from its office in another building – some 5,000 volumes – into a gallery within the museum, and there it will be presented as a reference library, an interactive installation, for the public. Ezzam Rahman will be staging several performances utilizing little else but talcum powder, and presenting diminutive, delicate sculptures of flowers crafted from his own skin, and Ong Kian Peng is creating an immersive installation that deals with environmental issues. Those are just some of the artworks that will be exhibited at PYT this year.
Loo Zihan, Of Public Interest: The Singapore Art Museum Resource Room (2015), installation of books from the Singapore Art Museum
Since its inaugural exhibition as the pioneer art award in recognition of contemporary artists, how has the PYT charted the growth of contemporary practices in Singapore?
PYT has generally proved itself to be at the vanguard of contemporary art in
Singapore, highlighting emerging artists who go on to develop into important voices, and recognising those who, while just as compelling, have played less visible roles. Heman Chong, a PYT alumnus from 2003, is a prime example of the former; today he is one of the most prolific Singaporean artists active on the international stage.
Bani Haykal, necropolis for those without sleep (2015), installation with custom designed mechanical turks, computer-programmed chess game
The PYT has extremely talented alumni such as Tan Pin Pin and Donna Ong. Whose practice amongst all of them would you consider truly definitive of contemporary art today?
“Truly definitive” can be a subjective label. The terrain of contemporary art is
(rightfully) polyphonic, plural, contested … Past PYT projects that I’ve personally enjoyed, or found interesting, are Liao Jiekai’s installation from the 2013 edition, which saw him explore the history of the former St. Joseph’s building – home, of course, to the Singapore Art Museum today – as well as Robert Zhao’s project that same year, a sparsely elegant yet cannily reflexive take not just on his ostensible subject matter (the wild boar infestation that Singapore suffered a few years back), but broad issues of perception and technology.
Ang Song Ming, Days (2015), multi-part installation: video: photographs, drawing, text
There are two artists with performance art components in their work this year - what is your opinion on the actionism of performance-based art?
The body – in all its grace, frailties, imperfections, dysfunctions, sensuousness and sensuality – is one of the abiding concerns of contemporary art, and performance is simply the most direct expression of that.
Ong Kian Peng, Too Far,Too Near (2015), DC Motor, metal balls, steel structure; 2-channel video with 3-channel sound. Duration: 15 mins
Will the interaction between the many media types represented in the exhibition influence your design of it? Furthermore, how does the exhibition design process even begin for PYT?
The aesthetics of the exhibition really came about – as did so much of the exhibition itself – from a dialogue between the artists, their mentors, and SAM’s exhibition and design teams. The look of each project is specific to its conceptual contours; the theme and the design had to dovetail. For instance, Ang Song Ming’s “Days” installation features a flood of fluorescent lights, instead of the usual dramatic spotlights; the artist wanted the even, somewhat clinical feel of an everyday milieu, as the work foregrounds the prosaic details of his own life.
Ezzam Rahman, Here’s who I am, I am what you see (2015), artist’s skin, nails and adhesive, second-hand furniture and glass bell jars
As curatorial mentorship is a defining aspect of the PYT throughout the entire process of art creation, what is your view on artistic and curatorial authorship?
I see “mentorship” as a dialogue, an exchange, and less of a hierarchical
relationship. For instance, I mentored Loo Zihan for his project, but – as he’ll tell you– the process was an organic, fluid one, where the curatorial shape of his installation really came about from bouncing ideas off one another. Not just between us, but the entire PYT team as well: artist, curators, the project manager, the exhibitions and design folks … Everyone played a part. Exhibitions on this scale are almost always a team effort, and should be acknowledged as such.
Today’s artists work in and respond to a global environment that is culturally diverse, technologically advancing, and multifaceted, how do you think this affects the kind of work they produce?
It’s a connected world we live in today. Social media platforms ensure that news and ideas and values and even the minutiae of daily life are rendered immediate, visible, accessible - from one end of the earth to the other in the thud of a click. Art simply reflects that amorphous, cross-cultural social environment that we inhabit. It’s full of tension and ambivalence: between the local and the global, between a sense of the historical and an awareness of the flattened, horizontal character of the contemporary.
Curator, Louis Ho and the artist Ang Song Ming by the artist’s installation Days
Louis HO – Bio
Louis Ho is the Lead Curator for the President’s Young Talents exhibition. He is also a Curator at the Singapore Art Museum and oversees the Malaysian contemporary art portfolio. Prior to joining the Singapore Art Museum’s curatorial team, Louis Ho was an independent art historian, critic and curator. He taught classes on Southeast Asian art at a number of local universities, including the National Institute of Education (NIE), where he still lectures part-time. In addition to teaching, he has contributed reviews to publications such as Art Asia Pacific and Pipeline, and has written about the work of Jason Wee, Alan Oei and Loo Zihan, among others; curated shows have included the likes of Cheo Chai-Hiang, Ian Woo and Sarah Choo. He was trained in art history, and his research interests include Southeast Asian visual culture, the intersections between art and the social, and cinema.
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21 August 2015
Interviewed by Nicolette Sim
Images by Nicolette Sim
Any views or opinions in the interview are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the company or contributors.
Saw this piece written by Glen Goei which tracks his path from stage into making film.
Goei wrote about his journey into making a film. The success of his first film, Forever Fever and subsequently his second film, Blue Mansion which was not financially successful. This meant that he lost the money made on Forever Fever on the next film.
One of the reason he attributed to the difficulty of making film or maybe art in general is the 'market expectation'. E.g. The asian theatre practitioner in a western world, the English speaking asian film and his latest film project, Pontianak which will be in Malay but would have no Chinese actors. These projects don't fit into the formula for a successful film model.
Singapore with English/Singlish as a lingua franca is the Singapore Goei knows. Shouldn't films be appreciated for it's cultural merit not language. He argues that Singapore's film are visual documents of its culture, traditions, languages and history. We should look at film as a cultural product and not only as an economic commodity.
I document his article below. It helps me understand an aspect of a film maker's struggle in Singapore. In this article, it suggests that MDA's grants focused more on economic merit or potential than it as a cultural merit. Do Singapore need a block buster film or a meaningful film?
From this article:
http://www.straitstimes.com/opinion/my-leap-into-movies
A thespian and director reflects on his transition from stage to screen
Glen Goei PUBLISHED on MAY 4, 2015, 6:47 AM SGT
MY FIRST film, Forever Fever, was born out of a situation of sheer desperation. It was 1995, and I'd been living in the United Kingdom for nearly 15 years.
I was a 32-year-old West End actor, had won a couple of awards as theatre director on the London stage and had been running an Asian theatre company called Mu-Lan Arts for close to five years. It was after our fourth production - the staging of Three Japanese Women at London's Soho Theatre - that reality sunk in: The audience numbers were not increasing and the company's finances were dwindling.
I grew despondent. Despite receiving awards and great reviews from the British media, there just wasn't sufficient demand for theatre with actors of Asian descent (or Orientals, as less-informed Brits are wont to say).
Artistically frustrated, I left for New York to do a short course in film at New York University (NYU), where, not unexpectedly, I was forced to think about possible story lines for films. On returning to London, I set out to produce a film based on Ming Cher's Spider Boys, a gritty novel about youth gangs in 1950s Singapore. Unfortunately, before filming could take place in 1997, the project fell through due to casting problems. Dejected but not defeated, I became more determined to make a film - no matter what the odds were.
The problem was I didn't have a script. I locked myself in my basement with a book on screen-writing and forced myself to write, never having written anything beyond academic essays at university. Miraculously, by the end of the month, I'd written the first draft: I had in my hands the makings of Forever Fever.
I packed a suitcase and headed home. When I returned to Singapore at the end of 1997 to make Forever Fever, the challenges were immense. What did I know about producing a film apart from that stint at NYU? My background was in theatre for goodness' sake. To make matters worse, the film-making scene in Singapore was practically non-existent. The now-defunct China Runn Pictures, which I'd engaged to co-produce Forever Fever, had previously shot only commercials and documentaries. What was I thinking?
I didn't know of any production company that worked solely in film. In desperation, I roped in friends for help, like actress Tan Kheng Hua, who became my casting director. There wasn't a large pool of talent around and she hired many fresh faces that audiences today have become familiar with.
Inexperience and a lack of resources posed critical problems to funding and budgeting. To make the film, I ended up mortgaging my apartment in London. I was stupidly naive then, even paying huge copyright fees for the use of 10 pop songs. Fortunately, it was a risk that paid off. Harvey Weinstein from Miramax, who later picked up Forever Fever for an international release, said it was the music that allowed him to connect with the film. Fortunately, screenings in international audience markets ensured a healthy profit for Forever Fever - its local takings would not have come close to breaking even.
Eleven years later, when I made my second film The Blue Mansion, I wasn't as fortunate. I blew the budget and, despite good reviews, the murder-mystery thriller set in Penang turned out to be a financial disaster at the box office. I lost all the money I had made on Forever Fever.
Once again, I found it hard to find a producer who could handle the demands of a feature film. Local producers rarely have the opportunity to handle big budgets and shoot large-scale films. Truth be told, it's a chicken-and-egg situation: Local films remain small because the market for them is small. I needed - and still need - producers who can handle the funding, the budgeting, and manage the scale and complexities of making a feature film. The demands are completely different from television.
I took a personal hit financially with The Blue Mansion, mainly because it failed to secure international distribution. At a foreign film market, I was told by a film executive in all seriousness that the film would sell better if it was in Chinese (I didn't know whether to laugh or cry). In fact, for both my films, I found there to be resistance among investors and distributors to the idea of Asians speaking English in a film.
In its North American release, Forever Fever was dubbed over by American actors because of fears that audiences would not understand the Singaporean actors. Changing a film's language to pander to an audience market perplexes me. Shouldn't a film's marketability be based on its merits and not its language?
As a nation of immigrants, Singaporeans have no common language except for English; it has become our official lingua franca and our situation is unique for an Asian country. As a director, I make films about the Singapore I know - a Singapore where English, or rather Singlish, is primarily used as a means of communication. A significant majority of our population, however, converse in Chinese dialects in their homes. This is why Chinese films tend to do better at the domestic box office.
I recently started to source for funding for my next film, Pontianak and, already, I've faced rejection for its language. A local production company (that will remain unnamed) has chosen not to invest in the film because it will be in Malay and does not feature any Chinese actors. The perceived financial risks are just too high.
My earliest memories of watching movies are of Malay films screened by Radio Television Singapore (RTS) in the 1960s and 70s. Pontianak is my homage to the golden age of film-making in Singapore and the highly successful string of iconic Pontianak films that were produced by Cathay-Keris and Shaw in the late 1950s. These movies were in Malay and were watched by many Singaporeans, regardless of their race or the language they spoke. Society felt more diverse and embracing of other cultures back then, possibly because we were searching for an identity in post-World War II Singapore.
To be true to the spirit of the original films and that period of our history, it is essential that my remake of Pontianak be filmed in Malay.
Our nation's films are visual documents of our culture, traditions, languages and history. We should learn to look at film as a cultural product and not an economic commodity with a price and a return on investment. We need to develop a culture of film-making and film appreciation in order to address this narrow view of this art form and, by extension, the difficulties of funding, developing and maintaining an industry. It is grossly reductive to say that we are a small market or a young country when there existed a thriving film industry in 1950s Singapore. One also only needs to look at Hong Kong, a city not much larger than Singapore, for proof of the potential possibilities.
To develop a culture of film-making, risks need to be taken by investors from both the public and private sectors, with the former leading the way. The Media Development Authority and the Singapore Film Commission have been established to promote film and to award grants to assist young film-makers. Unfortunately, there is an institutionalised preference to fund films with commercial merit and to veer away from the untried or untested. In a country where the media is regulated, it is in theatre and film that an artist can - and should - have a voice. The importance of film goes beyond pure entertainment and profit. There must be institutional support for films in all the different genres. Only then might we have a chance at growing our film scene into the industry we dream of presently.
This article originally appeared in BiblioAsia Vol 11 Iss 1, the flagship magazine of the National Library Board.www.nlb.gov.sg/Browse/BiblioAsia.aspx
Found out about the work of Assemble. I loved their 'can-do' approach. In many ways, I feel that their form of architecture proposes a different kind of practice for architecture. Kind of remind me of FARM's work. (find out more about them: http://www.farm.sg/information ).
Not exactly the same but I was thinking of their earlier period in 2005 that kinda reminded me of this uk FAT. (find out more about them: http://www.fashionarchitecturetaste.com/)
The street that might win the Turner prize: how Assemble are transforming Toxteth
It’s not quite a pickled calf – but the rebirth of a troubled Toxteth community might be art. The story of the street and the young architects succeeding where every official plan has failed has caught the art world’s attention By Oliver Wainwright At the end of Granby Street in Liverpool’s Toxteth, past relentless rows of tinned-up houses punctuated by half-demolished corner shops, the mood is unusually festive. Television crews have been here for the past few days, camping out amid the jungle of pavement plant pots and poking their cameras into tumble-down terraces. But for once they haven’t come to report on the sorry story of urban dereliction that has plagued these streets for the past 30 years. It’s not the usual social affairs correspondents, but packs of bewildered cultural critics – because this is the street that’s been shortlisted for the Turner prize. “Our first reaction was a sort of surreal amazement,” says Ronnie Hughes, a member of the Granby Four Streets community land trust, which is now at the centre of the art world’s attention for the way residents have been taking the future of their streets into their own hands. “But then again, the community has had practice at this. It’s the same way that Liverpool reacted to becoming Capital of Culture in 2008: there was dancing in the streets because we’d won something, rather than particularly knowing or caring what it was we’d won.”
Cairns Street in Toxteth, which Assemble have helped to transform after decades of ‘managed decline’. Photograph: Andrew Teebay/Liverpool Echo
Most locals might still be in a state of baffled amusement that the DIY handiwork of a young London-based architecture collective, Assemble, in doing up some of the area’s empty homes has been shortlisted for the country’s most prestigious art award. But the members of Assemble are at an equal loss for words – mainly because they’re far too busy for the news to have sunken in. There is work to be done. In the back yard of one of the houses, a couple of the group are pouring pigmented concrete to make a series of fireplace surrounds, beautifully cast in moulds made of debris collected from one of the derelict properties. Indoors, others are convening a meeting with future residents to present options for their new floors and front doors, around a group of intricately crafted doll’s house-sized models. “Assemble are the only ones who have ever sat and listened to the residents, and then translated their vision into drawings and models, and now into reality,” says Erika Rushton, chair of the community land trust that has been working with the designers during the last couple of years to bring these neglected houses back to life. It is a moment that has been sorely awaited. Since the 1981 riots, which saw buildings torched and 500 people arrested, Toxteth has suffered from decades of “managed decline”, with life inexorably drained from its streets. Eleanor Lee has lived here since 1976 and seen most of her neighbours leave.
Plans for Assemble’s renovation of the Granby Four Streets area of Toxteth in Liverpool
“After the riots, an invisible red line was drawn around the area,” she told me when I first visited the area in November last year. “It was an unspoken policy of no maintenance and no investment. Once houses are boarded up, it sends a signal.” Bins weren’t collected, streets weren’t swept, and Granby became a no-go area. There are now just 70 residents clinging on in an area of 200 homes, a post-apocalyptic statistic that is the result not of some great environmental disaster or mass industrial collapse, but of a series of failed regeneration plans. New Labour’s Housing Market Renewal Pathfinders is one of the most recent of such schemes that have systematically eviscerated the communities here to make way for promised visions that never arrive. “Everyone just offered a total solution,” says Rushton. “Every house would be done, with no recognition of what people have crafted into their individual homes, or the value that people had invested in the street with planting and building furniture. “Regeneration is always this blunt, abstract, over-professionalised thing,” she adds. “But Assemble have shown how it can be done differently, by making things that people can see, touch, understand and put together for themselves.”
After attracting funding from a Jersey-based social investor, Steinbeck Studio, which also brought Assemble on board, the community land trust formalised its plans and took control of 10 empty properties from the council last year. They are midway through being refurbished to Assemble’s designs, with the help of local apprentices, in a strategy that makes the most of what is already there, celebrating the generous ceiling heights and big windows of the existing structures, in comparison to the mean-minded hutches that have been built in the tabula rasa approach nearby. “We want to celebrate the idiosyncrasies of the existing derelict buildings,” says Assemble’s Lewis Jones. “If a floor is missing, why not leave it out and have a double-height space? There isn’t the usual pressure to extract the maximum possible value from the site and put profit before people.” As part of a second phase of work, Assemble has imagined a spectacular winter garden within the empty brick shell of a gutted house – an idea that might form part of their installation for the Turner show at the Tramway in Glasgow later this year.
“I just love their attitude,” says Lee. “They are so bold and fearless in their designs, and their vision for housing isn’t limited to the usual cream-coloured boxes. They are architects working truly as artists.”
The Cineroleum … Assemble’s first project converted an abandoned petrol station into a temporary cinema.
For Assemble themselves – all still in their mid-20s, and not one of them even yet qualified as an architect – the nomination has come as a bit of a shock. When they first got together as a group of recent graduates to build a temporary cinema in an abandoned petrol station in Clerkenwell in 2010, they can have had little idea that, just five years later, they would be shortlisted for the Turner prize. But not much about the dazzling trajectory of this loosely assembled collective of designers and makers was ever really planned. The 18-strong group has since gone on to build a portfolio spanning everything from temporary theatre structures and artists’ studio spaces to community housing strategies and new town squares – as well as staging a mysterious ritual happening at the Serpentine Pavilion last summer. They might not be qualified architects, but that wasn’t much of an obstacle to them landing a £2m competition to build a new art gallery for Goldsmiths College last year, or to building an adventure playground in Glasgow, or to proposing a revolutionary new housing strategy for Liverpool. The diversity of Assemble’s work is matched only by their ability to make things happen in unlikely circumstances, where the usual necessities of a client, site or budget might not be in ready supply. The Cineroleum in Clerkenwell came about, they said, from a collective desire to build something; the result exuded their pleasure in the process of making, a feeling that has infused their work ever since. Sheets of Tyvek, the foil-like waterproof building material, were turned into walls of sumptuous, silvery swagged curtains, hoisted in a dramatic reveal at the end of each screening to leave the audience exposed on the edge of a busy main road. Formica was used to make intricate marquetry tops for tables and stools, while plastic tiles were vacuum-formed on site (using a jury-rigged hot air gun and a vacuum cleaner) to transform the ceiling of the former garage shop into something special. The building process was as much a performance as the final event itself.
Assemble have never claimed to be artists – and their shortlisting has no doubt raised some eyebrows in the rarified realms of the gallery world – but in both their approach to materials and the collaborative process by which their projects are made, their work transcends the norms of conventional architectural practice.
Folly for a Flyover … their second temporary events space was conceived as a little house trapped beneath a motorway.
A year after the Cineroleum, they built a second temporary events space under a motorway flyover in east London, commissioned by arts organisation Create, its pitched roof poking up between the roaring lanes of traffic like a fairytale cottage that had lost its way. Made of wooden bricks sawn from railway sleepers and hung like drapery over a scaffolding frame, it was built by an army of 200 volunteers and provided a surreal theatrical setting for films, talks and children’s play sessions. Its bricks went on to be reused to make planters for a local primary school. The more interest they received in their talents, the more the group began to coalesce as a formalised practice. These initial projects caught the eye of the London Legacy Development Corporation, the agency charged with co-ordinating the spoils of the Olympics, who offered them a warehouse space in Stratford on a peppercorn rent, while it awaits development by Ikea’s property arm. With a fully equipped wood shop, welding facilities, ping-pong table – and a kitchen where they take turns to cook lunch each day – it is a lively laboratory for testing their ideas at full scale, and developing new hybrid materials with an almost alchemical sensibility. There are chunks of “papercrete”, which they used to make tables for a British Council exhibition, samples of “rubble-dash” render for a little performance temple for OTO Projects, along with sliced tree-trunk furniture and sheets of pummelled metal that look like battered steel drums – a cladding test for another forthcoming project.
Yardhouse under construction … erected with the collective spirit of an Amish barn-raising.
Across the yard, the LLDC has since commissioned Assemble to build an affordable workspace building, the Yardhouse, which exhibits a similar level of care and fun as their temporary venues, elevating cheap materials into something refined. It is a basic timber-framed shed – once again erected with the collective spirit of an Amish barn-raising – full of spaces for like-minded makers, arranged around a processional staircase, with elegantly welded chandelier light-fittings. It is wrapped with a candy-coloured facade of hand-made concrete shingles, which has become an accidental Instagram sensation, turning this East End industrial estate into an unlikely place of pilgrimage for the selfie brigade.
Such things might make their projects sound like fleeting designer stage-sets or marketing-friendly “pop-ups” produced by agents of gentrification. But that would miss the point that Assemble’s work is founded in an interest in issues, and sites that go way beyond constructing pretty scenography in gritty industrial locations. It is about engaging with people on their own terms, driven, as they put it, by “a belief in the importance of addressing the typical disconnection between the public and the process by which spaces are made”. Theirs is a down-to-earth, no-nonsense attitude that comes in part from the mix of disciplines involved. While many of them studied architecture at Cambridge, others came from backgrounds in English, history and philosophy, or had worked as builders or technicians. As one member said of his non-architect colleagues in a recent interview: “They can be so much more astute and direct than the rest of us, who are loaded with the language of obfuscation and meaning with which architectural education indoctrinates you.” Their plain-speaking approach seems to go down well with their clients, too. Countless are the architects who talk of engaging with communities, wielding Post-it notes and collaborative board games, but Assemble do it for real, often embedding themselves in places for months at a time.
New Addington town square … the result of weeks of testing uses with temporary structures and events.
I saw them in action in New Addington, the Croydon council estate long damned as a “benighted ghetto”, where they took up residence in an old kiosk on the town square and staged community events during a number of weeks, as full-scale tests for how the public realm might be improved. After orchestrating such things as a stage for pensioners’ tea dances and ramps for young skateboarders, and reorganising the market, they proposed permanent improvements along similar lines. The result is a low-key collage of pieces that have since taken on a life of their own. I’ve seen them at work in Dalmarnock in the east end of Glasgow too, where the regenerative juggernaut of the Commonwealth Games razed the local high street and bulldozed the local park to make way for a “transport hub” for the games. Assemble have since been helping to pick up the pieces, building an adventure playground that prioritises mud and understands the fun to be had with logs, sewer pipes and tree-houses, instead of the officially sanctioned play equipment beloved of risk-averse local councils. In June, they’ll be unleashing further ideas about play with a Brutalist Playground installation at the Royal Institute of British Architects, injecting a much-needed dose of whimsy into the prim surrounds of Portland Place. All this and more is what piqued the interest of Alistair Hudson, director of the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art and one of this year’s Turner prize judges. He invited himself to visit the Assemble studio earlier this year. They didn’t know why he had come and, as usual, they were mostly too busy to talk. Receiving the phonecall from Penelope Curtis last week – an occurrence met with equal bafflement – Assemble’s first reaction was to call the Granby residents. If the community didn’t want the attention, they wouldn’t accept the nomination. “They were very conscious that the residents had been battling to save their the street for 25 years,” says Rushton. “It had been a gradual process, beginning with the community doing guerilla gardening and setting up a monthly street market, which gradually changed the reputation of the place and started to bring people back during the last five years. It’s not something that’s happened overnight.” Back in Granby, the residents couldn’t be prouder of the Turner prize news.
Goldsmiths Art Gallery … being carved out from a series of extraordinary spaces within a former Victorian bathhouse.
“It’s just a fantastic boost for the whole area,” says Delucia Emina, 31, who set up the Baby Dolls beauty salon on Granby Street last year, the first new sign of life the high street had seen in a decade, where most of the units remain boarded up. Born on Granby Street, Emina moved away at age eight, but recently returned, buoyed by the fresh shoots of optimism poking up through the pavement cracks. Since she set up in July last year, a kebab shop has sprung up next door, and she’s planning to expand across the street. Whether any of this is of interest to the Turner prize judges is neither here nor there. Assemble’s work with the residents is thankfully bereft of any of the pretensions that the bestowal of such a gong implies. But if the prize wants to look outwards and engage with the real world, then its arbiters need look no further.
• This article was updated on 15 May to add further detail about Assemble’s Granby Four Streets project
