11 September 2015 – June 2016 @ NUS Museum, NX1
2 October – December 2015 @ Lee Kong Chian Reference Library, Level 11, National Library Board
Sheltered: Documents for Home examined assumptions regarding domesticity and urbanity in Singapore’s public housing landscape. Using photography, architectural drawing, installation, sound and printed material, the five accompanying projects responded to the architectural essay film 03-FLATS (concept and research Lilian Chee; direction Lei Yuan Bin, 2014) which anchored the exhibition. The objective was to locate the essay film as a critical text that could generate research responses and conversations. The contributors were architecture alumni who had previously worked under my supervision. Dwelling on the spaces between architecture and domesticity, land and ground, the private and the public, this exhibition explored home as a place both of security and uncertainty, familiarity and alienation. In this exhibition, drawings and models were critically displaced from the architectural design studio onto three public sites – the URA’s city gallery, the NUS Museum and the National Library reading rooms. The contexts in which the public encounters the exhibits influence their interpretation and reception of these materials. In these contexts, freed from disciplinary codes and norms, the habitually annotative architectural drawing and model are forced to operate anew, even taking on unexpected meanings. Here, they become critical objects.