Itinerant Practices is the culmination of many years of camaraderie between two curators and three artists who lived and worked in Singapore. French multi-disciplinary artist Hélène Le Chatelier, American painter Lydia Janssen, and British artist Piers Bourke, join forces with the curatorial team at Peruke Projects to bring to the viewer the narration of a collective diasporic consciousness that embodies their everyday lived experiences.
About the artists
Hélène Le Chatelier. Highlighting our state-of-being in both social and private settings, Hélène Le Chatelier’s Missing Part underscores resilience as a commonality of our human condition. Seeking to honour the personal stories which constitute the narrative of social history in Singapore, she emphasises the complexity of human beings and the multiplicity of faces and identities which can successfully coexist.
Simultaneously, this series conveys the notion that there is no human existence without pain, and loss. The unique capacity to recompose and turn any situation into a positive outcome can arise through transformation and acceptance. From a nation of citizens to a single human being, we recreate and address a subjective reality to serve different goals, and by leaving space for new narratives, the way we process our memories and our capacity for resilience can even become political.
Lydia Janssen. Drawing from previous exhibitions Spotlight and Yellow Brick Road, and developing new sketches titled The Rectangles, Lydia Janssen investigates what it means to belong and feel at home. In 2011, she left New York City for Singapore, and seven years later moved to Bali, Indonesia. In 2020, having travelled between five countries during Covid, all in an attempt to get back home to Bali, Janssen became fascinated with the psychology of space, place, and how one's definition of home changes when living the life of a nomad.
A home can be limiting and claustrophobic (especially when quarantined), making a life in the diaspora a liberating escape from restrictions and boundaries. Navigating both rootlessness and groundedness, she likens her life to a river, but one that you can never step into twice. The experience of Janssen’s work atmosphere and physical surroundings will alter, depending on your mood and emotions, memories, and experiences.
Piers Bourke. Piers Bourke’s Fan series developed as a result of his time living in the island-nation of Singapore. The convergence of cultural influences of living and traveling in Southeast Asia led him back to the fundamentals of working with paint on paper and canvas. In this series he strips his subject matter back to capture the rapid movement of transformation that he observed in Singapore’s ever-changing urban landscape. Bourke's exoticised Asian hand fans generate quick hand movements and are an analogous response to Singapore as an island that is perpetually under construction and rapid modernisation.
Known for seamlessly fusing various cultural symbols into his pieces, Bourke depicts their historical uses within the constant context of change. For Fans he focuses on an aesthetic based loosely on the instruments, developing a technique with which to paint the motif that mimicks the flow and function of the object itself. Abandoning brushes for wooden blocks, he sweeps mineral pigments across the surface material, resulting in gestural marks with an unpredictability unique to his movements. By infusing a linear structure in the pieces through flashes of vibrant colour and the angular interventions on the paper, he emphasises duality, movement, and multiple layers, much like Singapore’s multicultural and swiftly evolving society.
For questions or press, please contact Tanya Amador tanya@perukeprojects.com / +44 (0)7895 240137 or Sofia Coombe sofia@perukeprojects.com/ +44 (0)7762 860288.
