Museum Musings: Intriguing Uncertainties at the Parkview Museum

Following their previous exhibition on Italian contemporary art, the Parkview Museum presents their latest exhibition this September. Once again curated by Dr Lorand Hegyi, Intriguing Uncertainties will be displayed at the museum from 3rd September 201 to 5th January 2019, comprising over 40 drawn works highlighting contemporary art that focuses on narratives of darkness, chaos and fear.

Said curator Lorand Hegyi at the exhibition opening: “Art acts as a vision of life, and the last representative of mental freedom, integrating stories and measuring histories. Looking at these artworks is almost like being in a forest on a dark night, where moonlight is all we have to guide us. We feel a little lost as we absorb ourselves in the detail of each work, each of which creates a vision that activates our imagination. It’s a journey in darkness to let the art come to life, and it’s amazing how the spontaneity of these drawn works are so personal and intimate, almost like sacred, diary-like images of the artists themselves.”

Across the works, each drawing reveals hidden forces that shape our world as we know it, using their radical imaginations to bring out disturbing and destabilizing improbabilities of human existence itself. When one first steps into the Parkview Museum, one is already left arrested by Kuul Kraijer’s Untitled (2007), a charcoal drawing of a mass of entangled roots lying underneath an otherwise innocuous tree, suggesting the mess that often lies just beneath the surface, requiring us to take second looks.

Other works imagine or chart entire landscapes in the span of a canvas, capturing the desolation around us, or the surprising beauty in said desolation. Qiu Zhijie’s work Map of Art and China after 1989: Theatre of the World, for example, intricately redraws the map of China while giving each locale cheeky names, from an entire area dedicated to the ‘Beijing Olympic’ to a mountain named ‘Peak of China Dream’.

So many of the works create an immediate sense of discomfort with the darkness that emanates from them, comprehensively capturing the entire spectrum of improbabilities and uncertainties that force viewers into engaging. A figure who looks as if he is about to be executed by hanging stands alone in Bernardi Rogi’s Practices to Suck the Light V (2013), fly open and pale, a harrowing looking experience that activates a primal fear within us, yet invites us to rethink and re-observe what exactly this man might be going through in his otherwise non-fatal act.

Each of these works may initially seem close to visions of a hellish mindscape, but really, act as a visual means in which to comprehend existence itself, often feeling like a trudge through a world where darkness is constantly encroaching. Intriguing Uncertainties then shows us that amidst the darkness there is poetry in expression, taking one on a journey into an inner realm that destablilizes us and allows us to find the intricate details in life that may have just slipped us by.

Intriguing Uncertainties runs at the Parkview Museum, Singapore till 5th January 2019. Admission is free. For more information, visit their website here