As Art Takes Over at the upcoming Singapore Art Week 2025 from 17 to 26 January, Objectifs is excited to present three public exhibitions that offer visitors a chance to engage with diverse artistic practices spanning curation, video art, and dance movement. This year, the exhibitions explore themes of artistic labour, the interplay of light and darkness, and the power of self-expression through the works of Lenette Lua, Susie Wong, Zen Teh, and SueKi Yee.

Lenette Lua, 2024 Curator Open Call recipient, takes on the curatorial mantle with Hope you are keeping well!, an exhibition that responds to Singapore’s productivity-driven culture and its impact on artistic labour. Lua curates an exploration into the often-invisible aspects of artistic production, bringing together the works of visual artists Hu Rui, Genevieve Leong, Huijun Lu, and Arabelle Zhuang to transform the Objectifs Chapel Gallery into a psychological artist’s studio.

With a focus on care as both a curatorial approach and a method of unpacking artistic labour, the exhibition will also host a series of informal gatherings, including dialogues with artist Ezzam Rahman, curator-led tours, and interactive open studio sessions. The exhibition and gatherings call on visitors to rethink the values embedded in our productivity systems and consider how creative work can evolve beyond Singapore’s pursuit of relentless excellence. This multifaceted curatorial project fosters a deeper dialogue about the sustainability of artistic practice in a high-pressure environment.

How do we experience light and darkness—not just as physical phenomena, but as profound forces shaping our lives and emotions? In Phenomenology of Light and Rhythms of the Earth, Zen Teh and SueKi Yee delve into this question through a deeply collaborative exhibition across the mediums of visual art and dance. Building on their earlier work in Berlin during Zen’s multi-city research on urban illumination, the duo investigates the coexistence of light and shadow and their ties to life rhythms, memories, pollution, urban development, safety and surveillance, environmental changes, accessibility of energy, and volatile global political states.

As the exhibition unfolds during Singapore Art Week, the inquiry continues with a participatory movement workshop on 18 January 2025, guided by Berlin-based Malaysian dancer-choreographer SueKi Yee. Drawing from her creative process, the workshop explores how our bodies encounter, avoid, and interact with darkness—whether through curiosity, fear, or peace. Through movement, attendees will reflect on their own embodied relationships with light and shadow, transforming the gallery into a space for personal discovery and engagement.

Lighting up the Bras Basah District from 17 to 26 January 2025, Susie Wong’s Dancing Alone (Don’t Leave Me) transforms the urban landscape into a canvas for introspection and self-expression with a series of onscreen vignettes of solitary women dancing by themselves, for themselves.

Curated for Urban Screens and supported by the National Arts Council and Plan B Media, this digital billboard installation at Fortune Centre and Wilkie Edge draws inspiration from a memorable line in The King and I, where the protagonist declares, “No woman would dance alone when a man is looking at her.” In Wong’s reimagining, the dancers embody a duality: they are both the focal point of attention and profoundly indifferent to it, their presence offering fleeting moments of joy and defiance.

First exhibited at Objectifs in 2020 within an intimate gallery setting, relocating Dancing Alone (Don’t Leave Me) to the outdoors transforms the Bras Basah District into an expansive stage. By bringing these private, introspective moments into the public sphere, the work amplifies the power of individual agency within the collective gaze, turning solitary dance into a striking commentary on Susie Wong’s long-term preoccupation with romance, agency, and the complex negotiations they evoke in relation to cinematic tropes.

These three exhibitions offer a diverse, multifaceted approach to visual art, exploring themes that resonate deeply with today’s global and local realities. Whether engaging with questions of care and artistic sustainability or reflecting on the complexities of light, darkness, and identity, the exhibitions at Objectifs provide a unique opportunity to connect with art in dynamic and meaningful ways this Singapore Art Week 2025.

More information about the respective exhibitions can be found on Objectifs’ website:
Hope you are keeping well! curated by Lenette Lua
Phenomenology of Light and Rhythms of the Earth by Zen Teh & SueKi Yee
Dancing Alone (Don’t Leave Me) by Susie Wong