unfurling murmurs by Dylan Chan and Daniel Chong, draws from the tensions within ephemeral queer moments. Located between fleeting gestures of intimacy, they circulate and exist within the inbetween. Set against the backdrop of DECK’s open ground, the project bridges imagery and materiality, forming structures that both invite and evade. Absent within the site are direct references to figures, hinted only through cut background images. Taken from dating apps, their users are cropped, leaving only the site around them.

Resisting traditional documentation, the works embrace the instability of memory and a residual texture of experience. The exhibition hopes to be like a gesture that unfurls through movement, pause and a lingering gaze. These quiet murmurs hope to tell of transitory sites as places of tenderness through defiance, where despite everything, intimacy persists.

Dylan Chan and Daniel Chong are the recipients of DECK Associate Creative Programmes 2024. The annual programme offers creative thinkers (artists, curators, researchers, writers) around the world an opportunity to create and disseminate new knowledge pertaining to the photographic medium, its associated practices, and its transformations. From the open call submissions, the participants are selected based on their proposal, portfolio and intended project or research.

Dylan Chan is an artist whose practice engages with themes of intimacy, memory, and the subtle, often unnoticed facets of daily life. Working with photography and collage, Chan crafts layered visuals that explore the periphery of human experiences. His work addresses the body and notions of visibility, encapsulating quiet narratives that touch on identity and belonging. Recognised with the Winston Oh Practice Award, Chan’s thoughtful storytelling has been featured in exhibitions such as With You Here Between: Defamiliarisations at Objectifs.

Daniel Chong is an artist-curator that works between the quiet slippages of function and sentimentality. Working through subtlety, his works evoke an emotive sense of longing and desire. Chong engages with materialism as a means to unearth sentimental connections through objects, but centred in our understanding of them through its use. His practice is often characterised with the ability to softly nudge our preconceived notions of objects through minute interventions. His works seem irreverent and casual but in it lies a thorough process of listening and working an object through its materiality.

unfurling murmurs runs from 7th March to 6th April 2025 at DECK Open Ground, 120A Prinsep Street, Singapore 187937. (Nearest Station: Rochor Station – Downtown Line). More information available here