Examining Singapore’s Arts Ecologies: The Probe of Gillman Barracks

Abstract

<p>From the establishment of the Singapore Art Museum in 1996 to the National Gallery in 2015, Singapore has accelerated the cultivation of what the National Arts Council (NAC) and the Economic Development Board (EDB) have called its “arts ecology” by constructing spaces to implement the city’s aspirations to become a “Global City of Arts.” Framed from the perspective of how spatial productions manifest arts ecologies, this talk uses Gillman Barracks to unpack the inherent contradictions of developing an arts ecology, located between global and local, top-down and bottom-up, and space and institution. Its selection and conversion from a set of former colonial-era military barracks into a hub for international galleries by the EDB, NAC and the state developer JTC capitalized on the rapidly growing art market moving East, coinciding with the establishments of the fair Art Stage and the Freeport. The flattening of Bukit Blanga’s terrains in the 1970s, where Gillman is situated, and its rebranding as part of a new park system in the late 1990s, also reveals the city state’s control of ecological diversity, both artistic and natural. By working with the artists who have taken on the ecologies and geologies that manifest indigeneity, the NTU-Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA) has made Gillman a space shaping the meaning of art for nationhood. What does the 2021 closing of the exhibition space of the CCA, followed by that of the Substation, the city’s oldest artist-founded institution, bode for its ecologies?<br></p>