Sacrificial Protection
20 APRIL & 11 MAY 2024
About
SACRIFICIAL PROTECTION is a collaborative research project on tropical technology, reimagining the relationship between the organic and the technological through the incorporation of climatic elements such as heat, humidity, sunlight, and wind in material experiments. Within 136 GOETHE LAB, the project focuses on systems of circulation and movement, extending inquires into temporality and corporeality, thereby prompting a different attention and sensitivity to our co-constitution with the environment.
Public Events
20 APRIL & 11 MAY
Tinker Tropics
20 April, Saturday, 1 to 6pm
Join us for an afternoon of tinkering, experimenting and making as we explore circulations of water, air and heat. Free and easy, come and go as you please.
Artist Sharing
20 April, Saturday, 3 to 4pm
In this sharing, artists Chok Si Xuan and Victoria Hertel, along with curator Seet Yun Teng, will share about their ongoing collaboration and experimental work for SACRIFICIAL PROTECTION. They will reflect on their previous outdoor installation and discuss new explorations in relation to their ongoing interests in tropical elements, energy, weathering, and material transformations.
Open Studio
11 May, Saturday, 1 to 6pm
Marking the end of the residency at 136 GOETHE LAB, this open studio presents the work-in-progress, experiments, and outcomes of research. Come by and chat with the artists as they test modes of display and share about the process.
The Artists
Chok Si Xuan is a sculptor and installation-based artist whose practice is heavily influenced by technology and science fiction. Her works explore cybernetic systems through an enquiry into the body as a site of virtual and corporeal convergence. Chok often conducts material investigations into familiar and unfamiliar territories, experimenting with different methods of production and installation and exploring the proxy effects materials hold to transgress the symbolic order.
Victoria Hertel is a Singapore-based German-Venezuelan artist whose practice explores the sensory entanglement of the self and non-self. Her immersive installations combine sensor technology, trace and motion to construct distilled sensory encounters that heighten our awareness of the material network we inhabit. Through the synaesthetic experience of these encounters we are invited to expand our understanding of our coexistence in relation to everything within and around us.
Seet Yun Teng is a curator, producer, and writer based in Singapore. A keen alignment to the material world and embodied processes underlies her approach. She works closely and collaboratively with artists to develop long-term, research-based projects on topics ranging from the visibility of space debris to tropical technologies. She is currently researching how materially-led artistic practices are shaped by digital processes and technologies—investigating how artistic experiments productively destabilise notions of materiality and observing the modes of sense-making and translation that emerge. With an interest in alternative formats of exhibition-making and interdisciplinary collaborations, she has worked curatorially across a range of exhibitions, events and platforms.
The Space
136 GOETHE LAB is a new project space at the Goethe-Institut Singapore. Housed in the former library and reading room, the space is intended as a response to the need for physical spaces for the arts, and an ongoing conversation with the public and arts community in Singapore.
SACRIFICIAL PROTECTION is supported as part of the open call for 136 GOETHE LAB, which invited applicants to activate the space with a group proposal.