Arts picks: Exhibitions by three women artists spotlight the environment, the female gaze and mental health

The Straits Times, November 10, 2022

From These Ruins, We Rise And Fall

Artist Marla Bendini’s work What Is Painting But The Act Of Embracing By Means Of Art The Surface Of The Pool, oil and oil pastel on linen. PHOTO: COURTESY OF CUTURI GALLERY

A visual journal is one way to describe the works of Singaporean cross-disciplinary artist and trans woman Marla Bendini. In her solo exhibition at Cuturi Gallery called From These Ruins, We Rise And Fall, she casts her gaze on matters such as friendship, female archetypes and spirituality to create layered documentations of her experience.

 

In the installation piece The Start Is The End And The End Starts Again (2022), she collaborates with writer and performance artist ila in a work that includes free-form text as well as torched and recovered parts of the guzheng, a Chinese musical instrument.

 

In another work, What Is Painting But The Act Of Embracing By Means Of Art The Surface Of The Pool (2022), Bendini references the desolation expressed in Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh’s Wheatfield With Crows (1890), by depicting a figure floating in a pool apparently calling for help on a mobile phone.

 

Where: Cuturi Gallery, 61 Aliwal Street
MRT: Nicoll Highway/Lavender/Bugis
When: Saturday to Nov 27, Tuesdays to Saturdays, noon to 7pm; Sundays, noon to 6pm; Mondays, by appointment only
Admission: Free
Info: www.cuturigallery.com

 

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