The opening of the National Museum of Singapore presents an opportunity to explore the varying perspectives that contemporary cultural practitioners and artists have adopted in response to issues of tradition and history.

The current dynamism of the cities of Asia has its social roots in the complex variety of intersecting cultural forces that characterise urban centres with rich histories like Bangkok, Taipei, New Delhi, Singapore, among others. In theatre, film, dance, music and the visual arts, the contemporary is haunted by the ghosts of history. Like Harold Bloom argues in the field of poetry, the anxiety of influence is inescapable - each contemporary artist creates his or her own identity through an argument with the one(s) that came before. The present cultural landscape is composed of sedimented layers of old and new processes simultaneously. Revival, rejection, and reinvention are all possible stances towards history. As implied by the title, tradition and history is seen as a cradle, and a source of ideas.

The Performance and Cinémathèque strands of Wellspring tackle the difficult and complex issues of the relevance of these cultural traditions to contemporary society. Core events will be opportunities for the people of Singapore - both artists and the public, to develop their own meaningful interpretations of cultural forms found in Singapore. The performance traditions of Chinese opera and puppetry, Malay Bangsawan and Indian musical forms are recontextualised rather than simply reproduced. These traditions found in Singapore's cultural makeup will also be contextualised through juxtaposition with other forms found in the larger Southeast Asian and Asian region.

In addition to the performances, concurrent workshop demonstrations, seminars and talks attempt a discovery of the anxiety of influence in our contemporary culture.

Interrogating Time, Hidden Histories look at the process of conceptualising history through the visual. Here attention turns to the physical presence of the National Museum and also the idea of the Museum in its local context. While the permanent exhibitions deal seriously with the pre-colonial history of the island, the Museum site itself reflects this through its strategic location at the foot of Fort Canning, where the ruling elite of 14th century Singapore resided. With the transition from colony to nation, the history of this Museum itself evolves in tandem. The ‘ghosts’ of the Museum, with its 19th century origins as the Raffles Museum, collecting the ethnology and natural history of the region (read British colonial territories) presents another opportunity for artistic response.

The redeveloped National Museum juxtaposes a 19th century colonial building-gazetted a national monument- with a modernist glass and steel extension. The architectural concept put forth, that the explicit transparency of the latter is to showcase the beauty of the historical building, forms one possible basis for intervention.

Tan Boon Hui
Festival Programmer
National Museum of Singapore