Naima Morelli

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Essay

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Migration

Geographically small and without local resources, Singapore has historically based its entire survival on the presence of the sea as a strategic location to commerce. A city port and a global trading hot spot since the beginning, creating a good relationship with the region and projecting a reliable image has always been key. In shaping their identity, the Singaporeans couldn’t afford to be purely preoccupied by the way they perceive themselves, but also in the relationship they have with the outside world.

These two narratives are not parallel, but blend into each other. Singapore is a city in constant and rapid flux; his port is bustling with activity and the airport is almost a mandatory stop for fights to and from Asia. You would expect that in such a mobile space, “the local” and “the other” won’t look that different. However, those who aspire to become locals learn quickly that the papers granting Singaporean citizenship can’t really grant a inner sense of belonging to the individual and they don’t make the community accept you.

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 Writing history


When we were studying history in school as kids, we perceived it to be a fixed, unchangeable entity. “Only history will tell”, is still a common saying, which identifies history as the ultimate judge, operating with the fairest of methods. We see that mentality in art history as well. Van Gogh is your typical case in point of the neglected artist in his lifetime who History then recognised as one of the major artists of the 20th century. At the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome my professors used to see art history as a force opposed to the art market. Market success was described to us students as kind of a cheat. Conversely, history couldn’t care less about money and other such vileness. Apparently what history remembers are the true masterpieces of real artists, not certainly what’s up on the stock market. Good art is what will stand the test of time.
While I subscribe this view, I’m also aware that along the winds shaping the rocks of history, market forces are in the picture as well. Today more than ever. History is a re-reading of the past according to what the present values important and useful. The retelling of every story necessarily implies highlighting some elements and hiding others. It does that in a functional way. In this sense, we can consider the old saying, “History is written by the winners” has been true until the ‘80s came along and postmodernism challenged this notion.

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Hello dear readers. I’m glad to announce that from today on this blog and on the platform MEDIUM I am starting the publication of my reportage on the Singaporean contemporary art system. I have been working on this for more than three years, and I’m proud to finally share it with you!

You will read a new essay each Monday for about six months, and this will culminate in a final publication. After considering different options to get this material out there, I very much liked this idea of publishing a new episode each week. It reminds me of those writers like Salgari or Jack London who used to publish their books “in episodes” on newspaper, making it into almost an appointment with their readers.

This is the index, comprising of the interviews that you will read in the next few months:

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I’m honored and humbled to have had the chance of writing about the work of an extraordinary artist and human being such as Cambodian painter Vann Nath. The piece is out in the new issue of Art Republik and is part of the Cambodia reportage I realized in February. This is the fifth piece about Cambodian art I did for the magazine, and I’m so happy to have these beautiful pages as an outlet for the research.

In the article, which I wrote in conjunction of the publication in Italy of Vann Nath’s memoir by ADD Editore “Il pittore dei khmer rossi”, I traced the legacy of this artist on Cambodian contemporary art, and how his example and practice influenced the new generations of artists in the Kingdom.

Here is the link to the pdf version of the piece

 

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museumsrome

I have just been back from Japan a couple of days ago,  and it has been great to find my essay on the state of contemporary art museums in Rome published on Culture360, the webmagazine of the Asia-Europe foundation.

The piece stems from my conversations with Hou Hanru and Giorgio de Finis, and takes into consideration the example of the ex-GNAM, La Galleria Nazionale directed by Cristiana Collu. While in the piece I take a bit of a critical tone, I hope that you can read through the lines my positive feeling for a scene in transformation.

Here is the link to the piece

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loredanaMAAIAM

CoBo Social has just published my new article where I discuss the show DIASPORA Exit, Exile, Exodus at MAIIAM in Chiang Mai with the curator Loredana Pazzini-Paracciani, as well as the importance of tackling geopolitical change in Southeast Asia from a variety of angles.

Here is the link to the piece

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Back with some updates from my life. There is noting better than a warm, sleepy Saturday morning without super-urgent deadlines for articles, to stop for a second and ponder and reflect on the amazing ride I have been on since the beginning of the year. Basically, a moment of quiet to park the horse and smell the roses. I feel this is somewhat necessary to have a clearer picture of my narrative, because of course it’s a story, but we humans need to make sense of things, and it’s fun, and my heart longs for it! I feel that when I’m talking with friends I tend to focus on the problems, maybe because I have identify them as the alley to let it all out. But my public writing, whether for these occasional rants or even in my articles, is really the place where I feel compelled to look at beauty, while not shying away from complexity. I feel it’s my wiser self talking, and I’m happy to get raw and vulnerable. Well, most of the times!

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Little by little parts of my Cambodia research/reportage are coming out in the press: here is a piece on the Phnom Penh-based supergroup Stiev Selapak which has just been published on the Singapore-based art magazine Art Republik. Can’t wait to have the physical copy in my hands!

Here is the link to the article

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Audience anxiety

In 2017, I visited a show a of late ceramic artist called Iskander Jalil, in dialogue with the young Singaporean artist Gerald Leow at the National Gallery of Singapore. Gerald’s day job was set design, and it showed from his intervention in the show, which was very subtle. He built a metal structure evoking the traditional house of Inskandar with a simple metal outline. I was looking forward to seeing the show since the artist mentioned that he was doing research from it in our first interview, and I peered out curiously into the room. Before I had the chance to set foot inside, the gallery sitter, gentle as ever, handed me a flyer: “Please find here some information about the show. You will find also the interview of the curator with Gerald Leow and some information about the content of the show. Please proceed to your left to see the exhibition.” Being a Neapolitan, so a rule-breaker by nature, I was about to blurt out: “Well, what if I want to start from the right?” After all, there was no chronology intended in the work, and there were no other people in room. But instead, I shut up and remembered where I was. And yes, I was in a place where the so-called audience anxiety was real.

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I love the end of the year so much. Looking back and taking stock of what worked and what didn’t, because acknowledging that even what apparently didn’t worked is the seed for something even bigger to happen. And also, recognizing that nothing is ever wasted, and everything will converge eventually, because it’s all you, all one person is one universe following his own personal trail of crumbs.

In the past few months I haven’t posted on the blog my regular rants/reflections on my journey through life. This is because I realized that instead of being focused on the present and what was at hand, I was rehearsing the “narrative of my life” a little too often. Too much of looking back and planning ahead, instead of sitting down, spot the priorities and get down to them. Which resulted a dispersive mindset and lazy habits. And now that is the right time to reflect, look back and appreciate, it just feels so much better. A few lessons have unfolded. And while of course everything is unfolding all the time, I feel that right now I can see a motif appearing, whereas in the past few months it was more the phase where everything was colliding before taking a recognizable form.

Enough with vagueness! Let’s get down to the specifics; one thing I learned this is that when you ask your friends for feedback in a particular area of your life they know you well for, they will always tell you that “in the past you were so much better at this.” Of course you know that this is not true. There were movements where you showed up with your higher self in that sector. One particularly focused training session, a period where you were really pushing with work, another week where you realized a set of very good comic book pages. Growth is never even. You’ll have moments where you are quietly learning in some areas and it doesn’t show, and moments where it finally come up. It’s a gift to have friends to keep you in check, but most importantly you have to regularly practice, day in day out.

On the edge of 2017 I can see how all the expressions of my being are starting to come together, and hopefully in 2018 they will find a way to coexist harmoniously as an even flow. Ok, let’s be more specific. I guess I’ll start by looking at the year through the lens of my different practices.

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collectingcambodia

Art Republik Issue 17 is just out. You will find there my article on collectorship in Cambodia, where I have interviewed curator Reaksmey Yean, dancer and collector Sophiline Cheam Shapiro and artist Sophal Neak, discussing the concept on building an art collection in a country where the art infrastructure is still absent.

Here is the link to the pdf version of the piece

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Bureaucracy

CoBo has just published my new piece titled “5  Singaporean artists working with the theme of Bureaucracy”. Researching the Singaporean art system and the artists’ practice, I noticed the emergence of this set of preoccupations with organisation, repetition, boredom, archiving, censorship, procedures, rules – which definitely dismantles the romantic idea of the artist as we conceived it. Bureaucracy is so pervasive in society such as the Singaporean one, that becomes not only a conditio sine qua non for art to be happening, but also a subject in itself to reflect on.  This article features artists Jack Tan, Terry Wee, Zihan Loo, Lim Tzay-Chuen and Lai Yu Tong.

Here is the link to the piece

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