Singapore Biennale 2019
Every Step in the Right Direction
Multiple locations, Singapore

The world today is rife with complexity. And so, it seems, is the act of reimagining it. In the words of Patrick D. Flores, artistic director of the 6th Singapore Biennale: “As the world makes the art, so does the art make the world. This world has previously been mapped for us. The Biennale would like to revisit that map and carry out new steps to draw it anew.” Perhaps nowhere in this latest edition of the Biennale, boasting works by 77 artists and collectives located across 11 sites, was that step toward remapping the macrocosm we inhabit more manifest than in a nondescript corner of the National Gallery Singapore, the event’s main venue. In a section dedicated to the Filipino-American artist Alfonso Ossorio sat several modest examples of the artist’s “congregations,” medleys of found objects that he enfolded into rich, haptic repertoires of quotidian materiality. Ossorio’s works are historically significant yet little remembered, though it is worth noting that the seminal 1961 survey “The Art of Assemblage,” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, featured one of his pieces, Excelsior (1960). These congregations are reminders of a rapidly diversifying art historiography, of the need to re-world our sense of both chronologies and geographies, and to recuperate a figure such as Ossorio—migrant, biracial, Southeast Asian, queer, and, admittedly, privileged.