The Great Lubricator

2016

This group show coproduced by Alliance française de Singapour and LASALLE Faculty of Fine Arts presents collaborative works by members of the faculty on the theme ‘The Power of Image – The Image of Power’.

The idea of the exhibition was developed by referencing two images from the realm of photojournalism as a starting point.
Lecturers responded to an open call and selected a student(s) to work with, creating a work in any medium of their choice. The different sensibilities and practices result in a wide range of explorations examining the relation between image and power from diverse points of view: social, historical, political, Freudian, etc.

​Ultimately, the exhibition hopes to investigate the role of images as a ‘great lubricator’ in the power play at work in human society since the dawn of time.

Click here to view The Great Lubricator Website

Exhibition Postcard

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Installation View

The Most Beautiful Day Of My Life
by Gilles Massot and Moses Tan
 
We started working by considering the duality contained in the subtitle “the power of image – the image of power” and developed the idea of a video installation in which the same scene would be looked at from two opposite angles. This duality hints at the question of reliability of information: who is representing what? Furthermore the video is only a simulation: a projection on a blank TV screen and a mirror reflection of the original ‘broadcasting’. In the complex relation of image to power, what you see is hardly ever what you get.
 
We then had to choose a topic for the visual material. We eventually decided to work with the imagery of the traditional British academic gown. Highly representative of a specific cultural context, this gown is now widely adopted by countries of the formal British Empire for historical reason as well as beyond, as a result of the omnipresence of American cinema and the related cultural imperialism. The gown itself is an image of power, symbolising the new status of the graduate. Interestingly enough, and mostly in the context of developing countries, this image of power also results in an expression of the power of image: the studio photograph of the graduate in full outfit, possibly surrounded by his family. This photo is typically lavishly framed and hanged on the wall of the living room to signify the family’s newly found social status through the child’s academic achievement.

The duality from which the work was first developed was eventually expressed by enacting such graduation scene as both a photograph and a video, contrasting stillness and faint movement. And the studio brought out of context, into nature. From the power of image comes the layer of photography (and videography) and the power it gives to the subject. By contrasting studio photography with a backdrop set in another space, this ‘power’ is then collapsed and the trick revealed.
 
Lastly the title refers to the emotional construct associated to the documentation of such important moments in life, be it graduation or wedding, the moment, a construct that needs to be immortalized to lend it its full meaning.