Accelerated Intimacy, is a 5-channel immersive video installation projected on the acrylic furniture of the hotel room. These spectral objects hint at the semblance of a quotidian space, and the series of moving images projected upon them enact elusive and allusive narratives.

Choo’s cast of solitary figures rehearse a disjointed textual collage of found dialogue, appropriated and spliced from scripts of famous films. The artist has decontextualised these conversations, in turn, reconstructing a potential narrative surrounding each character, who all have been filmed occupying iconic hotel rooms in Singapore. Between the characters and their frames, Choo has carefully constructed uncanny coincidences that are incomplete, open-ended, and methodically ambivalent. In this environment of staged intimacy, the five hotel guests seemingly speak to each other, encountering each other as strangers, yet simultaneously set apart. 

Alongside the video installation, photographic prints and objects that have been used in the films are also on display. This dual presentation of images and objects creates a complex staging of “lived” experiences that exist concurrently across time and space.
 
Rather than offering any kind of resolution to the histories of these characters and the sites they occupy, Accelerated Intimacy is a series of coincidences that are unfinished, culminating and ongoing, revealing further complexities upon each reading. 

Accelerated Intimacy

A parallel to previous methods of compositing images, Choo manipulates and reconfigures elusive moments between consciousness, document and space.

Formerly a plantation land in Singapore, the area of Emerald Hill was subdivided for wealthy th
Chinese and Straits-Chinese merchants at the turn of the 20​ Century for their place of abode. A space where families were seen to interact frequently with one another, dwellings were built as terrace houses of a variety of architectural styles ranging from Transitional, Late to Art-Deco; with most independent mansions having been demolished today. Now a conservation site, Emerald Hill houses new businesses ranging from restaurants, bars to small firms.

Towards the end of a stretch of shophouses, ​156 Emerald Hill stands and remains as a residential block housing various individuals. This artwork presents a digital composite of documented moments, recorded during the Circuit Break in Singapore as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. ​Hovering on the border between objective and subjective, public and private; the image presented is a culmination of momentary openings, pockets in between. A transitory site, ​156 Emerald Hill sets the stage in depicting ignored seams and forgotten vistas, promising a site from which either/or of utopian and apocalyptic.

156 Emerald Hill

playground 
noun | play·ground | \ ˈplā-ˌgrau̇nd  

1: a piece of land used for and usually equipped with facilities for recreation especially by children

2: an area known or suited for activity of a specified sort

 
Tonight, the air is warm is an investigation of one’s perception and behaviour in relation to the playground as a social space.

Individuals are invited to respond to a series of instructional procedures designed for them.  The essential nature of the activity is imprecise and occurs across space and time. A perpetually open project, the piece takes place in the inter-spaces between interpretation and negotiation, performance and chance.

Tonight, the air is warm

Zoom, click, waltz is a multimedia installation comprising 13 LED screens depicting individuals in various states of “performance”, while isolated within separate window frames. What began as an attempt to communicate with neighbours during Circuit Break, developed into an imagined possibility of individuals connecting through dance. 

Over a period of 2 months, residents received mailed instruction requests to perform at an interval spanning 30 minutes. These recordings were at times effective, others, futile. Various subjects’ responses range from active to passive; with individuals participating in modes of conscious performance, and others nonchalant, in contemplation. 

Juxtaposed and interspersed alongside staged, found and borrowed media, separate footages are stitched together to form an uncanny, seamless reality situated in the inter-spaces between interpretation and negotiation, truth and fiction, performativity and chance.

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SARAH CHOO JING