PPC |珍珠坊: A Public Living Room

Since its birth in the 1970s, the People’s Park Complex, with its cornucopia of activity and visual clutter, has played a pivotal role in the transformation of Chinatown and Singapore’s architectural, spatial and social landscape. Known for many firsts, including being the tallest residential space and mix-used building encompassing residential, office and car-parking facilities, the Complex continues to capture our imagination, as it is shaped and shaped by the activities, movement and humanity in and around the building.

The ‘PPC |珍珠坊’ exhibition, aptly held at the fifth floor carpark space of the Complex, aims to respond to notions of the ‘public living room’, where distinctions between the public and private are blurred, and human intervention is juxtaposed against the sterility of infrastructure and hardware in our urban environment. Through this new and immersive reading of the carpark and Complex, audiences are invited to reflect on and suggest alternative ways of appraising the treatment of public space, at the same time exploring the hidden potential of parking architecture taking on a different existence.

‘PPC | 珍珠坊: A Public Living Room’ will be held from 15 – 30 January 2016, spanning three weekends with a myriad of visual and performance artists showcasing their works and creations. Visitors can expect an experimental visual feast from an impressive line-up of over 20 visual and performance artists and collectives whose practices span across diverse mediums, ranging from sculpture to drawing and photography to site-specific 3D installations.

Highlights include public workshops conducted by Andreas Siagian and Budi Prakosa of Lifepatch (Yogyakarta), and the PPC Performance Dialogues initiated by performance artists Daniela Beltrani, Ezzam Rahman and Natasha Wei.

Besides the exhibition, performances and workshops, some of the city’s hottest musical acts such as singer-songwriter Nicholas Chim, collective Getai Group and HBRD THRY will also take to the stage and ‘jam’ in the public living room. A re-creation of a Singapore 60s Tea Dance, featuring The Pinholes and Southeast Asian vinyl from that era, is slated for 23 January. Together with technology innovators Voicemap, Hyphen is also working on an immersive audio tour and story-telling experience linking other heritage buildings and sites in Chinatown with the Complex.