Sean Cham

Washing White (2020)
HD three channel video (80 minutes), performance artefacts

On February 6, 1819, Stamford Raffles signed a Treaty and ‘founded modern Singapore’. The next day, on February 7, Raffles left Singapore. He had left instructions for a fort to be built, and for the British troops to be dispatched on the island. A port city was to be established. In just 24 hours, the colonial official changed the course of the island’s narrative. 

The work takes as its point of departure this historical turn, and the brevity of Singapore’s colonial founding. What remains today is the residue of that 24-hour intervention. Washing White is a proposition of inhabiting that same duration differently, through a performance of slow undoing.

The five acts that structure the performance are drawn from the language of architectural conservation, which are often applied to the preservation and maintenance of colonial-era buildings. By borrowing this institutional language and appropriating it for the body and its labour, the work questions: what is chosen for restoration, what is allowed to decay, and what does it mean to preserve an act of slow violence?

In the same amount of time that Raffles took, I will attempt to undo and repair.

Exhibition Summary

• Exhibited:
  • FIFTEEN, online (2021)

Stills from the durational performance.