Nowhere Here
Sissi Kaplan and Sam I-shan 

8th Singapore International Photography Festival
Level 3, Peace Centre

Nowhere Here is a site-specific video and photographic project unfolding over three chapters: The Presence of Your Absence, Anima and Dance With Me. It speaks of the desire to connect despite isolation, and the humanity inherent within forgotten things. Hotels and hospital rooms become a stage set for singular performances, while ephemeral street assemblages take on lives of their own. The video installation The Presence of Your Absence features a series of hotel rooms, with crumpled bedclothes suggesting a lingering presence, and half-opened curtains hinting at unknown realities outside. An intermittently-appearing figure performs mysterious actions that suggest persistent longing in the face of impermanent dwelling. The photographic series Anima depicts the anthropomorphic forms of covered vehicles and abandoned materials. Installed along the corridors of Peace Centre, where time is suspended and activities will soon cease, they become uncanny presences that represent alternative forms of inhabitation in seemingly quotidian settings. Finally, the same figure from The Presence of Your Absence reappears in the video installation Dance With Me, dressed in a biohazard bag and performing alone in an impersonal environment. Her breathing, moving body in the plastic bag echoes, yet subverts the shrouded or hollowed forms of Anima. Together, these works take the viewer on a journey through the emotions arising from proximity and distance, intimacy and separation, absence and existence, the spectral and the concrete, and the individual within the rest of the world.  

Sissi Kaplan is a visual artist working with photography, video and text. Her work focuses on the fictionalisation of the everyday, employing solitude, emptiness and her own performing body to transfigure found situations and reveal hidden aspects of human nature. Her work has been presented at film festivals and exhibitions in Singapore, Paris, Berlin, Naples, Johannesburg, and Kuala Lumpur. She lives and works in Hong Kong.

Sam I-shan is a curator focusing on time-based media, photography, and art and politics. She also programmes for film festivals, specialising in Southeast Asian and experimental cinema. With fifteen years’ experience in art institutional settings, she was previously curator at National Gallery Singapore, Singapore Art Museum and Esplanade Visual Arts. Living and working in Singapore and Cambodia, she has been photographing alleyways since 2010. 

Music and Sound by Vivian Wang