Haegue Yang has been invited to create a new installation titled Forum for Drone Speech – Singapore Simulations for the OUTBOUND series of National Gallery Singapore (hereafter the Gallery). Housed in two national monuments which were built in the country’s colonial past—City Hall and former Supreme Court—that have been restored and transformed, the Gallery has cemented its status as the leading national gallery of Singapore since opening its doors in 2015. Launched in 2018, OUTBOUND invites accomplished artists to create works for different spaces within the Gallery, to provoke critical reflection regarding history of the gallery while shifting perceptions of what might be considered art. The City Hall building (former Municipal Building) in particular, which houses Haegue Yang’s work, faces the Padang which is considered an important public space in political, social, and economic aspects and is also where Singapore’s self-governance was announced in 1959. Thus this building engages with Yang’s multi-layered composite which embodies both past and present, history and culture, and society.

Born out of her research on the historical context of the Gallery, Forum for Drone Speech – Singapore Simulations explores ideas of hybridity in which the real and the faux, natural and artificial, past and present encounter each other in a multi-sensorial experience. The sculptural faux marble base resembles the fluted columns, semi-arches, and pyramids and alludes to features of Western classical architecture. The base is crowned by a ribbon of wire mesh containing a selection of holographic prints of black and white. These include images of British sculptor Dora Gordine’s multi-ethnic bronze busts once displayed in the City Hall, and Italian sculptor Rudolfo Nolli’s architectural decoration of the former Supreme Court building and cultural artifacts and instruments made to perceive the world. The images are accompanied by artwork labels which playfully appropriate museological language, interweaving factual introductions with Yang’s subjective readings of them. Yang draws attention to museums as spaces in which objects are continually rearranged and reinterpreted to envision alternative narratives, provoking questions on identity, belongingness, and engagement.

The platform also hosts three of Yang’s sculptures—The Intermediates series and Sonic Swell—with materials such as artificial straw, bells, and turbine vents which evoke movement and sound combining crafts and industry, past and present, technology and cultures. Also a soundscape of birdsong, recorded in the demilitarized zone (DMZ) during the historic Inter-Korean summit in 2018, captured when the leaders of the two Koreas sitting together at the end of a footpath speaking privately at a distance, and a speech in six languages by the humanoid robot Nadine developed by Nanyang Technological University add an acoustic dimension while collapsing dichotomies—human versus nature, technology versus politics, and history. Forum for Drone Speech – Singapore Simulations embodies history and civilization, transforming the space into multisensorial experience to possess an organic three-dimensionality.