Opening - Thukral+Tagra @ STPI




A clear blue sky, sanitized environment, colourful birds and plenty of shopping opportunities, if it sounds like Singapore, it’s because the new works of Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra are exactly about that: describing the perceived paradise life one can experienced in the city-state. The dynamic duo, better known as Thukral + Tagra, used to create ads for the Singapore Tourism Board when they were working for Ogilvy, and are still obviously drawing on their background in advertising, by using slogan in their works ('children eat free', 'open 24 hours'), as well as using a rather tongue-in-cheek advertising format. But if the works allude to Singapore as a “Disneyland’ of sorts, an ideal family vacation destination as perceived by the rising middle class of India, grate the surface and the commentary is a bit more subversive. Happy shoppers are standing behind bar code, confined and imprisoned in their environment. Several works include mechanised and automated parts that animate the figures in a stop motion effect – a reference to our sometime programmed and robotic consuming behaviours. These latest print works are very complex - and technically challenged the Singapore Tyler Print Institute – but the result in Low-Tech Family Vacations, now on show, is definitely worth a visit.