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Apple Rations — Post-show reflections

A part of the learning process of curating a show is I think to be very critical about the show, and not be too protective over it. There’s always things to improve on and to learn from.

We were wondering why the show was not getting much visitorship. Certain factors could be that:

  1. We were a young space — so perhaps a space requires time to gain its followers and hence we may consider running a space when we have more stamina to run it for a longer period of time.
  2. The marketing is weak — part of this was intentional. I had this unfounded belief that a show that is good will travel by word of mouth automatically. I was also trying to avoid making the space too public as there may be more friction with the school when there is too much attention on the space. I do think we could have done better and put in more effort in getting the word out, as a responsibility to the artist who worked on the show.
  3. The show and the artist was too mysterious, perhaps even pretentious and too try-hard? — a friend did give me feedback that perhaps the show had too many elements — the mysterious artist who is 7 years old, the strange title, coupled with the knowledge that the artist credited is not actually the artist. Seung Ji also suggested that for someone to drag themselves down to exhibitions (especially since there are so many other exhibitions now to see) requires the exhibition to be appealing in various ways. One of the reasons why we visit shows is because of our interest in the artist.

I’m fine with all these criticisms. I think that it’s important to question our actions and evaluate whether we were successful in what we set out to achieve by starting this space. It’s one thing to think we are doing challenging shows and another to be just plain delusional. So it’s important to evaluate whether the show was just bullshit and not well curated — not well finished, not well thought off, not enough careful consideration etc.

Food for thought.



We had a closing event which was a film screening of the silent film, Anonymous Spirits by Azharr Rudin. There was a lot to reflect about the screening.

During the screening itself, I was slightly bothered by the fact that audiences were talking amongst themselves. I think this is natural and simply reflects varying notions of sharing a space and what this concept means to different people. It was a nice experiment for me to be more relaxed about how things go even if they do not go according to plan.

The bigger dillemma was concerning the appropriateness of screening the film. A few days before we were going to do the screening, a friend messaged me to ask me to consider dropping the screening because of negative allegations against the film-maker’s behavior towards women. After much discussion, we felt that we were going to address this during the screening instead of sweeping it under the rug. I still have mixed feelings about the way we dealt with it, thinking of whether it was right to reveal these private information about the artist. Perhaps we could have just not shown the film in the first place instead of trying to be social justice warriors? Eventually reflecting on this scenario perhaps we did the right thing and at least it opened up much conversation afterwards about how to deal with such cases in future. I learned that ethics and morality is always a grey area and that it’s perhaps immature and ignorant to judge others based on principles I may very well not possess as well.

Food for thought.




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