People have never had a problem disposing of the past when it gets too difficult. Flesh will burn, photos will burn, and memory, what is that? The imperfect ramblings of fools who will not see the need to forget. And if we can't dispose of it we can alter it. The dead don't shout. There is a certain seductiveness about what is dead. It will retain all those admirable qualities of life with none of that tiresome messiness associated with live things. Crap and complaints and the need for affection. You can auction it, museum it, collect it. It's much safer to be a collector of curios, because if you are curious, you have to sit and sit and see what happens. You have to invest in a glass-bottomed boat, which is more expensive than a fishing rod, and puts you in the path of the elements. The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home, like all the men who now live with mermaids at the bottom of the sea.
Or the people who found Atlantis.

- Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit
Jeanette Winterson

...Within this space she will be installing various exhibits including a machine that measures brainwaves in relation to external stimuli and in this case, art. There will also be labeled photographs, case studies with notes and obscure tools amongst other exhibits within the space. ... Are these things for real? Do we take for granted what we see and read as truth? Do we believe because of the thing itself or the way it is convincingly displayed? Who tells us these things and where does the research come from?

For SB2008, Pimkanchanapong is re-creating a Google Earth image-map of Singapore to be installed as a wall-to-wall floor covering for the Chamber room at City Hall. The artist has provided stickers or tags on which visitors may provide information about specific places and attach or 'stitch' them onto the map. ... As the exhibition progresses, more tagging will occur and layer upon layer of information will be placed upon the surface of the map. This in itself will be a beautiful, performative process, where public interaction will provide personal detail to an otherwise impersonal satellite image, but the same time, the paper tags will physically obscure and 'mess up' the pristine map.

Pham Ngoc Duong's creepy giant maggots are the size of adolescents making their way up into City Hall's former well-appointed restaurant. ... Breeding in flesh (human, animal or fruit, cooked or raw), the presence of maggots signals the rotting of their host's body. This metaphor for corruption within a system is characteristic of Pham's work. That he has mutated them to giants - as monsters - borders on the comically grotesque and piques our morbid fascination with bodily transgression.

D. 84 Little Guilin (Bukit Batok Town Park) Singapore (2008)
Gary Carsley

For SB2008, Carsley has, form a range of photographs taken of Singapore's Little Guilin Park in Bukit Gombak (itself a copy of the real Guilin in China, and representative of 'Chinese-ness' in Singapore) and Jurong's Chinese Garden, selected images and re-rendered them in faux wood-grain. These images have been creatively applied to selected IKEA furniture to create two installations... Surface representations, identity of the nation and self, interiorly and exteriorly, become sources for the creation and reading of the work.

Tropicana (2008)
E Chen

E Chen is showing sculptures made of woollen yarn. The yarn is elaborately woven to take the shape of a scooter and a lamppost with ivy growing around it. E Chen's use of this material makes his artworks very flexible, expandable and even soft and ephemeral - qualities which go against many of the traditional notions of sculpture. Another aspect of the artwork is that the tips of the yarn are hooked to, and pulled by, a motor on the ceiling and very slowly wound up so that the sculptures gradually unraveled. By the end of the exhibition the artwork will have disappeared... Although it is said that art is immortal, in fact nothing is permanent, and that idea is symbolically proved in this installation.

Blackfield (2008)
Zadok Ben-David

Among his latest works, Ben-David has created floor-based installations of thousands of small, wispy metallic plants emanating from a rectangle of white sand...The 'plants', which are etched out of metal, come from botanical drawings and are painted black on one side, while on the other, a myriad of colours is visible. All the plants are installed with the coloured side facing one end of the installation and black facing the other. ... The experience on seeing the black change into colour, and vice-versa, row by row, is mesmerizing.

These are just a few of the many fascinating installations at the Biennale, and if you haven't gone, do check it out, it runs till 16th Nov 2008.