Window Dressing VII, featuring Rakhee Jain Desai and Jessica Blaustein

public (be)longing | SGMRT

public (be)longing | SGMRT is a series of large textile panels based on a selection of Singapore MRT (subway) stations. Spanning the entire Singapore island with almost 200 kilometers of route, MRT stations are spaces where multiple publics interchange and also gather. They are connecting points both literally and figuratively. Taking visual and experiential direction from the MRT locations, we created the panels as tactile mapping devices for wandering and reflection about each station’s history and surroundings. Wander and discovery were critical to our research and process in 2017.

Traveling and exhibiting this series now, three years later, in today’s context of Covid-19, feels somehow strange and antithetical to our earlier expressions of public urban space. Busy urban interchanges have become foreboding. Underground and overground tubes carry risk, not the wonders of improvised connections. It feels oddly fitting that textile maps made for open interaction and touch hang silently behind a glass wall—almost like an open casket. We find ourselves longing for shared public spaces and dreaming of unplanned interactions with strangers.