Somewhere to Gather, Somewhere to Dream: 4 Stories of Lost Art Spaces in Singapore
It is 11PM on a Sunday night and I am getting a haircut in an industrial warehouse in Geylang. My friend Gwen runs a part time barber shop in this studio space which they share with their partner. There is something about getting your hair cut by a fellow queer person that makes it a hundred times less stressful: a kind of mutual understanding. There is also something about being in a space run by someone from your community that makes it feel like freedom.
But I’m not here to write a story about queer barbering, I’m here to write a story about the power and possibilities of spaces like this. I came here to ask Gwen about their time working at another independent art space, a café with an attached library, gallery and stage in Duxton called The Pigeonhole that existed from March 2011-December 2012. Even though it’s now been closed for more years than it was open, Gwen’s eyes light up as they begin to describe it.
The loss (and eventual return) of Blu Jaz’s entertainment license in 2019--and with it a rare dedicated space for live music, parties, comedy and poetry--was a reminder of how hard it is for dedicated small-to-medium-sized arts spaces to exist in Singapore. It was also a reminder of the kind of community that grows up around a performance space and what is lost when we lose a venue. If Blu Jaz left such an impact on so many people, what is the legacy of other art spaces that have come and gone before?I interviewed artists, employees, writers, and former managers of four places which no longer exist—The Post-Museum, The Pigeonhole, Telok Ayer Performing Arts Centre, and Artistry Café—to understand what went into building these spaces, the legacies they left behind and what they can teach us about sustaining communities and spaces.
The Pigeonhole
The Pigeonhole was started in 2011 by Ave Chan and her then-partner Rayner Lim. Ave, who had worked at the NGO and shelter HOME a few years before then, realised there was no space in Singapore for groups like HOME to hold events.
In an interview over Whatsapp, Ave remembered a sense of “let’s do this”, of wanting to start a space to host all kinds of events and people. They found a shop space in Duxton and filled it with books, Salvation Army furniture and an espresso machine. “One of our Unique Selling Points was that we took coffee seriously,” Ave told me in a Whatsapp interview. This was about a year before café culture took off in Singapore.
“There was no real aesthetic,” Gwen recalled, “it was a very anyhow café... and that’s what made it great.” It was a café where there was no dress code for the servers, where anyone could walk in and hang out or study for hours, and where customers did not complain while waiting for their coffee or sandwiches.
Over email, Cher Tan, another former employee, reminisced: “Even though I was only a staff member, I was seen as a peer and my suggestions with regards to the cafe (how it was run, what it should serve, events, etc.) were taken seriously. I have only had one other hospitality job since where I have been treated this way.” She organised various acoustic gigs with her DIY tour booking collective as well as many screenings and readings.
The place soon became (for the lack of a better word) a hub for people from wildly different scenes to meet. Almost anyone was free to organize something new there without having to pay high rental costs. It became home to a huge range of events: from student art exhibitions and meetings by civil society groups, to hackathons (many of which continued running long after The Pigeonhole closed), poetry and music showcases (the one time I made it out there was to see Pooja Nansi sing as part of her duo The Mango Dollies), and even a live tele-conference with a person in space.
“The Pigeonhole existed during a time where progressive, yet informal, spaces were only just burgeoning in Singapore… there weren't that many places where ‘alternative’ people could congregate and feel safe(r) in…and because it didn't profess allegiance to any one particular group of people, you'd see… a really great cross-pollination of people,” Cher explained.
The Pigeonhole’s music open mics made it one of the few places for many new musicians to experiment and play to a live audience. They would later come together to put on a benefit show to raise money to save the space when the landlord raised the rent. Over 10 different bands which had grown up with the Pigeonhole played at that gig, and was an incredibly emotional night for everyone.
The benefit gig did not raise enough money and the Pigeonhole sold its furniture, books, and equipment and closed in December 2012. In the end, the Pigeonhole did not become as sustainable as its owners had hoped. Ave hopes that what it left behind was a deeper understanding of what it takes to support small local venues, that these spaces need people to physically be there and spend both time and money there.
In an e-mail, co-founder Rayner Lim said, “Even though it wasn't easy… .I'd probably do it all over again because it was also a most fulfilling experience and even now, I meet people who would tell me what the Pigeonhole meant to them back then.”
I asked Gwen whether they think the Pigeonhole inspired their barbershop and studio.
“I’m always trying things everywhere,” they say.
Artistry
Photo: Mark Lewis Tan. The writer hosting Spoke & Bird, February 2018
Photo: Mark Lewis Tan. SingPoWriMo.com editor Natalie Wang reading at Spoke & Bird.
“It was the kind of space where you could go in on a random day and bump into someone you knew,” said Pooja Nansi, poet and director of the Singapore Writers Festival, remembers in a Skype interview.
Artistry was a cafe and art gallery in the middle of Victoria Street in Bugis. It had a sprawling deck on the outside with heavy wood tables and wooden steps you could sit on. The inside was a sanctuary for a huge community of musicians, DJs, artists, writers, LGBTQ people, activists, and people who simply appreciated live art and good food.
It was a home where anything could happen, where curious passersby regularly wandered into storytelling nights and found themselves sharing childhood anecdotes with a roomful of strangers, where you could wander in on any given night and find something happening.
When Prashant Somosundram, founder and proprietor of Artistry, asked if she wanted to programme a monthly poetry night in 2013,she had never really organized anything like that before. The event she put together was Speakeasy, a nnow-legendary event which featured a spoken word poet and a page poet every month, which was often so crowded you had to come early to get a seat in the café.
“[Artistry created] a moment in the scene where space felt very accessible, space to test something weird out, a lot of trial and error… it taught me how to create stuff for audiences and figure out who I was as an arts organizer as well,” she said.
In an interview at the Projector’s Intermission Bar, I asked Prashant whether he ever planned for Artistry to be this organic space for artists to experiment (Prashant is now the General Manager of The Projector).
“Honestly,” he says “I thought it was just going to be a quiet place to drink coffee and read a book.”
In 2012, his friend at design company Chemistry approached him in 2012 asking if he would like to run the downstairs of their shophouse as an art gallery and café. He soon found that there was a demand for brunch food, as well as a demand for small performing arts spaces, and Artistry evolved to fulfil both needs.
“There wasn’t really a small space to experiment with things,” Prashant told me, “…The Pigeonhole was kind of a precursor to this… we were a continuation, with the hope of making it more sustainable with the emphasis on F&B.”
Artistry soon became known as much for its brunch as it did for its arts events. and he liked how the often socially-engaged art in the space could confront brunch-eaters. This also meant it was open to all sorts of programming at night: anyone could suggest an event and put it on without worrying about rental costs or minimum spending.
“We were interested in seeing how things grow,” Prashant explained. And this led to everything from life drawing sessions and pottery workshops, to regular music events like Original Sing and Stage Fright, to a monthly storytelling night which I ended up co-running, The Singapore Story Slam.
Hundreds were heartbroken when Artistry shut its doors in 2018, as new restaurants in the area made it harder to compete for the office lunch crowds and the business struggled to stay afloat.
“We lost something when Artistry closed,” Pooja told me. When she described how it really felt like home — for people and initiatives that took root there — I knew what she meant. There has never really been another space like it. Prashant remembered people telling him he had to keep it open for the community.
“We tried to keep it going, because we knew how important it was… but at the end of the day it was a business decision, not an emotional one,” Prashant recalls. It made more financial sense to close it while it was still doing well rather than waiting for it to go into decline.
Perhaps it is easy to ask that a place stay open if you don’t help to run it. It is easy for me to be nostalgic and reminisce about the loss of a place which represented so much to so many people, where I learnt to be comfortable in my own skin, where I made countless friends and fell in love with too many writers. What is less obvious is the behind the scenes labour that goes into sustaining it in a hyper-capitalist world, and how to support it.
Telok Ayer Performing Arts Centre (TAPAC)
Photo: Marc Nair. The TAPAC building.
Photo: Marc Nair. Osman, the TAPAC caretaker.
At The National Library’s Hanis Café, Marc Nair (poet and multidisciplinary artist) is telling me about crawling through a trapdoor with the building caretaker to get to the rooftop of a school to hang a banner for an arts festival.
He was talking about TAPAC, a former school building turned arts centre that stood in the shadow of skyscrapers in the heart of the CBD. Around the corner from Tanjong Pagar MRT and Amoy Street Food Centre, it was a National Arts Council-run space that housed various performing arts groups including the poetry slam organisation WordForward before it got torn down in 2012.
“I remember the expansiveness of the walk between the front gate and the building you were going to We were in the further building, and at that time I remember feeling freedom… because it was an arts space and an arts space with space was very rare,” artist Deborah Emmanuel said in a half-whispered interview at Bishan Library. Deborah, along with several other poets who would later become stalwarts of the literary scene attended, then taught, her first spoken word workshop there in 2011.
“There was something about having all that space that changed your mindset once you came in,” she explained, “that made you interact with it differently, from simple things like feeling able to sit on the ground to read a book. That, combined with its long history, made it a rich and inspiring place to create work.”
Marc also recalled a sense of freedom because of how much autonomy TAPAC’s tenants had. He described each tenant having their own bathroom key and being responsible for cleaning the toilets themselves, and the feeling of being able to stick posters anywhere without worrying about getting into trouble. People from different arts groups were also happy to share their spaces and get to know one another.
“There was this ‘kampung’ sentiment, for the lack of a better term,” Marc said . “There was this sense of… ’this is my space’ but you can use it for your art.” Marc often found himself collaborating with different tenants working in different art forms, and it was this experience that led him to continue to collaborate and create interdisciplinary work with a huge range of artists of different genres to this day.
TAPAC’s closing was inevitable. The land was too valuable, the building was old and rundown (by Singapore standards) and everyone who was a part of it knew it had a deadline. “The space gave us permission to work with it; it was a bit grotty, a bit grimy, a little rundown… but it also felt like you had a mission to do stuff, and try things because it was an arts space, so we really took ownership like that.” He still remembers helping to organize an epic going-away party with collectives who made giant installations out of trash, massive murals and hours of poetry and live music.
The darker side of TAPAC’s end was that several small arts organisations who rented the space were unable to pay the higher rents in the newer arts centres and simply shut down. Marc mentions that arts organisations in Singapore are still closing at an alarming rate.
I wonder what an alternative to selling the land could have looked like. What might other ways of valuing the land look like? What would have changed if it had been restored and preserved as a heritage building?
When Marc reached the top of the TAPAC roof with the caretaker, he remembers the caretaker telling him about what he knew of the neighbourhood.“Before these skyscrapers came up,” the caretaker told him, “you could see the palm trees, you could see the ships.”’ It turned out the caretaker had been born at the school, and still lived in a little house on the grounds. “It was nice that he was able to hold onto his identity before the place got destroyed.”
Post-Museum
Photo: Jennifer Teo. The Really Really Free Market
Photo: Jennifer Teo. A Singapore Queer-Straight Alliance meeting.
The Post-Museum was a collective, a café, meeting and event space in two shophouse on Rowell Road which its founders rented from 2007 to 2011. It inspired the founders of the Pigeonhole and Artistry and was started by visual artist couple Jennifer Teo and Woon Tien Wei as an independent community space to foster conversation. It still exists today, though in a slightly different, nomadic form.
“We wanted it to be an open space… without a fixed identity, where everyone who came in could contribute to what it became,” Jennifer Teo tells me over lunch at Sidewalk Café, a small food court in the shadow of a shiny new Funan Centre.
In 2007, The Post-Museum was also one of the few places where like-minded people who were interested in art, social issues and creating positive change could gather and hold events for free. It housed all kinds of events, from film nights, workshops and exhibitions to a soup kitchen (which still runs today), and a Queer-Straight Alliance, to meet ups for environmentally-minded people (Green Drinks, which still happens regularly). It was also a home to the Singapore chapter of the Really Really Free Market, a counter-capitalist global movement of temporary markets where people can take and give away things and services for free.
Jennifer is grateful to have been able to see young activists grow up in, and get inspired by, the Post Museum, and how it helped many people meet one another. I only really visited the place two to three times in 2011, but I still remember it being the first l place in Singapore where I felt able to go up to strangers and have conversations with them about things like capitalism and the environment, and I’m still in touch with many of them today.
“People still ask me, ‘when will you bring it back’,” Jennifer laughs. Like many spaces that came after, the café never became financially successful enough to cover the rent and the Post-Museum’s physical space eventually shut its doors after four years.
“But people don’t know how hard it was to run,” She remembers feeling a huge sense of relief when they moved out of Rowell Road.
However, that was far from the end of the Post-Museum. The physical space was but one stage of its life.
“We actually call 2007-2011 our Rowell Road phase,” Jennifer tells me. “And we are in our second phase which is nomadic and involves working with/in other art and public spaces.” Since 2011, the Post Museum has built on the momentum and community it created with its physical space to facilitate community and art projects in Singapore and beyond, including the recent Singapore Biennale 2019. The collective’s ability to keep growing and transcend a fixed location is an inspiring possibility that future organisers can learn from.
Jennifer does wish the people who ran events at the Post-Museum treated it more like a communal space that they were a part of, instead of a free place they were able to use at any time. “We wanted people to feel like they were part of a community when they used the space, but that just wasn’t part of people’s mindsets then…I don’t know if anything’s changed.”
The idea of communal ownership of a space you don’t have to pay for is still a funny concept in Singapore.
“The idea of property is very twisted in Singapore,” Vanessa Victoria Lim, founder of Destination Ink Open mic (currently called Dink) and a former collective member of now-defunct Singapore punk space Black Hole. “People see spaces as the property and responsibility of the person who pays the rent. There is the idea that if you are not really involved in something it’s not really your problem,” she says, remembering the many times when people who talked about how much they loved it often ended up wrecking the place after shows.
“In Singapore, there’s the idea that ‘respect the space’ means ‘you need to respect this space or you will get into trouble’ as opposed to ‘take care of this space because you have a responsibility to take care of a space that is valuable to the community’.”
Perhaps there is a growing number of people in Singapore capable of treating spaces they love with respect and coming together to save these spaces (to an extent), as seen in Pigeonhole’s benefit, and the way people came together to try and appeal for the renewal of Blu Jaz’s Public Entertainment License. However, though rising rents, property values, rezoning and loss after loss of venues makes it hard not to feel cynical and burnt out. This hyper-capitalist country is, after all, pretty much designed to make us believe we are little more than consumers who are entitled to services and spaces if we have the money. By design, it is meant to make us feel exhausted and alienated from each other, our communities, and what we create.
How do we break this vicious cycle? How can we better support these spaces and their owners?
Everyone I spoke to had many overlapping ideas. If you cherish a local, independent space, support it, either by spending time/money there or talking about it with your friends or on social media. Get to know the owners and see what goes into sustaining the space and what kind of support they need. Respect and get to know the other people who work at these spaces: the cleaners, bartenders, baristas, waiters, sound crew, the event organisers.Some also suggested a change in mindsets, to see the value in live performances and visual art and be okay with paying to see them (if people are willing to pay $10-$15 for a beer, why do people still complain about having to pay that much to see a music performance or spoken word show at the same bar?). Someone else suggested that maybe cafes are not actually the best way to support art spaces and we need to think of other alternatives.
How can we imagine more sustainable ways of running spaces? How do we sustain the community as we lose physical spaces? Or perhaps, the fact that these spaces existed at all is something to celebrate. Maybe, like in the case of TAPAC, the temporary nature of these spaces is not so much a sign of failure as it is a sign of possibilities.
•
“So… you want to start a space?” Jennifer asks at the end of her interview.
I think of all the stories of debts, headaches and heartbreak I’ve been hearing over the past week.I think about how so many great art spaces get swallowed up by high rents, falling business or pure exhaustion then exist only remembered as “oh my god remember?!!”, incubation grounds and meeting spaces, where people could be themselves, where artists were free to try ridiculous ideas, to experiment and fail and try again.
But what if someone did start a space again? Which started from a mutual agreement on community and communal ownership? What if it was a strong, well-organised community of artists and businesspeople? What if I found a sympathetic landlord? Haha, just kidding —
“Well I might have an idea in the works, I’ll keep you in the loop.” Jennifer tells me.
….unless?