iSingapore Art MuseumTanjong Pagar
Lost & Found: Sea Chanty Project
First phase of a multi-part curatorial project: three commissioned music videos on maritime work songs, exploring displacement, labour and sonic memory.
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Three ghostly fishermen in pastel punk clothes move in slow motion around the body of a fourth for a burial at sea while a Pop Melayu ballad croons about longing for shore. That is Riar Rizaldi's Larung, named for the funerals Indonesian crews hold for colleagues who die on board. Talking Shorts called it a "pastel-coloured limbo state between reality and afterlife".
SAM commissioned three short music videos on the sea work song. You press play on Tirta Maya first: six minutes of gamelan, langgam and dangdut over a whirl of drawings, text and found footage, sinking from the cosmic ocean to the womb to the underworld. Vien Valencia's imprint of an imprint of an imprint closes in under three minutes, with field recordings of the Philippines' Tinipak River, threatened by a dam, over 500 rubbings of its rocks.
Nothing is at Tanjong Pagar. It's a virtual exhibition, free to stream from SAM's website until 31 December 2026, and the three videos run about 14 minutes in all.
Look for
Larung's sea burial (Riar Rizaldi)
Fashionably dressed punk fishermen, filmed on a set, move in slow motion through a funeral for a dead crewmate, choreographed to a crooning Pop Melayu lament and the waves.
Tirta Maya's three depths (Rosemainy Buang and Zachary Chan)
A collage of drawings, animated graphics, text and found footage descends through the cosmic ocean, the womb and the underworld, to a gamelan-and-dangdut song with call and response.
The Tinipak rock rubbings (Vien Valencia)
Some 500 rubbings of the river's giant white marbled rocks, made with Dumagat-Remontado youth, pass over field recordings of water, birds and cicadas.
Good for
- An Hour Or Less
- Cheap Culture
- Locals Who've Seen It All
Skip if
You want to visit SAM in person: these are three online music videos, with nothing in the galleries.
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Image credits
5
- Lost & Found: Sea Chanty ProjectCourtesy of Singapore Art Museum
- Fear No Power: Women Imagining OtherwiseCourtesy of National Gallery Singapore
- SINGAPORAMA by Navin RawanchaikulCourtesy of National Gallery Singapore
- Singapore Art MuseumSgconlaw, CC BY-SA 4.0
- Chinatown Heritage CentreSengkang / Wikimedia Commons