Four artfully lit pedestals in the ArtScience Museum new exhibition hold curated objects.
Instead of artworks, however, the displays offer up a pile of flip-flops and small buckets of straws, among other things.
The items are just some of the plastic trash picked up along Singapore’s shores in one day by local environmental group Seven Clean Seas. They demonstrate vividly the pollution caused by plastics which Planet Or Plastic? aims to highlight.
The exhibition, a collaboration between the museum and National Geographic, is ArtScience’s first show since reopening its doors.
The show is divided into sections, covering the invention of plastics to their rise as mass consumer items to ways of combating the problem of plastic pollution.
Ms Honor Harger, ArtScience’s executive director, says it aims to present a holistic view of plastic. “To the three Rs of reduce, reuse and recycle, we need to add another R, which is to refuse to use plastic.”
The show ends with an interactive segment which, thanks to the pandemic, has redirected the museum’s traditional hands-on approach to a “feet first” interaction. A series of quizzes are set up and visitors can answer by tapping their feet on buttons.
The photography was “digitally shipped” from National Geographic and the exhibition was designed and built locally. With the pandemic in mind, the layout offers plenty of room for socially distanced viewing.
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Source: The Straits Times, 15 September 2020