Putar Alam Café

Putar alam in Malay means charlatan, a person who deceives and tricks other people for his or her own selfish benefit. Putar Alam Café is an interactive space with a transistor radio, a television broadcasting a news channel (with the volume muted), and recent works by the artist. This café will be stationed at the SAM at 8Q plaza throughout the duration of the Singapore Biennale 2016, with the artist acting as a ‘bartender’ as well as a ‘mediator’. He serves food and drinks, which he either buys from shops or prepares himself, to the audience-customers. He also manages and mediates the conversations and debates among them, drawing them to respond to the information they hear over the radio, news stories on the television, or images of his artworks.The work is a social experiment to show how the media, possibly the greatest charlatan of them all, profoundly affects our perception and understanding of things around us.