A recent transplant from the National Gallery Singapore, Charmaine Toh tells CNA Women how life has changed after her move to London, what her work entails and what to expect from her debut exhibition at Tate Modern next year.
After weaving multiple narratives of Singapore and Southeast-Asian photography, Charmaine Toh felt the need to tell a bigger story, which her new role at Tate allows her to do. It has been five months since Charmaine Toh moved from Singapore to London to start her new job and new life. She is the first Singaporean to be“It’s not that the food here is bad,” she told CNA Women over a call on Google Meet.
Curation, if nothing else, is storytelling. And having woven multiple narratives of Singapore and Southeast Asia back home, Toh felt the need to tell a bigger story. “This kind of international collection allows me to really challenge the history of photography and the history of art, which I couldn’t really do in Singapore.”Toh’s first exercise in this regard, Global Pictorialism, is slowly taking shape.
The kind of artwork I have access to, and the kind of programmes and exhibitions I can curate, it’s expanded a lot, which is why I took the job. It was Toh’s expertise in Southeast Asian art that led to her appointment at Tate. “These guys were active in the 1950s and 1960s, and not just in Singapore. They were exhibiting around the world because their works were good enough to be exhibited around the world,” Toh said.
The 18-month process is fast by curatorial standards, she told CNA Women, considering the scale of the exhibition – an international showcase with 250 works. By comparison, her last exhibition at NGS, Living Pictures, which showcased 300 works, took five years to put together. Much of Toh’s time will be spent researching the works for her debut exhibition Global Pictorialism and coordinating overseas loans.
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