Image caption: Dr. Kamalini Ramdas and Debbie Ding listening attentively to panelist Dr. John Solomon

By Alefiya Juzar Malubhoy. Photos by Chang Qingyang.

This Critical Conversation session aimed to set the tone for the NUS Arts Festival, themed “A Question of Time” – and indeed, it succeeded. Not only because it made me conscious of time that passed so quickly as the panelists spoke among each other, but because it left me feeling simultaneously smaller and larger as I considered the history associated with the simple act of being.

Dr. Solomon opened the discussion with a careful reflection of his own role as a social historian in cataloging the past, how to create nominal time frames that adequately represent the very real, very messy lives of real people that don’t succumb to ‘neat’ categories – something current students at NUS can probably relate to immediately in exploring our own millennial versus Gen Z generational conflict, identifying with different parts of what seems to be a distinct divide. This periodization, he concludes, alienizes everyday people, creating a ‘silence’ in history that is the historian’s responsibility to circumvent.

Debbie Ding, a visual artist, responded with a juxtaposition of this alienization with an image of a straightforward grocery list, a fragment of time that could only represent the ordinary reality of an everyday life. It was a similarly powerful list that led her to find the truth behind Palau Saigon, and in designing an exhibit for this forgotten island, she has found that artists create ‘new circuits of meaning’ that weave together the past by transporting an object from one timeline to another in a way that is only limited by imagination.

Making art out of history fills in the gaps between historical narratives, but it also leads to an ‘unforgetting’ –  a removal of context accompanied by a superimposition of meaning.

Where artists have the freedom to engage in both a metaphorical and literal construction of a fantastical past, historians solely attempt to reconstruct the truth behind the past. However, the conceptual framing of time resists the exclusivity between both these notions – time constantly grapples between linearity and discontinuity and raises one salient question: how do we stand to understand the past?

Dr. John Solomon and Debbie Ding navigate the treacherous concept of time across the sometimes narrow and sometimes wide gap between their professions, exchanging insights about historical ‘silences’ and artistic ‘meaning’ that leaves the listener with a whole new perspective on not just the past, but the present as well.

Critical Conversations: Reframing the Past was streamed live on 3 March 2021 and is available on YouTube here.