Alexandre Singh

Born in 1980 in Bordeaux, France, Alexandre Singh lives and works in New York. Singh primarily relies on the narrative conventions of storytelling and gothic literature to spin corrupt systems of knowledge, utilizing a wide range of media including video, performance and installation to lend form to his tall tales. His works explore the artist-narrator’s capacity to lead an all-too-willing audience astray along forked paths and tenuous connections, by stringing together cryptic symbols, obscure figures and soft facts drawn from a number of disparate sources, using associative thinking, word plays and tangential logic. Singh stealthily balances out the unreliability of the stories he weaves – full of dead ends and digressions – with the undeniable seduction of his captivating leaps and bounds. Rather than dwelling on the nostalgic potential of historical forms, he levels the information and materials that he borrows to an even playing field, compressesing chronological time to establish causality links between distant and unlikely events. 

The multimedia artist Alexandre Singh concocts artistic situations that intermingle the forces of logic and the occult—via collage, video, texts, performance, and installation—to question the ways in which we acquire knowledge and understand the world.

Since 2008, the artist has been presenting his work in the format of academic lectures as part of Assembly Instructions, a performative series consisting of hour-long talks on such topics as childhood memories, dreams, Jewish mysticism, and TV soap operas. Singh illustrates these lectures with a multitude of collages that he connects by drawing dotted lines between them, by hand, on the wall. One collage might present photos of Carrie Bradshaw overlapped with images of Alexander Pushkin; another might show a series of falling dominoes with the word "cause" on the first and "effect" on each thereafter.

Alexandre Singh has recently presented solo exhibitions at Monitor Gallery, Rome (2008), White Columns as part of Performa Biennial 09, New York (2009), Harris Lieberman Gallery, New York (2009), Jack Hanley Gallery, San Francisco (2008), Ballroom, Marfa, in collaboration with Justin Lowe and Jonah Freeman (2008), and Museu da Electricidade, Lisbon, in collaboration with Rita Sobral Campos (2008). His work has also been shown as part of Manifesta 8, the European Biennial for Contemporary Art, Region of Murcia (2010), “Free” at the New Museum, New York, “Dynasty” at Palais de Tokyo/MAMVP, Paris (2010), “Knight’s Move” at Sculpture Center, Queens, NY (2010), “100 Years (version #2)” at PS1-MoMA, Queens, NY (2009), “À corps et à texts” at La Galerie, Noisy-le-sec, Paris (2009) and “Of This Tale I Cannot Guarantee A Single Word”, the Curating Contemporary Art Degree Show at The Royal College of Art, London (2008).

For additional information about this artist, visit Mutual Art