Release Date : 09 Jan 2013
Remember Clean and Green, Sharity Elephant and Singa, the Courtesy Lion? These are some of the familiar campaigns and mascots which will be featured at Campaign City: Life in Posters exhibition held from 9 January till 7 July 2013 at level 11 of the Lee Kong Chian Reference Library.
Presented by the National Library Board in collaboration with art curator, Alan Oei, visitors to this exhibition will get to see reinterpretation of campaigns that have shaped our social landscape. Also on display are seven campaign movements which rallied Singaporeans to confront the challenges in the post independence period of Singapore in the 1960s and 1970s. For this display, original campaign posters as well as news articles on these campaigns are drawn from the National Library's poster and archive newspaper collections and the National Archives. Besides the posters on display, visitors are able to view them in our library. Among these campaign movements include Anti-drug abuse, National Courtesy Campaign, and Green Singapore, Productivity Campaign and Family Planning.
Said Mrs Elaine Ng, Chief Executive Officer, NLB, “This is the first time that we are having an entire exhibition within our library. To provide a complementary setting, the exhibition is co-located with the Singapore History collection. This exhibition presents a novel way of showcasing the different perspectives of campaigns through the eyes four local artists. We hope that these thought-provoking artworks will spark off conversations about and reflections on our past.”
Said Mr Alan Oei, art curator, “We have grown up with so many campaigns and have the official narrative and accounts of different campaigns. But we do not have the voices from the ground - of real people, of real lives which were shaped by the campaigns. This is a great chance to hear what the artists have to say."
The public can take photos of themselves with the original campaign posters through the photo booths that will be located within the National Library Building. There will also be a memory reflection wall where visitors can view shared memories and pen their recollections of the campaigns.
NLB will also be organising guided tours of the exhibition and workshops conducted by the artists for visitors to try their hands at creating their own campaigns. For more information on the programmes, please visit golibrary.nlb.gov.sg.