Urban Play: City Crossword

Urban Play is a series of interventions in public spaces that Ahmett and Salina have devised using ‘play’ as their platform at the Singapore Bienniale these days. These interactive and participatory interventions respond to the specific problems and/or idiosyncrasies of their host cities, seeking to transform the public’s perspectives about of certain sights, spaces and behaviours that they have come to take for granted.

The public may participate in two Urban Play projects, 10 Years Later at SMU concourse and City Crossword outside Li Ka Shing library, SMU.

Innocuously playful on the surface, City Crossword raises important questions about the nature of urban planning and the public’s role in actively (re)claiming public space. The artists’ modus operandi of transforming the uses and functions of existing features of the cityscape challenges the functionalism and pragmatism that drive urban zoning imperatives in Singapore. It is in the spirit of play – play as breaking from control, and spontaneous (re)invention or improvisation – that the Urban Play interventions present an approach to rethinking the spaces we inhabit and what they mean to us.

Singapore Bienniale