Brandon Tay: Sangkalan

Sangkalan is a fictional island imagined by artist Brandon Tay. Through sculptures, textiles, and texts, the exhibition presents fragments of a lost culture shaped by its close relationship with nature. The installation unfolds as a growing archive, introducing visitors to the island’s ecosystem through three organisms: a fruit, an insect, and a bird. Together, they form the basis of how the inhabitants of Sangkalan understand their world.

At the centre of this imagined ecology is the Ta’Lur fruit, which produces shared hallucinations among those who consume it. These visions reflect the behaviour of two other species on the island: the Selantri insect and the Zaraun bird. The insect’s cycles of pollination and reproduction, together with the bird’s shifting songs and flight paths, allow the people of Sangkalan to perceive patterns within their environment and recognise changes across time. The colourful textiles on display function as a form of record-keeping. Instead of written language, they use colour, geometry, and repeating patterns to document environmental changes on the island.

Tay draws a parallel between this imagined ecosystem and blockchain technology, a digital system in which information is recorded and shared across a network rather than stored in a single place. On Sangkalan, knowledge is similarly distributed across the island’s fruit, insect and bird, forming a living system through which information about the environment is generated and remembered.

From April to October, Brandon Tay: Sangkalan will travel to National Library Board locations in Woodlands, Tampines, Jurong, and Punggol. With each presentation, the archive grows, gradually revealing the imagined history of the lost culture of Sangkalan. Through this fictional archive, the exhibition invites us to think differently about how we gather and process information through digital technologies. By prioritising the rhythms of the natural world, and not the logic of machines, the exhibition’s underlying narrative asks us to consider how our senses might record memory, and how such memories are understood, shared, and passed on.

about the artist

Brandon Tay
Brandon Tay (b. 1981) is a Singaporean artist whose work explores the speculative potential of emerging technologies. In his practice, he engages with varying permutations of the moving image, experimental game cultures, generative AI and sculptural objects. Tay uses metafictional worldbuilding strategies to challenge common assumptions about how technology functions in our lives.