Velda Phua



Introduction text: Lingerers,
A solo exhibition by Anna Du Toit




+




Curatorial text:
A Becoming of Things























Lingerers is the first solo show of artist and maker Anna Du Toit. Known for her intimate, layered works, the artist uses a range of mediums to revisit moments that resist closure. Several works were attended to over the span of a few years; their memories of stillness and activation remain traceable in the coalescence of faded ink, new marks, and shifting materials.

Drawn to paper for its immediacy and impermanence, Anna Du Toit explores the temporally absorbent nature of her mediums: they soften, buckle, and wear down through touch and exposure. Her process resists polish or finality. Beckoning the viewers into strange worlds, the initial unease of Du Toit’s entangled compositions gradually unravels into points of quiet contemplation.

The title Lingerers reflects this approach. To linger is to remain — sometimes beyond comfort. Within 35A, a space of pause and transformation, this invitation gains added weight. Anna Du Toit’s works ask for time, and reveal themselves slowly. 



This exhibition was co-curated by Velda Phua and Anna Du Toit. Text, photography and website elements © Velda Phua 2025. For more information, kindly click here.











Walking A way:
The Idle Saunter as a Practice of Non-Sovereignty


+


The Walking Log:
A Visual Diary








*All texts can be accessed at the bottom of the page.


What shapes your desires? This essay attempts a critical renegotiation of the covert attachments that influence our everyday.  Resisting the insidious culture of choice-making, this essay examines the idle saunter as a radical response to the neoliberal pressures of productivity and self-control by offering it as an embodiment of the practices of non-sovereignty, non-being and non-self. By embracing purposeless wandering, it seeks liberation from the rigidity of ‘humourless’ living, cruel optimism, and the paralysis of the impasse. Writings from Berlant, Cvetkovich and Daoist doctrines are woven together to form a possible tool of emancipation from this moment of ‘crisis ordinariness’.


 










Lost and Found:
A Phenomenology of Disorientation



‘I am writing this essay from my room in Peckham, London. If I were to march south-east in a straight line, I would find myself walking exactly 10,851.98 kilometres to reach my room in Seletar, Singapore. But here I am, a third-generation Singaporean-Chinese woman, living in a house a twenty-five minute drive away from the Prime Meridian of the World in Greenwich. That is the line that dictates my family and hometown lives in a temporality eight hours ahead of me, the line that inscribes itself as a ‘here’ to all ‘there’s. [...]’

Distance is not just measured in kilometers; it is felt in the rupture of familiarity, in the disjointedness of moving between places that define who we are. The experience of disorientation reveals itself not all at once, but through the gradual unraveling of what feels stable. As Sara Ahmed writes, “It matters how we arrive at the places we do.” How do we navigate the unfamiliar? How do we trace the unseen forces that shape our sense of belonging? What exactly is the consequence of Singapore’s cosmopolitan generation? Drawing from phenomenology, I confront the ungraspable impressions left by displacement and the unexpected clarity that emerges when we pause to reorient ourselves. 











Queer Disconnection,
Desire and Defiance:
The Cyberfeminist Roleplay World

What emerges in a world seemingly untethered from the physical? This essay delves into the hidden cyberspaces of Roleplay Worlds (RPW) as a unique space of queer potential.  In these digital realms, boundaries blur—between self and other, the real and the imagined, connection and disconnection.  This is a playground of possibility, where gender bends, desire reshapes, and digital bodies collide. 

By engaging with theories of gender performativity, cyberfeminism, and digital prosthesis, it reveals how RPWs challenge and redefine normative frameworks, offering radical possibilities for self-expression, communal interaction, and reimagining the relationship between the virtual and the real.  Here, identity fractures and multiplies: Every break is a new beginning.












Unveiling the
God-trick of the
Smart Pass
Vision Machine

Incheon Airport’s newly introduced 'Smart Pass' comes as yet another welcomed implementation of facial recognition technology (FRT), amidst the busy environment of modern airports where surveillance has become congruent with public safety. However, we must consider: Who is safe, and who isn’t? What ideologies drive the surveillance systems we encounter? These questions are essential to clarifying the complexities of power and control in the surveillance economy of the aviation industry. Referencing Haraway’s key text on the ‘god-trick’ of an impartial gaze, the essay offers a brief insight into the invisible stakeholders of the surveillance-economy and data privatisation, and what possible forms of resistance can look like.











 

Becoming Utopia: Lee Wen’s Journey of a Yellow Man No.1


The vivid yellow figure enters, not as a person but as a symbol. Chains scrape the ground, a body marks space, and a silent language of motion unfolds. Lee Wen’s Journey of a Yellow Man No. 1 is an embodied act of questioning identity, place, and perception. Here, a racialized body is transformed into a liminal site, a vessel for diasporic histories, colonial critiques, and ontological inquiries. Yellow becomes both wound and possibility: a glaring emblem of constructed otherness yet simultaneously a vehicle for self-transcendence. How does one tether utopia to the weight of the body? In this reading, Lee's work emerges as a profound dialogue with the "no-place" of utopia as envisioned by Michel Foucault and the Daoist notion of the non-self. It is not a conclusion but a threshold—a call to journey, to unravel boundaries, and to remake the body as an ever-becoming, utopian site.













❶ Home ❷ Information ❸ Contact