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film and video art
Duration : 00:10:58
Holding Time Gently unfolds within a composite shophouse where seven characters from different decades coexist across intersecting timelines. Through small gestures of care, routine, and affection, the work reflects on how memory and intimacy quietly persist across generations.
ARTIST, DIRECTOR : Sarah Choo Jing
PRODUCER : Soh Hui Min
DOP : Charles He
MUSIC COMPOSER : Ding Jian Han
COSTUME DESIGNER : Rena Kok
EDITOR : Mathias Choo
COLORIST : Joel Chew
CONTACTS / LINKS : www.sarahchoojing.io @sarahchoojing
Holding Time Gently is a multi-channel video installation staged within a composite shophouse, bringing together seven characters across different time periods. Spanning from the 1920s to an imagined 2050s future, the work unfolds through parallel yet interconnected scenes in which each character performs subtle gestures of care, memory, and routine.
The shophouse functions not only as a physical setting, but as an intergenerational architecture through which time accumulates. Characters from different decades coexist across overlapping timelines, inhabiting the same spaces while remaining unaware of one another. Through acts such as grinding spices, folding clothes, painting, sewing, or archiving objects, everyday gestures become carriers of continuity.
Constructed using cinematic staging, multi-channel video, and spatial sound, the installation explores how memory is transmitted through domestic environments and embodied rituals. Rather than presenting history as linear progression, the work approaches time as layered and cyclical, considering how affection can persist quietly across generations.
Director’s Statement
I have long been interested in how spaces absorb the emotional residue of everyday life. In Holding Time Gently, I wanted to construct a work where time does not move linearly, but folds into itself through gestures, routines, and acts of care that quietly repeat across generations.
The shophouse became an important framework for this exploration. In Singapore, these spaces hold layered histories of migration, labour, family, and commerce. I approached the shophouse not simply as architecture, but as a vessel capable of carrying memory across time.
Rather than monumentalising history, the work focuses on small accumulations. I wanted the installation to feel like a space where past, present, and imagined futures remain in quiet conversation with one another.
Bio
Sarah Choo Jing is a Singapore based artist working across photography, moving image, and immersive installation. Her practice examines contemporary urban life, often focusing on the relationship between individuals, memory, and constructed environments. Through cinematic staging and multi-channel narratives, her works explore themes of intimacy, surveillance, isolation, and social behaviour within shared spaces.
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Pebbles Underground is focused on showcasing and promoting experimental, avant-garde, underground, and no-to-low budget projects by artist-humans from all over the world. Absurd, uncanny, witty, humorous, slow-video – all are welcomed, and loved. Pebbles Underground is an independent project not funded by any government or corporation, and we intend to keep it that way. Main source of funding is personal donations from humans organizing the project, who are artists themselves, and the main drive of the project is formed by the energy and involvement of the organizers, and the public.