with works from A City in Miniature and by artists C&G, Heman Chong, Ho Rui An, Serene Hui,
Joaen, Josh Kline, Kwan Sheung Chi, Michael Lee, Li, Yong Xiang, Charles Lim, Margaret Tan,
Arlette Quỳnh-Anh Trần, Wang Tuo, and Tisya Wong

From 17—26 January 2025, The Utopia of Rules exhibition, curated by …, took place in 72-13 in Singaopre. The DGI is happy to share some notes and pictures from the curators. You can find out more about the book and read the essays feauted in it on our website.

Bureaucracy is a defining feature of contemporary life, embodying the social contracts and financialised logics that permeate how we value our time, labour, relationships, and even the afterlife. Borrowing its title from David Graeber’s 2015 book, The Utopia of Rules recovers historic and recent artworks that have engaged with bureaucracy and its aesthetics.

Installation view of The Utopia of Rules at 72-13, Singapore. Courtesy of Ahmad Iskandar. 

Structured as a front office and its backroom, the exhibition weaves through the bureau—the infrastructure of the office including furniture and archival documents that confer legitimacy and authority—and through assets—the house and its attendant technologies, or the artwork upon which social contracts are negotiated. In turn, it is through these objects and how they condition
our experiences that our democracies are conceptualised. The artworks in this exhibition reflect upon the agencies that can be found in paperwork and the attendant forms of bureaucratic labor found in observing legal limits, personal relationships with censors, the financialisation of public housing, or in operating a vacuum or mobile phone.

If everyday bureaucracy imposes an anti-social framework upon human beings, the artists in this exhibition present artworks that speak to the affective relationships of conforming to totalitarian technologies and systems. Our unevenness of encounter with the uniformity and standardisation demanded by bureaucracy conditions everyday life and artistic production. As some of the artworks suggest, bureaucracy was not designed to work for human beings. In light of our accelerated drive to automatise work and streamline systems, how do we make bureaucracy work? The exhibition, itself a product of following rules and filing paperwork,
materialises the limitations and opportunities of working with such regulating logics.

Acknowledgements
Curated by Hera Chan and Kathleen Ditzig
Exhibition Design by Joshua Comaroff
Graphic and Web design by Vanessa Ban
Audio-visual media by Art Factory
Supported by NAC, T:Works, Joshua and Shing Comaroff