Charmaine Poh is an artist, documentarian, and writer who delves into stories centred on Asian feminist and queer experiences, navigating questions of gender norms, kinship dynamics, and queer worldmaking. Poh’s hybrid documentary series Kin (2021) delves into queer domestic life in Singapore. She highlights the dissonances experienced by queer people, whose desire to live and thrive is circumscribed by society’s idealisation of heterosexual nuclear families. In Kin, three young queer individuals contemplate notions of home and chosen family, where access to public housing hinges on heterosexual definitions of marriage. With What’s softest in the world rushes and runs over what’s hardest in the world (2024), Poh examines the struggles of queer parents in raising children when their family lacks legal legitimacy in the eyes of the state. In 2022, Singapore’s Parliament repealed Section 377a, a colonial-era law criminalising sex between men, while simultaneously entrenching the definition of marriage, quashing future efforts to establish equal marital rights for LGBTQIA+ people. Interweaving personal letters from queer parents with intergenerational practices of caregiving, the film envisions queer domestic home life – simultaneously mundane, fantastic, and complex – as a site of potential for alternative forms of community. Queer kinship becomes an open-ended horizon of relational possibilities that points beyond heteronormative orderings of intimacy, desire, care, and reproduction.
This is the first time the work of Charmaine Poh is presented at Biennale Arte.
—Joleen Loh
