Singapore arts community mourns The Substation closure as fears rise that more independent venues will disappear

Zakir Hossain Khokan, a Bangladeshi construction supervisor in Singapore, was devastated when he learned the independent contemporary arts centre called The Substation was closing in July.

Khokan, a two-time winner of the Migrant Worker Poetry Competition, was featured in a recent exhibition held in The Substation’s iconic 1920s grey-and-white building on Armenian Street. The exhibition in March focused on the island nation’s 1-million-strong low-wage foreign workforce. It was held just after the Covid-19 pandemic swept through cramped dormitories for migrant workers, including the one that Khokan, who caught the virus, was living in.

“I think that The Substation gives a lot of support to a lot of out-of-bounds topics and gives a voice to communities that don’t have a voice, like the migrant worker community,” he says. “I think that kind of support is very important, and I hope that after its closure, more doors will open.”

Among the major public figures who have spoken up about its closure is Tommy Koh, a diplomat and founding chairman of the National Arts Council (NAC), who wrote in The Straits Times that the centre was like “a beehive for artist and art lovers” where “artists young and old, of different language streams, and practitioners of different forms of art would gather at its small coffee shop or garden in the evening”.

A month since The Substation made the announcement, Singapore’s arts community is still reeling from news of its permanent closure. Named because the building used to be a power substation, The Substation was founded as Singapore’s first independent arts centre in 1990 by theatre doyen Kuo Pao Kun. The careers of some of Singapore’s most renowned artists, such as the playwright Haresh Sharma and Alvin Tan, founder of independent theatre company The Necessary Stage, were launched here.