War bunker-turned-art space: Why you should visit Fort Canning's Battlebox

Business Times

30-04-2025

[SINGAPORE] Hidden beneath the hillocks of Fort Canning, the Battlebox was once the British underground command centre where generals made the fateful call to surrender Singapore to the Japanese in 1942.
Today, it's a museum of wax figures and wartime tableaus open to the public – but the bunker still feels thick with the air of colonial power and political intrigue.
Now, thanks to a new exhibition titled Portals, curated by Jonathan Liu and Shireen Marican, it crackles with something else: sound art, projection mapping, artificial intelligence, and a kind of speculative electricity that only contemporary art can conjure.
'We wanted to explore the comfort and discomfort written into wartime architecture,' says Liu. 'This place was built for control. So what happens when we reclaim it and use it for reflection.'
Zul Mahmod's sculpture picks up surrounding electromagnetic frequencies and turns them into sounds resembling wartime radio transmissions. PHOTO: FINBARR FALLON
Seven Singapore-based artists were invited to respond to different parts of the Battlebox, with site-specific works that look like they've been beamed in from the future but are haunted by the past.
Take sound artist Zul Mahmod's Electromagnetic Sound: The Hidden Echoes. Tucked into what was once the generator room, his sculpture picks up surrounding electromagnetic frequencies and spits them back out as static – a ghostly hiss that suggests the room still remembers every military order and Morse-coded SOS.
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Victoria Hertel's darkmode, meanwhile, is pure sensory poetry. A series of hand-blown glass vessels dangle in the dark, lighting up and vibrating in response to your movement. 'She wanted to show how technology can sense presence even in total darkness,' says Shireen. 'There's something tender here, but also strange – like the space is alive and trying to communicate with you.'
Anthony Chin's installation reflects on the opium trade's devastating legacy – tracing its entanglement with colonial power, addiction and exploitation. PHOTO: FINBARR FALLON
Anthony Chin's piece is anything but tender. In BMA, a motorised hook tugs repeatedly at a stretched latex screen projecting colonial imagery: Lord Louis Mountbatten's limp arm, Chinese coolies, opium dens. The tension is literal – the screen strains with every pull, never quite breaking. 'It's about how colonial power never really lets go,' says Shireen. 'It's about profit, addiction, exploitation – all under the guise of liberation.'
Then there's Jake Tan's In Flux, a piece straight out of a dystopian sci-fi film. Using robotics-grade depth cameras, the artwork tracks visitors and projects ghostly silhouettes across rooms, allowing you to spy on yourself and others in real time. Not only that, he adds a spectral dimension to the installation – suggesting that the soldiers that once manned this underground bunker have not quite left.
Jake Tan's installation detects and projects human presence on the wall – but also adds a spectral dimension that suggests the dead are not quite dead. PHOTO: FINBARR FALLON
On the other side of the wall, Chen Dongyan's artworks are quieter but no less eerie. She transforms the old bunker bar into a kind of Morse-code DJ booth. As you speak or move, projections dance across the walls, translating your presence into pulsing visuals. 'It listens to you,' says Shireen. 'Like a bartender who watches and remembers everything.'
Before creating the works, the seven artists – who also include Ernest Wu and Lu Huijun – explored the site with a historian, picking up on fragments of forgotten narratives. For instance, when the Battlebox was first rediscovered in the 1980s, it was filled with rainwater and the bones of a dog trapped inside.
'There's this symbolic transfer of power that's happened,' says Liu. 'From the British to the Japanese, back to the British – and now, to the artists.' The show's underlying thesis is that technology – once the domain of war rooms and surveillance – can now be used to provoke introspection, and stir curiosity.
The Battlebox has always been a place of secrets. Now, it glows with strange new truths and conversations.
Curator-led tours, artist talks, and hands-on workshops are happening from now to June. Visit cmdexe.art for more information.