SERPENT VESSEL/VOTIVE SPIRAL/OPHIDIAN CODEX
Singapore Biennale 2025
Serpent Vessel, Votive Spiral, and Ophidian Codex form a connected sculptural system exploring how scientific revelation is shaped by intuition, myth, and material recursion. Installed as a spatial constellation of floor sculpture, wall piece, and surrounding text, the works transform the exhibition space into a looping environment where matter, language, and image continuously feed into one another.
At the centre of the project is August Kekulé’s dream of the ouroboros—the self-consuming snake that revealed the ring structure of benzene. Rather than treating this vision as a moment of origin, the installation positions it as a point of recursion, from which alternate histories and speculative futures branch outward. Across the works, the ouroboros becomes a model for revelation itself: a structure in which discovery, error, and repetition are inseparable.
Votive Spiral and Serpent Vessel act as biomorphic reliquaries, objects that oscillate between scientific instrument and ritual device. Their forms echo biological architectures, chemical geometries, and devotional artefacts, suggesting that the act of knowing is always entangled with systems of belief.
Framing the installation, Ophidian Codex unfolds across the walls as a vinyl text work—a speculative timeline that traces moments of scientific and mystical breakthrough from antiquity to imagined futures. Each fragment layers historical record, fictional narrative, and recursive commentary, creating a metatextual field in which knowledge behaves like a living organism.
Together, the three works articulate a continuum between observation and revelation, between the rational and the irrational. They propose that every scientific insight carries within it a trace of dream, and that every dream conceals the structure of a system waiting to be understood.
Graphic Design by Darius Ou
Photography by Jonathan Tan
