Copies of tabla! can be difficult to find on certain weeks.
But it seems anonymous graffiti artist Banksy managed to get his hands on one recently, for an art-piece on display at the Royal Plaza on Scotts hotel.
Banksy’s guerilla-style political art, which has popped up on streets in cities worldwide, finally graced vandalism-tough Singapore last month – albeit indoors.
More than 170 of his artworks are on show at The Art Of Banksy: Without Limits, which has toured globally and been viewed by more than 2.1 million visitors since 2016.
Banksy, whose career as a freehand graffiti artist started in the early 1990s, has since created a distinctive visual idiom with his spray paint, stencils and knack for creating digestible anti-establishment images.
An exclusive highlight of the Singapore exhibition is a custom-built entrance featuring a lobby styled after Banksy’s controversial boutique hotel The Walled Off Hotel, which opened in Bethlehem, West Bank, in 2017 and offers “the worst view in the world”.
Other highlights by the self-styled prankster include Dismaland, described by the artist as a “family theme park unsuitable for children”; a print of the iconic Flower Thrower, which was stencilled onto a mural in the West Bank in 2003; and his apocalyptic sculpture of a submerged British telephone booth.
And then of course, this “tabla-inspired” seated mannequin, which might be an interpretation of how a mannequin would sit and rest in between long shifts of gruelling window modelling.
Of course, it would be reading tabla! during its break.
