Place.Labour.Capital. – NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore

Since the 1990s, contemporary art in Thailand has achieved considerable international recognition. While many Thai artists have shed identification with their nation, “Thainess” remains an interpretive crutch for understanding their work. In the first scholarly book on the subject since 1992, Dr David Teh examines the competing claims to contemporaneity staked in Thailand, and on behalf of Thai art elsewhere, against a backdrop of sustained political and economic turmoil.

Part of Symposium: Ghosts and Spectres – Shadows of History

This walk is developed to explore how a city can be, if experienced outside of one’s routines. When we change environment, the new conditions affect the senses. Through light, sound and scent, our awareness of space changes dramatically. Composer and sound researcher Dr PerMagnus Lindborg will focus on the perception of sound and its design in complex environments and how this extends to all our senses.

The aim of this walk is to experience the city anew, outside of one’s routines under the guidance of Sissel Tolaas, who has been studying smells since the early 1990s. By a conscious use of the sense of smell, participants will navigate and explore various parts of Singapore, rediscovering the city through a different sense perception.

28 Oct 2016, Fri 4:00pm – 6:00pm
17 Jan 2017, Tue 05:30 PM – 07:00 PM
19 Jan 2017, Thu 09:00 AM – 10:30 AM

Mapletree and NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (NTU CCA Singapore) will co-present the Discursive Picnic on 14 October as part of Archifest 2017, with the objective to gather the community to public spaces at Mapletree Business City II. The event is organised under the Mapletree-NTU CCA Singapore Public Art Education Programme which aims to promote art appreciation to the general public. The event will kickstart with a walking tour of MBC II led by the building architect from DCA Architects Pte Ltd, the landscape architect director Prapan Napawongdee from Shma Company Limited, and curators of MBC II’s public art commissions, Professor Ute Meta Bauer and Khim Ong from NTU CCA Singapore.

Through poetry readings, well-known local poet Isa Kamari, who serves as the Deputy Director of Architecture (Design) at Singapore’s Land Transport Authority, will share stories behind urban architecture and young poet, Samuel Lee, will stand in dialogue with poetry interventions. The tour will be followed by a discussion, moderated by NTU CCA Singapore Assistant Professor Sophie Goltz, at the Green Bowl, an amphitheatre within the lush and green Central Park at MBC II. Participants, curators, and architects will have the chance to share their ideas of working with space between business/work and art/leisure.

This talk looks at the Non-Aligned exhibition as a speculative point-of-view on the past that suggests that the capacity to imagine new or other futures emerges only from an embodied encounter with disappointment. Taking this as a point of departure, Dr Roy will discuss the figurative and formal legacies of “Third World Man” as a way of engaging the historiographical and artistic strategies of the works on view, and their evocation of image-based temporalities that survive the episode of postcolonial closure.

BIOGRAPHY

Dr Tania Roy is Senior Lecturer, and Chair of the Graduate Programme, in English Literature at NUS. She is the author of Adorno and the Architects of Late Style in India: Aesthetic Form after the Twentieth-century Novel (Routledge, 2020). At NUS, she teaches topics in Critical Theory, especially the aesthetics of the Frankfurt School, trauma studies, postcolonial and world literatures. Related interests on art after the liberalization of the Indian economy considered, especially, as a response to civic violence under the current dispensation of far-Right supremacism, have appeared as book-chapters and articles in journals, including, boundary 2, Theory, Culture and Society, Political Culture, The European Legacy, and The Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy.

This event marks the Asian premiere of artist, academic, and agitator Tan Kai Syng’s lecture performance the author conceived to launch her monograph, Neuro-Futurism and Re-Imagining Leadership: An A-Z towards Collective Liberation(Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). An uproarious manifesto that blazes new ways to think about and perform ‘leadership’, the book offers a change-making heuristic tool kit to individuals and institutions that want to challenge normative structures of power and knowledge. Practicing tentacular thinking, Kai Syng concocts a unique intersectional recipe for ‘neuro-futurism’ out of an eclectic mix of discourses, including creative pedagogy, critical studies, social justice, altermobilities, and Daoist cosmology among others. The lecture performance will be followed by a conversation with Dr Karin G Oen, NTU CCA Director.

A limited number of copies will be available for purchase.

Ng Mei Jia is currently Research Associate at the School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University, managing the research projects Climate Transformation Programme (2024–2027), Developing and Evaluating Digital Tools for Participatory Climate Change Mitigation (2025–2026) and a research assistant on Climate Crisis and Cultural Loss (2021–2024), Environmentally-Engaged Artistic Practices in South, Southeast Asia and the Pacific (2021–2023), and Understanding Southeast Asia as a ‘Geocultural’ Formation (2021–2023). She was previously a Project Officer (Intangible Cultural Heritage) at the National Heritage Board, Singapore. Mei Jia holds an MA in Southeast Asian Studies from the National University of Singapore.

ila and anGie Seah (both Singapore)
Between a Rock and a Cloud
Performance, approx. 45 minutes

POSTPONED:

Sunday, 30 September 2023
4.30pm – 5.30pm
NTU CCA Singapore Seminar Room
38 Malan Road, #01-04
Singapore 109441

Event is free.

Thinking about care as a form of labour that is often unnoticed and not adequately remunerated, in this collaborative performance anGie and ila explore a spectrum of physical gestures culled out from both institutional frameworks of care-giving, such as hospitals and clinics, and the more intimate setting of the domestic environment. Through a choreography of bodily movements and sounds that are partly intentional, partly improvised, partly interactive, the two performers reimagine the embodied experience of care-giving bringing forth its physical and emotional gravity as well as its unrelenting quest for comfort, lightness, and relief.

BIOGRAPHIES

ila’s (Singapore) practice encompasses performance, photography, and other mediums, and weaves her own body and emotions to create alternative entry points to encounter the peripheries of lived experiences and unspoken narratives. She often reconfigures and merges speculative fiction with factual histories to conceive sites for empathy and connectivity in her work. She has participated in group shows at Singapore Biennale, National Gallery Singapore and in festivals such as ASEAN-EU Cultural Festival. ila was an Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore as part of Cycle 7.

anGie seah (Singapore) thinks about the oneness and porousness of life & art, and thrives on being, lives and practices art with the radical acceptance of the agency of uncertain elements of life. She is fascinated by the splendour of the everyday; her multidisciplinary art practice traverses the mediums of drawing, sculpture, performance art, sound, installation and video. For more than a decade, she has been active in creating participatory art projects with diverse communities locally and internationally. Working within a community gives her a chance to be with the reality of life through people. In recent years she has been involved in local theatre productions, creating set and sound design. anGie is also part of a music band, Qianpima and the artistic director of ITBA (Islands time-based art ) festival in Singapore. anGie was an Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore as part of Cycle 2.

Since 2020, Joy Chee has been the resident bartender/gardener (or bardener, if you will) at Native, a Singaporean restaurant-bar focused on working with local and regional craftsmen and communities. Drawn to them for their ethos of sustainability and commitment to highlighting native produce, she has been working on rewilding the gardens with local kampung herbs and supporting the garden-to-table concept. When she’s not elbow-deep in compost, she can be found shaking up a cocktail or two at 52 Amoy Street.

Ana Sophie Salazar (1990) was Assistant Curator for Exhibitions at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore. She graduated with an MA in Curatorial Practice from the School of Visual Arts, New York, and a BA in Piano from the Music School of Lisbon. She investigates the crossing of disciplines and nomadic, poly-lingual, transcultural subjectivities.

Zac Langdon-Pole’s projects often take their point of departure in social structures of representation and organisation in order to question how and for whom such structures are posed. His current research relates specifically to the regions of Southeast Asia and the South West Pacific, and is centred on the mythology and historical cultural exchange of the so called ‘birds of paradise’ from Papua New Guinea. His interest lies in how within procedures of cultural exchange the loss of, or transposing and translating of information can itself be a process of formation. Two ideas that are currently helping to inform his research are Walter Benjamin’s notion of ‘the wish image’ that stands at the intersection of materialism and mythology and Peter Mason’s explanation of the process of ‘exotification’, in his book Infelicities. This is the idea that the exotic is not something that exists prior to its ‘discovery’ but rather is formed in the very act of discovery itself.

Inspired by the idea of expanded sculptural environments, the artworks explore the interplay between landscape, architecture, and the broader social and economic environments they are placed in. More than being monumental or site-specific, each work alters or permeates its local context to invite visitors to a broader, richer engagement.

Mapletree Business City II Public Art Trail Video Tour

Yinka Shonibare CBE RA, an artist of African descent, was born in London and grew up in Nigeria, returning to London only in his late teens. His work explores issues of colonialism and postcolonialism within the contemporary context of globalisation, as well as race and class. Mixing Western art history and literature, he questions the construct of collective contemporary identity and its meaning within cultural and national definitions. Shonibare has participated in major international art exhibitions, including the 52nd and 57th Venice Biennale and Documenta11. His works are in prominent collections, including the Tate Collection, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; National Gallery of Modern Art, Rome; and VandenBroek Foundation, the Netherlands. In 2004, Shonibare was nominated for the Turner Prize, the most prestigious annual art prize in United Kingdom, and was awarded the decoration of Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE). Fifteen years later, in January 2019, Shonibare was awarded Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE). That same year, he held a solo exhibition at the Norval Foundation in Cape Town, Trade Winds: Yinka Shonibare CBE, which featured works connected by their use of Dutch wax fabric and a major installation that celebrates the contributions of immigrant and non-immigrant Africans, The African Library.

Stemming from personal circumstances—due to his father’s employment as commander of the prison tactical unit, the artist grew up in Changi Prison’s quarters —Morton developed a direct, albeit unspoken, intimacy with the tortuous ethical issues and psychological consequences related to the most extreme form of law enforcement. Through researching archival materials, oral histories as well as literature and films from post-independence Singapore, the artist plans to interweave the nightmares and traumas experienced by both the punisher and the punished by steeping the fictional narrative into Malayan myths, folk music, and vernacular architecture.

In this episode of AiRCAST, we venture into the mysterious and mobile mindscape of our Artist-in-Residence, Russell Morton. During the residency, Russell has been deeply immersed in the development of his most ambitious project to date, his first feature film. Find out how a grim, largely forgotten historical event and past personal experiences will contribute to shape the narrative and the ambience of the film. The artist also reveals how he managed to overcome ‘the anxiety of influence’ and expands on his fascination for Southeast Asian folklore, the psychological underpinnings of horror films, and the role music plays in his work.

The filmic and performative practice of Russell Morton (b. 1982, Singapore) explores folkloric myths, esoteric rituals, and the conventions of cinema itself. His film Saudade (2020) was commissioned for State of Motion: Rushes of Time, Asian Film Archives, Singapore, and presented at the 31st Singapore International Film Festival (2020); The Forest of Copper Columns (2015) won the Cinematic Achievement Award at the 57th Thessaloniki Film Festival, Greece (2016) and was selected for several festivals including the Short Shorts Film Festival, Tokyo, Japan (2017); the Thai Short Film and Video Festival, Bangkok, Thailand and Jogja-NETPAC Asian Film Festival, Indonesia (both 2016).

Contributor: Russell Morton
Conducted by: Anna Lovecchio
Programme Manager: Kristine Tan
Sound Engineer: Rudi Osman
Intro & Outro Music: Tini Aliman
Cover Image & Design: Arabelle Zhuang, Kristine Tan

Credits:
11:53: Audio excerpt from Island of Hope, National Archives Website, Record date 1960s, https://www.nas.gov.sg/archivesonline/audiovisual_records/recorddetails/46b4445e-1164-11e3-83d5-0050568939ad
21:35: Recording from Russell Morton’s site visit to a kelong in Singapore. Courtesy the artist.
25:48: Audio excerpt from Russell Morton’s Saudade, 2020. Music by Syafii Ghazali. Courtesy the artist
35:20: Audio excerpt from Tani Yutaka, Marai no Tora, 1943 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lTigyqta_k]
36:58: Audio excerpt from “Siapa Dia” by Zainab Majid, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gDHPP6K-mA]

[See Full Transcript]

https://player.vimeo.com/api/player.js

Akiko Fukai (September 10, 1943) is a Japanese curator of fashion and textile arts. She received a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in fashion history from National University of Ochanomizu and studied at Paris-Sorbonne University. Currently, Fukai is the Director and Chief Curator of the Kyoto Costume Institute.

Apolonija Šušteršič, is an architect and visual artist, is a former Visiting Researher at NTU CCA Singapore. Her work is related to a critical analysis of space, usually focused at the processes and relationships between institutions, cultural politics, urban planning, and architecture. Šušteršič broad-ranging interest starts at a phenomenological study of space and continutes its investigation into the social and political nature of our living environment. Together with architect and researcher Meike Schalk, she formed an operative unit, which occasionally produces research, projects, actions, and discussions. Šušteršič is currently Professor of Art & Public Space, Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Norway and has her own art / architecture studio practice in Lund, Sweden and in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Reseach Focus

Contemporary art/ activist practices and current urban struggles over the provision of green spaces in large cities

Azra Akšamija is a Sarajevo born artist and architectural historian. She is the Career Development Professor and Assistant Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Art, Culture and Technology Programme. In her multi-disciplinary work, Akšamija investigates the politics of identity and memory on the scale of the body (clothing and wearable technologies), on the civic scale (religious architecture and cultural institutions), and within the context of history and global cultural flows.

Akšamija was trained in architecture at the Technical University Graz, Austria (Dipl.Ing. in 2001) and Princeton University (M.Arch. in 2004), and received her PhD in History of Islamic Art and Architecture from MIT (History Theory and Criticism of Art and Architecture / Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture) in 2011.

Akšamija’s work has been published and exhibited in leading international venues such as at the Generali Foundation Vienna, Valencia Biennial, Gallery for Contemporary Art Leipzig, Liverpool Biennial, Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, Sculpture Center New York, Secession Vienna, Manifesta 7, Stroom The Hague, the Royal Academy of Arts London, Jewish Museum Berlin, Queens Museum of Art in New York, and the Fondazione Giorgio Cini as a part of the 54th Art Biennale in Venice.

Research Focus

Azra Akšamija’s projects explore the potency of art and architecture to facilitate the process of transformative conflict mediation though cultural pedagogy, and in so doing, provide a framework for analysing and intervening in contested socio-political realities. Her recent work focuses on the representation of Islam in the West, architectural forms of nationalism in the Balkans since the 1990s, and the role of cultural institutions and heritage in constructing common good in divided societies. Akšamija investigates the role of cultural and religious identity in conflicts, especially in the recent history of the Yugoslavian war and its aftermath.

Piers Masterson is a writer, curator, and lecturer based in London with professional interests in contemporary visual arts development, gallery management, museums, and public art. He has has curated and commissioned numerous exhibitions and projects by artists including Sinta Tantra, Chila Burman, Suki Chan, Mona Hatoum, Faisal Abdu’Allah, and Isaac Julien, and has been closely working with the British Museum’s Raffles Collection.

Research Focus

In addition to publishing of History of Java (1817), Raffles curated displays of objects and pictures from Southeast Asia in his London homes. Through these displays, Raffles promoted several archetypes for colonial fantasies of Southeast Asia that were recirculated through the 20th century. During the fellowship, Masterson will examine the ways in which contemporary Singaporean artists appropriate and re-contextualise these images of the tropics for their specific aims.

Kelly Reedy has worked in Singapore for over 18 years as an artist and educator. She holds a BFA in Fine Art (University of Wisconsin, 1985), MA in Education (Hunter College, 1991), MA in Art Therapy (LASALLE College of the Arts, 2017). She has exhibited her artworks internationally in Paris, Chicago, and Berlin, as well as locally at Jendela Visual Arts Space, Esplanade, Singapore Tyler Print Institute, and Alliance Fran.aise. Reedy has developed educational resources for the National Gallery Singapore and trained teachers at the National Institute of Education, specialising in visual arts education in museums and galleries.

Contemporary art is an excellent educational resource that lends itself to inquiry-based and experiential learning, and encourages creativity, self-expression, and critical thinking. By using the Centre’s past exhibitions and programmes as examples, this guide is developed to help educators explore cross-disciplinary subjects and pedagogical strategies while engaging with contemporary art.

Published by NTU CCA Singapore, 2021
Edited by Kelly Reedy in collaboration with NTU CCA Singapore
Design by mono.studio
© 2021 by NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore

ISBN: 978-981-14-9585-4
Distributed by NTU CCA Singapore

To purchase your copy, please contact ntuccapublications@ntu.edu.sg

Subjectively, Newell Harry’s interests and work touch on diverse fields from religion and language, to the postcolonial impacts of trade and globalisation. An itinerant wanderer, his work is largely formed through a complex web of intercultural engagements bridging Australia’s east coast, the Vanuatu archipelago, South Asia, and his extended family’s home in Cape Town. These interests often culminate in installations drawing together a combination of media, generally unrestricted by any singular approach or application. Whilst in Singapore as an NTU CCA Artist-in-Residence, Harry looks at the under represented connections between the Cape Malay of South Africa and the Straits Malay linking these two histories to interchanges on the Malay Peninsula.

Newell Harry of South African and Mauritian descent, has for over a decade drawn from an intimate web of recurring travels and connections across Oceania and the wider Asia-Pacific, to South Africa’s Western Cape Province, where the artist’s extended family continues to reside. From Pidgin and Creole languages to modes of exchange in the “gift economies” of the South Pacific, Harry’s interests often culminate in culturally “entangled” installations. Selected exhibitions include Tidalectics, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art 21, Vienna (2017); Endless Circulation: Tarrawarra Biennial, curated Victoria Lynn & Helen Hughes, Tarrawarra, Victoria (2016); The 56th Venice Biennale: All the Worlds Futures (2015);Suspended Histories, Museum Van Loon, Amsterdam (2013); Rendez Vous 11 & 12, Institut d’Art Contemporain, Villebanne (2011) and South African National Gallery, Cape Town (2012); Untitled (12th Istanbul Biennial) (2011); The 17th Biennale of Sydney: The Beauty of Distance, Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age (2010); and The Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Before and After Science (2010).

Between February and April 2015, Harry was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore where he looked into the under-presented colonial connections between the Cape Malay of South Africa and the Straits Settlements.

Hendrik Folkerts (b. 1984, Netherlands) is one of the curators of documenta 14. He studied Art History at the University of Amsterdam, specializing in contemporary art and theory, feminist practices and contemporary curatorial practices. From 2010 until 2015, he was Curator of Performance, Film & Discursive Programmes at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Folkerts curated the Public Programme of The Temporary Stedelijk at the Stedelijk Museum, a special interim program that was presented from August 2010 until October 2011, as well as Temporary Stedelijk 3: Stedelijk @ (TS3) from October 2011 until September 2012. Prior to his position at the Stedelijk Museum, Folkerts was co-ordinator of the Curatorial Programme at De Appel arts centre in Amsterdam from 2009 until 2011. He frequently publishes in journals and on platforms such as Artforum, The Exhibitionist, Metropolis M and for the Stedelijk Museum (Bureau) Amsterdam. Folkerts is (co)editor of Shadowfiles: Curatorial Education (Amsterdam: de Appel arts centre, 2013, ed. with Ann Demeester) and Facing Forward: Art & Theory from a Future Perspective (Amsterdam: AUP, 2015, ed. with Christoph Lindner and Margriet Schavemaker).

Gary Ross Pastrana will collect “Fifty Shared Words” as a response to the overlaps in histories and languages in the various parts of Southeast Asia. With these words he will write short descriptions, musings, meditations or anecdotes about each word, comparable in format with Primo Levi’s Periodic Table. Research will be kept to informal conversations with artists and other everyday people encountered during the residency to keep the whole experience direct, unmediated, and current. The aim is not to come up with an academic linguistic study but to encounter words in actual usage by real people and in the process learn through communication. Short stays in other neighboring countries like Malaysia and Indonesia, (to meet artists and visit artists communities) is also worked into the plan to expose to varying settings and the more subtle differences in context and usage of the words.

Erika Tan (b. 1967, Singapore) is an artist and Lecturer at Central Saint Martins, London. Her research-led practice develops from an interest in received narratives, contested heritage, subjugated voices, and the transnational movement of ideas, people, and objects. Between July and August 2015, Tan was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore where she continued her research into the minor historical figure of the Malay weaver Halimah and the conditions surrounding the 1924 British Empire Exhibiton, an inquiry that has since developed into the video installations APA JIKA, The Mis-Placed Comma and The ‘Forgotten’ Weaver (both in 2017).

Since 2008, Emily Pethick (b. 1975, United Kingdom) has been Director of The Showroom, London, United Kingdom, a contemporary art space committed to collaborative and process-driven approaches to cultural production within its locality and beyond. She was previously Director of Casco, Office for Art, Design and Theory, in Utrecht, the Netherlands (2005-2008) and curator at Cubitt, London, United Kingdom (2003-2004). Pethick is currently teaching the course Curating Positions at the Dutch Art Institute, Arnhem, the Netherlands. She is also working on a research project for a new institution in Amsterdam led by Stedelijk Museum and Ammodo, both in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Pethick has contributed to numerous catalogues and magazines, including Artforum, Frieze, Afterall, and The Exhibitionist, and edited numerous publications including Wendelien van Oldenborgh’s monograph Amateur (2016), and Cluster: Dialectionary (with Binna Choi, Maria Lind and Natasa Petresin-Bachelez, 2014). Pethick is also a jury member for the 2017 Turner Prize.

Duto Hardono (b. 1985, Indonesia) is a conceptual artist and educator based in Bandung, Indonesia. Originally trained in painting, his practice traverses the two-dimensionality of collages and drawings to the dynamic incorporation of readymade materials such as everyday objects, old musical instruments, records and cassette tapes in his installations and performances. Often drawing reference from popular culture, conceptual art and anti-art movements, his works are peppered with touches of dark humour and irony in its aim to examine the relationship and paradoxes between humans and time through sound.

Hardono has participated in numerous international solo and group exhibitions including: Biennale Jogja XII Equator #2: Not A Dead End, Jogja National Museum, Indonesia (2013) and The 9th Shanghai Biennale: Reactivation, Bandung Pavilion for Intercity Pavilion, China (2012). Solo exhibitions include Klab Lucifer, Ark Gallery, Indonesia (2014) and Good Love, Bad Joke, Selasar Sunaryo Art Space, Indonesia (2010). He was nominated for the Asia Awards Young Creator Grand Prix, Tokyo Designers Week (2014).

Chia-Wei Hsu (b. 1983, Taiwan) an artist, filmmaker, and curator based in Taiwan whose work merges the language of contemporary art and film, often unveiling the complex production apparatus – cameras, camera cranes, lighting kits, microphones, etc. – employed in the filmmaking process. In his practice, Hsu unearths histories of the Cold War in Asia buried in precise geographical locations and brings them back to life through narrative and visual sequences that blend myth and reality, historical documentation and fictional developments. Fabricating a mythical narrative where stories, spirits, and machineries unfold on the same level, Hsu maintains a critical attitude toward the structure of film and often seeks to present his projects outside of museums and other contemporary art venues.

Chia-Wei Hsu’s works have been presented in numerous exhibitions and festivals worldwide, including Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2017); Cinema Muzeul Țăranului, Bucharest, Romania (2016); 4th Taiwan International Video Art Exhibition, Hong-Gah Museum, Taipei (2014); 55th International Venice Biennale, Italy (2013); 2012 Taipei Biennial, Taiwan, (2012); Beirut Art Center, Lebanon (2012); Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2011). He was Artist-in-Residence at Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Germany (2014) and at the International Studio and Curatorial Program, New York, United States, (2010). In 2013, he was a finalist for the Hugo Boss Asia Art Award. From 2011 to 2013, he was appointed director of Open Contemporary Art Center in Taipei, Taiwan.

The practice of Buen Calubayan (b. 1980, Philippines) interweaves politics, religion, history, and identity combining the autobiographical with the art historical in a continuous process of re-contextualization. In his works, the historical influence of Western canons on Filipino art and his own personal struggle to find validation as an artist often merge with broader reflections on the greater state of affairs of his country and the problematic writing of its socio-cultural histories. His most recent solo shows include Biowork at Ateneo Art Gallery, Quezon City, Philippines (2015) and Idiot Knows No Country, La Trobe University Visual Arts Center, Bendigo, Australia (2014). He has presented his paintings, performances, sculptures, and conceptual works in international group exhibitions at the Gwangju Museum of Art, South Korea and at Kunstvlaai: Festival of Independents, Amsterdam, Netherlands, amongst others. He received the 2013 Ateneo Art Awards for the project Spoliarium which reinterpreted an iconic painting by Filipino master Juan Luna and was awarded the 13 Artists Award by the Cultural Centre of the Philippines in 2009.

The artist’s residency was scheduled from July to September 2020. Due to the COVID-19 virus outbreak and international travel restrictions, the residency could not be carried out as planned.

Research Focus

Continuing his long-term critical examination of everyday life focused on the patterns of labour, leisure, and sleep produced by the “eternal wakefulness” of 24/7 capitalist economies, Danilo Correale intends to further investigate the global phenomenon of outsourced labour and its deep ramifications within Southeast Asia. The artist aims to problematize the differences between night- and day-culture by understanding how nocturnal time and urban nightscapes are inhabited and modified by shift workers operating across different time zones, the profound impact on their bodily rhythms, and the affective relationships within their communities. The realm of the night is therefore framed as a ‘back-door’ to examine the effects of late capitalism on society and understand how BPO (Business Process Outsourced) economy alters urban, cultural, and biological human ecosystems. Building upon fieldwork previously conducted in India and the Philippines, Correale will now further develop his project by taking advantage of Singapore’s unique position within the regional and global economic map.

The practice of Danilo Correale critiques contemporary life and investigates the opacity surrounding complex cultural and economic systems. In recent years, his research revolves around the dichotomy between labour and leisure and the relation between sleep and enforced wakefulness under the neoliberal economic regime. His work has been presented in numerous international group exhibitions and his solo shows include They Will Say I Killed Them, Metropolitan Arts Centre, Belfast, United Kingdom (2019); At Work’s End, Art in General, New York, United States (2017); and Tales of Exhaustion, La Loge, Brussels, Belgium (2016). In 2017, he was awarded both the New York Prize for Italian Young Art and an Associate Research Fellowship at Columbia University.

Art Labor is an artist collective. Comprised of artists Phan Thao Nguyen and Truong Cong Tung, and curator Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran, Art Labor works across visual arts and social sphere. In December 2015, Art Labor were Artists-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore where they recreated a Hammock Café serving traditional Vietnamese coffee, similar to itinerant roadside-resting spots for drivers and passengers along provincial highways of the Central Highlands in Vietnam. The name Jrai Dew Hammock Café relates to the philosophy of Jrai people of Vietnam’s Central Highlands, according to which, in the last stage of life cycle, humans evaporate into the environment and transform into “dew,” a state of non-being (ia ngôm in Jrai language).

Arjuna Neuman (b.1984, United Kingdom) was born on an airplane, that’s why he has two passports. He shows his work internationally with recent exhibitions and screenings at: Sunshinism, State of the Art, Berlin, Germany (2014); Les Recontres Internationales, Haus Der Kunst der Welt, Berlin, Germany (2014); The Museum of Immortality, Ashkal Alwan, Beirut, Lebanon (2014); Exposure, Beirut Art Centre (2014); Les Rencontres Internationales, Le Gaite Lyric, Paris, France (2014); Transpositions, Verge Gallery Sydney University, Australia (2014); Young Artist Moscow Biennale, Moscow Museum (2014); ABC : MTL, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, Canada (2012); In Our Sights, Machine Projects, Los Angeles , United States (2012) amongst others. As a writer he has published articles in Relief Press, Into the Pines Press, The Journal for New Writing, VIA Press, Concord Press, Art Voices and e-flux.

Between January and April 2015, Neuman was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore, where he researched on Singapore as a “City in a Garden” through the concept of “borrowed scenery.” In addition, Neuman produced Multicultural Dread, a collaborative event addressing the topic of identity in Singapore that included a conversation co-organised by Brack and a text intervention by one of its members, Nazry Bahrawi.

Anna Daneri is co-founder and adjunct curator of Peep-Hole, collaborator with Fondazione Meru (for which she initiated the Meru Art*Science Award), and editor of Peep-Hole Sheet. In 2015 she was the production manager for They Come to Us without a Word by Joan Jonas for the U.S. Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale. She has worked on international exhibitions including Food (Geneva, 2012), The Mediterranean Approach (Venice/Marseille/Sao Paolo, 2011), The Inadequate (project by Dora Garcìa for the 54th Venice Biennale), Collateral (Milan/Sao Paolo, 2008), Joan Jonas – My Theater (Trento, 2007). She collaborated with Art for the World (1996-2013) and with Fondazione Antonio Ratti (1995-2010), and was professor of Contemporary Art Phenomenology at the Accademia Carrara di Belle Arti in Bergamo (2003 – 2007).

Yason Banal is an artist and educator. His work spans from photography to video, installation, text, and performance, deploying varied conceptual strategies to explore links among seemingly divergent systems. Between July and August 2015, Banal was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore where he continued a work-in-progress in- spired as much by José Rizal’s transglobal coordination, Isabelo Delos Reyes’s experimental archive, as it is by contemporary coordinates such as reality TV and lo-fi culture.

Yan Jun is a musician, born in Lanzhou in 1973 and based in Beijing. His activities involve improvised music, field recordings and site-specific sound works/events. His feedback improvisation set always follows the unstable relationship between microphones, speakers, the space and his own body movement. He often plays with the environment and found objects at audiences‚ homes, along or with other artists, through the Living Room Tour project.

He is member of FEN, Tea Rockers Quintet and Impro Committee. He has performed in more than 20 countries in North America, Australia, Europe and Asia. As a poet and artist he has attended Rotterdam International Poetry Festival, Berlin International Poetry Festival and Shanghai Biennale.

Xu Tan is an artist. His ongoing project Searching for Keywords analyses video interviews of different communities to identify keywords based on meanings that reveal the values and motivations of contemporary Chinese society. Between June and August 2016, Xu was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore where he expanded his work on the project Keywords Lab: Socio-botany (first initiated in 2012), conducting interviews with various local practitioners engaged in the practice of urban farming in Singapore.

During her residency, Weixin Chong will explore perspectives and portrayals of Tropicality in a Singaporean context, from projections of exoticism and escape to the post- colonial self-conscious gaze of the tropical being and how the natural growth of tropical wildlife represents ‘undevelopment’.

Formally trained in sculpture, Zul Mahmod has continued to build and expand his practice over the last three years to include sculpted sound and live sound performances. Zul’s practice investigates the aural architecture of spaces in order to explore the emotional, behavioural and visceral responses of its inhabitants. While in residence, Zul will explore the aural relationship between readymade sound sculptures and the architecture of space. Sonic characteristics, forms and textures of everyday objects will be examined in order to compose an orchestra of sonic sculptures.

UuDam Tran Nguyen is an artist and co-founder of the experimental art magazine XEM. His practice explores the role and impact of human progress on rural and urban spaces. Between November and December 2016, Nguyen was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore. During his residency, Nguyen continued working on his long-term project Time Boomerang (2013– ongoing), which explores the lasting influence of colonialism. Articulated in eight phases, the project has a global scope with the artist attempting to reach and leave traces across all the continents.

Whilst in residence, Loo Zihan will continue his research into ‘The Ray Langenbach Archive of Performance Art’ which documents over 20 years of performance art in Southeast Asia from 1988 to the present. Loo’s research is an extension of his reenactments and installations such as Cane (2011, 2012), Archiving Cane (2012) and Artists’ General Assembly: The Langenbach Archive (2013), which have stemmed out of specific documentation from the archive. Loo aims to tap into the mostly unexplored parts of the archive, of abstract and informal, day-to-day recordings of memories and incidents. As a nostalgic and intimate reflection on the arts scene of the early to mid 1990’s in Singapore, Loo will unpack the archival material and return to the medium of an experimental essay film that aims to challenge the boundaries between documentary, fiction and experimental filmmaking.

In recent years, as globalisation accelerates the process of urbanisation, both developed and developing countries are experiencing a significant influx of immigrants. The reality of cities erected entirely through foreign labour has become increasingly common and the flows of temporary migration lead to the formation of “mini-nations” nestled within rapidly growing cities, that is enclaves of migrant workers that congregate, cohabit, and share material and immaterial resources in foreign countries. Pursuing his interest in the social, political, cultural, and economic impact of globalisation, during the residency Lim Sokchanlina investigates bureaucratic and political apparatuses as well as the personal and psychological aspects that define Singapore’s communities of migrant workers in Little India and “Little Burma” considered as case studies to be compared with similar enclaves in Cambodia and Thailand.

Li Ran provides exhibitionary structures in which to look at wider dynamics of fabricated structures in narrative and history. In Beyond Geography (2012) he looks at the National Geographic style of the anthropological but with the caricature of the natives and anthropologist played by the same race. Li has also looked at the idea of re using elements from projects and what it means to re contextualising work to comment on the circulation of cultures bringing to attention forms of mis/communication. For his research, Li will work closely with Singapore Management University faculty Rowan Wang to understand the dissemination of protestant ideals in Singapore, not only through the lens of theology, but as a form of ideological management. Li will build an open platform, re purposing works and structures from past work, incorportated into an interviewing structure.

Thao-Nguyen Phan will expand her research on the introduction of the Latin alphabet as a writing system in Vietnam, exploring how the same transition occurred in other Southeast Asian countries such as Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. In Vietnam, the Romanised script was first introduced in the 17th century by catholic missionaries to spread Christianity, playing a significant role in the process of colonization of the country. While official accounts celebrate the adoption of the Latin alphabet as a symbol of modernity, the implications of this historical process are far more complex and tell stories of cultural loss and gain, national amnesia, and violence.

Tara McDowell’s research interests include exhibition histories, contemporary curating, art institutions, feminist and queer spaces of sociability and production, alternative archives and forms of documentation, and historical and contemporary models.

While in residency at NTU CCA Singapore, McDowell aims to connect with local artists, curators, and educators to gain an awareness of the Singaporean arts communities. She is especially keen to understand how curatorial education is being developed by institutions in Singapore, what the particular needs and desires are of participants in these conversations and how connections might be made with the Curatorial PhD programme she founded in Melbourne, Australia. She will conduct research on experimental education and artistic labour, two areas of her research interests and present a public lecture in progress on the latter topic, titled Is the Post-Occupational Condition the New Post-Medium Condition?

Tara McDowell (United States) is Associate Professor and Director of Curatorial Practice at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. She is Editor-at-Large of The Exhibitionist, a journal on curatorial practice and exhibition making now published and distributed by the MIT press for which she served as Founding Senior Editor. She has held curatorial appointments at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, where she mounted over two dozen group and solo exhibitions. In addition to her contemporary curatorial work, McDowell has organized group shows on Minimalism, Fluxus, assemblage, and avant-garde cinema, and worked on retrospectives of Philip Guston, Gerhard Richter, and Richard Tuttle. She publishes and lectures frequently, and writes criticism for art-agenda and artforum.com. McDowell holds a Ph.D. in the History of Art from the University of California, Berkeley.

Lee Wen has been exploring different strategies of time-based and performance art since 1989. His project Malevich looks at the idea of going back to “square one”. Within his residency, Lee has focused on drawing and improvisation through music and performance and as an opportunity to revisit and revive past projects.

His recent concerns have revolved around the memory of Singapore’s art history through the initiation of the Independent Archive and Resource Centre documenting performance art and recent conversations with art historian and NTU visiting faculty, Nora Taylor have result in a wider discussion on how to remember performance art practices here.

Tan Pin Pin is a Singapore filmmaker who questions gaps in history, memory, and processes of documentation. Self-reflective in their addressing of the complexities of the filmic medium, her films include: Moving House (2001), Singapore GaGa (2005), Invisible City (2007), To Singapore with Love (2013), and In Time To Come (2017). They have been shown at numerous international film festivals around the world and have won multiple awards. She had retrospectives at RIDM Montreal, DOK Leipzig. She was the executive producer of award-winning Unteachable (2019). She is a co-founding member of filmcommunitysg, a community of independent filmmakers and was a board member of the Singapore International Film Festival, The Substation and the National Archives of Singapore. She was awarded the S. Rajaratnam scholarship to study for an MFA at Northwestern University, USA. She was awarded the S. Rajaratnam scholarship to study for an MFA at Northwestern University, USA, and was called to the Singapore Bar upon completion of her law degree from Oxford University.

During her residency at NTU CCA Singapore between May and September 2016, Tan was working on her five-year project In Time to Come (2017), a contemplative film on daily rituals in Singapore, from school ceremonies to opening protocol in a bookstore, in which constant repetition provides a sense of frozen time in a city that always looks forward.

Tan Pin Pin will use her time in residence to read as well as continue her practice of walking around Singapore, taking photos to gather material for future projects. She will also be exploring the idea of performance in documentaries and how this form may bring us closer to the truth.

Syafiatudina will discuss the practice of organizing spaces with few initiatives, collectives, institutions which are related to arts and culture in Singapore. Furthermore, she wants to investigate on how a space for critical engagement can be established in Singapore where owning a place is consider to be a luxury.

Svay Sareth’s works in sculpture, installation and durational performance are made using materials and processes intentionally associated with war – metals, uniforms, camouflage and actions requiring great endurance. While his critical and cathartic practice is rooted in an autobiography of war and resistance, he refuses both historical particularity and voyeurism on violence. Rather, his works traverse both present and historical moments, drawing on processes of survival and adventure, and ideas of power and futility. More recently, Svay confronts the idea that “the present is also a dangerous time” through the appropriation and dramatisation of public monuments that hint at contentious political histories. During his residency, Svay will research Singapore-Cambodia relations and history, and make use of libraries and archives specific to Singapore.

Kray Chen’s practice brings attention to the peculiar characteristics of forms, gestures and behaviours in society to discuss the value of progress. While in residence, Chen continues this line of research into the absurd, such as ‘Waiting’, reflecting on the psyche of a place that pits labour against gratification, fragments against the whole, traditions against modernization.

Koh Nguang How is an artist and independent researcher on Singapore art. His project, Singapore Art Archive Project @ Centre for Contemporary Art (SAAP@CCA) encompasses material touching the Singapore art scene from the 1920s until the arrival of the Internet. An entirely material archive with most documentation provided by the artist himself, this project developed as a response to the lack of a national art archive.

His residency at NTU CCA Singapore enabled public access to the archive for an extended period of time with a wealth of material showing extensive regional exchange as well as many international exhibitions in Singapore, debunking the myth of an isolated art scene .The ensuing dialogue and conversation with Koh are key when visiting this collection. Here the role of the artist is the role of cultural memory keeper.

Regarded as a successful model of strategic governance and urban planning across Asia, Singapore has shared her infrastructure plans and industrial development expertise with other countries since the 1990s. Choy Ka Fai intends to research the tensions and ideals that underlie the establishment of Singapore as a utopian “prototype city” investigating the multiple narratives that frame the efforts to export and, occasionally to forge, such an utopia.

In line with Julian ‘Togar’ Abraham’s multidisciplinary practice, Togar will develop DIABETHANOL, a hybrid of the word “diabetes” (a metabolic disease in which the body’s inability to produce any or enough insulin causes elevated levels of glucose in the blood) and “ethanol” (a colourless volatile flammable liquid C2H5OH that is the intoxicating agent in liquors and is also used as a solvent and in fuel. The artist project begins with a curiosity in the possibility of converting diabetic urine into a renewable energy source—bioethanol and increase in the prevalence of diabetes in Singapore and Asia. While in residence, Togar will conduct field research with diabetes related organisations in Singapore, from conducting laboratory experiments to analytics and interview.

As part of her time in Singapore Joselina Cruz will connect with the current NTU CCA Singapore exhibition, Charles Lim Yi Yong: SEA STATE and with the artist, understanding his practice and process. Cruz will also connect with local artists and institutions and explore the Singapore art scene in connection to the larger region of Southeast Asia and The Philippines.

Joselina Cruz (b. 1970, PhilippineS) is the Director and Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD), De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde, Manila. She studied art history at the University of the Philippines, and received an M.A. in curating contemporary art from the Royal College of Art, London. Cruz has worked as a curator for the Lopez Memorial Museum in Manila (2001-04) and the Singapore Art Museum (2004–07). She was a curator for the 2nd Singapore Biennale in 2008 and one of the networking curators for the 13th Jakarta Biennale in 2009. Cruz was curator-in-charge of the Tàpies retrospective at the Singapore Art Museum (2005), co-curated All the Best: The Deutsche Bank Collection and Zaha Hadid, Singapore Art Museum (2006), and curated You Are Not a Tourist for Curating Lab, Singapore (part of the Singapore Art Show 2007) and Creative Index: An Exhibition in Manila, Philippines (2010) for the 10th Regional Anniversary of the Nippon Foundation’s Asian Public Intellectuals Fellowship program. She also writes essays, reviews, criticism, and art commentary.

Jompet Kuswidananto is an artist. His works examine issues of colonialism, politics, power and mass mobilisation, and the notion of the state of transition in the context of post-reformation Indonesia. Between December 2015 and February 2016, Kuswidananto was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore. During the Residencies: OPEN, he presented Noda (2016), a site-specific intervention in his studio, a physical translation of “historical leaks” in Indonesia’s recent history that are breaking public silence and becoming visible.

The practice of Song-Ming Ang (b. 1980, Singapore) revolves around music, a subject matter he approaches from the overlapping perspectives of an artist, fan, and amateur musician. Spanning from classical and experimental to indie and mainstream music, he engages with a variety of material and immaterial elements such as music posters and instruments, school songs and mixed-tapes which are reconfigured through simple gestures to push an idea to its logical conclusion. Working across a wide variety of formats, he often develops participatory processes whose outcome is unpredictable and generate knowledge in unexpected ways.

Song-Ming Ang lives and works between Berlin and Singapore. He has had solo exhibitions at Camden Arts Centre, London, United Kingdom (2015) and Spring Workshop, Hong Kong (2012) and has participated in numerous group exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art Singapore (2016); NUS Museum, Singapore (2015); Witte de With, Rotterdam, the Netherlands (2014) and Haus der Kulturen de Welt, Berlin, Germany (2011), amongst many others. He has been an artist-in-residence at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Germany (2011-2012).

Belgrade-based collective Škart is set to research the relationship between Singapore and the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), excavating the historical, political, and cultural circumstances that framed Singapore’s adhesion to the movement in 1970. In recent years, the artists have been reflecting on the emancipatory potential and radical ideas purported by a movement which actively promoted the process of decolonization by subscribing to principles of cultural equality and mutual respect. Having focused so far mostly on European and South American countries, the residency provides the artists with the opportunity to expand their lines of inquiry into the context of Southeast Asia.

Škart is an experimental art/design collective founded by Djordje Balmazović and Dragan Protić in 1990 at the Faculty of Architecture in Belgrade. In Serbian, the word Škart means “trash/reject”, an allusion to the collective’s approach to creative endeavours. Using vernacular languages and low-tech media, Škart’s practice infiltrates the most unconventional settings and often engenders unorthodox, community-based collaborations. Revolving around poetry and the “architecture of the human relationships,” their projects have been developed in several institutions and independent spaces across Europe. Most recently, their work has been presented in exhibitions at Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2016; Galerija Nova, Zagreb, Croatia, 2015; Museum of Yugoslav History, Belgrade, Serbia, 2015; the Serbian Pavilion, Venice Biennial of Architecture, Italy, 2010.

Simon Soon will be comparing the architecture and landscape of Nanyang University (1955-1980) and Chinese University of Hong Kong (1963-present), two Chinese-language institutions of higher learning in former British colonies. He is interested in exploring how the spatial design of these two institutions facilitate different experiences of cultural and political modernity as well as constructions of social memory. His residency at the NTU CCA Singapore will allow him to undertake the Singapore segment of his research as well as pursue further research on contemporary art in Singapore. His research will involve archival material into architectural histories in Singapore as well as the facilitation of a panel discussion with scholars and artists on the Nanyang University.

Simon Soon is a Senior Lecturer in the Visual Art Department, Culture Centre, University of Malaya, Malaysia. His research focuses on 20th-century art in Southeast Asia. He is a member of the editorial collective of Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art and a team member of the Malaysia Design Archive. He was an Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore in May 2015.

During his residency Jeremy Sharma will focus on the idea of ‘Vertical Progression’ , observing the logic of production, the production of ideas and the idea of the use of the studio space through different strategies of art making. The research will be based on three phases , Longitudes, Endgames and Screensavers, White Heron and Vertical Progression. Longitudes, Endgames and Screensavers is a distractive stage that starts off with several elements going at once. White Heron will takethe form of a studio installation developed from the different phases and will conclude the project. Sharma’s current research investigates abstract ideas of time, capital and economy in our present society.

Often drawing on her experience, emotions and memories, Shooshie Sulaiman makes works and situations that create highly nuanced and personal interactions with their subjects and audiences. After receiving her BA in Fine Art from the MARA University of Technology (UiTM), Malaysia, in 1996, she received the National Art Gallery of Malaysia‚ prestigious Young Contemporaries Award, and has participated in numerous exhibitions and residencies in Malaysia and internationally.

In her paintings, drawings, books, and collages, Sulaiman infuses the social and artistic histories of Malaysia with her own responses and experiences. Between June and August 2015, she was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore. Her research on rubber plantation histories between Singapore and Malaya took the shape of a series of portraits executed within and outside her studio, making use of organic material such as soil and wood.

Interested in the cycle of redevelopment that is endemic to the life of Asian global cities, Jason Wee intends to investigate the phases of demolition, clearance, and destruction triggered by urban renewals and the complex ways in which they affect our understanding of ecology, urban planning, memory, and architecture. Starting from Singapore where destruction in the name of development results particularly aggressive, Wee will research these destructive events focusing on the underlying sets of laws, policies, procedures and technologies—involving a wide variety of experts such as geologists, architects, urban planners as well as financial and legal agencies— that determine them. His residency at the NTU CCA Singapore is inscribed within a longer-term comparative research project titled The City That Eats Itself, Lives, for which he will also examine the cases of Seoul, Delhi, Bangkok, Jaffa, and Tokyo.

Jamie North (b. 1971, Australia) is an artist based in Sydney. His practice explores the concurrence and conflict between architectural structures and the biological world. Initially working with photography, North’s interest in the ability of plants to recover, regenerate, and reclaim an environment after human intervention has shifted towards the creation of living sculptural installations. His work has been presented at the 20th Biennale of Sydney, Australia, 2016; Tophane-i Amire Cultural and Arts Center, Istanbul, Turkey, 2015; Monash University, Melbourne, 2015, amongst other venues.

Sally Tallant (b. 1967, United Kingdom) is the Director of Liverpool Biennial ‚ The UK Biennial of International Contemporary Art. From 2001 ‚ 2011 she was Head of Programmes at the Serpentine Gallery, London where she was responsible for the development and delivery of an integrated programme of Exhibitions, Architecture, Education and Public Programmes. She has curated exhibitions in a wide range of contexts including the Hayward Gallery, Serpentine Gallery, Hospitals, Schools as well as public commissions. She has developed commissioning programmes for artists in a range of contexts and developed long-term projects including The Edgware Road Project, Skills Exchange and Disassembly. She has also curated performances, sound events, film programmes and conferences. She is a regular contributor to conferences nationally and internationally. She is a Trustee of Metal, and Advisory Board Member of Open Arts Archive (Open University), a Board Member of the International Biennial Association and a member of the London Regional Council for the Arts Council of England.

James Jack is concerned with rejuvenating fragile links that exist in a place, developing socially engaged artworks in connection with the people and land encountered there. At NTU CCA Singapore, he will work on the project Stories of Khayalan Island (2013- ) which commenced with rumours of an island that disappeared near Singapore. While in residence, he will search for evidence of Khayalan Island amidst the paradoxes of the rapidly changing harbour. Historical maps will be redrawn based on collective imaginations of space and sea vessels will be rebuilt to visit contingent islands at risk of vanishing. A search for this imaginary island in the social and ecological realities of today provides the basis for a book of stories as well as newly created artworks.

As part of her time in Singapore she presented the lecture “Non-transmittable form? Thoughts on the impossibility to show what might need to be shown today” which she described as “It is a contemporary given that cultures are replete with forms that have been transmitted from elsewhere. Most discourse on global art either assumes that this transmission has been easy and neutral, or fraught and based on power relations. Whether the problem of transmission is articulated or not, it is commonly taken for granted that exhibitions are functioning transmission machines. But what about form that simply does not transfer? Or does not transfer simply?”

Noack also spent time in Singapore further understanding different institutional structures.

Ruth Noack (b. 1964, Germany) trained as a visual artist and art historian, held numerous lectureships, and works as curator, critic and author. She was curator of documenta 12. Recent shows include Notes on Crisis, Currency and Consumption and Vienna and Ines Doujak‚ first solo show in London. Noack headed the Curating Contemporary Art programme at the RCA, London, United Kingdom (2012-2013). She was Šaloun Professor atAcademy of Fine Art (AVU), Prague and led the Gwangju Biennale International Curator Course (2014). Currently, she is curator-tutor of a Dutch Art Institute’s Roaming Academy trajectory. She has published widely, including a book on Sanja Ivekovic’s Triangle for Afterall.

Damp: study of an artist at 21, an unconventional survey on the Australian artist group Damp which unfolded through a series of presentations within the context of the university art school in 2016. During her residency, Rosemary aims to expand her research focus investigating several university art galleries in Singapore.

Rosemary Forde’s research looks at “curating as pedagogy” and explores the role of galleries within universities and art schools. For her doctoral dissertation in Curatorial Practice at Monash University, she developed Art holds a high place in my life

Melbourne-based curator Rosemary Forde (b. 1978, New Zealand) has developed exhibitions and events at a range of institutions and contemporary art spaces in Australia and New Zealand such as National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia and Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts, Auckland, New Zealand. Forde is chair of un Projects, a collective based in Australia that aims to generate independent and critical dialogue around contemporary art, primarily through publishing projects such un Magazine. She co-edited un Anthology 2004-2014: a decade of art and ideas. She is currently a PhD candidate in Curatorial Practice at Monash Art Design & Architecture (MADA), Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. She was previously Director of The Physics Room, Christchurch, New Zealand (2002-2004).

Departing from a specific historical episode, the artists will explore the contemporary currency of gestures of sabotage in the context of the geopolitical frictions between Indonesia and Singapore. This research is part of Ring of Fire (2014-ongoing), a long-term project focused on natural disasters and geopolitical collisions named after the vast geographical area that runs from New Zealand to Chile stretching across Southeast Asia. By framing uncanny relationships between tectonic instability and political unrest, the pair seek to address conditions of vulnerability as well as the tensions related to environment, social justice, freedom of expression, and human rights among Southeast Asian countries.

Concentrating on Singapore, Philippines, and South Korea as fields of inquiry, Andaur will develop his research on multi-colonial zones. He will examine urban landscapes, cultures, ethnicities, and artistic practices within these chosen countries in order to build an online resource platform with a socio-spatial analysis of the intersections between landscape, culture, and political practice. Throughout his curatorial research process, Anduar will connect with visual artists, researchers, and curators in order to gain a better understanding of local contemporary art practices and their importance within the cultural ecosystem of the region.

Robin Peckham is the deputy editor of LEAP magazine. His residency coincided with Art Stage 2015. His residency coincides with Art Stage 2015 and he will conduct extensive studio visits with various Singapore artists. Peckham will facilitate the Q&A session for NTU CCA Singapore Artist-in-Residence Matthew Mazzotta where he will draw upon his experiences of working in China to question public art practices.

Robin Peckham‚ (b.1984, China) is the editor of LEAP magazine. His residency coincided with Art Stage 2015.

Research Interests:

– History of Singapore
– Iraq relations Personal and institutional archives
– Global networks of petroleum and weapons trade
– Counterterrorism intelligence
– International warfare coalitions

Instigated by a familial connection to Singapore dating to 1965, when her grandfather was sent on a training assignment to the Shell Eastern Petroleum Company in Singapore to address labour disputes, Rand Abdul Jabbar is interested in exploring the evolution of the complex bilateral relationship between Singapore and Iraq over the past 60 years, particularly pertaining to politics and counterterrorism intelligence and training.

By probing both institutional and personal archives, the research project will attempt to track relevant petro-histories, workforce tensions, the movement of arms across global trade networks, counterterrorism warfare coalitions, and conflict resolution to map out the elaborate trajectories that characterise the bonds across these two nations.

The residency of Rand Abdul Jabbar was scheduled for January – March 2021, but the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak rendered international travel impossible. In order to continue to support artistic research and foster collaborations beyond borders, the NTU CCA Residencies Programme initiated Residencies Rewired, a project that trailblazes new pathways to collaboration.

Research Liaison: Rafi Abdullah

Through research, writing, and curating, cultural worker Rafi Abdullah entwines politics of space and personal histories. He recently completed his BA in Arts Management at LASALLE College of the Arts.

Pelin Tan is involved in research-based artistic and architectural projects that focus on urban conflict & territorial politics, gift economy, the condition of labour and mixed methods in research. She has also done research into artist-run-spaces whilst she was a research fellow with The Japan Foundation in 2012. While in residence, Tan will connect with local artists and institutions whilst exploring the larger region of Southeast Asia.

Pelin Tan (b. 1974,Turkey) is a sociologist and art historian based in Mardin, Turkey. Assoc.Prof. at Architecture Faculty, Mardin Artuklu University and contributor of The Silent University (educational platform for/by refugees/migrants). Currently visiting Assoc.Prof. at School of Design, Hong Kong PolyU (2016). Fellow of ACT Program, School of Architecture and Urban Planning, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Tan is a member of Art1kisler video collective. She is the Turkey curator of Actopolis project (Goethe Inst. Athens, 2015 ‚ 2017). Lead author of Towards New Urban Society– IPSP (Edts.Saskia Sassen&Edgar Pieterse, 2015 ‚ 2017). Tan participated in Lisbon Architecture Triennial (2013), Montreal Biennial (2014), Istanbul Biennial (2007, 2015), Oslo Architecture Triennial (2016), Cyprus Pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennial (2016). Residencies: CCA Kitakyushu (2015), IASPIS (2008), GeoAir (2011).

Otty Widasari will research the public memory of Southeast Asia and it’s residents imagination about Singapore. Historically, Singapore is a small island in the region of Southeast Asia and has been known, since the colonial era, as a trade and business center, a transit place, and the largest entertainment venue in Southeast Asia.

Since it’s independence in 1965, Singapore has become an important part of regional economic and also culture development. Widasari’s research will explore the nostalgia of places of Singapore, which will be recorded and transferred to a variety of mediums, such as: video, drawing, painting and photography. This memory is related to the history of Singaporean issues in the geopolitical map of the ASEAN community viewed through cultural, economic and political perspectives such as gender issues and freedom of expression.

Orit Gat will lead an Exhibition (de)Tour: Townhall or Marketplace, Can Art find a Public Space on the Internet? Can it Create One? which is part of Incomplete Urbanism: Attempts of Critical Spatial Practice’s public programme. She will look at a number of specific artworks, which conflate the urban and digital space as well as the hidden aspects of the internet’s infrastructure. In light of internet changes since 1995, Gat will examine possibilities art opens up to make the internet a genuine public space of the commons.

Unfolding through visual, narrative, and performative acts, ila’s artist practice revolves around urgencies for repair, care, and mutual support. Amid frustrations resulting from the ever-shifting urban landscape and rising social inequalities, the artist is interested in navigating the collective emotional psyche through the notion of “wounded city” as described by cultural geographer Karen E. Till. By way of personal and collective exercises, she intends to warp existing spatial relations, map new pathways onto the urban fabric, and engage in the process of memory-work to open up entry points into places of the present through both subjective experiences and stories of the past. These exercises are intended as individual and collective forms of resistance to physical displacement, affective mutilations, and social disempowerment as well as symbolical remedies to mend ecosystem(s) permeated by alienation and loss. Throughout the process, the artist imagines the studio as a fluid space that can offer respite from the outside, resonate with the presence of its different inhabitants, and wherein her roles as mother and artist are organically integrated.

Hu Yun’s practice is grounded in research, surveys, travels, oral histories, and archives. Since 2012, Hu has made several trips to China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Southeast Asia to retrace the footsteps of missionaries such as Matteo Ricci and St. Francis Xavier, exploring both the factual and the imaginary. In line with this research, Hu will be investigating Chinese cemeteries and graveyards in Singapore as spaces of historical encounters. Of particular interest are the symbolisms of epitaphs on early 20th century tombstones as a reflection of the political landscape in China. Hu will also retrace the immigration of Chinese artists from China to Singapore in the early 20th century through Mr Koh Nguang How’s Singapore Art Archive Project.

While in residence, Ho Rui An will continue his research into the aesthetics of “futurecraft” across the various futures and “horizon scanning” programmes run by state and private entities in Singapore and beyond. Of special interest is the practice of “critical futures” and the normative forces that come to bear upon it within institutional frames. Ho will further use his studio space to explore different exhibitionary forms by which his discursive projects can be manifested.

Hamra Abbas is an artist. Her practice crosses a wide range of media, appropriating and transforming culturally loaded imagery, iconography, and traditional motifs and styles to raise questions of conflict within society. Between May and June 2015, Abbas was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore. During her residency, Abbas explored the complex intertwining of histories, class, race, and culture that defines Singapore, working with the courtly Chinese painting style of Gongbi to address the story of Indian migration in Singapore.

Dr Hildegund Amanshauser is an art historian, author and curator and since 2009, Director of the Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts, Austria. Previous appointments include professor of art history and theory in Muenster Westfalia, Germany and director of the Salzburg Kunstverein, Austria. She also worked as curator for the Secession Vienna and the Museum of Modern Art Vienna, Austria.
Amanshauser has published widely on modern and contemporary art and she is editor of The Word’s Finest Studio: 60 years of the Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts, published by Jung und Jung Verlag, Salzburg and Vienna, 2013.

Having noticed a tendency in writings on Thai contemporary art in quoting and referring to a restricted set of sociocultural texts, Narawan Pathomvat will conduct a research-based project focusing on mapping and analyzing bibliographical data in Southeast Asian contemporary art writings. Through collections of Southeast Asian writings in various institutions in Singapore and interviews and discussions with experts in the field she hopes to identify art historical, theoretical, philosophical influences in contemporary art writings in the region.

Miguel Andrade Valdez (b. 1979) lives and works in Peru, Lima. His practice blends building methodologies and the language of sculpture in order to shape a different understanding of architectural construction and urban development. Through his large scale sculptures and installations which take the human body as a standard unit of measurement, he casts built objects as representations of shared social spaces. His works have been included in numerous group shows including Mana Contemporary, Jersey City United States (2015); Museo Mario Testino, Lima, Peru (2014); Museum of Contemporary Art, Lima, Peru (2013), Art Basel Miami Beach, United States (2012).

Hendrik Folkerts will explore the Singapore art scene and do research on performance practices in Singapore and the larger region of Southeast Asia. In addition, Folkerts will make studio visits and meet with local representatives of museums and art institutions as part of his research for documenta 14.

Meiya Cheng will look at two exhibition projects, The Great Ephemeral (New Museum, 2015) and Trading Futures (co-curated with Pauline Yao, Taipei Contemporary Art Centre, 2012) relating them to NTU CCA Singapore’s overarching curatorial framework PLACE.LABOUR.CAPITAL. Cheng’s discussion explores the speculative nature of the global market, including the hypothetical systems of labour, value, consumption, and desire.

Meiya Cheng (b. 1975, China) is a freelance curator living and working in Taipei. From 2006-2009, she was the curator of MoCA, Taipei. For her talk she will look at two exhibition projects The Great Ephemeral (New Museum, 2015) and Trading Futures, (co-curated with Pauline Yao, Taipei Contemporary Art Centre, 2012) relating them to PLACE.LABOUR.CAPITAL. The Great Ephemeral responds to the speculative nature of the global market, both by exploring its intangible, even emotional, aspects and by offering clear-eyed commentary on its inequalities. Trading Futures was a gathering of conceptual interrogations, gestures and processes that look into the ways in which art and artistic experimentation intersect with hypothetical systems of labour, value, consumption, and desire.

Cheng participated in the founding and operation of Taipei Contemporary Art Center (TCAC) since 2009. With teamwork as the working model, she tries to builds up an alternative model that constantly examines and self/examines institutional the conditions in art production. From 2012-2014, she was the chair of TCAC. Her selected curated exhibition include: Augmenting the World, (The 6th Taipei Digital Art Festival, international section, 2011) and 6th Queens International (co-curated with Hitomi Iwasaki, Queens Museum, NYC, 2013.)

Working on the expansion of global art geographies, Writer-in-Residence Mechtild Widrich has previously focused her analysis on the opening of the National Gallery Singapore. While in residence, Widrich will expand her research and connect with local artists, curators and art administrators whose work revolves around performance art and issues related to urban development and museum studies.

Mechtild Widrich (Austria) is Assistant Professor of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), United States. Her work focuses on performance art, aesthetic theory, and global art geographies. Her book Performative Monuments: The Rematerialisation of Public Art was published with Manchester University Press, 2014. She has written for Grey Room, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Art Journal, The Drama Review (TDR), Performance Art Journal (PAJ), and Texte zur Kunst. She has edited books on Ugliness (London, 2013), Participation in Art and Architecture (London, 2015), and Presence (Berlin 2016), among others.

Taking advantage of Singapore’s position as a science and technology hub, Sohr will dedicate his residency to refine existing strands of work and explore new ones. He aims to advance his research on the history, materials, and aesthetics of Printed Circuit Board (PCB) and, also, to pursue his investigation into the accessibility of art spaces for the disabled. During the residency, Sohr will gradually transform his studio into a temporary space for the production of new sculptures and installations.

Premised upon the methodologies of ethnographic fieldwork, Matthias Sohr’s (b. 1980, Germany) artistic practice results in sculptures and installations that draw from technology and social sciences to reflect a wide range of research interests, from medical anthropology to “Bureaucracy Studies”. He is currently pursuing a PhD in the History of Medicine, University of Lausanne, Switzerland.

Matthias Sohr obtained a Master of Visual Arts from the University of Art and Design Lausanne, Switzerland in 2013. He has been a visiting lecturer at the University of Arts and Industrial Design Linz, Austria (2011-2012); Berlin University of the Arts, Institute of Spatial Experiments, Germany (2010). His work has been exhibited at Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT), Japan (2011) and Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany (2014), among others.

Matthew Mazzotta’s work evolves from an interest in exploring the relationship between people and their environments, as well as between each other. His practice manifests as participatory public interventions that aim at bringing criticality and a sense of openness to notions of public space and sculpture. Mazzotta recreated his community-specific Public Art project in the form of Outdoor Living Room at a hawker centre in Tiong Bahru, Singapore.

His research also involves looking at the different possibilities and limits of public space and public artwork in Singapore.

Hamra Abbas has a versatile artistic practice that straddles a wide range of media, from paper collage and painting to ephemeral soft plasticine sculpture and video. Her works often take a humorous look towards widely accepted traditions, appropriating culturally loaded imagery and religious iconography and transforming them into new works that are experienced in space and time.

Abbas takes various cultural references and recontextualises them using appropriated artistic techniques. For her residency she is learning the courtly Chinese painting style of Gongbi and conducting portrait studies of her various interactions of people in the lively inner city suburb of Little India in Singapore.

Mary Sherman will introduce TransCultural Exchange’s international conferences which were originally created to help American artists and arts organisations become aware of the networks of international residencies that exist around the globe. The benefits of statistical information TransCultural Exchange has gathered has successfully advocated for the vital and important creative role that Artists-in-Residence play in today’s increasingly interconnected and results-driven world. Sherman will connect with local artists, curators and educators to gain an awareness of Singaporean arts communities as well as the histories of cultural exchange that have taken place in Singapore.

Mary Sherman (b. 1957, United States) is an artist and the director of the artists-run TransCultural Exchange, which she founded in Chicago in 1989. (She also teaches at Boston College and Northeastern University and, in 2010, served as the interim Associate Director of MIT’s Program in Art, Culture and Technology). Additionally, for two decades, while pursuing her career as an artist, she worked as an art critic for such publications as The Chicago Sun-Times, The Boston Globe and ARTnews. She has received numerous grants and awards, including two Fulbright Senior Specialist Grants and been an Artist-in-Residence at such institutions as MIT and the Taipei Artist Village. Her own works, which push the definition of painting into the realm of space and sound, have been shown at numerous institutions, including Taipei’s Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Beijing’s Central Conservatory, Vienna’s WUK Kunsthalle, Trondheim’s Academy of Fine Arts at the University of Science and Technology, Seoul’s Kwanghoon Gallery and New York’s Trans Hudson Gallery.

Márton Orosz (b. 1979, Hungary) is Curator of the Collection of Photography and Media Arts at the Museum of Fine Arts and the Acting Director of the Vasarely Museum both in in Budapest, Hungary. He has recently curated Hungarian Artists and the Computer (2016), Time Landscape. Alan Sonfist and the Birth of Land Art (2014), and Film Experiments Brought to Light (2014).

He earned his PhD in Art History at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. He has been Terra Fellow at Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington D.C., United States, and György Kepes Fellow for Advanced Studies and Transdisciplinary Research at MIT, Cambridge, United States. His publications range across the history of photography, film, and collecting. His essay on Gyorgy Kepes’ Polaroid experiments appeared in AR – Artistic Research (Walther König, 2013). His study on the 1930s European abstract animated film industry was published in Regarding the Popular. Modernism, the Avant-Garde and High and Low Culture (De Gruyter, 2011).

Martin Germann will connect with local artists and institutions during his residency. He will also give a talk focusing on S.M.A.K’s unique politics in developing solo exhibition in close collaboration with artists placing them at the centre of her activities.

Martin Germann (b. 1974, Germany) is senior curator at S.M.A.K., the Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art in Ghent, Belgium, since autumn 2012. He has organised solo shows of artists Lee Kit, Michael Buthe, Thomas Ruff, Jordan Wolfson and Rachel Harrison as well as group exhibitions such as Drawing. The Bottom Line, together with Philippe Van Cauteren. Recent curatorial projects at S.M.A.K. include an ongoing series of presentations of works from the collection, as well as a year long exhibition unfolding around a wall piece by Sol LeWitt. He is currently working on a long-term project on the notion of ‘the photographic’ within the contemporary discourse.

Previously, Germann was curator at Kestner Gesellschaft Hanover, Germany and was responsible for the programme “Gagosian Gallery, Berlin” for the 4th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art. He has published numerous exhibition catalogues and monographs and has written for international magazines such as 032cand Frieze. In 2015, he received the AICA award for Belgium’s best exhibition for Lili Dujourie: Folds in time.

Unfolding over a period of three weeks is a special project by London based Singaporean Artist-in-Residence Erika Tan. The Lab will be used through multiple layers: as an exhibition space; a film studio; a working and meeting space as well as the site of a live “broadcast” performance debate. Focusing on the forgotten historical figure of the Malay weaver Halimah, Tan will reactivate through a series of footnotes instigating a process of collective labour towards the understanding that history should be an active effort created by many. Halimah lived and worked with 19 other Malayans in the 1924 British Empire Exhibition in London engaged in the production of woven material and as a physical representation of Britain’s “human” capital as a colonial subject. During the day Halimah demonstrated her craft selling products as a live object on one side of the British Empire Exhibition. At night she was behind the displays, cooking, eating and performing everyday life. Tan’s labour in The Lab is the (re)production of Halimah’s various conditions.

Responding to the context of the exhibition The Making of an Institution, Emily Pethick will present a talk on The Showroom, London, United Kingdom looking at its mission statement and how this was developed in tandem with the organisation’s development. This talk is part of Reason to Exist: The Director’s Review that brings together directors and founders of organisations that adopt critical and innovative strategies to advance the development of contemporary art practices and discourses. Pethick will also engage and connect with local artists and institutions.

Whilst in residence, Hardono will draw from personal experiences, to inquire into the impact that societal changes, such as the affect of censorship, have had on popular culture, local music and literature. His research methodology will be based on observations of human behaviour, field records, filming and the gathering of daily objects and images in Singapore and the context of Southeast Asia. In line with his current practice, Hardono will also further explore various approaches towards collaborative performances.

Dirk Snauwaert will connect with local artists and explore the Singapore art scene as well as the larger region of Southeast Asia. Snauwaert will also give a public talk presenting ideas related to the exhibition Atopolis, organised by WIELS, Contemporary Art Centre (Brussels) in collaboration with Mons 2015 – European Capital of Culture, which presented a group of artists interested in phenomena of circulation, diaspora and cultural dislocation. Twenty-three artists temporarily installed a proposal for an atopolis, or for an ideal city, connected to everyplace or anyplace. Snauwaert will also provide insight into the institution he directs – WIELS which combines a set of complementary functions: exhibition, production through an international residency programme and a robust education focus.

Maria Lind will connect with local artists and institutions whilst researching the art scene in Singapore for the upcoming Gwangju Biennale 2016. Lind will give a public talk sharing her experience working in and around Tensta Konsthall in Stockholm, Sweden where she currently holds the position as director. Her talk will also address notions of proximity, embeddedness, agility, shared concerns and contact/conflict zones.

Maria Lind (b. 1966, Sweden) is Director of the Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm and Artistic Director of the Gwangju Biennale 2016. Lind is also an independent curator and writer interested in exploring the formats and methodologies connected with the contemporary art institution. Previous positions include, director of the graduate program, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (2008-2010). Curatorial projects include co-curator of Manifesta 2, Europe’s biennale of contemporary art and was responsible for Moderna Museet Projekt; What if: Art on the Verge of Architecture and Design and guest-curated the group exhibition Abstract Possible: The Tamayo Take at Museo Tamayo in Mexico City. She has contributed widely to newspapers and magazines and to numerous catalogues and other publications. She is the 2009 recipient of the Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement. In the fall of 2010 Selected Maria Lind Writing was published by Sternberg Press.

Responding to the context of the exhibition The Making of an Institution, Diana Campbell Betancourt will present a talk on the Dhaka Art Summit, reassessing the landscape for cross-border artistic initiatives in South Asia and addressing the urgent need to research the history of institutional building in the region, specifically in Bangladesh. This talk is part of Reason to Exist: The Director’s Review, a series of events that brings together directors and founders of organisations that adopt critical and innovative strategies to advance the development of contemporary art practices and discourses.

Betancourt will also engage and connect with local institutions, with a focus on building connections between South and Southeast Asia.

Maria Hlavajova (b. 1971, Slovakia) is Artistic Director of BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, Netherlands, an institution that advocates for the critical role of art in society through various programmes of education, exhibitions, and publishing. Hlavajova is also initiator and artistic director of FORMER WEST, an eight-year long transnational research, education, exhibition, and publication project organised and coordinated by BAK. Other curatorial projects include Call the Witness, Roma Pavilion, 54th Venice Biennale, Italy (2011); Citizens and Subjects, part of the Dutch presentation at the 52nd Venice Biennale, Italy (2007); and co-curator of Manifesta 3, Ljubljana, Slovenia (2000). She regularly contributes to numerous critical readers, catalogues, and magazines internationally. In addition, Hlavajova is co-founder of tranzit, a network established in 2002 that supports contemporary art practices and exchanges in Austria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania. She serves on the Advisory Board of Bergen Assembly, Norway.

Responding to the concept of The Making of an Institution, Maria Hlavajova will discuss the notion of “instituting otherwise” using BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, in Utrecht, an institution of which she is the founding director, as an example. Dedicated to thinking about, with, and through art, BAK engages in long-term research trajectories engaging with the urgencies that define our contemporary, including issues of social and environmental justice and the relevance of digital technologies. Hlavajova will draw upon her research within a number of interrelated projects she is involved with, including Former West (2008–2016) and Future Vocabularies (2014–ongoing), all the while exploring the shifts within our existing conceptual lexicon for artistic, intellectual, and activist practices.

In 2015, Dennis Tan was hosted by a family in Kebau, Riau Islands of Indonesia where he honed skills in the construction of the traditional Kolek sailboat. On this journey Tan was introduced to three generations of all; Kolek named Pujangga, each built by a generation within the same family.

Two of the boats were gifted to Tan, who is now its custodian, keeper and bearer. While in residence, Tan will attempt to reconstruct the Kolek whilst investigating ideas of self-organisation and the transmission of skills and knowledge through generations of oral history in the Riau Archipelago and how this enables the continuity of cultural communities.

Personal narration and/or musical interpretation define both the method and the subject of Manon de Boer’s practice. Working primarily with the moving image, over twenty years she has composed a series of “portrait films” that explore the intimate relationship between language, memory, sound, and time while continuously interrogating truth claims, biographical narratives, and the medium of film itself.

Manon de Boer (b. 1966) is a Dutch artist based in Brussels. She completed her artistic education at the Akademie Van Beeldende Kunsten, Rotterdam, and at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam, Netherlands. Her work has received wide international recognition. Her most recent solo shows include presentations at Secession, Vienna, Austria (2016), Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands (2013), Philadelphia Museum of Art, United States (2012); Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, United States (2011).

Grieve Perspective is a Singapore-based art collective who use visual and written language to push the boundaries of art and explore taboo themes. The Obits focuses on the obituary as an art form that has somehow never quite taken hold in Singapore. Our newspapers feature death notices daily but nary an obituary the personal but slightly distanced profession of respect, reminiscence and regrets. It is, instead, our custom to frame our dead within boxes of rigidly determined sizes that stand like gravestones at the far end of the newspapers, sandwiched perversely between sports and business news.

An artist collective and band from Singapore consisting of Bani Haykal, Mohamad Riduan, Shahila Baharom and Wu Jun Han.

Cosmin Costinas lives and works in Hong Kong as the Executive Director and Curator of Para/Site Art Space. His curated exhibitions at Para/Site include: A Journal of the Plague Year. Fear, ghosts, rebels. SARS, Leslie and the Hong Kong story (with Inti Guerrero, 2013); It May Be That Beauty Has Strengthened Our Resolve (2013); About Films. Deimantas Narkevicius (2012); Taiping Tianguo: A History of Possible Encounters: Ai Weiwei, Frog King Kwok, Tehching Hsieh, and Martin Wong in New York (with Doryun Chong, 2012); rites, thoughts, notes, sparks, swings, strikes. a hong kong spring (with Venus Lau, 2012); Two Thousand Eleven (2011). He was the Curator of BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, Netherlands (2008-2011), co-curator (with Ekaterina Degot and David Riff) of the 1st Ural Industrial Biennial: Shockworkers of the Mobile Image, Ekaterinburg, 2010, and editor of documenta 12 Magazines, Kassel/Vienna (2005–2007). He co-authored the novel Philip (2007) and has contributed his writing to numerous magazines, books, and exhibition catalogs across the world. Cosmin has taught and lectured at different universities and art academies in Europe and Asia.

Bige Örer is the Director of the Istanbul Biennial. She has worked on the coordination of cultural and artistic projects for the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts since 2003. Örer also works as an independent expert in the European Union’s department, which evaluates cultural funds. She has acted as a consultant and a jury member for several cultural and artistic projects, is a member of the project Capacity Building for Cultural Policy in Turkey and a member of the team writing the alternative Cultural Policy Compendium of Turkey. Bige currently teaches at Istanbul Bilgi University.

Nikos Papastergiadis is the Director of the Research Unit in Public Cultures, and a Professor in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. Furthermore, he is a co- founder (with Scott McQuire) of the Spatial Aesthetics research cluster. He is the Project Leader of the Australian Research Council Linkage Project, “Large Screens and the Transnational Public Sphere,” and Chief Investigator on the ARC Discovery Project “Public Screens and the Transformation of Public Space.” Prior to joining the School of Culture and Communication, he was Deputy Director of the Australia Centre at the University of Melbourne, Head of the Centre for Ideas at the Victorian College of Arts, and lecturer in Sociology and recipient of the Simon Fellowship at the University of Manchester. Throughout his career, Papastergiadis has provided strategic consultancies for government agencies on issues of cultural identity and has worked in collaborative projects with international renowned artists and theorists.

Geert Lovink is a media theorist, internet critic and author of Zero Comments (2007) and Networks Without a Cause (2012). Since 2004 he has been a researcher in the School for Communication and Media Design at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA) where he is the Founding Director of the Institute of Network Cultures. From 2004–2013 he taught in the New Media Master’s Programme at Mediastudies, University of Amsterdam, which has organised conferences and research networks around topics such as the politics and aesthetics of online video, urban screens, Wikipedia, the culture of search, internet revenue models, digital publishing strategies and alternatives in social media. He is a Media Theory Professor at the European Graduate School (Saas-Fee) and Associated Member of the Centre for Digital Cultures at the Leuphana University (Lueneburg/D).

Zai Kuning is one of the pioneering experimental artists in Singapore who has redefined what it means to engage in multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary art forms. Zai’s artistic work in the last two decades has shifted between sculpture, drawing, installation, performance, movement, music and sound. In 2000, he began researching the lives of the Orang Laut, the sea gypsies of the Riau Archipelago in Indonesia, near Singapore. His research culminated in an internationally acclaimed documentary film RIAU (2003). He recently returned to further explore this theme, and he is currently working on a new documentary film project focused on the Mak Yong Mantang, an important form of Malay performing arts as it pre-dates Islam influence in the 14th century. Mak Yong has been declared by UNESCO as a “Masterpiece Of The Oral And Intangible Heritage Of Humanity”, one with roots in animist and Hindu-Buddhist beliefs and mythology. His project on the Mak Yong is supported by the National Arts Council Singapore.

During his residency, Chun will pursue his exploration of the inconspicuous fixtures of the urban environment shifting from a detached approach to a more active engagement that involves connecting with the public agencies in charge of the design, production, and installation of such elements. He is also contemplating to create a performance piece which will lend voice to a range of common objects.

During the residency Chong will develop The Economy of Birds (and Maximum Standard of Living), a research-based project that looks at how contemporary societies in Southeast Asia determine the minimum standard of living. The artist investigates the notion of “human dwelling” through a comparison between the human and the animal world by drawing a parallel between the practice of farming swiftlet birdhouses for sale and consumption and the typology of the metropolitan apartment block. In the artist’s vision, a comparative analysis of airflows, relative humidity, air temperature distribution, and light intensity that characterize the farming of edible bird’s nests and the technical requirements that make a human dwelling comfortable and efficient, is instrumental to rethink the guidelines for socially acceptable living environments as well as their implications in terms of economics and human rights.

In the wake of a research conducted in collaboration with the Eindhoven University of Technology which led to his solo exhibition at the Van Abbemuseum (2015), Hsu will continue to investigate colonial histories of Taiwan, Malaysia, and Singapore as part of a larger project dedicated to backtrack early models of globalization. His interest lies especially in the political, economic, and infrastructural role played by the Dutch East India Company in the 17th century in Southeast Asia and its manifestation in the architectural complexes such as Fort Noord-Holland in Taiwan and Stadthuys (City Hall) in Malacca City, Malaysia.

Casting an ironic look at Malaysia and Singapore’s historical merger, We Were Once a Nation is a research project about nation building which unearths the histories of Malaya, Sabah, Sarawak and Singapore. The research will focus on the years between 1963 and 1965, when Singapore and Malaysia split from the merger, in order to map a shared history of hopes, conflicts, and anxieties. Searching Singapore archival materials to decode Malayan history and, therefore, his own Malaysian identity, chi too aims to address the political and personal implications embedded in the construction of a nation state.

Charles Lim explores issues such as the environment, territorial borders and de-territorialisation. Lim researches the notions of borders, histories and everyday life and how these may be generated through our perceptions of the sea to create SEA STATE, recalling the excursions of the Land Art movement of the 1970s. His project scrutinises both natural and man-made systems, opening extraordinary new perspectives on our everyday surroundings, from unseen and alien landscapes, arbitrary borders and disappearing islands, to the imaginary boundaries of a future landmass.

While in residence Bojana Piškur aims to further the scope of her current research on the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) exploring the political and cultural implications of this global movement in the context of Singapore and Southeast Asia. Piškur will spend time conducting archival research on the NAM and will also explore possibilities for future collaborations in the region, engaging and connecting with local institutions and artists that focus on socio-political issues.

Featuring:
Denise Yap, Apartment 2079, 2020
Moses Tan, Study for Dramatic Venus, 2020
Ruby Jayaseelan, STOP., 2020
passthejpeg, passthetime, 2020

<!DOCTYPE work> is a curatorial project that encourages people to rethink productivity in creative practices, influenced by forced remote work situations due to the global pandemic. Borrowing a programming language for the compliance of HTML standards, highlights the use of digital tools and formats for telecommuting. It also signifies the start of an experiment that is open-ended and process-based. Given the context of this current situation, it seeks to chart out the process of exhibition-making while reflecting on these questions: How are our creative practices responding to situational changes and remote working? What are the trajectories of discourse that can arise from the idea of “productivity” in the creative field? What does “productivity” mean to us?

This project, conceived by Leon Tan, Shireen Marican, and Tian Lim, is a pilot programme of the Platform Projects Curatorial Award overseen by NTU CCA Singapore. Currently in its inaugural year, this award supports a curatorial project exploring Spaces of the Curatorial by recent graduates of NTU CCA Singapore and NTU ADM’s MA programme in Museum Studies and Curatorial Practices, as well as NTU ADM’s research-oriented MA and PhD programmes.

Zhang Jing Chao was Young Professional Trainee, Outreach & Education at NTU CCA Singapore in 2018.

Olivia Wong was Young Professional Trainee, Exhibition at NTU CCA Singapore in 2018.

Priscilla Toh was Young Professional Trainee, Communications at NTU CCA Singapore in 2018.

Joey Sim was Young Professional Trainee, Residencies at NTU CCA Singapore in 2018.

Sara Ng was Young Professional Trainee, Residencies at NTU CCA Singapore in 2018-2019.

Ho Mun Yee was Young Professional Trainee, Research at NTU CCA Singapore in 2018.

Qamarul Asyraf Bin Hosri was Young Professional Trainee, Production at NTU CCA Singapore in 2018.

Wang has been working on an on-going project on Hong Kong. The project that began in 2012 is an examination of Hong Kong’s cultural anxiety and crisis through a set of cinematic explorations of the city’s space. In Singapore while in the residency, he will study the role of sand in Singapore, by not only tracing its physical circulation as a fundamental element for the state’s development but also its symbolic role in the cultural sphere.

Binna Choi will research the Singapore art scene and the wider Southeast Asian region as represented in Singapore Biennale 2016 – An Atlas of Mirrors. She will give a public lecture on the relationship between artistic projects and social movements drawing from her recent collaborative projects The Grand Domestic Revolution and Composing the Commons and will share models of collaboration and self-organisation developed at Casco.

Asia Art Archive is an independent non-profit organisation co-founded by Claire Hsu and Johnson Chang in 2000 in response to the urgent need to document and make accessible the multiple recent histories of art in the region. A team of over thirty-five individuals led by Hsu are responsible for AAA’s Collection, research activities, programming, and operations. AAA’s Board of Directors, co-chaired by Benjamin Cha and Jane DeBevoise, comprises appointed members drawn from the art and business sectors within Hong Kong and beyond. The Board jointly supports the Executive Director and oversees the strategic direction and financial status of the organisation. AAA is financially supported through diverse channels to include individuals, corporate, foundations, and government. AAA’s Advisory Board comprises thirty-eight noted curators and critics from around the world. Advisors provide guidance in developing the potential and possibility of our collection, and assist in promoting the growing research interest in art from Asia. Asia Art Archive in America and Asia Art Archive in India are set up as independent entities with separate Boards of Directors.

During the residency, Baptist Coelho will turn his focus to the history of the Indian National Army (INA) and the Rani of Jhansi Regiment, two military units created in Singapore respectively in 1942 and 1943. During the Japanese occupation of Singapore, almost 20,000 Indian prisoners-of-war were instigated by their Japanese captors to create the INA with the goal to free India from British colonial rule. This short-lived military formation, which was disbanded in 1945, also included the Rani of Jhansi Regiment, one of the very few all-female combat units developed during the Second World War. Coelho aims to trace back patterns of everyday life at a time of war and delve into the reasons that drove INA women, most of who had never set foot in India, to fight for the country’s independence. Continuing his extensive research on the psychological and physical disruptions caused by war and conflict, the artist will critically interweave personal memories, historic accounts, and archival records laying out the groundwork for the production of a new work.

For the past two decades, Darren has sound designed and composed music for over 250 arts productions, and has received multiple Straits Times Life! Theatre Awards for Best Sound. Being the Associate Sound Artist and Music Composer for The Finger Players since 2004, Darren is also one of the co-founders of design collective – INDEX. He was conferred the Singapore National Arts Council’s Young Artist Award (music; multi-disciplinary practice) in 2012.

While in residence, Malinda will investigate Singapore’s history as a trading port, following the discovery of the Belitung shipwreck in 1998, 600 miles off the coast of Singapore that signifies the exchange of goods, ideas and cultures in the 9th century. She will work with Singaporean women to develop a collection of ceramic objects that will then enter the art market, highlighting notions of hybridity in cultural studies as well as the route of globalisation today that has existed in the region for more than a thousand years.

Art Labor will recreate a Hammock Café serving traditional Vietnamese coffee, akin to the many itinerant roadside-resting spots of the Central Highlands of Vietnam. The café will be a place for visitors to sit together, chat, rest, observe, think or simply pass time, alluding to the café culture central to Vietnamese daily life. The name Jarai Dew Hammock Café is an introduction into Art Labor’s long-term project. That takes inspiration from the Jarai people of Vietnam’s Central Highlands and their philosophy on the cycle of life. After death, humans will go through many stages to get back to their origins of existence. The final stage is that they transform into dew (ia ngôm in Jarai language) evaporating into the environment – a state of non-being – the beginning particles of a new existence.

Arjuna Neuman works towards a diagnostic of the economic, affective and ideological systems that envelop us; he uses the history of the nuclear industry and technology more generally to this end. Neuman researched Singapore as a “City within a Garden” through the concept of “Borrowed Scenery”, an ancient Chinese and Japanese garden design as it re-appears in unusual places: from an Israeli-Singaporean Military collaboration on various weapons, to the Singapore Tourism Board’s masterplan, to local gateway architecture built by foreign stars.

While in residence, Arin Rungjang will investigate the phenomenon of historical rumours in Thailand and Singapore. His research aims to unearth unofficial stories that circulate by word of mouth and connect them to the politics of governance and notions of historical truth, allowing us to glimpse at popular mentalities and anxieties in a given period. Rungjang will also be using the studio space to further develop the project that he will be presenting at Kassel and Athens next year.

Antariksa’s research interests lie in the complexities of the Indonesian art environment. In particular, art collectivism during Japanese occupation (1942–1945) and its impacts and influences on Indonesian art history. While in Residence, he will investigate art collectivism in Singapore during Japanese occupation, and collaboration and camaraderie between Chinese-Indonesian and Nanyang style artists in Singapore.

Anocha Suwichakornpong’s research is on Thai history within Southeast Asia, in particular the Thai politics and student movements of 1970s. From her research, Suwichakornpong will develop two projects, a short documentary/video essay exploring the relationship between Thailand and Singapore, which dates back to 1871 when King Rama V – the first monarch in Thai history to visit a foreign country – Singapore, and a multi-platform project on the Golden Mile Complex, known today as a Thai town in Singapore.

Anne Szefer Karlsen will connect to and explore the Singapore art scene, investigating parallels between the Singaporean and Norwegian art environment. She will give a public presentation discussing the Scandinavian art book series Dublett (2012 – 2016). Each edition of Dublett consists of a new artist’s book and an anthology of commissioned texts on the artist or project at hand, written by contributors from a variety of disciplines that aim to cultivate art mediation within a book format. While in residence, Szefer Karlsen also aims to connect with artists, curators, writers and designers in Singapore, focusing on the intersections between editorial and curatorial practices.

Anna Daneri has worked with Joan Jonas on several occasions in the past, and was the production manager for the presentation of They Come to Us without a Word at the U.S. Pavilion during the 56th Venice Biennale. While in residence Daneri will give a Curatorial Tour of Joan Jonas: They Come to Us without a Word at the NTU CCA Singapore and will provide a deeper understanding of Jonas’ way of working and share insights into how the artist developed the different elements of her exhibition. Daneri will research Singapore’s port city status and different mutations of trade and migration and how this has affected the psychogeographic landscape of Singapore. She will also connect with local artists to gain an awareness of Singaporean arts communities.

Selene Yap is a Programme Manager for Visual Arts at The Substation. From 2014 to 2015, she was a member of Curating Lab, a curatorial mentorship programme by National University of Singapore (NUS) Museum. Yap’s previous projects include Objects in the Mirror Are Closer than They Appear (2015), a site-specific exploration on the experience of space and material in Singapore’s Dakota Crescent estate. Her interest in discursive engagements on the politics of urban space and culture is a development from her studies in NUS where she read Sociology and Southeast Asian Studies. Image credit: Susie Wong, image of selected pages from (her) Book of Solitude (2014).

Melanie Pocock is Assistant Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, LASALLE College of the Arts and Editor-at-large of Kaleidoscope Asia. A graduate of the Royal College of Art’s MA in Curating Contemporary Art, she previously held curatorial positions at Art Scene China and Modern Art Oxford, where she worked on solo exhibitions by Shezad Dawood and Stephen Willats. Pocock’s projects and writing explore shifting modalities in contemporary media and the influence of intercultural exchange on artistic practices. Exhibitions she has curated include Jack Tan: How to do things with rules (2015), Countershadows (tactics in evasion) (2014) and Michael Lee: A machine for (living) dying in (2014). In 2014, Pocock edited and co-authored Sulaiman, the first monograph on the work of Malaysian artist Shooshie Sulaiman.

Siddharta Perez is an Assistant Curator at the NUS Museum, focused on developing exhibitions and programmes around the museum’s South & Southeast Asian Collection. Previously based in Manila, she is the co-founder of Planting Rice, an independent curatorial and resource platform, and worked as the curatorial associate for The Drawing Room’s Manila and Singapore galleries (2012-2015). Her other previous projects include LOSTprojects (2009-2012) – an independent space for Australia and Philippine artist exchange, the coordination of the Roberto Chabet retrospective (2011) and as an exhibition manager/curator for the Valentine Willie Fine Art galleries (2008-2011).

Artist Resource Platform: activate! is an ongoing project that engages with and expands upon the Artist Resource Platform, a growing collection of visual and audio materials from over 90 artists and independent art spaces. The series will negotiate with the limitations of an archive by initiating conversations and experimentations, offering the audience multiple access points to the resource materials and the artists’ practices.

This edition of Artist Resource Platform: activate! will feature three curators based in Singapore, providing a conceptual framework to understand their practices and how they are situated within the local and international contemporary art scene.

Public Programme

Artist Resource Platform: activate! I with Sidd Perez (The Philippines/Singapore), Assistant Curator, NUS Museum Wednesday, 18 May, 7.30 – 9.00pm

Artist Resource Platform: activate! II with Selene Yap (Singapore), Programme Manager (Visual Arts), The Substation Friday, 27 May, 7.30 – 9.00pm

Artist Resource Platform: activate! III with Melanie Pocock (United Kingdom/Singapore), Assistant Curator, Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, LASALLE College of the Arts Friday, 10 June, 7.30 – 9.00pm

Artist Resource Platform: activate! III with Melanie Pocock (United Kingdom/Singapore), Assistant Curator, Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, LASALLE College of the Arts Friday, 10 June, 7.30 – 9.00pm

Artist Resource Platform: activate! II with Selene Yap (Singapore), Programme Manager (Visual Arts), The Substation Friday, 27 May, 7.30 – 9.00pm

Artist Resource Platform: activate! I with Sidd Perez (The Philippines/Singapore), Assistant Curator, NUS Museum Wednesday, 18 May, 7.30 – 9.00pm

We Are Open! brings the artists’ files of NTU CCA Singapore’s Public Resource Platform into the spotlight by reinterpreting The Lab, the Centre’s space for introducing research in process, as an open studio for activation. Each artist’s file contains materials ranging from books, collaterals, photographs, and videos to grey literature, donated to the Centre by the Artists-in-Residence, as well as Singaporean artists outside our Residency Programme.

Spanning eight weeks, this presentation by NTU CCA Singapore’s Young Professional Trainees takes the form of an ongoing experiment to explore the potential of these files as a tool for research and education, inviting the public to engage with materials for research, creation, and commentary about subjects such as culture, identity, and alternate realities. We Are Open! will also include collaborations with local artists who have been invited to utilise the diverse resource materials in the context of education workshops.

Curated by Young Professional Trainees:

Qamarul Asyraf, Productions
Ho Mun Yee, Research
Sara Ng, Residencies
Joey Sim, Residencies
Priscilla Toh, Communications
Olivia Wong, Exhibitions
Zhang Jing Chao, Outreach and Education

The Public Studio

The Public Studio consists of two workshops in which the public will be able to work first-hand with invited local artists who are also educators in the arts field. Through these workshops, the public and artists will have the opportunity to generate tangible interpretations of the resources in the Public Resource Platform.

These collaborative discussions on contemporary subjects found in the artists’ files, aim to provide a better understanding of how the Public Resource Platform can be utilised beyond the intended context of curatorial research. Insights derived from these workshops will be exhibited on the walls throughout the course of the show as demonstrations of the experimental processes.

Ready, Steady, Go (2 — 8 August 2017)
Incidental Scripts (10 — 15 August 2017)
Proximities and Encounters (16 — 22 August 2017)
Islanded (23 — 31 August 2017)

Speakers’ Corner is a selection of video documentations of former public events and related research materials from its archives. Here, the term “Speakers’ Corner” stands as a metaphor for public discourses created through the various programmes of NTU CCA Singapore. Outreach not only means to create discussions but also to find different languages, or to question under what premises we create our knowledge. Altogether this is what creates a public discourse or a “speakers’ corner” within an institution, which can be academic, literary, or performative. It opens up the possibility for encounters with the known and unknown, the expected and unexpected, as a form of its lively activities.

NTU CCA Singapore’s public programmes reflect on our present world through culture and art. Unfolding over two months will be four chapters: Islanded, Incidental Scripts, Proximities and Encounters, and Ready, Steady, Go. Each chapter is related to an exhibition held at NTU CCA Singapore such as Incidental Scripts by Yang Fudong (2014) or SEA STATE by Charles Lim Yi Yong (2016), or to invited local and international Artists-in-Residence and their artistic research and practices like Heman Chong (2017) or Zac Langdon-Pole (2014). On a broader scheme, the events offer an expanded reading and understanding of the complexity and diversity of the contemporary art production of today and how it intersects with current developments in culture, society, and politics.

As a genre of theatre that features exclusively women actors, Yeoseong Gukgeuk reached the peak of popularity in the 1950s and 1960s, its success being tightly intertwined with the process of modernisation of South Korea. While today it lingers on the verge of extinction, in the post-colonial period Yeoseong Gukgeuk opened up a space for women to embody “other” identities and perform different subjectivities. Reinventing the traditional Korean theatre, they brought the process of gender-shifting to the limelight and subverted socially acceptable norms by blurring conventional gender binaries. Since 2008, siren eun young jung has investigated the public and private lives of Yeoseong Gukgeuk performers who, after the genre fell out of favour, went on to live disparate lives. This configuration of archival materials offers an insight into the artist’s research process and articulates the politics of recollecting, weaving together queer desires and patterns of resistance, affective matters and subversive subjectivities, gender fluidity and the performance of difference.

Allan Sekula was born in Pennsylvania in 1951 and he lived and taught at California Institute of the Arts before passing away on 2013. By employing photography and written words, his works often focused on the shipping industry and ocean travel, contributing on questions of social reality and globalization. His works were included in the dOCUMENTA (11) and (12), Kassel, Germany (2002, 2007), Centre Pompidou (2006, 1996), Sao Paulo Biennial (2010), Whitney Museum (1976, 1993, 2002, 2006, 2014), Foto Institute Rotterdam (1997, 2001), Whitney Biennale (2014), (2010), Istanbul Biennale (2007), Busan Biennale (2006) and many others. He also received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts National Endowment for the Arts, the Getty Research Institute, and many other prestigious institutions.

Fiona Tan’s work range from photographs to drawings, from digital installations to theatrically scaled projections. Tan’s evocative works are powerful investigations of identity and belonging in a world shaped by global culture. Much of her work expresses a long-standing interest in the documentary image, both personal and public, and the role of memory, time and place in the construction of identity. The artist’s explorations on issues of post-colonialism and displacement originate in her own biography straddling East and West. Born in Indonesia, to a Chinese-Indonesian father and an Australian mother, she was raised in Australia and moved to the Netherlands in her late teens where she studied at Rijksakademie, Amsterdam. Still, her work often suggests that displacement is part of everyone’s life and everyone’s identity is in a constant flux.

Tan’s work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions. She participated in various biennales including São Paulo Biennial, São Paulo (2010), Göteborg Biennial, Göteborg (2009), New Orleans Biennial, New Orleans (2008), Biennale of Sydney, Sydney (2006), Berlin Biennale (2001) and she also took part in documenta 11, Kassel (2002). In 2009, she represented The Netherlands at the Venice Biennale’s for the Dutch Pavilion. Tan’s recent solo exhibitions include: Inventory, Maxxi, Rome (2013), Disorient, Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow (2012), Point of Departure, Andalusian Centre of Contemporary Art, Sevilla (2012), Rise and Fall, a touring solo exhibition at Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau; The Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver (2010 – 2011).

Zarina Bhimji’s work spans a range of media – from installations to photography, from film to sound. Often in her work, Bhimji engages with her family story. Of Indian descent, born in Uganda, Bhimji and her family left the country in the wake of Idi Amin’s expulsion of the South Asians community. Bringing aesthetic to the fore, Bhimji’s approach to colonial history is defined by a strong visual language that resists simplifications and predictable interpretations of the work.

Bhimji’s work has been shown extensively both in the UK and abroad and her solo shows include De Appel Arts Centre (2012-2013), Whitechapel Gallery, London (2012; The New Gallery, Walsall (2012), Kunstmuseum Bern, Bern (2012), Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2009), Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago (2009). Bhimji’s work has also been shown at He Disappeared Into Complete Silence, De Hallen Museum, Haarlem (2011), ARS11 – Africa in Kouvola, Kouvola (2011), Göteburg International Biennal, Göteburg (2011); 29th Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo, Capturing Time, Kadist Art Foundation, Paris (2009), Zones of Contact, Biennale of Sydney (2006). Her first film, Out of Blue was commissioned, produced by and presented in 2002 at documenta 11, Kassel. Zarina Bhimji was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2007, received a DAAD award in 2002 and was a recipient of the Paul Hamlyn Visual Arts Award in 1999.

Vera Mey is an independent curator and PhD candidate at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She is part of the curatorial team for SEA Project (2017) at the Mori Art Museum, Japan, and National Art Center, Tokyo. She is also co-founder of the scholarly journal Southeast of Now. Between 2014 and 2016, she joined Ambitious Alignments, a research initiative of the Getty Foundation. She was part of the founding team of NTU CCA Singapore as Curator for Residencies from 2014 to 2016.

Malak Helmy lives and works in Cairo, Egypt. Her work explores relationships between constructions of language and constructions of place; the line between private and public, science and magic, and metaphor. Helmy’s work has been exhibited at the 63rd and 64th Berlinale Forum Expanded,(2014 and 2013); the 9th Mercosul Biennial (2013); Frankendael Foundation (2013); Beirut (2013); Camera Austria (2013); 9th Gwangju Biennial (2012); amongst others.

Nigel Rolfe lives and works in Dublin, Ireland. He has most recently performed and featured in Performance Art Festivals, in galleries and museums in many countries. Nigel Rolfe is recognized as a seminal figure in performance art and has been active as an Action Artist since 1969. Since 2008 live working has become once again in his primary form. He is a senior course tutor in Fine Art (Perfomance) at the Royal College of Art, London.

Marie Shannon is an New Zealand-based artist. Her work has always been concerned with her immediate surroundings, and has at times addressed the work of other artists. Following the death of her partner, the artist Julian Dashper, in 2009, she has been cataloguing his art works and archive in their shared Auckland studio. It is from this process that she has gathered the material for her text-based videos.

Diego Tonus lives and works in Amsterdam. His works addresses the boundaries between truth and fact, reality and fiction, presentation and representation, mediation and lived experience. His work has been recently presented at Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2013); the 9th edition of Furla award (2013), Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam (2013).

Mona Vătămanu and Florin Tudor are artists who have worked together since 2000. Their artistic practice involves bringing history into the present tense. Between July and September 2014, Vătămanu and Tudor were Artists-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore where they focused on the prevalent presence of migrant labour in Singapore. During their residency, the artists also produced Le Monde et les Choses, a map based on statistical studies by the Central Intelligence Agency that shows the dominant industries in each world country. The map exposes the contradictions of global neoliberalism, revealing the large domination over industries by a small number of countries.

While in residence, Erin Gleeson gave a public talk with her nomination for the NTU CCA Singapore Artist-in-Residence, Luke Willis Thompson. She also had introductory visits and curatorial tours to important institutional spaces and made a number of first-contact studio visits, finding synergies with CCA artist-in-residence Koh Nguang How’s research for Shui Tit Sing – 100 Years of an Artist through his Archives as part of his Singapore Art Archive Project @ CCA (SAAP@CCA).

Planting Rice is a curatorial collaboration of Lian Ladia and Sidd Perez. This platform is aimed at fostering the rise of cross-pollination among artistic communities and has been in existence since 2011. Planting Rice’s major component is a web-based platform that generates and circulates an archive of open source republished texts that highlight scholarship on art history and criticism that is at the risk of being inaccessible. The team’s curatorial practice extends off-site and their projects include repotentializing spaces, rehistoricizing narratives of art, and expanding the roles, forms and gestures of curatorial practice.

Sonya Lacey (b. 1976, New Zealand) is a Wellington-based artist whose practice focuses on forms of communications within spoken, printed, and online scenarios. She works with a variety of mediums including performance, video, and installation often drawing on historical references to speculate on the specificity of socio-technological discourses. Alongside her studio practice, Lacey is also interested in curatorial, publishing, and collaborative methodologies. Together with Sarah Rose, she established the collaborative research project lightreading.

Her works have been shown at Govett Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, Taranaki, New Zealand (2017, 2016), Glasgow Centre for Contemporary Art, United Kingdom (2016), and London International Film Festival, United Kingdom (2015).

Yang Fudong was born in 1971 in Beijing and now lives and works in Shanghai. Working primarily in photography and film, Yang’s works are filled with psychological and existential questions. Yang’s work has been shown at many international exhibitions including: Documenta XI, Germany, 2002; the Shanghai Biennale, China, 2002; the Carnegie International, United States, 2005; the Asia Pacific Triennial, Australia, 2006; and the Venice Biennale, 2007.

Trinh T. Minh-ha is Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies and of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, and an award-winning artist and filmmaker. She grew up in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War and pursued her education at the National Conservatory of Music and Theater in Ho Chi Minh City. In 1970, she migrated to the United States where she continued her studies in music composition, ethnomusicology, and French literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She embarked on a career as an educator and has taught in diverse disciplines which brought her to the National Conservatory of Music in Dakar, Senegal, where she shot her first film, Reassemblage. Trinh’s cinematic oeuvre has been featured in numerous exhibitions and film festivals. She has participated in biennales across the globe including Documenta11, Kassel (2002), and most recently at Manifesta 13, Marseille (2020). A prolific writer, she has authored nine books. She is the author of several books including Lovecidal: Walking with the Disappeared (2016), D-Passage: The Digital Way (2013), and Elsewhere, Within Here: Immigration, Refugeeism and the Boundary Event (2011). Her film Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989) was presented as an installation within NTU CCA Singapore’s inaugural exhibition Paradise Lost (2014).

While in residence, anGie seah will investigate this ineffable expression into a series of expressive notions; creating moments in curious site-specific rituals and making instructional tools and activities for uplifting purposes. Her research will focus on reflecting upon existential questions on the meaning of fear, death, loss and being human. Fascinated by the splendour of the everyday and against all the depressing and chaotic evidence to the contrary, Seah will investigate intrinsic values of living.

Eva Meyer is a writer and filmmaker based in Berlin. She is the author of various works of cinematic thinking including What Does the Veil Know? (ed. in collaboration with Vivian Liska, 2009), Frei und indirekt (2010), Zählen und Erzählen. Für eine Semiotik des Weiblichen (1983, reprint 2013). She has taught at various universities and art schools in Europe and the United States, and currently is a faculty member at the Zurich University of the Arts. Since 1997 she has collaborated with the filmmaker Eran Schaerf, focusing on documentary fiction.

Isaac Julien, CBE RA is a distinguished filmmaker and installation artist, and Professor, UC Santa Cruz. His multiscreen film installations and photographs incorporate different artistic disciplines to create a poetic and unique visual language. Julien’s notable documentary-drama, Looking for Langston (1989), garnered him a cult following. His works have shown in solo shows internationally, and he has participated in various biennales. Most recently, he received the Charles Wollaston Award (2017) for most distinguished work at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, and in 2018 he was made a Royal Academician. Julien was awarded the title Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the Queen’s birthday honours, 2017.

Harini V (Singapore) is a bilingual poet and a member of the Tamil Language Council. Her Tamil poems have been featured in the recent SG50 Singapore women poetry anthology titled Nithimisai Nagarum Koorangazhkal, as well as in Love at the Gallery 2017 — a book of poems inspired by art from the National Gallery Singapore. Outside of her writing activities, she has also organised open mic nights and literary panels over the past few years.

The filmic and performative practice of Russell Morton (b. 1982, Singapore) explores folkloric myths, esoteric rituals, and the conventions of cinema itself. His film Saudade (2020) was commissioned for State of Motion: Rushes of Time, Asian Film Archives, Singapore, and presented at the 31^st Singapore International Film Festival (2020); The Forest of Copper Columns (2015) won the Cinematic Achievement Award at the 57^th Thessaloniki Film Festival, Greece (2016) and was selected for several festivals including the Short Shorts Film Festival, Tokyo, Japan (2017); the Thai Short Film and Video Festival, Bangkok, Thailand and Jogja-NETPAC Asian Film Festival, Indonesia (both 2016).

Karin G. Oen is Deputy Director, Curatorial Programmes, at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore. She received her PhD in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Art and Architecture from MIT. A global modernist, she has recently focused on curatorial projects that explore transmediatic, transcultural, and transhistorical discourse. Oen is the curator of the forthcoming exhibition, teamLab: Continuity, at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, where she was a curator from 2015-2019.

In her videos, services, concoctions and drawings, Ana Prvacki uses a gently pedagogical and comedic approach in an attempt to reconcile etiquette and erotics. Prvacki’s practice also centres around the human negotiation involved in endeavours such as hospitality, team efforts through music or questioning our normative cultural codes around ways of being in and navigating a contemporary life.

Amy Lien & Enzo Camacho’s residency research focuses on employees of financial institutions in Singapore. It fixates on the college graduates who have recently entered the field, and who are becoming biologically shaped by the dominating but fraught system of globalized financial capital. This artistic research began after hearing stories about the extreme work routines and social lives of these fresh recruits in Singapore. The best stories were about Enzo Camacho’s sister, a beautiful, young third-year analyst at a prominent investment bank in this city.

Amanda Heng has championed the representation of women within exhibitions in Singapore through examining notions of the female body through her performances, her work with WITAS (Women in the Arts Singapore) and through various artists’ initiatives in the early 1990s.Heng’s recent work is focused on the issues of history, memory, communication and human relationships in urban conditions.

CITIES FOR PEOPLE is the pilot edition of the annual NTU CCA Ideas Fest, a platform to catalyse critical exchange of ideas and encourage thinking “out of the box”. It is a bottom-up approach linking the artistic and academic community with grassroots initiatives. This pilot edition expands artistic interventions and engages contemporary issues such as air, water, food, environment, and social interaction in connection to artistic and cultural fields, academic research, and design applications.

The 10-day programme, coinciding with Singapore Art Week 2017 and Art After Dark at Gillman Barracks, comprises a conglomerate of performances, public installations, participatory projects and social experiment, urban farming initiatives, public dialogues, and a variety of workshops. It cumulates in a three-day summit that brings together a prominent group of architects, theorists, researchers, curators, and community groups to discuss and exchange ideas about urbanism, modes of exchange, critical spatial practice, and to envision a future city. CITIES FOR PEOPLE offers a platform to contemplate the possibilities for our shared space, reformulate our demands accordingly, and project solutions and desires for the future.

CITIES FOR PEOPLE, borrowing the title from a book by eminent Singapore architect William S. W. Lim published in 1990, expands on some of the ideas Lim developed, particularly in relation to tropical environments and recycling, as well as his call for a humanistic architecture. Organised on the occasion of the exhibition Incomplete Urbanism: Attempts at Critical Spatial Practice, this event is an invitation to share and engage in cooperative projects and collective experiences that critically reflect on current challenges in urban and social development.

During her residency, Alice Miceli plans to expand her current project, In Depth (landmines) (2014-ongoing). So far she has conducted field research in Cambodia, Colombia, and Bosnia where she photographed several mine-contaminated areas. The artist plans to examine other sites where landmines and unexploded ordnance remain an active deadly threat. She is especially interested in the landmine situation in Angola, the most heavily mined country in the world as a result of decades of conflict and civil war. The process of gathering relevant materials and managing the complex logistics required by trips to such dangerous areas are all essential components of the work. The artist intends to use her studio to experiment with different spatial presentations of In Depth (landmines) and to initiate new lines of research around the subject of landscape, looking into areas affected by plagues and epidemics and exploring the possibilities involved in their photographic representation.

Ari Wulu is a solo electronic music performer also known as midiJUNKIE or WVLV. He has been actively creating arrangements and performing since 1998, and his works have been presented at various events and festivals in Indonesia. Apart from his audio works, he is also the Program Director of SoundBoutique (2005–present), and Yogyakarta Gamelan Festival (2009–present), and was a member of the board of directors of Yogyakarta Art Festival (2013–18). Together with his collective, Jogjakarta Video Mapping Project (also known as JVMP, 2013–present), Ari Wulu organises SUMONAR, an annual video projection and interactive art festival in Yogyakarta (since 2018).

Lulu Lutfi Labibi studied textile craft in Indonesian Institute of the Arts in Yogyakarta (ISI Yogyakarta). In 2012, LULU LUTFI LABIBI was launched: a ready-to-wear fashion label that promotes the use of Indonesian traditional textiles such as lurik, tenun, and batik in a more up-to-date look. The technique of drapery became its own identity by forming the fabric directly onto the mannequin or living model, without creating many patterns. Apart from presenting his works at various local and international festivals, Lulu Lutfi Labibi collaborated with artists indieguerillas to present Petruk Jadi Supermodel at Artjog 2015, and with art collective Piramida Gerilya to present Warung Murakabi at Artjog 2019.

Alex Murray-Leslie is part of Chicks on Speed, a multidisciplinary art group and pioneers in the cross pollination of Pop Music, Performance Art, Fashion and New Media. Murray-Leslie will research into computational footwear in live art The BipedShoe Project, acoustic shoe tools for performance), through the production of new knowledge via experimental research and new collaborations with local Singaporean arts practitioners, curators and academics. She will integrate her experiences while in residence into a new body of performative work around the BipedShoes, which is at the core of her ongoing research into Objectinstruments and their effects on dramaturgie in artformances (live art performances).

Aimee Lin, Editor of ArtReview Asia gave a talk during her residency at the Singapore Art Book Fair 2014. Lin met with local artists to understand the art scene in Singapore with research facilitated by Vera Mey NTU CCA Singapore Curator, Residencies.

Luke Fowler is an artist, filmmaker and musician based in Glasgow. His work explores the limits and conventions of biographical and documentary filmmaking, and has often been compared to the British Free Cinema of the 1950s. Working with archival footage, photography and sound, Fowler’s filmic montages create portraits of intriguing, counter cultural figures, including Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing and English composer Cornelius Cardew.

Peter Daniel Sipeli is passionate about storytelling because he believes that stories humanise people by showing that we all face the same choices, struggles, and triumphs. A well-known spoken word artist, he was instrumental in the revitalisation of the Fiji SLAM in Suva. He founded the Poetryshop Fiji to fill a development gap for new and emerging local writers, as well as the only online Pacific islands arts magazine ARTalk. Having worked for 10 years with NGOs as a human rights and LGBTQ activist, he has also worked in the Fiji Arts Council and in the Dean’s Office at the Fiji School of Medicine. Additionally, he managed the popularised ROC Sunday street market.

Unfolding over four weeks, the NTU CCA Singapore presents Four Practices, a display of resource material of current Artists-in-Residence. Showcasing publications, audio and visual documentation, Four Practices provides an entry point in understanding the artists’ diverse body of works and the complexity of their practices.

Four Practices complements and expands on NTU CCA Singapore’s Artist Resource Platform, a growing collection of resource materials from more than 80 local and international artists, independent art spaces and NTU CCA Singapore’s Artists-in-Residence.

Dennis Tan went to an arts college in Singapore and graduated with a diploma in Painting. Tan subsequently took on an MA in Architecture, however this course of study was peppered with interruptions and took over a decade to obtain his degree. During his studies, he took on the role of a nomad and a bricoleur, of thinking while making. Tan cites the turning point of his practice when he first encountered Alan Kaprow’s, The blurring of Art and Life and sees this and Tom Marioni’s, The Act of Drinking Beer With Friends Is the Highest Form of Art as a pivotal influence on his practice. Tan’s practice suspends conceptualism, tinkers with found objects and the environment as a gestural structure upon which the loop closes with the behaviour of its recipients. To date, this inclination sets the tone of his evolving practice.

Between February to June 2016, Tan was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore. During his residency, he continued his research on the fast-disappearing knowledge of marine craft in the region, working with oral histories in the Riau Archipelago to reconstruct a traditional Kolek sailboat.

Zac Langdon-Pole’s work is underpinned by questions of belonging, translation, and identification. He has worked in a variety of media, including sculpture, performance, photography, film, textiles, poetry, installation, and using the work of other artists, to explore processes of montage, transposition, travelling, reinterpretation, collaboration, and appropriation. He is the latest recipient of the BMW Art Journey Prize (2018), was awarded the Ars Viva Prize for Visual Arts in Germany (2017), and received the Charlotte Prinz Stipendium in Darmstadt (2016). Langdon-Pole completed a BFA (Hons) at Elam School of Fine Arts, Auckland (2010) and at the Städelschule, Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Frankfurt (2016). Recent exhibitions include scions, Kunsthalle Darmstadt (2018); Ars Viva, S.M.A.K., Ghent (2018), and Kunstverein Munich (2017–18); Discoveries, Art Basel Hong Kong 2018 (presented by Michael Lett Gallery); emic etic, Between Bridges, Berlin (2018); Trappings, Station Gallery, Melbourne (2017); La Biennale de Montréal (2016–17); and Oratory Index, Michael Lett Gallery, Auckland (2016). Between March and April 2016, Langdon-Pole was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore, where he developed further his work My body … (Brendan Pole) (2015), a text based upon the memory of a poem that was only ever conveyed orally to the artist’s mother by her brother shortly before he died of AIDS complications.

“Patterns – cloth and textiles as text in Southeast Asia – imbedding cultural interrelations and the question of identities” in times of global sameness, is Regina (Maria) Möller‘s research focus. Möller’s research in The Lab stems from her interest in the trademark headdress of Samsui women, and will elaborate with time through experimental, collaborative and participatory forms of research practice. During workshops, lectures or formats of story telling, new layers will be added to reflect upon each other and trigger next threads for an ever expanding weave.

Social Memory Making and the Samsui Women: Objects, Heritage, Merchandisation: A talk by Kelvin E.Y. Low, public programme of research project Interrogative Pattern – Text(ile) Weave by Regina (Maria) Möller at The Lab

Regina (Maria) Möller is an artist and previously Visiting Professor at NTU ADM, Singapore, and Visiting Research Fellow at NTU CCA Singapore. With an interest in practices of design and histories of textiles, Möller is the founder of the magazine regina (1994–ongoing), which appropriates the format of mainstream women’s fashion magazines, and of the label “embodiment” focused on the interaction between body and environment at large. As part of her research fellowship, Möller developed Interrogative Pattern – Text(ile) Weave (2015–17), a project unfolded in various formats that explored the relation between labour, identity construction, and cultural assimilations in an emerging global sameness through the case study of the Samsui women’s iconic headdress.

Unfolding over two months, Artists-in-Residence Li Ran and Gary Ross Pastrana will develop projects for The Lab, NTU CCA Singapore’s space for experimentation, which are speculations on how an image is created and deconstructed.

Gary Ross Pastrana’s An ASEAN Exhibition 1 creates an artistic gesture around the idea of Southeast Asia as a reference with no visual referent. The artist engaged DSM Solutions, a young Singaporean creative collective, to stage a “Contemporary Southeast Asia Art Exhibition-Themed Event” and prototype props that could stand in for Southeast Asian artworks. In this manner, the artist has effectively outsourced the sometimes-problematic task of representing Southeast Asia, an implied obligation of artists invited to regionally themed group exhibitions within the region.

Li Ran presents a new project Waiting for the Fog to Drift Away, a collaboration with Singapore Management University (SMU), Assistant Professor Rowan Wang, a specialist in overall planning science. Li Ran will conduct interviews to gain planning advice from Wang in an attempt to define the most successful trajectory for the life of an artist as a business enterprise, estimating production levels and peaks and troughs in key life moments.

Li Ran is a performance and video artist. His practice tests the line between fact and fiction, questioning assumptions of cultural cliché and challenging the idea of the self. Between September and November 2015, Li was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore where he started the work It is not Complicated, A Guide Book (2016). As part of the work, Li juxtaposed recordings of Singapore’s popular attractions, Gardens by the Bay and Marina Bay Sands, with quotes from the Chinese version of the Centre Pompidou museum guide, whose account of modern art resonates with Singapore’s contemporary landscape.

Gary-Ross Pastrana is an artist and curator. His artistic practice combines concepts with objects and his poetic and subtle works often focus on the afterlife of things and the new meanings it generates. Between July and October 2015, Pastrana was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore. His residency coincided with Singapore’s 50th-year celebrations as a nation state, which prompted the artist to document a series of coincidental encounters in the city with this anniversary number.

Integrated within NTU CCA Singapore’s overarching research framework PLACE.LABOUR.CAPITAL, The Lab will present Darcy Lange: Hard, however, and useful is the small, day-to-day work, taking the video work of New Zealand artist, Darcy Lange (1946 – 2005) as the starting point for a complex discussion concerning the representation of labour. During the 1970s, Lange developed a socially engaged video practice with remarkable studies of people at work that draw from documentary traditions as well as conceptual and structuralist video making. With his seminal style of real-time, unedited, without commentary, lengthy observations of workers that came to characterise his Work Studies series (1972 – 77), Lange aimed to “convey the image of work as work, as an occupation, as an activity, as creativity and as a time consumer”.

Curated by guest curator, Mercedes Vicente.

Darcy Lange was a New Zealand artist born in Urenui. During the 1970s, Lange developed a socially engaged video practice with remarkable studies of people at work that draw from documentary traditions as well as conceptual and structuralist video making. With his seminal style of real-time, unedited, without commentary, lengthy observations of workers that came to characterise his Work Studies series (1972 – 77), Lange aimed to “convey the image of work as work, as an occupation, as an activity, as creativity and as a time consumer”.

This ongoing research project is inspired by Amar Kanwar’s The Sovereign Forest. Referencing Kanwar’s artistic approach, The Haze: An Inquiry brought together people from different disciplines in a focus group that takes the haze situation in Southeast Asia as the main topic for investigation.

How do we bridge the gap from the banal to the sensual, the tactical and visceral? What steps of inquiry leads us from the scientific to the notion of immediacy? How do we define abstract terms such as “crime” – Is the haze a crime? What is a crime against society? Different perspectives are offered in this process by participants from diverse backgrounds, including a research scientist, theatre director, community leader, writer, tech consultant, co-founder of a hackerspace, activist, designer and curator, geographer, architect, and postgraduate student.

A core group of specialists from varied fields of law, natural and social sciences, literature, art and architecture, media and theatre, is brought together in a series of workshops and discussions to explore the haze situation as an environmental, human, and legal challenge, given its transnational impact. The aim is to create a collection of “evidence” and to investigate the potential of the haze to be considered a “crime”. This collecting which include factual information and data, compilation of ancestral knowledge, media clippings, commentaries, unrecorded oral knowledge, as well as writings, photographs, and films will be gathered in the space amidst working notes of the core group. Using these “evidences”, participants will uncover social and environmental impacts beyond the haze, and deliberate on questions of social justice, corporate environmental responsibilities, agronomy cultures in industrial developments, amongst others. Each participant brings to the discussion individual responses that stem from their respective interests and disciplines. This research platform aims to assemble a diversity of viewpoints to provoke alternative ways of looking at and talking with a wider public about contemporary situations of urgency.

In addition to the series of closed and public workshops, discussions, and presentations participants in the core group is engaged in, they are also encouraged to invite guests who will make further inquiries into the “evidences” in The Lab and to look into collaborative working methods of shared agency.

Syaheedah Iskandar works with vernacular ideas of visuality within Southeast Asia, drawing on contemporary discourses on hyper-visuality and its opposite, the unseen. Her projects aim to unpack knowledge(s) that inform and counter hegemonic systems of seeing. Recent curatorial projects include State of Motion 2021: [Alternate/Opt] Realities (2021), An Exercise of Meaning in a Glitch Season (2020) and Nyanyi Sunyi (Songs of Solitude) (2018). Syaheedah was the inaugural Emerging Writers’ Fellow for the academic journal Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia and the recipient of the IMPART Awards 2020 (Singapore) in recognition of her emerging curatorial practice. She holds an MA in History of Art and Archaeology at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. She was previously Curatorial Assistant at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (2014–18).

Bring it to LIFE is a curatorial project that engages with NTU CCA Singapore’s Artist Resource Platform which aims to overcome the mediated experience and create direct encounters with artistic production. Structured in four different episodes, Bring it to LIFE brings to the fore artworks by Mona Vatamanu & Florin Tudor, Kray Chen, Sufian Samsiyar, and Geraldine Kang that directly engage with the subject matter of PLACE.LABOUR.CAPITAL. through themes of migration and capital transactions. In addition, it uses spatial interventions as a tool to highlight that the production of meaning is also a spatial process and our movement into a confined place impacts upon the way we relate to it and make meaning out of it.

The work of Mona Vatamanu & Florin Tudor produced during their residency at NTU CCA Singapore is conceived as a visual poem focused on the migrant workers whose individual destinies are influenced by the wider movements of capital flow. Kray Chen’s contribution is a playful installation highlighting how transactional activities such as cutting queues, getting out of a train or simply shopping are punctuating our everyday life. Sufian Samsiyar’s collaborative project tests the thin boundaries between work and life space. Geraldine Kang’s intervention into the spatial arrangement of the Platform is a proposition for another reading and way of engagement with an archive that eschews linearity and prescribed movement into the space.

Conceived by a constellation of voices from NTU CCA Singapore, Bring it to LIFE is curated by Shona Findlay, Curatorial Assistant, Residencies, Syaheedah Iskandar, Curatorial Assistant, Exhibitions, Samantha Leong, Executive, Conference, Workshops & Archive, and Kimberly Shen, Manager, Communications.

Driven by his interest in exploring the conditions of the human body, multi-disciplinary artist Choy Ka Fai focuses his research on choreographic practices inAsia. The wind that cuts the body presents his current investigation into Butoh, which arose in Japan at the end of the 1950s, encompassing a diverse range of techniques from dance, theatre, and movement. Choy traces the legacy of one of the key founders, Tatsumi Hijikata (1928–1986) who sought a new form of physical expression he referred to as ankoku butō (“dance of darkness”), delving into imageries of the grotesque and sickness of the human form. The research presentation will feature a selection of reference materials from the Tatsumi Hijikata Archive in Tokyo and from the artist’s expeditions, interviews, and documentary sketches. In his pursuit, Choy went to the extent of interviewing the spirit of Hijikata through an itako (Japanese shaman) and to speculate on the technological possibilities of dancing with Hijikata again.

The wind that cuts the body is curated by Khim Ong, Deputy Director, Curatorial Programmes.

Shona Mei Findlay (Singapore, 1989) is Curatorial Assistant Residencies of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (NTU CCA Singapore), a contemporary art research centre of Nanyang Technological University (NTU). Since its inauguration in January 2014, the Residencies Programme has brought together artists, curators and writers in a research driven residency with particular emphasis on artists from Singapore and Southeast Asia alongside artists from the rest of the world. She was project assistant for No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia, UBS Guggenheim Global Art Initiative’s MAP exhibition (2014) and co-curated the Artist Resource Platform: Bring it to Life (2015), both at NTU CCA Singapore. Findlay was a participant in the inaugural Workshop for Emerging Professionals of Para Site in Hong Kong (2015) and received her BA in Fine Art and History of Art from Goldsmiths College, London (2007). In the curriculum year 2016-17 she participates in the De Appel Curatorial Programme.

Since the establishment of the first human settlements in the late 19th century, the ecosystem of Christmas Island—a small volcanic outcrop in the Indian Ocean which was transferred from Singapore to Australia in 1958—underwent dramatic changes. Along with human settlers, several non-indigenous species alighted on the island disrupting the endemic biodiversity that had thrived undisturbed thanks to geographical remoteness and almost nil human interference. The accidental introduction of invasive species severely impacted a fragile ecosystem, imperilling the island’s wildlife and causing the extinction of a number of native species. As a result, extreme biocontrol strategies are currently being undertaken in an attempt to restore the island’s biodiversity.

In the past two years, The Institute of Critical Zoologists has been researching the escalating chain of events brought about by the human presence on Christmas Island gathering a varied collection of research materials that merge factual and fictional elements. By surveying the impact of human beings on an endemic habitat, Final Report of the Christmas Island Expert Working Group maps out lines of invasion and retreat, it investigates dynamics of connectedness and isolation triggering reflections on states of vulnerability and conditions of survival in the age of globalisation.

Curated by Anna Lovecchio, Curator, Residencies

On the occasion of the launch of the Digital Resource Platform, NTU CCA Singapore is presenting a selection of materials from Singapore’s Independent Archive (IA), a research and resource platform dedicated to time-based media, established by internationally-renowned artist Lee Wen (Singapore) in 2012. For the past six years, the IA captured the zeitgeist of performance art in Singapore and larger (South-)East Asia through artistic collaborations.

This presentation in The Lab is organised into five chapters —“Condition,” “Body,” “Formation / Gestalt,” “Absence,” and “Memory”—that look at the development of performance art as a new medium as well as its political conditions. Journey of a Yellow Man. takes visitors through the archive with photographs, videos, writings, sketchbooks, while simultaneously, introducing the digital archive. As of today, the Centre has digitalised 20,000 files from the IA.

The practice of Lee Wen is motivated by social investigations that use art to interrogate stereotypical perceptions of culture and society. He became famous for his performance series Journey of a Yellow Man (1992—), where he embodied his Chinese descent and its relationship to oppressive systems.

The presentation provides insight into a continuously expanding resource platform that highlights ephemeral moments in the history of performance art in Singapore. The project addresses the importance of providing historically significant source material for researchers and the wider public. The digitalised files will be integrated into NTU CCA Singapore’s Public Resource Platform and will be accessible at the Centre, the Independent Archive, and the Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong, a collaborative partner of this project.

With IA, a series of public programmes will take place in both The Lab at the NTU CCA Singapore and in the IA. The programme highlights IA as a “living archive” that not only serves as a reference library and archive focusing on time-based and event-specific art, but is also a gathering space that offers dynamic programmes in a vibrant network of artists, musicians, and the public.

Journey of a Yellow Man is curated by Sophie Goltz, Deputy Director, Research and Academic Programmes, NTU CCA Singapore, in collaboration with Lee Wen, artist and Founder, Independent Archive, Singapore, Bruce Quek, Research, Independent Archive, and Kamiliah Bahdar, Public Programmes, Independent Archive. Project Assistant: Ho See Wah, Young Professional Trainee, NTU CCA Singapore. Assistant to Lee Wen: Liu Wen Chao, Library, Independent Archive.

The NTU CCA Digital Resource Platform was initiated in 2016 by Ute Meta Bauer, Founding Director, NTU CCA Singapore, and Professor, NTU ADM Singapore and Lee Wen, in collaboration with Chương-Đài Võ, Researcher, Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong. Assistant to the project: Bruce Quek with the support of Samantha Leong Min Yu, Executive, Conferences, Workshops & Archive, NTU CCA Singapore (till May 2018), Corine Chan Li Ling, Executive Archive, NTU CCA Singapore (May to July 2018), and Pooja Paras Mehta (2017), Ho See Wah (2018), Young Professional Trainees, NTU CCA Singapore.

Samantha Leong is Executive, Conference, Workshops & Archive at NTU CCA Singapore from 2016-2018.

Sufian Samsiyar is an artist. Their work was featured in exhibitions at the National Gallery Singapore and the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore.

How are aspects of Southeast Asian modern art imaginatively engaged in contemporary practices—by artists, by archivists, and by others? This presentation pairs two ongoing research projects, which draw on histories of modern art in Southeast Asia with radically unlike methodologies: one is archival, yet innovative and unconventional in nature; the other is artistic, yet includes work from archives and involves other kinds of looking. The experimental curatorial juxtaposition of the two projects explores unlikely resonances between them, suggesting unexpected connections across the region, and across times. Among these synergies are the presences of spirituality and the Cold War, and the refiguring of forms and images within differing developments of the modern.

The Buddhist Archive of Photography in Luang Prabang, Laos, has gathered over 35,000 photographs either taken or collected by monks since 1890. The photographs have recently been digitised and catalogued, using innovative methodologies attentive to climatic, cultural, and religious circumstances. This Archive is, therefore, a fascinating instance of specifically 21st-century contemporary practice, as much as it is a unique collection of 19th and 20th-century modern photographs. This is the first time images from the Buddhist Archive of Photography are publicly presented in Asia, outside of Luang Prabang. The Archive has also published a series of bilingual English and Lao research volumes, which are made available in this presentation.

When considering this vast repository of images, several tropes and questions recur. What is photography’s relationship to anicca (impermanence), dukkha (suffering), and anatta (non-self), the three marks of existence in Buddhist thought? What role did Buddhists and photographers play in the Southeast Asian theatre of the global Cold War? And what are the limits of architectural modernity? These questions are explored in three distinct collections of photographs selected for this presentation. The first is a series of portraits of the late Most Venerable Pha Khamchan Virachitta Maha Thera (1920–2007), co-founder of the Buddhist Archive, taken every year from the age of seven until his death. The second selection comprises photographs collected by photographer-monk Pha Khamfan Silasangvaro (1901–1987), which protest the effects of civil war in Laos from 1959 to 1975, as well as photographs taken by another photographer-monk Pha Oun Heuane Hasapanya Maha Thela (1928–1982), who chronicled rarely seen aspects of Buddhist life, such as women’s vipassana meditation retreats. The third selection of images depicts the 1950s modernising renovations of Wat Saen Soukharam temple, under the direction of the late Most Venerable Pha Khamchan. These photographs, and the publications which accompany them, reward historical, spiritual, aesthetic, and other modes of attention and analysis.

And in the Chapel and in the Temples: research in progress by Buddhist Archive of Photography and Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho is conceived and organised by Dr Roger Nelson, an art historian and curator specialising in modern and contemporary art in Southeast Asia, and currently Postdoctoral Fellow at NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore and the School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. The presentation draws on Nelson’s ongoing art historical archival research in the Buddhist Archive, and his ongoing curatorial dialogue with Lien and Camacho.

Presented as a Fringe Programme of the 6th Singapore International Photography Festival.

Roger Nelson thanks Dr Khamvone Boulyaphonh, Hans Georg Berger, the Acuña family, Lynda Tay, the caretakers of Gillman Barracks, Drusilla Tay, Marc Glöde, Guo-Liang Tan, Patrick D. Flores, Simon Soon, and others who assisted in the development and realisation of this presentation.

Behind the Scenes: Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho on Alfonso Ossorio’s Angry Christ mural, a public programme of And in the Chapel and in the Temples: research in progress by Buddhist Archive of Photography and Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho.

Roger Nelson is an art historian interested in the modern and contemporary art of Southeast Asia. He was previously a curator at National Gallery Singapore and Postdoctoral Fellow at Nanyang Technological University and NTU CCA Singapore. Nelson is co-founding co-editor of Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, a journal published by NUS Press. He completed his PhD at the University of Melbourne on Cambodian arts of the 20th and 21st centuries. Nelson has contributed essays to scholarly journals, as well as specialist art magazines such as Artforum, books, and exhibition catalogues. He has curated exhibitions and other projects in Australia, Cambodia, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. Nelson’s translation of Suon Sorin’s 1961 Khmer novel, A New Sun Rises Over the Old Land, will be published in 2019. His Modern Art of Southeast Asia: Introductions from A to Z was published in 2019.

Research Focus

Roger Nelson’s research is on modern and contemporary art in Southeast Asia, with a particular focus on trans-media intersections between visual and other forms of art, as well as with urban spaces and other texts. The role of women in discourses of the modern and the contemporary is a recurring concern in his research, which is mostly concentrated on Cambodia, Laos, and other areas of peninsular Southeast Asia. Interested in historiographies of art in Southeast Asia, Nelson recently published a major research report on terminologies of “modern” and “contemporary” “art” in nine Southeast Asian vernacular languages, co-authored with ten other contributors, all based in the region, and published in Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia. Also historiographical in nature, Nelson recently completed a journal article on recent independent curatorial initiatives in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, which is currently under peer review; in that essay, he argues that independent curatorial research and practice performs art historical functions in these contexts. Nelson’s translation of a 1961 Khmer nationalist novel by Suon Sorin, titled A New Sun Rises Over the Old Land, is forthcoming with NUS Press; in his introduction to that publication, he argues for the value of the literary text as a resource for art historical and other forms of research. He is a participating scholar in a two-year Getty Foundation-funded project titled “Site and Space in Southeast Asia.” There, Nelson’s research focuses on downtown Rangoon in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, considering the dynamic relationships between painting, photography, sex work, and discourses about women in the booming and cosmopolitan Burmese port city. Also relating to discourses about women, gender, and feminisms, Nelson is co-editor with Yvonne Low and Clare Veal of a forthcoming special issue of Southeast of Now, and co-convenor with them of international research gatherings on gender in Southeast Asian art histories.

Amy Lien (b. 1987, United States) and Enzo Camacho (b. 1985, Philippines) perhaps recklessly assume the near total dissolution of creative agency as participants in the financially networked public sphere commonly referred to as “art world”. Yet, this does not prevent them from generating ever more questions via an image-oriented material production, continuously inaugurating a kind of affective and data-frantic cartography of places connected and disconnected to each other, while employing the standard theoretical rubrics of economics‚ and contemporary art. What results is something like mixed media sculpture, or installation art.

The two artists began collaborating in 2009, between New York and Manila. They both received their Bachelor’s degrees from Harvard University (Lien in 2009; Camacho in 2007), and their Master’s degrees from the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg (both in 2014). Most recently, they were Artists-in-Residence at Gluck50 in Milan, where they curated a group exhibition including artists based in New York, Taipei, and Cairo. They have had solo exhibitions at 47 Canal (New York, USA), Mathew Gallery (Berlin, Germany), Republikha Art Gallery (Quezon City, Philippines), and Green Papaya Art Projects (Quezon City, Philippines), as well as participated in recent group exhibitions at the Kunstverein in Dusseldorf and the Künstlerhaus in Bremen.

Sophie Goltz was Deputy Director, Research & Academic Programmes at NTU CCA Singapore, and Assistant Professor at the NTU School of Art, Design and Media. Goltz was the Artistic Director of Stadtkuratorin Hamburg (City curator) from 2013 to 2016, and has worked as Senior Curator and Head of Communication and Public Programmes at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein between 2008 and 2013, becoming Associate Curator in 2014. Goltz worked as a freelance curator, as well as an art educator for various international exhibitions, including Documenta11 and documenta 12 (2002 and 2007), 3rd berlin biennale for contemporary art (2004), and Project Migration (2004-06).

Soh Kay Min is currently Research Associate at the School of Art, Design, and Media, Nanyang Technological University, overseeing the research projects Climate Crisis and Cultural Loss (2021–2024), Environmentally-Engaged Artistic Practices in South, Southeast Asia and the Pacific (2021–2023), and Understanding Southeast Asia as a ‘Geocultural’ Formation (2021–2023. Previously, Kay Min was part of the research team at NTU CCA Singapore (2018–2021), and worked on projects that focused on the development of trans-institutional research collaborations and facilitation of transdisciplinary artistic research. Kay Min holds a BSc (Hons) in Anthropology from University College London, and MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths College, both University of London.

In partnership with Mapletree Investments Pte Ltd., Culture City. Culture Scape. is a public art education programme launched in 2017. A first of its kind in Singapore, the programme features a series of newly commissioned public art works by Dan Graham, Zulkifle Mahmod, Tomás Saraceno and Yinka Shonibare CBE (RA), nestled at Mapletree Business City II, and aims to bring the arts closer to the communities.

Conceived as a research presentation at NTU CCA Singapore’s The Lab, Art, Urban Change, and the Public Sphere engages with the making of the Public Art Trail at Mapletree Business City II in the context of Privately-Owned Public Spaces (POPS) together with other artistic and urban developments in Singapore. The works of the Public Art Trail by international renowned artists Dan Graham, Zulkifle Mahmod, Tomás Saraceno and Yinka Shonibare CBE (RA)are animated through augmented reality in a unique spatial setting. The presentation reflects on emerging discourses such as Future Asian Spaces or Art in the Public Sphere and situates the interconnectedness of cultural politics, urban developments and economic conditions in today’s Singapore. A same-titled Public Art Education Summit in October will reflect on the socio-poltical changes and challenges of Art in the Public Sphere with a focus on community engagement, social (corporate) responsibility, and new artistic approaches in an ever-expanding urban setting.

Contributors include: Lewis Biggs, Chairman, Institute for Public Art; Lilian Chee, Associate Professor & Deputy Head (academic), Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore; Connie Chester, Head of Research and Communication, Studio Tomás Saraceno; Heman Chong, artist; Speak Cryptic, artist; Priyageetha Dia, artist; Eileen Goh, Assistant Manager, Art-In-Transit; Jeremy Hiah, artist and founder, Your Mother gallery; Ruth Hogan, Studio Manager; Yinka Shonibare CBE (RA); Kevin Hsiu, Assistant Director, Liveable Cities; Eileen Lee, Manager, Corporate Communications, Mapletree Investments; Vincent Lee, Principal Architectural Assistant, Art-In-Transit; Samantha Lo/SKL0, artist; Zulkifle Mahmod, artist; Khim Ong, independent curator; Seelan Palay, artist and founder, Coda Culture; Aurel von Richthofen, Senior Researcher, Singapore-ETH Centre SEC; Regina de Rozario, PhD candidate, NTU ADM; Peter Schoppert, Managing Director, National University of Singapore Press; Mustafa Shabbir, Senior Curator, National Gallery Singapore; Angela Tan, Assistant Director, Sector Development (Visual Arts), National Arts Council; Isaiah Tan, 3D Modeler; Ludovica Tomarchio, Research Assistant, Singapore-ETH Centre SEC; Ian Woo, artist; Robert Zhao, artist; Epigram Books; Lisson Gallery; DCA Architects,; Shma Company Limited,; Shimizu Corporation; and among others.

Ato Malinda (b. 1981, Kenya) lives and works in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

She has a Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) from Transart Institute, New York. Her diverse practice consists of performance, drawing, painting, installation, video, and ceramic object-making, through which she investigates the hybrid nature of African identity, contesting notions of authenticity and issues of colonialism, trade, race, gender and sexuality.

Malinda was recently the winner of the first Annual African Art Award from the Smithsonian Institution (2016) and was one of the awardees of the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2015). She has exhibited extensively participating in exhibitions at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen, Denmark (2015) and the Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main, Germany (2014) among others.

James Jack is an artist and Assistant Professor of Visual Art, Yale-NUS College, Singapore. His practice is concerned with rejuvenating fragile connections that exist in the world, making artworks in direct relationship to a place and the people that live there. Between February and April 2015, Jack was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore, where he expanded his artistic research on the project Stories of Khayalan Island (2013–ongoing).

Otty Widasari is an artist and co-founder of Forum Lenteng, a community-development project that uses video, photography, and texts as tools to unveil sociocultural problems. Since 2002, she has produced documentary films for non-profit organisations. Widasari was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore, between October and November 2015, where she continued to work on the video work Fiksi (Fiction) that includes footage of the diorama section at the National Monument, Jakarta, drawing attention to state-driven efforts to establish historical truths in the collective memory of a nation.

Weixin Chong‚ (b. 1988, Singapore) work is drawn from fascination with the stylisation of natural elements, digital and organic memory systems and the relationship between surface and perceived superficiality. She sees these concerns as material metaphors for human social relationships and the psychology behind the structures and projections of power, value and desire.

Through printed surfaces and objects, she looks at the constant construction of imposed and composed realities,and reproductions that replace and represent. Interactions of the digital and the organic, and the effects and methods of reproducing and manipulating images across materials, are core to her practice.

SHIMURAbros are a brother/sister artist duo composed of Yuka (b. 1976, Japan) and Kentaro Shimura (b. 1979, Japan). Since 2014, they have been working as researchers at the Studio Olafur Eliasson in Berlin, Germany. Film is a catalyst for their works wherein the equilibrium between light and matter and the material representation of film become a focal point. Between November and December 2016, SHIMURAbros were Artists-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore. During the residency, the duo continued their investigations on the archaeology of film and its structural components, focusing on light as the power source in the cinematic process and the essential condition for seeing.

Jeremy Sharma is a visual artist and Lecturer for Fine Arts at LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore. His practice addresses our present relationship to modernity and interconnectivity in an increasingly fragmented and artificial reality. Sharma was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore between May and July 2015. During his residency, Sharma focused on the idea of “vertical progression,” observing the logic of production, from the act of making to the moment of display. This research consolidated into the video work Vertical Progression (2016) that spans across two years, revealing the network of collaborators, scientists, fabricators, movers, and collectors involved in the process.

Loo Zihan is an artist. His work emphasises the malleability of memory through various representational strategies, from performance re-enactments to essay films. Between June and September 2016, Loo was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore where he continued his research into The Ray Langenbach Archive of Performance Art (which documents over 20 years of performance art in Southeast Asia), and developed I am LGB (a participatory performance commissioned by the Singapore International Festival of Arts) that highlights the fragile relation between education and control.

The artistic practice of Arin Rungjang (b. 1974, Thailand) is deeply intertwined with Southeast Asian histories, symbols, memories and addresses the ways in which social and economic transformations affect individuals‚ lives. Exploring power relations embedded in traditional practices and daily objects, he creates works that stand on the threshold between the public and the private and recast collective histories through personal narratives. Regarded as a pioneer of installation art in Thailand, his work spans across different media and often engage collaborative practice. Arin Rungjang has recently received a solo exhibition at the Jim Thompson Art Center in Bangkok, Thailand (2015). He has participated to the 18th Biennale of Sydney, Sydney, Australia (2012), the Bandung Pavilion at the Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai, China (2012) and the Asia Triennial, Manchester, United Kingdom (2011). He represented Thailand at the 55th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (2015).

Between October and November 2016, Rungjang was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore, where he focused on unofficial stories that circulate by word of mouth while connecting them to the politics of governance and notions of historical truth. During his residency, Rungjang conducted an interview with Johnston, who offered a poignant account of the difficulties of growing up as an albino man in Singapore. Based on an agreement with him, the artist decided to limit the work to a fully washed-out still from the recording, a symbolic indication of how such narratives circulate at the margins of visibility.

Tamara Weber is an artist. She explores formal questions (light, space, figuration, portraiture, temporality) and the possibilities of multidisciplinary collaboration. Between October and December 2016, Weber was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore. As part of her residency, she produced the unbound book Close Readings that features a series of photographic reinterpretations of the iconic hotel PARKROYAL on Pickering in Singapore, designed by WOHA, an impressive building that merges the rigorousness of abstraction and unruliness of tropical greenery.

Jegan Vincent de Paul is an artistic researcher with an interest in large-scale technopolitical phenomenon with a focus on physical infrastructures. He received his Ph.D in Art, Design and Media from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore in 2021. His doctoral thesis Infrastructure, Narrative, Impact: A Counter-Reading of Belt and Road uses art as a research methodology to show how “the Belt and Road” is a rhizomatic global narrative constructed in the process of interpretation and analysis. He has worked internationally as a researcher and designer and was a visiting scholar and lecturer at the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology (2010–12). He has exhibited at the 4th ZERO1 Biennial in San Jose, California, Space in Kingston, Jamaica and the Centre for Contemporary Art in Singapore. Vincent de Paul holds a Master of Architecture from University of Toronto and a Master of Science in Visual Studies from MIT.

Anocha Suwichakornpong is an independent film director, screenwriter, and producer. Suwichakornpong’s filmic research is on Thai history within Southeast Asia, in particular the Thai politics and student movements of the 1970s. Between September and November 2014, Suwichakornpong was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore where she worked on Nightfall (2016), a short video essay exploring the relationship between Thailand and Singapore, harking back to 1871 when King Rama V—the first monarch in Thai history to visit a foreign country, Singapore, donated as a token of appreciation a bronze statue of an elephant; and a multiplatform project on the Golden Mile Complex, the most popular gathering place of the Thai community in Singapore.

Bo Wang is an artist, filmmaker, and faculty member at Visual and Critical Studies, School of Visual Arts, New York. Wang’s work depicts provocative portraits of China, presenting contradictions in its cultural identity, changing urban spaces, and power structures. Wang was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore, between August and September 2016, where he studied the role of sand in Singapore, tracing its physical circulation as a fundamental element for the state’s development but also its symbolic role in the cultural sphere.

“Speaking nearby” to the exhibition Trinh T. Minh-ha. Films., this research presentation showcases the Wattis Institute’s year-long research season on Trinh’s multifaceted practice as a filmmaker, writer and theorist. What does the promise of “speaking nearby” rather than “speaking about” look like today? What are the politics of hospitality? What are the problematics of “post-feminism,” and how do we challenge the West as the authoritative subject of feminist knowledge? Expanding the discursive orbit of these questions, the presentation features projects by artists Hồng-Ân Trương (US) and Genevieve Quick (US), and is accompanied by the online convening Mother Always Has a Mother, a result of the ongoing research collaboration between NTU CCA Singapore, Rockbund Art Museum (Shanghai), and the Wattis Institute.

Conceived by Kim Nguyen (Canada/United States), Curator and Head of Programs, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts (Wattis), San Francisco.

Mona Vătămanu (b. 1968, Romania) and Florin Tudor (b. 1974, Swtizerland) have worked together since 2000. Their artistic practice spans diverse media including film, photography, painting, performance, and site-specific projects. Vatamanu and Tudor’s broad-reaching practice has positioned them among the most compelling and literate interpreters of our contemporary post-communist condition, which extends far beyond their native Romania. Widely shown in Europe, Vatamanu and Tudor’s artistic practice involves bringing history into the present tense, whether in the form of performative re-enactment or symbolic recuperation. A deep interest in architecture as a repository of both personal and collective memory and as a mark of communist power underlies many of their projects.

Dr Anna Lovecchio (Italy/Singapore) is a curator committed to foster the processes of artistic research and create platforms for the production and circulation of knowledge, critical discourse, and interdisciplinary collaborations. Since 2016, she works at the NTU CCA Singapore where she has developed a broad range of programmes, including residencies, exhibitions, publications, and a podcast. Previously, she was Junior Curator at Villa Croce Museum of Contemporary Art in Genoa, Italy where she has worked on exhibitions by Tomás Saraceno, Tony Conrad, Susan Philipsz, Pino Pascali, Julieta Aranda, and Zhang Enli, amongst others. She was Executive Editor of the art journal Around Photography International from 2007 to 2008. She holds a PhD in the history of contemporary art from the University of Bologna, Italy, and an MA in Contemporary Art and Museum Studies from Tufts University, Boston, United States.

The Making of an Institution captures different moments in the development of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (NTU CCA Singapore) connecting artistic projects, discursive manifestations, and the institutional apparatus in a seamless display. It looks back into its young past in order to shape its future. Challenging the format of an exhibition, The Making of an Institution creates a communal space where projects and research explorations by the Centre’s Artists-, Curators-in- Residence, and Research Fellows coexist with ongoing series of talks, screenings, performances, and workshops. The project engages the Centre’s main pillars–Exhibitions, Residencies, Research and Academic Education – bringing to a close the overarching curatorial narrative Place.Labour.Capital. that served as a framework for its activities since 2013.

Established in 2013, the Centre embodies the complexity of a contemporary art institution in times of knowledge economy and global art. The role of a contemporary art institution should not be limited to the presentation of art. It feeds off and nurtures the cultural ecosystem it belongs to through a complex series of actions that often reside in the realm of the immaterial. The Centre’s inaugural programme Free Jazz addressed the foundational question “What can this institution be?” highlighting the skill of improvisation and free play. Three years later, different questions are to be raised: What could the role of the NTU CCA Singapore be for the years to come within a fast changing local, regional, and global cultural landscape? What are the criteria to evaluate its achievements and impact?

In revisiting its own process of institutional building, NTU CCA Singapore appropriates the format and language of a “public report”. While a public report is conventionally employed to deliver an official written narrative, the Centre’s report unfolds in the exhibition space through the languages of the performative, the discursive, and the archival.

“It’s amazing how far we were able to come in just three years,” said Ute Meta Bauer, Founding Director, NTU CCA Singapore. “The Making of an Institution is a celebration of the international community we have built, including scholars, artists, and the public. Now it is time for us to reflect and analyse our achievements before the exciting next steps ahead.”

The Making of an Institution is divided into four sections borrowed from the structure of a public report: Reason to Exist: The Director’s Review; Ownership, Development, and Aspirations; Artistic Research; and Communication and Mediation. The first section, Reason to Exist: The Director’s Review maps out a network of institutions, like NTU CCA Singapore, that place research at the core of their identity. Each guest director will closely examine the vision, mission, and operative model of her respective organisation in a series of talks aimed at deepening our understanding of the changing role of contemporary cultural institutions. Ownership, Development, and Aspirations is a public panel with several members of the NTU CCA Singapore’s International Advisory Board and its stakeholders representatives that stresses the importance of feedback and exchange among peers especially in the development phase of an institution. The section dedicated to Artistic Research frames the material and immaterial aspects that constitute contemporary art practices. It takes over the Centre’s physical Spaces of the Curatorial—The Exhibition Hall, The Single Screen, The Lab, and The Vitrine—juxtaposing artworks and research projects by NTU CCA Singapore’s Artists-, Curators-in- Residence, and Research Fellows alongside various formats of public programming. Finally, Communication and Mediation explores the production of an institution’s identity through visual communication and spatial practices. Through workshops and presentations, artists, architects, and designers will discuss how they create diverse visual and spatial identities for art institutions.

The public report will culminate into a book planned for publication in mid-2017, gathering the voices of all the artists, curators, researchers, and academics who have contributed to this first phase of the Centre. The Making of an Institution is curated by Ute Meta Bauer, Founding Director, Anna Lovecchio, Curator, Residencies, and Anca Rujoiu, Manager, Publications.

The Making of an Institution public programmes

The mixed-media selection presented in The Vitrine stems from Railtrack Songmaps, a project exploring competing claims to nature and culture that resound along the former Malaysian railway tracks at Tanglin Halt. For at least five decades, birds, nature lovers, songbird clubs, tree shrines, kampung gardeners and foragers have roosted and seeded themselves along the tracks, nurturing a tangled patch of urban wild that is currently undergoing redevelopment. The particular constellation of elements on display – photographs, Malay pantuns, embroidery on paper, and delicate airborne assemblages of images, cut-outs and coconut sticks – weave in and out of memories of Lim Kim Seng, who together with his brother Lim Kim Chua, joined the Nature Society of Singapore (NSS) as teenager. Both are now senior members of the NSS Bird Group. Kim Seng assisted The Migrant Ecologies Project in the identification of 105 bird species around Tanglin Halt. In an accompanying soundtrack he recalls how an early encounter with a kingfisher first drew him into a bird zone.

The Migrant Ecologies Project was founded in 2010 by artist, art writer, and educator Lucy Davis. Investigating movements and migrations of nature and culture in Southeast Asia and beyond, the project unfolds through collaborations with sound artists, photographers, scientists, and designers.

Lucy Davis has been an Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore from April to June 2017.

Confounding ordinary notions of legibility, the work of Sonya Lacey addresses the politics of communication by tampering with the concrete textures of language. Specifically conceived for The Vitrine, Speed Reading combines two bodies of work that put the sheer physicality of language to a test. Headlines from The Straits Times and Solar Print Tests (both 2017) result from a series of experiments, undertaken by the artist during her residency at NTU CCA Singapore, where she exposed newsprint paper to both sunlight and artificial light, while Dilutions, an earlier work from 2016, is a sculptural piece involving a movable metal typeface and the process of corrosion determined by lead oxide. Slowly warping over time, the material components entailed in the production and circulation of the written word, Speed Reading alters the boundaries of legibility and shakes the physical foundations of the transmission of knowledge.

Marjetica Potrč is an artist and architect. Her work includes drawing, architectural case studies, and public art projects. Since 2011, she leads a class of participatory practice, Design for the Living World, at the University of Fine Arts (HFBK) in Hamburg, Germany. In Potrč’s view, the sustainable solutions that are implemented and disseminated by communities serve to empower these communities and help create a democracy built from below. Potrč has received numerous awards, including the Hugo Boss Prize (2000) and the Vera List Center for Arts and Politics Fellowship (2007) at The New School in New York, United States.

Developed during his residency at NTU CCA Singapore, Creatif Compleks (2018) is the culmination of Michael Lee’s reflection on the function of the artist’s studio within the arts ecology of a city. The work takes the form of a diagram about a hypothetical property development consisting of various configurations of the artist’s home/studio. The use of LED light strips, a popular fixture in advertising and interior design, alludes to latent apprehensions about the development and promotion of the arts in Singapore which today are, arguably, at a feverish pitch. Informed by myths and fantasies of artists in their studios, the work takes a speculative leap into the utopian and the absurd.

Interested in the “semiotic thickness” of Geylang, an area located on the east-central side of Singapore where bustling street life, covert activities, information technologies, and data mining protocols are increasingly intertwined, Luca Lum has been observing the diffuse entanglements of bodies and surfaces, behaviours and networks that define contemporary urban life. impasse to verbal comes out from her continued engagement with the neighbourhood and from her speculations on the slippage between what things are, how they look, and what they do—which the artist defines as the play between description and disposition.

The work is a visual assemblage that merges wall notices, official zoning maps, personal routes, and various extracts sampled from the urban landscape. Through an intricate interplay of stratifications and transparencies, it creates an imploded visual environment where information is simultaneously displayed and withdrawn, revealed and cloaked. Steeped in a pervasive blue glow reminiscent of the light of electronic devices, the signs are left to float and clash into leaky configurations that shatter conventional patterns of readability.

Dr June Yap is a curator, art historian, and Director of Curatorial, Programmes and Publications at the Singapore Art Museum. She is the author of Retrospective: A Historiographical Aesthetic in Contemporary Singapore and Malaysia (2016) and curator of the Singapore Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale (2011). In April 2012, Yap was selected as Guggenheim UBS MAP Curator, South and Southeast Asia. This led to the exhibition No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia that was also presented at NTU CCA Singapore between May and July 2014.

The subject of Sheela Gowda’s Loss is Kashmir, a region bordered by India, Pakistan, China, and Afghanistan. Historically a locus of exchange and syncretism, where Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam flourished in the wake of South Asia’s partition, it is now fraught with violence and uncertainty as border disputes and armed encounters persist. Originally photographed by Kashmir resident Abdul Gani Lone, these six scenes show the path taken to a burial site by the bodies of youths from his village killed in the continuing conflict. Tentatively painted over with watercolour in a subtle accentuation of their subjects’ plight, these prints express the tragic irony of deadly geopolitical struggle unfolding in a place described since the Mughal period as “heaven on earth.”

Bani Abidi’s early engagement with video led her to performance and photography. The Guggenheim acquired three works by Abidi, The Boy Who Got Tired of Posing (2006), The Ghost of Mohammed Bin Qasim (2006), and This Video Is a Reenactment (2006), which include installations of video photography, and text. Through these elements, the figure of Mohammad bin Qasim, considered Pakistan’s early colonial founder in state history, is brought to life in a lighthearted and candid portrayal that provides an opportunity to reflect on the history of the South Asian nation. Solo exhibitions of Abidi’s work have been presented at the Baltic Center for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, United Kingdom (2011); and Experimenter, Kolkata (2012–13). Important group exhibitions include: Making Normative Orders: Demonstrations of Power, Doubt and Protest, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt (2012); and Documenta 13 (2012). Abidi lives and works in Karachi and New Delhi.

Navin Rawanchaikul works in various media including sculpture, painting, performance, photography, and film. Rawanchaikul’s Places of Rebirth (2009) was inspired by the artist’s first visit to Pakistan, the birthplace of his ancestors. Purchased for the Guggenheim’s collection, the painting narrates his family’s migration to Thailand in pursuit of new opportunity during the aftermath of 1947’s partition of South Asia. In 2010, Rawanchaikul was awarded the national Silapathorn citation from the Thai Ministry of Culture in the field of visual arts. His work has been featured in solo exhibitions at MoMA P.S.1 in collaboration with Public Art Fund, New York (2001); Tang Contemporary Art, Hong Kong (2008); and Valentine Willie Fine Art, Singapore (2011). He represented Thailand at the 54th Venice Biennale (2011) and has participated in numerous group exhibitions around the world. Rawanchaikul lives and works in Chiang Mai and Fukuoka, Japan.

Norberto Roldan’s work offers a commentary on the social, political, and cultural conditions of the Philippines via assemblages of object, text, and image. Roldan’s F-16 (2012), acquired for the Guggenheim’s collection, draws a relationship between the colonization of the Philippines and events on today’s global stage. In 1986, he founded Black Artists in Asia, a Philippines-based group focused on socially and politically progressive practice. He is also the cofounder of the Manila gallery Green Papaya Art Projects. Roldan has had solo exhibitions at Now Gallery, Manila (2011 and 2012); and Vulcan Artbox, Waterford, Ireland (2012). He was also a finalist for the Philip Morris Philippines Art Award, Manila, in 1996, 1997, and 1999. In 1998, he was selected as Juror’s Choice for the same award, as well for the Art Association of the Philippines Annual Art Competition. Roldan lives and works in Manila.

Pokong Anading began as a painter, but has expanded his practice to video, photography, and process-oriented sculpture and installation. In 2006, he received the Ateneo Studio Residency Grant in Australia, and a Cultural Center of the Philippines 13 Artists Award. The Guggenheim acquired Anading’s Counter Acts (2004), a group portrait photograph in which the subjects hold mirrors up to the camera, reflecting a blinding constellation of light toward the viewer. Anading’s works were presented in the two-person exhibition Between Signs at Silverlens Gallery in Makati City (2011). Anading organized and participated in Room 307: Inkling, Gutfeel and Hunch at the National Art Gallery in Manila (2008). He has been included in notable group exhibitions including the Gwangju Biennial, South Korea (2002 and 2012). Anading lives and works in Manila.

Employing video, performance, and installation, and often using his own body in his work, Reza Afisina explores the manifestations and meanings of physical and emotional pain. Afisina’s early experimental work What . . . (2001), part of the Guggenheim’s collection, records a performance by the artist in which biblical verses about truth and confession are referenced, and are underscored with an act of violence. Afisina has performed and screened his work in such group exhibitions as Simple Actions and Aberrant Behaviors, PICA, Portland (2007), Jakarta Biennial (2009); Move on Asia: The End of Video Art, Para/Site Art Space, Hong Kong (2010 and 2012); and City Net Asia, Seoul Museum of Art (2011). Afisina is a member of the artists’ collection ruangrupa and lives and works in Jakarta.

Shilpa Gupta’s mediums range from manipulated found objects to video, interactive computer-based installation, and performance. Acquired for the Guggenheim’s collection, 1:14.9 (2011–12), features a hand-wound ball of thread accompanied by a small plaque reading “1188.5 MILES OF FENCED BORDER – WEST, NORTH-WEST / DATA UPDATE: DEC 31, 2007,” poetically representing the geopolitical division of India and Pakistan. In 2011, Gupta was the recipient of the Bienal Award, Bienal De Cuenca, Ecuador; in 2004 she was the recipient of the Transmediale Award, Berlin, and the Sanskriti Prathisthan Award, New Delhi. Canada’s South Asian Visual Artists Collective also named her International Artist of the Year. A 10-year survey of her work, Half A Sky, was presented at the OK Center for Contemporary Art, Linz, Austria (2010). Gupta lives and works in Mumbai.

Through performance, installation, painting, sculpture, and drawing, Tang Da Wu explores social and environmental themes including deforestation, animal endangerment, and urban transformation. Acquired for the Guggenheim’s collection, his three-part sculpture Our Children (2012) references a story from Teochew opera in which a young boy experiences illumination at the sight of a baby goat suckling at its mother. Tang is credited as the founder of the Artists Village, a collective that has become synonymous with experimental art in Singapore. In 1999, he was awarded the 10th Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize in Arts and Culture. He has had solo exhibitions at Valentine Willie Fine Art, Kuala Lumpur (2006); and Goodman Arts Centre, Singapore (2011), and was featured in the Singapore Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2007. Tang lives and works in Singapore.

Tayeba Begum Lipi makes paintings, prints, installations, and videos. Lipi cofounded the Britto Arts Trust, Bangladesh’s first artist-run alternative arts platform, which has extended its reach beyond Bangladesh through exhibitions, residencies, talks, collaborations, and exchanges. Her 2012 work Love Bed, acquired for the Guggenheim’s collection, addresses themes of female identity, and references the double bind of political and gender-specific violence. Lipi was awarded the Grand Prize at the Asian Art Biennial, Dhaka, in 2004, and was the commissioner for the Bangladesh Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale (2011). She has had solo exhibitions at Alliance Française (1998 and 2004) and Bengal Gallery (2007) in Dhaka. Notable group exhibitions include the Venice Biennale (2011) and Colombo Art Biennial (2012). Lipi lives and works in Dhaka.

Tran Luong’s practice spans painting, installation, and performance art. The artist came to international prominence as part of a group of artists called the Gang of Five, and was responsible for leading the development of contemporary art in Vietnam in the late 1980s and early ’90s. Acquired for the Guggenheim’s collection, Tran’s video installation Lập Lòe (2012) features the red scarf—an item of historical and political significance associated with communism—waving, floating, and being snapped against the artist’s body. Tran is a member of the curatorial team for the 2013 Singapore Biennial, and has participated in notable group exhibitions including Negotiating Home, History and Nation: Two Decades of Contemporary Art in Southeast Asia 1991–2011, Singapore Art Museum (2011). Tran lives and works in Hanoi.

Tuan Andrew Nguyen (Vietnam) graduated in Fine Arts from the University of California, Irvine (1999) and received his MFA from The California Institute of the Arts (2004). His work investigates the body as site and as moment of resistance in public space, exploring the impact of mass media. Nguyen has exhibited at international exhibitions and film festivals, having works in the collection of the Queensland Art Gallery; Carre d’Art; the Museum of Modern Art; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. He is co-founder and board member of Sàn Art, an artist- initiated exhibition and educational space in Ho Chi Minh City. In 2006, he founded the art collective The Propeller Group, which has participated in numerous exhibitions including the New Museum Triennial (2012); Los Angeles Biennial (2012), New Orleans Triennial (2014), and the Venice Biennale (2015).

Vincent Leong’s practice often concentrates on the production of nation and culture across media including photography and video. Acquired by the Guggenheim in 2012, Leong’s pair of portrait photographs, Keeping Up with the Abdullahs (2012), assembles family members from two minority ethnicities in Malaysia—Chinese and Indian—addressing the subject of assimilation in a multiethnic country. Leong’s work has been presented in solo exhibitions at Valentine Willie Fine Art, Kuala Lumpur (2007 and 2012), and Sculpture Square, Singapore (2007). The artist has also been featured in the following notable group exhibitions: Some Rooms, Osage Gallery, Hong Kong (2009); Our Own Orbit, Tembi Contemporary, Jogya, Indonesia (2009); and Tanah Ayer: Malaysian Stories from the Land, Selasar Sunaryo Art Space, Bandung, Indonesia (2011). Leong lives and works in Kuala Lumpur.

Artist and writer Judith Barry’s work spans several disciplines: architecture, film/video, performance, installation, sculpture, photography and new media. Through this rich variety of media, Barry explores complex relationships between issues of public address, representation, and popular culture.

Barry has exhibited internationally in numerous exhibitions including: the 3rd Berlin Biennale (2004), Sao Paolo Biennale (1994), the Venice Biennales of Art and of Architecture, and the Whitney Biennale (1987). Recent exhibitions include: The Content of Form, Generali Foundation, Vienna (2013); Critical Episodes, MACBA, Barcelona (2013); This will have been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980’s, ICA, Boston (2013); The Deconstructive Impulse, Contemporary Art Museum, Houston (2012); and dOCUMENTA 13, Kassel (2012). She was awarded the Frederick Kiesler Prize for Architecture and the Arts (2000), Best Pavilion at the Cairo Biennale (2001), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2011) among others. Public Fantasy, a collection of Barry’s essays, was published by the ICA in London (1991).

Judith Barry was born in Columbus, Ohio, USA, in 1954. She lives and works in New York City, and is currently Director/Professor of the MFA in Visual Arts at the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University.

Photographer and filmmaker Stan Douglas has, since the late 1980’s, examined complex intersections of narrative, fact and fiction, while scrutinising the constructs of the media he employs and their influence on our understanding of reality. His interest in the social implementation of Western ideas of progress, particularly utopian philosophies, is located in their often divisive political and economic effects. Douglas’s work is often characterised by extensive research and an interrogation of the structural possibilities of film and video, in concert with intricately developed narratives.

Douglas was recently awarded the Scotiabank Photography Award (2013) and the Infinity Award by the International Center of Photography, New York (2012). His work has been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions at prominent institutions worldwide, including: the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minnesota (2012); MOCA, Los Angeles (2012); the Power Plant, Toronto (2011); the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010); the International Center of Photography, New York (2008), Staatsgalerie and Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart (2007); and documentas 11, 10, 9 (2002, 1997, 1992).

Stan Douglas was born in Vancouver, Canada in 1960, where he lives and work.

Eran Schaerf’s multidisciplinary work focuses on the architecture of narration. He has exhibited in group-exhibitions such as Venice Bienniale (2011), Fake or Feint (2008), Territories (2003), Manifesta (1998), Listener’s Voice, Brussels (2001), DOCUMENTA IX (1992). Among his publications are: fm-scenario – where palms stand – mask –delay, London (2012), Blue Key, Cologne (2002), Listener’s Voice, Brussels (2001), Re-enactment, New- York (1996).

Paul Ha is currently the Director of the List Visual Arts Center, the contemporary art museum at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Known for presenting experimental and timely exhibitions, the List also oversees the active MIT’s Percent-for-Art program, which has created one the of the outstanding national collections of public art. The collection includes 50 plus site-specific commissions from artists such as Dan Graham, Cai Guo-Qiang, Anish Kapoor, Sol LeWitt and Sarah Sze. The List also oversees more than 3,500 works in the permanent collection as well as 600 works in an innovative student loan art collection program. In 2014 Ha was chosen to be commissioner of the U.S. Pavilion for the La Biennale di Venezia 56th International Art Exhibition. Ha and co-curator Ute Meta Bauer, presented artist Joan Jonas, a pioneer of performance and time based art.

Constanze Ruhm is an artist, filmmaker and author whose artistic practice focuses on the relation of cinema, new media and theatrical forms, and investigates questions of female identity and representation.

Ruhm’s works have been shown at international exhibitions, as well as at film festivals, including: Internationale Filmfestspiele / Forum Expanded | Living Archive, Kunstwerke, Berlin, Germany (2013); Internationale Filmfestspiele, Berlin, Germany (2010 and 2011); The 5th International Video Art Biennial, Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, Israel (2012); Tel Aviv Film Festival (2010); The University Art Gallery / Room Gallery, University of California, Irvine (2010); Extracity, Antwerp (2008); Museo de la Reina Sofia, Madrid (2008); Generali Foundation, Vienna (2006), and 3rd Berlin Bienniale (2004). In 1995 Ruhm represented Austria at the Venice Biennale along with Peter Sandbichler. Ruhm also curates exhibitions, realises publications, and both organises and contributes to international symposia. Constanze Ruhm was born in Vienna, Austria in 1965. She lives and works in Vienna and Berlin. Since 2006, she is Professor for Art and Media at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna.

Ulrike Ottinger (b. 1942) grew up in Constance, Germany, where she opened her own studio at an early age. From 1962 until 1968, she lived and worked as an artist in Paris, where she exhibited at the Salon de la Jeune Peinture and elsewhere. She studied etching techniques at the studio of Johnny Friedlaender and attended lectures at the Sorbonne on art history, religious studies, and ethnology with Claude Lévi-Strauss, Louis Althusser, and Pierre Bourdieu. In 1966, she wrote her first screenplay, entitled The Mongolian Double Drawer.

After returning to West Germany, she founded the filmclub visuell in Constance in 1969, as well as the galeriepress gallery and press, presenting Wolf Vostell and David Hockney, among others. With Tabea Blumenschein, she realised her first film in 1972–73, Laocoon & Sons, which had its premiere at Arsenal Berlin. She moved to Berlin in 1973 where she filmed the happening documentation Berlinfever – Wolf Vostell. After The Enchantment of the Blue Sailors (1975) with Valeska Gert, came the female pirate film Madame X (1977), a coproduction with the ZDF television network. The film was a sensation and prompted substantial controversy.

Ottinger’s “Berlin trilogy” began with Ticket of No Return (1979), followed by Freak Orlando (1981) and Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press (1984). Collaborating on the films were Delphine Seyrig, Magdalena Montezuma, Veruschka von Lehndorff, Eddie Constantine, and Kurt Raab, as well as the composer Peer Raben. In the short film Usinimage (1987), she revisited imagery derived from industrial wastelands and alienated urban landscapes.

Amar Kanwar is an artist and filmmaker. Kanwar has distinguished himself through films and multimedia works, which explore the politics of power, violence, and justice. His multilayered installations originate in narratives often drawn from zones of conflict and are characterised by a unique poetic approach to the social and political. Kanwar’s long-term research project, The Sovereign Forest (2012–ongoing) was presented at NTU CCA Singapore in 2016.

Sherna Dastur (born 1971, lives in New Delhi, India) is a graphic designer and filmmaker. Her film Manjuben Truck Driver (2002) has been screened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, United States, and the International Documentary Film Festival, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, among several other festivals. Her recent design work includes Project Cinema City (eds. Madhusree Dut ta, Kaushik Bhaumik, and Rohan Shivkumar, Tulika Books, 2013), Trace Retrace: Paintings, Nilima Sheikh (ed. Kumkum Sangari, Tulika Books, 2013), and The Khoj Book, 1997–2007: Contemporary Art Practice in India (ed. Pooja Sood, Harper Collins, 2010). She has also worked on a range of interventions for social campaigns and films on issues of fundamentalism and women’s rights. She has taught the foundation course of colour and form as visiting faculty at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, India, also her alma mater. Dastur has been collaborating on The Sovereign Forest since 2011, experimenting with making paper and the handmade books, and designing the installation as it travels and evolves.

Sudhir Pattnaik (born 1962, lives in Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India) is an independent media activist who has been intensely engaged in social issues for the last 25 years. He is associated with print and electronic news magazines as a part of non-profit collective Samadrusti, and is the editor of fortnightly Oriya news magazine The Samadrusti. He is also a lyricist, playwright, and theatre director. His views are non-ideological and secular. He “firmly believes that it is only love and peace preached, practiced, and propagated by the bold and the brave minority that may bring lasting change in society.” Pattnaik has collaborated on The Sovereign Forest since 2011, and has hosted its installation in the Samadrusti campus in Odisha since 2012.

Magdalena Magiera is Curator, Outreach & Education at NTU CCA Singapore. She was an independent curator, Managing Editor of frieze d/e, and currently Editor of mono.kultur, a quarterly interview magazine. She co-curated Based in Berlin (2011) as well as exhibitions for The Building and SPLACE in Berlin. Magiera was Project Manager of The Maybe Education and Other Programs at dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel (2012), and UNITEDNATIONSPLAZA, Berlin (2006–08). Prior to joining NTU CCA Singapore, she worked for e-flux exhibitions and public programmes in New York City.

Amar Kanwar has been filming the industrial interventions that have reshaped and permanently destroyed parts of Odisha’s landscape – a battleground on issues of development and displacement since the 1990s. The resulting conflicts between local communities, the government, and corporations over the use of agricultural lands, forests, revers and minerals, have led to an ongoing regime of violence that is unpredictable and often invisible. A long-term commitment of Kanwar, The Sovereign Forest initiates a creative response to the understanding of crime, politics, human rights and ecology. The validity of poetry as evidence in a trial, the discourse on seeing, and the determination of self, all come together as a constellation of films, texts, books, photographs, objects, seeds and processes.

The Sovereign Forest is produced with the support of Samadrusti, Odisha, India; Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna, Austria; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Yorkshire Sculpture Park, United Kingdom; Public Press, New Delhi, India; and dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany.

The exhibition at NTU CCA Singapore and its public programmes are curated by Ute Meta Bauer, Khim Ong, and Magdalena Magiera, in collaboration with Amar Kanwar, Sudhir Pattnaik and Sherna Dastur.

The Sovereign Forest is produced with the support of Samadrusti, Odisha, India; Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna, Austria; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Yorkshire Sculpture Park, United Kingdom; Public Press, New Delhi, India; and dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany.

The Sovereign Forest pubic programmes

Non-Aligned in the press! Read Stephanie Bailey’s article in Ocula and Object Lessons Space‘s interview with Dr Karin Oen, the Centre’s Deputy Director of Curatorial Programmes.

The Unfinished Conversation (2012), John Akomfrah (United Kingdom), Two Meetings and a Funeral (2017), Naeem Mohaiemen (Bangladesh/United States), Nucleus of the Great Union (2017), The Otolith Group (United Kingdom)

The British Empire spanned from Asia to Australia to Africa to America to the Caribbean. The various colonial territories gained their sovereignty and independence at different times, in processes of decolonization that played out in the histories of nations, but also determined the lives of individuals. Non-Aligned brings together three moving-image works by artists, filmmakers, and writers that inquire into the challenging transition periods from colonial rule to the independence of nations.

The presented works apply archival material in different ways. The focus spans from the work and personal histories of intellectuals who experienced these unprecedented circumstances first-hand, including Jamaican-born British theorist Stuart Hall (1932-2014) and African American novelist Richard Wright (1908-1960), to the history of political organization around the Non-Aligned Movement. This process of examining the interconnected stories of place, identity, and the conscious assertion of difference from established Western narratives, is also embedded in the personal histories of the artists.

The Non-Aligned Movement was formally established in 1961 on principles such as world peace and cooperation, human rights, anti-racism, respect, disarmament, non-aggression, and justice. At the height of the Cold War, a large group of African, Asian, and Latin American countries navigating post-colonial constellations attempted a diversion from the two major powers—the United States and the Soviet Union—forming what is to date the largest grouping of states worldwide, after the United Nations. The non-aligned nations, which Singapore joined in 1970, wished to secure independence and territorial sovereignty, and fight against imperialism, domination, and foreign interference.

This history is at the core of Two Meetings and a Funeral (2017), a feature-length three-channel video installation by Naeem Mohaiemen. It explores Bangladesh’s historical pivot from the socialist perspective of the 1973 Non-Aligned Movement meeting in Algeria to the emergence of a petrodollar-funded Islamic perspective at the 1974 Organisation of Islamic Countries meeting in Lahore. Recounted by Algerian publisher Samia Zennadi, Bangladeshi politician Zonayed Saki, and Indian historian Vijay Prashad, Mohaiemen’s film considers the erosion of the idea of “Third World” as a political space that was to open the potential for decoloniality and socialism, while articulating the internal contradictions behind its unfortunate failure.

In the video essay Nucleus of the Great Union (2017), The Otolith Group traces Richard Wright on his first trip to Africa in 1953. Travelling the Gold Coast for 10 weeks, he witnessed political campaigns for independence in West Africa, yet feeling alienation at his first encounter with the continent. For this film, The Otolith Group reconciled excerpts from Wright’s book Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos (1954) with a selection of the over 1,500 previously unpublished photographs the writer took on his journey. Wright’s initially intended book including both text and photos was inadequately published without images. Through this work, The Otolith Group finally honors Wright’s initial aim of seeing image and text as one single narration.

The Unfinished Conversation (2012) is an in-depth inquiry by filmmaker John Akomfrah into the personal archive of audio interviews and television recordings of the influential theorist and educator Stuart Hall. The multi-screen film installation unfolds as a layered journey through the paradigm-changing work of the late intellectual, regarded as a key founder of cultural studies, who triangulated gender, race, and class. Hall was particularly invested in black identity linked to the history of colonialism and slavery.

Amplifying and celebrating defining voices and intertwining personal lives with political movements, the featured works in Non-Aligned examine not only the new possibilities for progressive social and independence movements but also the inherent struggles that define the post-WWII period.

Non-Aligned is curated by Ute Meta Bauer, Founding Director, NTU CCA Singapore, and Professor, School of Art, Design and Media, NTU.

FILM PROGRAMME: THIRD WAY / AFTER BANDUNG
This programme features films that engage post-colonial processes covering different moments and geopolitical contexts. The Asian-African Conference in 1955, known as the Bandung Conference, amidst the complex processes of decolonization, established self-determination, non-aggression, and equality as part of the core values that then formed the Non-Aligned Movement. This history is unpacked and contextualised through this series of screenings.

Co-curated by writer and curator Mark Nash and film researcher Vladimir Seput.

READING CORNER
Accompanying this exhibition is a library of over 50 books on postcolonialism, decoloniality, the history of the Cold War, the Non-Aligned Movement, archiving, as well as theory of the moving image and publications on and by John Akomfrah, Naeem Mohaiemen, and The Otolith Group. Authors include Frantz Fanon, Stuart Hall, and Richard Wright, as well as Kodwo Eshun, Rosalind C. Morris, Bojana Piškur and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, among many others.

In light of COVID-19, we have removed the reading corner for the safety of our visitors.

We have selected texts on, or in conversation with, some of them to be used for online reading groups. These additional texts including articles by Vijay Prashad and Elspeth Probyn, and book chapters by Adil Johan and S.R. Joey Long.

ACTIVITY CARDS
Designed for young audiences aged 13 and above, the Non-Aligned activity cards explore several core themes of the exhibition through thoughtful reflection questions and engaging activities. While the Centre strongly encourages audiences to experience the artworks in person, the cards may also be used independently at home or in the classroom.

The NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore is honoured to present They Come to Us without a Word, video and performance pioneer Joan Jonas’ first large-scale exhibition in Singapore and Southeast Asia. They Come to Us without a Word was organised for the U.S. Pavilion of the 56th Venice Biennale by the MIT List Visual Arts Center and co-curated by Paul C. Ha, Director of the MIT List Visual Arts Center and Ute Meta Bauer, Founding Director of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore. With this exhibition Jonas evokes the fragility of nature, using her own poetic language to address the irreversible impact of human interference on the environmental equilibrium of our planet.

Acknowledgements They Come to Us without a Word was organised for the U.S. Pavilion of the 56th Venice Biennale by the MIT List Visual Arts Center and co-curated by Paul C. Ha, Director of the MIT List Visual Arts Center and Ute Meta Bauer, Founding Director of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore. The exhibition was generously supported by U.S. Department of State, Cynthia and John Reed, the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Additional major support was provided by the Council for the Arts at MIT, Toby Devan Lewis, VIA Art Fund, Agnes Gund, Lambent Foundation.

The exhibition in Singapore is organised by the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, Nanyang Technological University with support by the Economic Development Board, Singapore. Additional support has also been provided by the U.S. Embassy Singapore.

Joan Jonas: They Come to Us Without a Word public programmes

Theatrical Fields introduces theatricality as a critical strategy in performance, film and video. This exhibition presents six video installations shown for the first time in Southeast Asia: Voice off by Judith Barry (USA), Suspiria by Stan Douglas (Canada), Lines in the Sand by Joan Jonas (USA), Vagabondia by Isaac Julien (UK), She Might Belong to You by Eva Meyer & Eran Schaerf (Germany / Israel), X Characters Re(hers)AL by Constanze Ruhm (Austria). Situated in juxtaposition, the works generate temporal spaces for experimental action, creating unfamiliar proximities and encounters.

Theatrical Fields was curated by Ute Meta Bauer (Founding Director) with Anca Rujoiu (Curator for Exhibitions), and was first presented and commissioned by the Bildmuseet, Umea in Sweden (2013).

As a collaboration, Bildmuseet Umea and NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore will publish a catalogue including keynotes from the symposium and additional commissioned essays.

Theatrical Fields public programmes

Yang Fudong, a leading international figure of contemporary art and one the most important artists to emerge out of China in the 1990s, staged his first major solo exhibition in Southeast Asia at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore. The exhibition, Incidental Scripts, presented a selection of four works by Yang: An Estranged Paradise (1997-2002), The Fifth Night (II) Rehearsal (2010), On the Double Dragon Hills (2012) and About the Unknown Girl – Ma Sise (2013-2014). These works are emblematic of his multi-faceted approach towards the creation of visual imageries that complicates our understanding of reality / fiction, and our experience of space / time.

The exhibition was curated by Ute Meta Bauer (NTU CCA Singapore Founding Director) with Khim Ong (Independent Curator).

Yang Fudong: Incidental Scripts public programmes

No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia is part of the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative which was launched in April 2012, a multi-year collaboration that charts contemporary art practice in three geographic regions—South and Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East and North Africa—and encompasses curatorial residencies, international touring exhibitions, audience-driven education programming, and acquisitions for the Guggenheim’s permanent collection.

Curated by June Yap, No Country at NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore brought the artworks back to the Southeast Asia region from which many of the artists hail and called for an even closer examination of regional cultural representations and relations. This return suggests the possibility of a renewed understanding through a process of mutual rediscovery that transcends physical and political borders. The exhibition in Singapore also marked the debut of two works from the Guggenheim UBS MAP Purchase Fund not previously shown as part of No Country: Loss by Sheela Gowda and Morning Glory by Sopheap Pich.

No country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia

Simryn Gill’s first major solo exhibition in Southeast Asia brings together a series of works that reveal the artist’s specific attitude towards how we produce meaning and make a place for ourselves in the world. NTU CCA Singapore will present three photographic series: Standing Still (2000- 03), Dalam (2001), May 2006 (2006), and a new work, Like Leaves (Syzygium grandis) (2015). Much of Simryn Gill’s work results from a process of sifting through and documenting her immediate surroundings creating quiet and at the same time commanding work marked by history, culture, the passage of time, and the poetry of daily life.

Curated by Ute Meta Bauer, Founding Director and Anca Rujoiu, Curator, Exhibitions.

Simryn Gill: Hugging the Shore public programmes

Formally trained as an architect, Tomás Saraceno draws on art, architecture, natural sciences, astrophysics, and engineering in his practice. His floating sculptures, community projects, and interactive installations propose and explore new, sustainable ways of inhabiting and sensing the environment. Over the past decade, he has initiated collaborations with renowned scientific institutions, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Max Planck Society, Nanyang Technological University of Singapore, and institutions of the Exhibition Road Cultural Group. For many years, Saraceno has studied the methods by which various species of spiders construct their webs and has incorporated this knowledge about their functionality and aesthetics into his own artistic practice. He was the first person to scan, reconstruct, and reimagine spiders’ weaved spatial habitats, and possesses the only three-dimensional spider’s web collection in existence. In January 2020, as part of the global art initiative “CONNECT, BTS”, Saraceno launched his project “Fly with Aerocene Pacha”, featuring the first-ever fuel-free hot-air balloon, above the Salinas Grandes salt flats in Jujuy, Argentina, achieving the world’s first manned solar-powered free flight and setting six world records. His major commissions include Tomás Saraceno on the Roof: Cloud City (2012) at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the permanent installation In Orbit (2013) at Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf. Saraceno was also a participating artist in the 53rd and 58th Venice Biennales. His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin; among others.

NTU CCA Singapore is pleased to present the pioneering and visionary work of artist Tomás Saraceno for the first time in Southeast Asia. Situated at the intersection between art, architecture and science, Saraceno’s artistic practice is an articulation of a utopian vision for new forms of sustainable living and cohabitation.

Arachnid Orchestra. Jam Sessions at NTU CCA Singapore is a new production by Tomás Saraceno commissioned by the centre that brings his long-term research on spider webs into the realm of sound. The artist uses spider webs as musical instruments embodying the incredible structural properties of the spider’s silk, but also the spider’s sophisticated mode of communication through vibrations.

Arachnid Orchestra. Jam Sessions is a pioneering investigation by Saraceno and his studio in Berlin that involves a range of collaborators from various universities and disciplines. The exhibition space is turned into an interactive sound and visual installation, a process-driven laboratory for experimentation that pushes the boundaries of interspecies communication.

As an extension of the exhibition, a dedicated website (www.arachnidorchestra.org) will operate as a research platform and playful hypertext of musical tuning.

Arachnid Orchestra. Jam Sessions public programmes

Invisible to the human eye, geological kinships flow under the oceans and lay deep into the earth’s crust. When they manifest themselves, it is often in apocalyptic forms that disrupt existing ecosystems and the course of human life. In geography, The Ring of Fire denotes the volcanic belt and the collision zone of tectonic plates running around the edges of the Pacific Ocean, a deadly area where the majority of the world’s earthquakes and eruptions occur. For Irwan Ahmett and Tita Salina, this geologically unstable territory demarcates a field of artist inquiry.

Since 2014, the Indonesian duo have embarked upon a journey that engages issues of social injustice, political struggles, colonial histories, and environmental crises encountered along erratic routes that stretch from Indonesia to New Zealand, from Taiwan and South Korea to Japan. The Ring of Fire (2014–ongoing) brings together for the first time the most significant works realised by the artists, either together or individually, since the inception of the project.

A Tumbling Inch, The closing programme for Irwan Ahmett and Tita Salina: The Ring of Fire (2014 – ongoing).

Mary Otis Stevens (b.1928) is a pioneering American architect. Her architectural designs, along with the founding of i Press (1968-1978), an important publisher of books on architecture, urbanism, and social space, were linked to her ability to radically re-envision space and relationships. In the context of the Cold War and American political activism in the 1960s, her work, which were often in collaboration with her partner, fellow architect and i Press co-founder Thomas McNulty, revealed her foundational training in philosophy and her commitment to de-centralising hierarchies. Revisiting her work more than fifty years later, the themes of active citizen participation in government, integrated planning, and genuine risk-taking to make substantial change in people’s lives remain relevant and crucial means of incorporating a social context into the practice of architecture. On view is Mary’s sensitivity to variations, large and small, visible in her work as a publisher as well as her drawings and architectural designs. This research presentation also explores The Ideal Communist City, an i Press publication by Alexei Gutnov et al. from 1970 that offers a deep dive into a utopian proposition that “the new city is a world belonging to all and to each.”

In order to help introduce the i Press series on the human environment to a wide audience, NTU CCA Singapore, with series editors Ute Meta Bauer (Founding Director, NTU CCA and Professor, NTU ADM), James Graham (Director of Publications, Columbia University GSAPP), and Pelin Tan (2019-2020 Keith Haring Fellow in Art and Activism, Bard College), is currently working with i Press and Mary Otis Stevens to republish several original i Press books with revisions and commentary by contemporary theorists and practitioners.

Mary Otis Stevens. The i Press Series is curated by Dr Karin Oen, Deputy Director, Curatorial Programmes, NTU CCA Singapore

Filipa Ramos will lead an Exhibition (de)Tour of Joan Jonas: They Come to Us Without a Word. Joan Jonas’s work is inhabited by a multitude of human and non-human creatures, which traverse her drawings, videos, and performances in a plurality of gestures and configurations. Assembled in idiosyncratic, non-narrative manners, these animal selves propose new temporal conventions and ways of being in the world. Ramos’ (de)Tour will be a journey across the creatures Jonas summons and collaborates with through her work. Ramos will also connect with artists and writers and explore the Singapore art scene as well as the larger region of Southeast Asia.

While in residence, Erin Gleeson gave a public talk with her nomination for the NTU CCA Singapore Residency Programme, Artist-in-Residence, Luke Willis Thompson. She also had introductory visits and curatorial tours to important institutional spaces and made a number of first-contact studio visits, finding synergies with CCA artist-in-residence, Koh Nguang How’s research for Shui Tit Sing – 100 Years of an Artist through his Archives as part of his Singapore Art Archive Project @ CCA (SAAP@CCA).

NTU CCA Singapore’s first publication, this reader stages conversations between theatre and visual arts, theoretical discourse and artistic practice juxtaposing artists and theoreticians who share a communal interest in theatricality as a critical strategy to address questions of ideology, gender, power relations. The reader includes writings by Antonin Artaud, Mikhail Bakhtin, Ute Meta Bauer, Bertolt Brecht, Giuliana Bruno, Jacques Derrida, Regis Durand, Josette Féral, Jean-François Lyotard, Eva Meyer, Timothy Murray, Katharina Sykora, and Marina Warner, documentation of the exhibition Theatrical Fields, Bildmuseet, Umea (2013) and NTU CCA Singapore (2014) presenting the works of Judith Barry, Marcel Dzama, Stan Douglas, Marie-Louise Ekman, Eva Meyer and Eran Schaerf, Isaac Julien, Joan Jonas, Constanze Ruhm, and Ulrike Ottinger.

Theatrical Fields: Critical Strategies in Performance, Film, and Video
Published by König Books
© 2016
ISBN: 978-981-11-0362-9 · 978-9-81110-362-9

To purchase your copy, please contact ntuccapublications@ntu.edu.sg

The political aspiration to map and shape a regional identity through historical writing and cultural planning stumbles upon a multi-layered subject difficult to grasp or define. The diversity of voices in this publication mirrors the complexity of the region itself: its various curatorial spaces, infrastructures, and political systems. The publication includes contributions by Ute Meta Bauer, Zoe Butt, Kevin Chua, Patrick D. Flores, Gridthiya Gaweewong, Tony Godfrey, Yin Ker, Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez, Seng Yu Jin, Simon Soon, Nora A. Taylor, and David Teh. The publication was launched in several places across the wider region including Singapore, Manila, Kuala Lumpur, and Hong Kong.

To purchase your copy, please contact ntuccapublications@ntu.edu.sg

This audio publishing project is conceived as a continuation and circulation of Tomás Saraceno’s eponymous exhibition at NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore in 2015. Exploring the arachnids’s sophisticated mode of communication through vibrations, Saraceno developed several instruments that were able to amplify the vibrations of spiders, rendering them audible to other species. Various instruments, ranging from strings to percussion, were incorporated into the artist’s exhibition at NTU CCA Singapore, and used within a series of Jam Sessions between arachnids and musicians including Brian O’Reilly, Bani Haykal, and Joyce Koh who collaborated with philosopher Etienne Turpin. Multiple recordings, also took place, often impromptu, in Saraceno’s studio in Berlin throughout the preparations of the exhibition in Singapore. These Studio Rehearsals, Spiders Salons—improvisations between the arachnids and multidisciplinary musicians David Rothenberg and Evan Zyporin—together with the Jam Sessions came together as an album. Accessible on the online audio distribution platform, SoundCloud, the album is included in this publication. An essay by Elizabeth A. Povinelli and a manifesto authored by Brian Massumi foregrounds Saraceno’s experiment in current attempts to decentralise the human subject and address the perceptual world of non-human species. Spiders don’t speak in the way humans conceive language, yet they are neither silent nor mute. By making audible what we can not hear and fully comprehend—the spider’s vibrations—Saraceno draws attention to various modalities of expression and inter-relationality whose potentiality is yet to be valued.

To purchase your copy, please contact ntuccapublications@ntu.edu.sg

The title of the book refers to the framework employed at NTU CCA Singapore in its first cycle of activities, from 2013 to March 2017, which took Singapore, the world’s second-largest trading port and the economic epicentre of Southeast Asia, as a point of departure to investigate the notion of place, the intersection between locality and the global, labour, and flows of capital.

Unfolding across four broad sections of “The Making of an Institution,” “The Geopolitical and the Biophysical,” “Incidental Scripts,” and “Incomplete Urbanism,” this publication reads as an exhibition. Drawing connections across disciplines and merging theory with practice, Place.Labour.Capital. weaves together a constellation of different bodies of materials from essays, poetry, and fiction to artworks and documentation of the Centre’s past exhibitions

Richly illustrated, the publication brings together the voices of more than 80 contributors, from former Research Fellows such as Tony Godfrey (Philippines), Regina (Maria) Möller (Germany), T. K. Sabapathy (Singapore), Yvonne Spielmann (Germany), to former Artists-in-Residence including Tiffany Chung (Vietnam/United States), Amanda Heng (Singapore), Shooshie Sulaiman (Malaysia), Lee Wen (Singapore), and Yee I-Lann (Malaysia). Other contributions include those from the Centre’s exhibitions and public programmes such as artists, academics, and curators including Amar Kanwar (India), Lee Weng Choy (Malaysia), David Teh (Australia/Singapore), and June Yap (Singapore).

This extensive publication “reminds us that institution building remains enormously significant as a means of opening up new spaces, claims, communities, dialogues, publics, and trajectories for critical artistic practice.” (Felicity D. Scott, Associate Professor Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University, New York)

“Drawing together stories, voices, and thinking by leading artists and academics, Place.Labour.Capital. traces the invention of a remarkable model of an institution. The publication is an inspiration and a valuable tool to anyone trying to find ways of building releveant arts institutions for the future.” (Sally Tallant, Director, Liverpool Biennial)

Place.Labour.Capital. takes a reflective look the art institution, and serves as a means to review the parameters of its own position in the present globalised art world and knowledge-production economies.

The visual concept of the book was conceived by renowned Singapore design firm H55.

To purchase your copy, please contact ntuccapublications@ntu.edu.sg

Emerging from an exhibition, conference, and festival that explored architect and urban theorist William S. W. Lim’s concept on “Incomplete Urbanism” and his call for “Cities for People,” this publication juxtaposes research essays, visual and textual documentation. Organised into three chapters — “The City as Living Room,” “The City as Multiple,” and “The City as Stage,” the contributions — by architects, scholars, planners, artists, activists, and curators —constitute a diverse set of analyses. Unexpected notions of planning, building, and living in Asian cities suggest multiple paths into critical spatial practice of Asian urban space. The volume positions Lim’s thoughts, concepts, and plans for action as that of a humanist who addresses the complex topography of an ever-changing urban Asia.

Contributors include: Laura Anderson Barbata, Jiat-Hwee Chang, Thanavi Chotpradit, Calvin Chua, Yvonne P. Doderer, Chomchon Fusinpaiboon, indieguerillas, Marc Glöde, Sacha Kagan, Lulu Lutfi Labibi, Magdalena Magiera, Laura Miotto, Marjetica Potrč, Pen Sereypagna, Shirley Surya, Sissel Tolaas, Etienne Turpin and Nashin Mahtani, John Wagner, H. Koon Wee, Woon Tien Wei, and Ari Wulu. Foreword by Nikos Papastergiadis. Afterword by William S. W. Lim.

To purchase your copy, please contact ntuccapublications@ntu.edu.sg

Published and commissioned by the Centre, Voyages de Rhodes re-assembles into a book format watercolour drawings painted directly by the artist on the pages of a found publication. The artist used as her canvas a book by French Jesuit missionary Alexandre de Rhodes (1591–1660) that describes his travel experiences and observations, including in the region of present-day Vietnam, during the seventeenth century.

Phan’s interventions in the book interweave different narratives that sit at the border between realism and fantasy. Reflecting upon the problematic agrarian reforms in post-war Vietnam that led to the redistribution of land and collective farming, Phan’s drawings depict children in the foreground as protagonists of an imagined commune where play or state of inertia become tools of defiance and escape. Juxtaposing seventeenth-century travel literature with contemporary images, Phan’s works produce a palimpsest of Vietnam’s history with layers of voices from the present and the past.

The artist started the project Voyages de Rhodes in 2014 and the drawings were first exhibited in a solo exhibition Poetic Amnesia (2017) curated by Zoe Butt at The Factory Contemporary Arts Centre, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

In the process of assembling the drawings back into the codex form, the project Voyages de Rhodes turned into artist’s book, whereby the book format is an artistic medium and subject of investigation. Voyages de Rhodes highlights that a book remains inherently open-ended despite its strive for completeness, and is prone to processes of erasure, ongoing interpretation, and new associations.

Thảo Nguyên Phan: Voyages de Rhodes
Published by NTU Centre for Contemporary Art
Design by mono.studio
© 2018
ISBN: 978-981-11-8676-9

To purchase your copy, please contact ntuccapublications@ntu.edu.sg

Looking at the overlooked is the core of Geraldine Kang’s projects. She intends to use her residency as an incubatory period to think about the role of waste and its management in the context of urban living, a subject matter that is often regarded as invisible in Singapore. Throughout this project, she will focus on labour issues and investigate theoretical approaches towards the act and the politics of cleaning. Kang will reflect on alternative possibilities to the aesthetisation of waste in order to create cross-disciplinary dialogues that can lead to concrete action.

The national archives contain numerous documents related to public assemblies (strikes, sit-ins, student protests, demonstrations, etc.), and yet collective gatherings aimed at voicing dissent have disappeared from the streets of present day Singapore. How do today’s youth address social issues and global emergencies? Where do they voice concern and manifest disagreement? Focusing specifically on student bodies, Green Zeng plans to investigate the history of public expressions of dissent and assess their relevance for younger generations. His efforts will be first directed at creating an archive of public assemblies in Singapore. This will allow him to engage university students on a series of workshops and participatory platforms aimed at understanding the performative function inherent in such actions. Ultimately, he will devise strategies of (re)enactment to reflect on how public assemblies embody the often strained relations between power and the people and shape our understanding of democracy, freedom, and civil rights.

Mona Vatamanu & Florin Tudor’s artistic practice spans diverse media including film, photography, painting, performance, and site-specific projects. Through their works, they confront the traumatic legacy of Communism in their native Romania and Eastern Europe, while wrestling with the ongoing challenge of how to process history. As part of the residency so far they have taken a look at the surrounding environment of both the natural jungle like environment and various constructions happening in Gillman Barracks to explore various social dynamics. They have taken the prevalent presence of migrant labour as a starting point to think about construction, the literal building of a nation, migration and the emotional realities of itinerancy and how this may affect social interactions.

Pratchaya Phinthong’s methodological process is an intense research period whereby he embeds himself within a community or through working with experts and interloculators. Travelling is a key element of his work. Phinthong presents the piece Untitled (Singapore) (2014), as part of research undertaken during his time on the NTU CCA Singapore Residencies Programme. The work explores the idea of airspace as monitored and ambiguous. The site of the NTU CCA Singapore Residencies studios is also the site of a former military camp built in 1935. Phinthong heard that airspace is a negotiated place of ownership between various nations. Singapore itself sought permission from neighbouring countries to use different airspaces and is home to one of the world’s most active airports. This permission is vital to the ongoing activity of Changi airport. An agreement in 2004 between the respective Singapore and Thai Governments was reached whereby seven used F-16 jet fighters from Singapore were given to the Thai Royal Air force, along with 15 years of military base training in Udon Thani, a north Thailand. Working with artist, Tanatchai Bandasak, Phinthong has been collecting images of these jets during their daily training practice.

Åbäke is a transdisciplinary graphic design collective, founded in 2000 by Patrick Lacey, Benjamin Reichen, Kajsa Ståhl and Maki Suzuki in London, England, after meeting at the Royal College of Art.

Želimir Žilnik is best known as one of the major figures of the Yugoslav Black Wave film movement of the 1960s and 1970s. He is noted for his socially engaging style of filmmaking and focus on contemporary issues— social, political and economic assessments of everyday life. His feature film Early Works (Rani Radovi) won him a Golden Berlin Bear Award at the 19th Berlin International Film Festival. Not only has his work been included in programmes of art galleries and museums worldwide, he is also a mentor and executive producer in many international workshops for students in South-Eastern Europe. He is also a visiting lecturer at film schools.

Aimee Lin, (b. 1979, China) editor of ArtReview Asia gave a talk at the ‘Singapore Art Book Fair 2014’. She met with local artists to understand the art scene in Singapore with research facilitated by NTU CCA Singapore Curator, Residencies.

Alec Steadman is a curator and researcher. He is currently Co-Chief Curator at Cemeti — Institute for Art and Society, Yogyakarta. Previously he occupied various roles including: Curator, Arts Catalyst, London, United Kingdom (2015—2016); Exhibition Studies Research Fellow, Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong (2015); Artistic Director, Contemporary Image Collective, Cairo, Egypt (2013—2014); Curator in Residence, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy (2013), and Head of Exhibitions, Zoo Art Enterprises, London, United Kingdom (2005—2010).

Alex Mawimbi is a visual artist. Her multimedia practice investigates the hybrid nature of African identity, contesting notions of authenticity as well as gender and female sexuality. Since 2012, she has been working on a series of drawings of half-human, half-animal creatures caught up in intimate situations and pensive poses. Mawimbi was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore between August and October 2016. During her residency, she produced a new series of self-portraits, Out of Africa, Out of Reach, and several portraits of one of Singapore’s most famous drag queens. *formerly Ato Malinda

Alvin Tan (Singapore) is the Founder and Artistic Director, The Necessary Stage, Singapore.

Amanda Heng is an artist. With an interest in the clash of Eastern and Western values, traditions, and gender roles in the context of a multicultural and fast-changing society of Singapore, her work embraces different media including performance. Between April and September 2015, Heng was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore. During her residency, she developed the series Exchange of Everyday Rituals (Forms of Engagement), which included Contact Improvisation with dancer Eng Kai Er and Tea and Sounds with NTU CCA Singapore’s curator Vera Mey, and the studio intervention The Body, Wall Space, and a Smile.

Anca Rujoiu is a curator and editor based in Singapore. As curator for exhibitions and later head of publications (2013–2018), she was part of the founding team of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore. In 2019, she was the co-curator of the third edition of the Art Encounters Biennial, Timișoara, approached as a one-year institutional programme. Whether working in a contemporary art centre, an independent space, an art school, or in the context of a biennial, she has been passionate about stretching art’s publicness, working across formats. First-Person Institutions, her PhD research at Monash University in Melbourne is focused on institution building, artists’ archives, and transnational imaginaries.

Dr Andrew Johnston is a musician, interaction/software designer, and Associate Professor, School of Software, Faculty of Engineering and IT, the University of Technology Sydney. His work focuses on the design of systems that support experimental approaches to live performance. Johnston is also co-director of the Creativity and Cognition Studios, an interdisciplinary research group working at the intersection of creativity and technology.

Ann Demeester is the Director of Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, Netherlands. She was appointed Manager of Art and Urban Development for Amsterdam City Council, co-curated the 10th Baltic Triennial, Vilnius, Lithuania (2009) and was previously the Director of De Appel Arts Centre and W139, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Demeester was part of the editorial team of the literary journals, Yang, A Prior Magazine and F.R. David, and wrote catalogue texts on the work of Luc Tuymans, Michael Borremans, Jennifer Tee, Richard Hawkins, Mika Rottenberg and Bjarne Melgaard, amongst others.

Asian Urban Lab is a Singapore-registered non-profit founded in 2003 with three primary objectives. First, to promote a greater awareness and understanding of contemporary urban issues in Asia; second, to facilitate multidisciplinary research and discussion on topics related to the trends and directions of modern Asian urban life and architecture; and third, to disseminate the results of this research to as broad an audience as possible.

Bahbak Hashemi-Nezhad is a designer based in London. His studio practice spans from the domestic to the public realm, from neighbourhood plans to products and recipes. He is interested in the changing role of the designer within complex urban conditions and draws from the permissive nature of play and processes of defamiliarisation to develop methodologies that actively engage publics within design processes. He collaborated with various art institutions in London, United Kingdom including The Showroom, The Serpentine Gallery, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Hashemi-Nezhad is currently a lecturer at the Royal College of Art, London, United Kingdom.

As artist and musician, bani haykal (Singapore, b. 1985) experiments with language, sound, and fiction. His work revolves around human-machine relationships/intimacies, and cultural identity formations reflecting critically on how language, tools and technologies have shaped and continue to shape our life experiences. From interfaces to interactions, from fictions to frictions, from commuting to communicating, the creative output of his research often involves the creation of DIY tools and it encompasses site-responsive installations, poetry, and performance as well as publications and music releases.

Bastian von Lehsten is the co-founder of Novamondo Design together with Christian Schlimok. The design agency works in the fields of brand strategy, corporate design, and digital communications for several international art organizations including the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, United States , the Staatsoper and the Leibniz Association in Berlin, Germany. He is teaching branding and corporate design at the Design Academy Berlin, Germany. His work has received numerous rewards, including the Red Dot Award and the iF Design Award. Since 2015, Novamondo collaborates closely with NTU CCA Singapore on communication collaterals for exhibitions, research, and residencies.

Dr Wee Beng Geok is a consultant of the Nanyang Business School,Nanyang Technological University (NTU) where she was Associate Professor from 1999 to 2014. In 2000, she set up the Asian Business Case Centre at the Nanyang Business School, and was its Director until 2014. Dr Wee has written and published many business case studies and several casebooks, including a series of case studies on the maritime industries in Singapore. Her career in Singapore’s corporate sector spanned two decades of which more than half were in the maritime sector. Dr Wee’s current research interests include the history of maritime businesses and industries in Singapore.

Bertolt Brecht was a German poet and playwright. He lived in exile for much of his life—first in Scandinavia and later in the United States, only to return to Berlin and found his own theater company, the Berliner Ensemble. His plays, the best known of which include The Three-penny Opera (1928) and Mother Courage and Her Children (1941), are the foundations of epic theater. This concept radically departed from theater conventions of the time and pushed forward a political theater that embodies revolutionary aims and contributes to social change. His ideas of a self-conscious and actively engaged spectator—a form of theater that addresses the immediate political and cultural circumstances—had a wide influence upon theater and the arts at large.

Bildmuseet is a contemporary art museum in Umeå, northern Sweden.

Brian O’Reilly works within the fields of electroacoustic composition, sound installations, moving images, and noise music. He is also a contrabassist focusing on uncovering the inaudible textures and hidden acoustic micro-sounds of his instrument through the integration of electronic treatments and extended playing techniques. He performs with moving images and modular analog synthesizer under Black Zenith and contrabass as well as electronics with the group Game of Patience. O’Reilly is Lecturer at the School of Contemporary Music, Lasalle College of the Arts, Singapore.