Concepts of Concern – A Lexicology of Ecology
Course Details
Date: Monday, 6 December 2021
Time: 7 – 10 pm
Delivery Mode: Online
Standard Course Fees: SGD 90.95 (inc. GST)
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For enquiries please email ntuccaeducation@ntu.edu.sg
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About the Course
Concepts of Concern – A Lexicology of Ecology is a survey of terminology in social, cultural and political ecology. Old and new terms such as recycle, sustainable, green, renewable, biomass, climate change, carbon footprint, global warming or anthropocene constitute what can be called concepts of concern. They are used to propose solutions to waste, advance environmental justice and imagine new worlds, but also to justify new forms of resource extraction, industrial production and economic globalisation as necessarily eco-centric.
The 3-hour online course traces the evolution of specific eco-centric terms and their corollary discourses since the global environmental movements of the 1960s, and examines a lexicology of ecology as a springboard to engage the emerging and heterogeneous field of ecocriticism. This course will also discuss several artistic responses that operate outside the bounds of terminological discourses and its trappings.
This course is divided into three main sections:
Part 1: Overview of dominant terminology in social/cultural/political ecology since the 1960s.
Part 2: Critical examination of selected terms, such as their use in corporate propaganda and political narratives.
Part 3: Survey of non-terminological/artistic responses to the crisis of ecology.
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Your Course Instructor
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.
Open College programmes are offered on 2 tracks; Discovery and Immersive Series. Discovery Series programmes are short exploratory courses that allow participants to explore topics outside their usual fields of interest, and acquire basic knowledge and skillsets that may be transferrable to other areas of study and work. By contrast, Immersive Seriesprogrammes are more in-depth and led by professional educators, researchers and critical thinkers in their fields of expertise. Through a blend of practical projects and discussions to stimulate critical thinking and dialogue, participants will deep dive into a subject matter and gain new perspectives.
Today, a growing number of social interactions, economic transactions, political engagements, and affective relations are enabled and regulated by a global network of online platforms operated through algorithms. As algorithmic infrastructures become enmeshed in the fabric of society, more and more aspects of everyday life are being captured and released in data streams that feed digital entities unilaterally coded and controlled by profit-driven tech companies. Through extensive online and offline fieldwork conducted across the Global North and the Global South, Tiziano Bonini and Emiliano Treré—co-authors of Algorithms of Resistance. The Everyday Fight Against Platform Power (The MIT Press, 2024)—ventured into uncharted alghoritmic territories. They encountered forms of agency, practices of resistance, and bonds of solidarity enacted by users who negotiate their own terms of existence within the platform regime. In this lecture, the speakers will reflect on how grassroots practices can spark emancipatory frictions that reinvent and disrupt the uneven power relation between users and platforms.
This event is generated by bani haykal within Communities of Practice. Techno Diversions, a research programme that aims to propel a transformative understanding of technology through artistic practices and transdisciplinary synergies.
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.
The research-driven conceptual practice of Anthony Chin (b. 1969, Singapore) grows out of site-specific engagements with the historical, social, and architectural stratifications of a place. Through the articulation of ordinary materials into poetic installations, his work unravel the latent power structures and complex geopolitical narratives that undergird the colonial past and the post-colonial present. He has regularly presented his work in Singapore and abroad. His recent solo exhibitions include S$1,996/- S$831.06/-, Comma Space, Singapore (2021); TROPHY, Metropolitan Museum of Manila, Philippines (2020); and Western Pacific, Mo Shang Experiment, Beijing, China (2016). Among the group exhibitions are SAM Contemporaries: Residues & Remixes, Singapore Art Museum, Singapore (2023); For the House; Against the House, Gillman Barracks, Singapore (2022); Concept 88, Comma Space, Singapore (2022); three editions of OH! Open House, amongst others. Anthony has previously taken part in other residency programmes such as National NAC-MET international Artist Residency, Manila, Philippines (2020) and Taipei International Artists Residency season 4, Taiwan (2018).
Priyageetha Dia is an arts practitioner who experiments with time-based media, 3D animation and game engine software. Her practice addresses the transnational migration of ethnic communities and the intersections of the colonial production with land, labour and capital in Southeast Asia through speculative methods and counter-narratives. She has been invited to participate in several exhibitions including the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, India (2022); Attention Seeker, La Trobe Art Institute, Bendigo, Australia (2022); An Exercise of Meaning in a Glitch Season, National Gallery Singapore (2020); 2219: Futures Imagined, ArtScience Museum Singapore (2019). She was a recipient of the IMPART Art Award in 2019.
The migratory movements of her ancestral lineage from Southern India to Malaysia, and later to Singapore, sparked Priyageetha’s deep-seated engagement in South Asian diasporic histories, the labour relations that underlie plantation agriculture in Malaya and the vast terrain of colonial narratives. Interweaving these research threads in her multimedia practice, her works figure alternative histories that empower subaltern forms of existence.
During her residency at Jan Van Eyck Academie, the artist is interested in delving deeper into the emergence and expansion of agro-industrial plantation projects, the dispossession and displacement of lands and communities in Southeast Asia, and their relation to The Netherlands through archival research. Moreover, the residency will provide her with a supportive environment to articulate critical viewpoints and counter-narratives through her ongoing and self-led experiments with computer-generated imagery (CGI), animation technologies and game engine software while also allowing her to gain an understanding of issues related to contemporary transnational interactions within Southeast Asia and Europe.
Spanning moving image, sculpture, as well as performative installations, Priyageetha Dia (b. 1992, Singapore) addresses identity politics by questioning dominant narratives and socio-spatial relations. In the past few years, her practice has been consistently experimenting with a variety of world-making gestures that envision alternative futures. Her works have been part of several group exhibitions including, Attention Seeker, La Trobe Art Institute, Bendigo, Australia (2022); An Exercise of Meaning in a Glitch Season, National Gallery Singapore (2020); 2219: Futures Imagined, ArtScience Museum Singapore (2019). She was a recipient of the IMPART Art Award in 2019.
Luke Willis Thompson’s (b. 1988, New Zealand) objects are typically both curios drawn from historical blind-spots and markers of, or stand-ins for, very particular personal lived experience. Thompson’s recent projects have focused on politics around the circulation and repatriation of artefacts, and the
class-bound art world’s mode of distribution.
Thompson holds an MFA (2010) and a BFA (2009) from the ELAM School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland. Selected exhibitions include: Surround Audience, the New Museum Triennial (2015); Foreign Exchange (or the stories you wouldn’t tell a stranger), Weltkulturen Museum, Frankfurt, Germany (2014); The 5th Auckland Triennial, Auckland Art Gallery, New Zealand (2013). Thompson won the acclaimed Auckland Art Gallery’s Walters Prize in 2014.
Corinne Diserens (b. 1960, France) is guest curator for the Taipei Biennial 2016. She currently serves as director of the ERG, higher art and research academy in Brussels, Belgium. Some of her notable previous positions include director and chief curator at the Museion in Bolzano, Italy (2007-2008), Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nantes, France (2003-2006), Les Musées de Marseille in Marseille, France (1996-1999), curator at IVAM in Valencia, Spain (1989-1993), and art director at the 1993 Tyne International Biennial sponsored by the Arts Council of Great Britain.
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.
The interdisciplinary practice of Nolan Oswald Dennis (b. 1988, Zambia/South Africa) looks at histories and futures of solidarity in the global south as strategic responses to capital and colonial power, and as trajectories of collective world-making. Engaging with “a black consciousness of space”, his practiceunsettles dominant ways of knowing. His work has been shown internationally at Young Congo Biennial, Kinshasa, Congo (2019); Goethe Institute, Beijing, China (2018); Kalmar Konstmuseum, Sweden (2017), amongst others. In 2016, he was awarded the FNB Art Prize. He is a Research Associate in the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre, University of Johannesburg, and a 2020/21 Digital Earth Fellow.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
“To live and die well together in a thick present,” quotes the seminal text Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Cthulhucene by Donna Haraway. In this text, Haraway responds to the rising sense of alarm surrounding ecological discourses on the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene. The book is a proposal to move instead towards the discursive framework of the Cthulhucene—an ecological epoch that, for Haraway, “eschews futurism” and remains resolutely with the present and all its problems; one that stays with the trouble and finds kin within it.
To consider the global ecosystem as a network of entangled and interconnected life-forces, the ecological imminence is also an imminence of existence. It begins with disappearance—of water, of trees, of entire habitats and species—all turned to vapour and thin air. And yet thin air in a thick present takes vapour as a beginning, too: vapour cycles through time, becoming cloud, becoming rainfall, becoming water-body again. Taking the Earth’s hydrologic cycle—that is, the sequence of processes detailing the cyclical movement of water on and off the Earth’s surface—as its entry-point, Vapour Islands: to live and die well together in a thick present* is an archipelago of thematic “islands,” in which each island corresponds to one of the four main stages of the hydrologic cycle: evaporation, condensation, precipitation, and percolation. Interacting with books and research materials from the Centre’s Public Resource Platform while thinking through the cycle of water, this presentation moves through and between loss and regain, release and redistribution, to consider the ways in which thin air can be transformed into a present thick with possibility.
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.
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 making of each film transforms the way I see myself and the world. Once I start engaging in the process of making a film or in any artistic excursion, I am also embarking upon a journey whose point of arrival is unknown to me.”
—Trinh T. Minh-ha
Trinh T. Minh-ha. Films. is the first institutional exhibition of filmmaker, music composer, writer, anthropologist, feminist and postcolonial theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha in Asia, presented in an exhibition format. Five of her films—Forgetting Vietnam (2015), Night Passage (2004), The Fourth Dimension (2001), A Tale of Love (1995) and Shoot for the Contents (1991), filmed over a quarter of a century, in different parts of Asia—are simultaneously on view in five small-scale movie theatres in The Exhibition Hall. As the viewer wanders from one theatre to the next, the proximity of the films enables their narratives to interrelate. This spatial configuration took its point of departure from Trinh’s exhibition at the Secession, Vienna, in 2001.
Forgetting Vietnam, framed by two ancient Vietnamese myths, was made in commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam war, touching on the memory of trauma. Night Passage, inspired by Miyazawa Kenji’s novel Milky Way Railroad (1927), narrates the spiritual journey of a young female immigrant and her two companions, into a world of in-between realities. Shot in Japan, The Fourth Dimension is Trinh’s first digital film. Using special video effects to composite images and sound in multiple layers, this film is an exploration of time through rituals of religion and culture, new technology and everyday reality. A Tale of Love is a retelling of 19th-century Vietnamese poem The Tale of Kiều (1820), through a modern-day Vietnamese immigrant in the United States. In this film, Trinh experiments with various cinematic techniques and elements. Shoot for the Contents, an excursion into allegories, explores cultural and political shifts in China, as refracted by the June Fourth incident in Beijing.
Presented in the Centre’s Single Screen from 31 October 2020 is Trinh’s newest cinematic work, What about China? (Part I of II, 2020–21). Initiated by NTU CCA Singapore, and co-commissioned with Rockbund Art Museum (RAM), Shanghai, the film takes the notion of harmony in China as a site of creative manifestation, and draws from footage shot in 1993 and 1994, in Eastern and Southern China, specifically from provinces Anhui, Hubei, Zhejiang, Fujian and Guangxi—linked to the remote origins of Chinese civilisation.
Through Trinh T. Minh-ha. Writings., a display of Trinh’s books on reading platforms along the passageway connecting the five theatres in The Exhibition Hall, as well as Why are they so afraid of a lotus?, presented in The Lab by CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts (Wattis), San Francisco, that showcases its year-long research season on her multifaceted practice, viewers are able to encounter her extensive writing that is core to her practice.
Trinh’s early films, Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989), Naked Spaces—Living is Round (1985), and Reassemblage (1982), are part of an online film programme, Speaking / Thinking Nearby. Other films selected echo strands of discussions in Trinh’s layered practice, ranging from ethics of representation, to aspects of migration, global socio-politics, and feminism.
Besides the film programme Speaking/ Thinking Nearby, other public programmes include Mother Always Has a Mother, an online convening presented by the Centre, Wattis, and RAM, and “There is no such thing as documentary”, a conference that brings together filmmakers, film historians, and curators to question the politics embedded in presentation and representation, perception, context, and the spatial.
This is NTU CCA Singapore’s final presentation in its current exhibition space, its opening coinciding with the Centre’s seventh anniversary. By the end of this exhibition, the Centre would have hosted 55 exhibitions since its inception in 2013, inaugurated by the show Paradise Lost (2014), featuring works by Trinh T. Minh-ha alongside those of Zarina Bhimji and Fiona Tan.
Trinh T. Minh-ha. Films. is curated by Ute Meta Bauer (Germany/Singapore), Founding Director, NTU CCA Singapore, and Professor, NTU ADM.
This project focuses on the multi-layered practice of Trinh T. Minh-ha as a filmmaker, writer, music composer and educator, generating a multi-year (2019–2022) research and programme partnership between NTU CCA Singapore, RAM, Wattis, and the Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart.
Yeoh Lam Keong is currently a private economic consultant, an Adjunct Professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy and a Vice-President of the Economic Society of Singapore. He worked at the GIC for 26 years, where he was Director of Economics and Strategy as well as Chief Economist and oversaw global macro-economic analysis and investment strategy. As a prominent economist, Yeoh has authored many academic publications and is heavily involved in public policy research.
The artistic practice of Sung Tieu (b. 1987, Vietnam/Germany/United Kingdom) spans a variety of mediums includingsound installation, video, sculpture, photography, performance, and public interventions. In her work,she contends with notions of history and analyses transnational movements of people and capitals. Forthcoming solo exhibitions will be held at Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany and NottinghamContemporary, United Kingdom (both 2020). Other forthcoming projects will be featured at TateModern and David Roberts Art Foundation (both London, United Kingdom, 2019), and the PragueBiennale (2020). She has had solo exhibitions at FRAGILE, Berlin, Germany (2019); Royal Academyof Arts, London, United Kingdom (2018); and Nha San Collective, Hanoi, Vietnam (2017).
Fish Story, to be continued presents an investigation of the global maritime industry, an extensive research of the late artist, theorist, photography historian and critic, Allan Sekula. Showing for the first time in Southeast Asia, NTU CCA Singapore will juxtapose chapters from Fish Story (1988 – 1993) alongside two film works, Lottery of the Sea (2006) and The Forgotten Space (2010) co-directed with Nöel Burch. With a focus on the core works of his explorations of the maritime world, this exhibition aims to emphasise Allan Sekula’s sustained argument that the sea is the “forgotten space” of the contemporary global economy. Fish Story, to be continued will include works from the collections of Fond Regional d’art contemporain Bretagne, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York and Thyssen Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA 21), Vienna.
An International Symposium is organised on the occasion of Fish Story, to be continued on Saturday 26 September 2015. Bringing together different researchers and artists who have collaborated or share common interests with Allan Sekula’s work, the symposium will focus on key themes of his practice including questions of critical realism in contemporary art and representation of labour.
This exhibition is part of NTU CCA Singapore’s curatorial programme PLACE.LABOUR.CAPITAL., a trandisciplinary research addressing the complexities of a world in flux and the network of connections that such underlying elements define at both local and global scale.
Incomplete Urbanism: Attempts of Critical Spatial Practice is an open-ended exhibition that serves as a laboratory of ideas, exploring the indeterminacy and changeability of urban living. Borrowing its title from eminent Singaporean architect William S.W. Lim’s book Incomplete Urbanism: A Critical Urban Strategy for Emerging Economies (2012), this multifaceted project takes Lim’s practice and the initiatives of the Asian Urban Lab that he started with colleagues in 2003, as a point of departure. It presents various researches into the spatial, cultural and social aspects of city life according to the publications Lim was involved with.
Acknowledging Lim’s contributions as a prolific urban theorist and catalyst of ideas, whose vision asks that we reconsider the traditions of Asian architecture for the “contemporary vernacular”, Incomplete Urbanism is a direct response to his critical ideas – a space is generated to encourage participation and agency.
Lim’s key ideas will be explored by commissioned projects from several contributors, including Dr Marc Glöde (Germany/Singapore), film curator, Visiting Scholar, School of Art, Design (ADM) and Media, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore; Laura Miotto (Italy/Singapore), Associate Professor, NTU ADM; Shirley Surya (Indonesia/Hong Kong), Associate Curator for Design and Architecture, M+, Hong Kong and NTU CCA Singapore Visiting Research Fellows; Dr Etienne Turpin (Canada/Indonesia), Research Scientist, Urban Risk Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States; and Sissel Tolaas (Norway/Germany), smell researcher and artist.
Incomplete Urbanism seeks to present a dynamic space to engage urban issues, through discussions, debates, a programme on classic Singapore films, workshops and other collective efforts.
