In this thoughtful exchange, artist Panos Aprahamian and film curator Viknesh Kobinathan probe the stratigraphy of meanings sedimented in Aprahamian’s latest work situating it in the context of the Lebanese artist’s extended inquiry into dystopian landscapes, tormented histories, ecological devastations, and supernatural horror. The conversation will be preceded by the screening of the film.
This is the opening event of Panos Aprahamian: More Spilled Blood Than Drinkable Water (11 – 27 September 2025, The Hall, NTU CCA Singapore) which premieres the video work created with the support of the Han Nefkens Foundation – Museu Tàpies Video Art Production Grant 2024.
Wednesday, 17 September 2025
6:30 – 8:00pm
The Hall, NTU CCA Singapore
6 Lock Road, #01-09
Gillman Barracks 108934
Free with Registration
NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore is pleased to premiere the latest work of Panos Aprahamian, recipient of the Han Nefkens Foundation – Museu Tàpies Video Art Production Grant 2024 which enabled the creation of this work.
The final instalment of Aprahamian’s unplanned “Karantina Trilogy”, More Spilled Blood Than Drinkable Water (2025), takes place, like two previous works, in Karantina, a former quarantine district in northeastern Beirut bordered by the Beirut River. One of the most polluted parts of the city due to its proximity to the port, a waste sorting facility, and an infamous, now-closed slaughterhouse, the area has witnessed environmental crises and uncounted deaths. In the film, the disembodied voice of a paranormal investigator recounts her contemplative journey along the river’s course as a descent into the underworld, addressing the chemical compounds, spectral echoes, foul odour, and invisible presences that dwell in a dystopian landscape made of flows and stagnations. As the camera follows the emergences and submergences of the riverine water, it captures glimpses of deteriorating ecologies and the wavering reflections of industrial infrastructures while the narration—part investigative report, part diary entry, part speculative fiction—entangles historical chronologies in a non-linear sequence. Blending documentary realism, abstract sequences, and fictional genres, the work slowly excavates deep sediments of sorrows within a wounded landscape haunted by the spirits of uncountable entities, both human and non-human, who lost their lives there. Turning the water body into a portal onto intangible worlds and an uneasy mirror of the present, Aprahamian’s work ponders over and bears witness to the aftermath of violence, historical trauma, and environmental degradation.
An instrument for supporting contemporary artistic production in the field of video art, the Han Nefkens Foundation – Museu Tàpies Video Art Production Grant is awarded annually to an emerging visual artist from Central or West Asia. In addition to financial support, the grant connects the awardee to an international network of institutions committed to showing the newly produced work. In this way, the awardees are given the opportunity to dialogue with art professionals at each institution and present their work in different social, cultural, and political contexts.
The partners for the Han Nefkens Foundation – Museu Tàpies Video Art Production Grant 2024 are: NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore; WIELS (Brussels, Belgium); Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (Manila, Philippines); Jameel Arts Centre (Dubai, UAE) and Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Donnaregina (Naples, Italy). NTU CCA Singapore is a partner of the Han Nefkens Foundation – Museu Tàpies Video Art Production Grant since 2019.
Dates
11 – 27 September 2025
Opening Hours
Thursday to Saturday, 1:00 – 7:00pm
Venue
The Hall, NTU CCA Singapore
6 Lock Road, #01-09
Gillman Barracks 108934
Free Admission
17 Sep 2019, Tue 06:00 PM – 08:00 PM
(Led by Professor Ute Meta Bauer, NTU ADM)
29 Oct 2019, Tue 06:00 PM – 08:00 PM
(Led by Professor Ute Meta Bauer, NTU ADM, and Dr Andreas Spiegl, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna)
The Exhibition Hall, Block 43 Malan Road
Sign up here.
During these reading sessions, participants will look at and discuss texts from books such as Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene and Rosi Braidotti’s The Posthuman. The group will explore the possibility of a critical humanity, ranging from cohabitation with other forms of life to more dystopian scenarios. This links to the Centre’s overarching research topic Climates. Habitats. Environments., which examines, among others, the precarious conditions of human habitats due to climatic shifts, and their impact on geo-political, social, and cultural systems.
Entanglements – Writing The Environment
Course Details
Date: 21, 22, 24 & 25 Feb 2022
Time: 9:00am – 4:00pm
Location: NTU CCA Singapore, The Seminar Room, Block 37 Malan Road, Singapore 109452
Course Fee: $856 (inc. GST) Skillsfuture credits applicable for Singaporeans.
Registration has closed.
For enquiries please email ntuccaeducation@ntu.edu.sg
About the Course
Entanglements – Writing the Environment is a 4-day course which offers participants the opportunity to develop their writing skills and interests in ways that promote and illustrate environmental awareness, concerns, and sensitivities.
Participants will explore diverse issues of the environment captured in writing through experimenting with a variety of writing forms from the glossary definition, annotations, essay, review, poetry, short fiction and novel.
The course format will include examination of literary texts related to environmental themes, class discussions, as well as writing and editing practice to texts produced throughout the course.
By the end of this course, participants will have a new literary appreciation and increased confidence in writing about the natural world. Join us in the sandbox of literature to explore new ideas, experiment with language, and arrange words in new and exciting ways with like-minded individuals.
What You Will Learn
1. To understand different formats of writing and writing conventions that can be applied to other facets of daily life.
2. To integrate environmental concerns in writing of fiction and non-fiction.
3. To identify and analyse developments in the field of environmental literature through the study of specific works.
4. To develop a personal style of writing by connecting ideas and creating an effective narrative.
Who Should Sign Up
Artists, Cultural Producers, Curators, Researchers, Educators, Naturalists, Editors, Art Critics, Budding Writers or someone who simply enjoys writing
NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore and the European Union Delegation to Singapore are pleased to present the exhibition Hoo Fan Chon, Citra Sasmita, Vuth Lyno: New Works. The exhibition marks the culmination of the first cycle of SEA AiR—Studio Residencies for Southeast Asian Artists in the European Union (SEA AiR). As participating artists in the inaugural cycle of SEA AiR, Hoo Fan Chon (Malaysia), Citra Sasmita (Indonesia), and Vuth Lyno (Cambodia) have each been awarded a three-month-long residency at an art institution in Europe as well as funding for the creation of artworks.
Stemming out of a year-long engagement, Hoo Fan Chon, Citra Sasmita, Vuth Lyno: New Works is the outcome of a multifaceted process made of journeys and institutional collaborations, fieldwork and encounters, research and artmaking.
In the first half of 2022, amidst unrelenting surges of the pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the artists took off from their home countries to conduct three-month-long residencies: Hoo Fan Chon at HIAP – Helsinki International Artist Programme (Finland); Citra Sasmita at WIELS (Brussels, Belgium); and Vuth Lyno at Villa Arson (Nice, France). The artworks featured in the exhibition Hoo Fan Chon, Citra Sasmita, Vuth Lyno: New Works have been created by the artists in the months following their residencies, a much-needed time for critical reflection and material experimentation that allowed them to develop their research findings and creative inspiration into full-fledged artworks. Ranging from installation and video to sculpture and painting, some of these works also mark these artists’ first attempts at embracing new mediums and materials: 3D animation techniques for Hoo Fan Chon, video for Citra Sasmita, and paper for Vuth Lyno. Most importantly, they bear witness to how the artists’ interests in the cosmetics of food, cultural contaminations, decolonial practices, the empowerment of women, and the resilience of marginalised communities, have evolved over the last year.
The exhibition is curated by Dr Anna Lovecchio, Assistant Director (Programmes), and NTU CCA Singapore. The project leader of SEA AiR is Ute Meta Bauer Founding Director, NTU CCA Singapore, and Professor, School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University.
SEA AiR—Studio Residencies for Southeast Asian Artists in the European Union is funded by the European Union.
What worlds transpire and conspire when capitalist violence sparks radically different beings to meet?
In 1887, a 4.7 metre-long crocodile was shot and donated to the colonial-era institution known as The Raffles Library and Museum where a taxidermist stuffed it with straw. The crocodile’s stuffing saw the light of the day again in 2013 when the specimen was opened for conservation by Kate Pocklington, then Conservator at the Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum. Since then, several artists convened by Migrant Ecologies Projects have participated in “gleaning sessions” of these dried stalks more than a century old. Throughout the sessions, the straw released a sleeping ecology of cereal and flower seeds which Finnish and Swedish cultivators and specialists from the Kew Gardens in London are trying to awaken, while their provenance is being investigated by Australian plant geneticists.
In a newspaper article—found by Pocklington—published in The Straits Times in 1948,it was claimed that this very crocodile hosts the spirit of a 19th century tin-mine kongsi leader, mystic, and warrior in the Larut Wars (1861-74) turned anti-colonial fighter. Shrines for this spirit persist alongside the mangroves and rivers of Matang, in the northwestern Malaysian state of Perak. In 2023, a group of artists, researchers, and historians from Singapore and Malaysia went on a field trip there. However, along the way, the initial crocodile trail and tale of the 19thcentury anti-colonial hero began to bifurcate, sending out feelers and drawing the group through other more-than-human waterbodies, mountains, caves, and the devastated landscapes of historic and contemporary mining.
In this panel the project’s participants will share about their work-in-progress on this spirit ecologies, with each contributor variously addressing submerged and emergent sounds, senses, and cinematic practices developed during their research.
Pursuing her ongoing research into intergenerational conflicts and trauma, Yanyun Chen will spend her residency examining methods of discipline within the family context. With a focus on Singaporean personal and communal childhood histories of discipline and punishment, the artist will explore how the indelible traces of disciplinary behaviour linger on in people’s bodies and minds and bleed into the everyday. Observing the irony and self-deprecating humour that come into play as a self-soothing practice in the retelling of such memories, she will also seek to unpack the heterogeneous ways in which pain and violence are remembered by conducting fieldwork, literary investigations, and interviews. The research weaves through histories of punishment and discipline in Singapore. Ultimately the artist intends to create large scale drawings that address these intergenerational wounds through the lens of medical, ethnographic, historical, and material studies.
Merging fictional stories and historical accounts, the practice of Liu Yu (b. 1985, Taiwan) cuts across video, installation, and text. Her work is concerned with re-contextualizing stories of marginalised communities as a commentary on the intricacies of domineering power structures. Using field work and site-specific methodologies, she reconstructs alternative narratives strung together by fragmented representations of space, history, image, and narration. Recent solo exhibitions include The history of the concave and the convex, Hong-gah Museum, Taipei, Taiwan (2018) and Several Ways to Believe, Taiwan Academy, Los Angeles, United States (2016). She has recently participated in group exhibitions such the Asian Art Biennial, Taichung, Taiwan (2019).
The practice of Lêna Bùi (b. 1985, Vietnam) is deeply drawn to the intangible aspects of life, such as faith, death, and dreams and the ways in which they influence our behaviours and perceptions. Through the incorporation of anecdotes and personal stories, her works articulate intimate reflections upon the impact of rapid development and the relationship between humans and nature. Bùi’s works have been included in group exhibitions and presentations at Sharjah Art Foundation, United Arab Emirates (2018); Mansfield Freeman Center for East Asian Studies, Wesleyan University, Middle Town, United States (2018); Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany (2017); The Factory Contemporary Arts Centre, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (2016); and Carré d’Art, Nîmes, France (2014) amongst other venues.
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.
Everything begins from small steps. That was the first thing that came through History of Merchant, a solo exhibition of Husein’s work in 2012. A small-intimate approach to his family journeys, from Hadramaut, in Middle East to South East in Indonesia. By collecting, archiving, and listening to the elders stories, the work started to build a strong foundation that led him to one project and then another project. Since that, he started to further seek and question Arabic descendants in Indonesia. The ideas go across the border between art, politics, economy, and also science. What did they do? Why are they doing that? How do they live and adapt? How they see themselves now? As Arabic-Indonesian or Indonesian-Arabic? These questions about identity, adaptation, survival, daily life culture, and also originality are evoked. While doing research for that project, Husein found stories about the transition, from Hyderabad to Singapore. These descendants were supposed to go directly to Indonesia through the Malaya Peninsula but stopped and stayed in Singapore for two years due to the critical situation that happen between British and the Dutch thus it has been said, to have developed a new community. This is the point of entry into Husein’s research for the NTU CCA Residencies Programme. The topic is simplified into three aspects: Identity, Transition, and Journeys. By using those as the main core Husein will explore the story of Arabic society in Singapore, seeking artefact and archives through the stories from the citizens.
Marianna Simnett (b.1986, United Kingdom) lives and works in London. Her interdisciplinary practice includes video, installation, performance, sculpture and watercolour. Simnett uses vivid and visceral means to explore the body as a site of transformation. Working with animals, children, organs, and often performing herself, she imagines radical new worlds filled with untamed thoughts, strange tales, and desires. Simnett has shown in major museums internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include LAB RATS, Kunsthalle Zürich, Switzerland (2019), My Broken Animal, Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, Netherlands (2019), CREATURE, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia (2019), Blood In My Milk, New Museum, New York, United States (2018) among others. She is a joint winner of the Paul Hamlyn Award 2020, received the Jerwood / FVU Award in 2015, and was shortlisted for the Jarman Award in 2017.
The artist was scheduled to be in-residence from July ‚ Sept 2020. Due to the COVID-19 virus outbreak and international travel restrictions, the artist was unable to participate in the residency programme physically.
During the residency, Brigitte van der Sande aims to further the scope of her ongoing research on the currencies and potentialities of science-fiction in the context of Asia. By connecting with local artists and cultural practitioners with similar interests, she will explore possibilities of future collaboration for the second edition of the multidisciplinary festival Other Futures that will take place in Amsterdam 2020. Reflecting on these experiences and interests, van der Sande will also present a public talk entitled Speculations on other futures.
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).
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.
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.
The exhibition China. The Arts – The People, Photographs and Films from the 1980s and 1990s by acclaimed filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger (b. 1942 in Constance, Germany) is the first large-scale exhibition by the award-winning filmmaker and artist in Asia. The selection of works focuses on Ottinger’s research and travels in China and Mongolia during the 1980s and 1990s, comprising four films and more than one hundred photographs. The photographs, created largely in parallel with the production of her films, will be unfolded along the artist’s leitmotifs.
Starting with China. The Arts – The People (1985), the exhibition leads a journey through the cultures and geographies of China, while also exploring the relationship between moving image and still life. The three acts of the documentary are presented on a three-screen installation, documenting everyday life in Beijing (February 1985), Sichuan Province (March 1985), and Yunnan Province (March 1985). While meeting the film director Ling Zifeng in one chapter, a Bamboo factory is visited in another, and in parallel the Sani people, a minority group, show their habitat, the Stone Forest.
Taiga. A Journey to Northern Mongolia (1992), a documentary over eight hours long that will be presented on multiple monitors throughout the exhibition space, looks into the everyday life of nomadic peoples in Mongolia. Furthermore, on view in the cinematic space of the Centre, The Single Screen, will be Exile Shanghai (1997), a film telling the six life stories of German, Austrian, and Russian Jews intersecting in Shanghai after their escape from Nazi Germany, as well as Johanna d’Arc of Mongolia (1989), Ottinger’s only feature fiction film presenting a cast starring Badema, Lydia Billiet, Inés Sastre, and Delphine Seyrig.
From 1962 to 1968, Ulrike Ottinger was living as an independent artist in Paris, where at the University of Paris-Sorbonne she attended lectures on ethnography and religion of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Louis Althusser, and Pierre Bourdieu. Over the decades, she has created an extensive image archive, including films, photographs of her own as well as collections of postcards, magazine illustrations, and other iconographic documents from times and places worldwide. Driven by her curiosity for people and places, the artist’s images alternate between documentary insight and theatrical extravagance, presenting encounters with everyday realities at the intersection of the contemporary, the traditional, and the ritual.
The extraordinary filmic and photographic oeuvre from China and Mongolia of the 1980s and 1990s prove her outstanding practice and beyond. Fighting for permission to travel and film in communist China, Ottinger’s interest in Asia also broke with the Cold War stereotype of that time. Her inimitable universe of provinces and regions of China is filled with rich imagery of various provinces in China and nomadic societies in Northern Mongolia and their history, paying attention to the presence of local details and reaching far beyond its described territory.
The exhibition is accompanied by an intensive public programme, starting with a Behind the Scenes discussion with the artist on her practice as photographer and filmmaker. The programmed talks and screenings will reflect on the notion of the documentary, the intersection of documentary and fiction, and the potential that artistic production can have for anthropology, cultural studies, and history.
Initially a painter, Ottinger came to filmmaking in the early 1970s. She furthermore produced operas, several theatre plays, and radio dramas. Her films have received numerous awards and have been shown at the world’s most important film festivals, as well as appreciated in multiple retrospectives, including Rio de Janeiro International Film Festival (2013), Centre Pompidou, Paris (2010), Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid (2004), The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2000), and Cinémathèque française, Paris (1982). Her work has been featured in major international exhibitions such as Documenta (2017, 2002), Gwangju Biennale (2014), Berlin Biennale (2010, 2004), and Shanghai Biennale (2008). Recent solo shows include, among others, Johanna Breede Photokunst, Berlin (2015, 2013), Sammlung Goetz, Munich (2012), Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2011), Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin (2011), and Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam (2004). Major monographs include Ulrike Ottinger: World Images (2013), Ulrike Ottinger (2012), Ulrike Ottinger: N.B.K. Ausstellungen Band 11 (2011), Floating Food (2011), and Image Archive (2005). In 2011, she was awarded the Hannah Höch Prize for her creative work, and in 2010 honoured with the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Ulrike Ottinger: China. The Arts – The People, Photographs and Films from the 1980s and 1990s is curated by Ute Meta Bauer, Founding Director, and Khim Ong, Deputy Director, Exhibitions, Residencies and Public Programmes.
Ghosts and Spectres — Shadows of History features video installations and films by Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Thailand), Ho Tzu Nyen (Singapore), Nguyen Trinh Thi (Vietnam), and Park Chan-kyong (South Korea). The artists’ research into their own cultural and historical backgrounds gain shape through allegories that re-evaluate the social and political reforms in Post-War and Cold-War Asia. The cinematic works in the exhibition combine fact and fiction. They not only allude to rarely discussed subject-matters but also raise crucial questions about power and authority, construction of narratives, repression of identities, and collective trauma.
Embedded in the vernacular, ghosts, myths, and rituals present systems of knowledge that enable the expression of unknown worlds. Ghosts and Spectres — Shadows of History brings to light clouded histories at times not officially recounted but those that remain a lingering presence in collective memories through local mythologies, ghostly figures, and traditions. The works create their own language and systems of reference, reflecting current efforts of exposing written historical accounts and contemporary situations that subvert mainstream narratives.
In parallel, The Lab, NTU CCA Singapore’s platform for research in-progress, will be featuring projects by siren eun young jung (South Korea) and Choy Ka Fai (Singapore/Germany), both recent NTU CCA Singapore artists-in-residence. While jung focuses on Yeoseong Gukgeuk, a vanishing form of traditional Korean theatre featuring only female performers, Choy brings up his long-time research into Butoh dance, also called “dance of darkness,” and looks at its evolution and influence through one of the Butoh founders, Tatsumi Hijikata.
Ghosts and Spectres—Shadows of History is curated by Ute Meta Bauer, Founding Director, NTU CCA Singapore, and Professor, School of Art, Design and Media, NTU, and Khim Ong, Deputy Director, Curatorial Programmes.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul is an artist and filmmaker. Recognised as one of the most original voices in contemporary cinema, his feature films, short films and installations have won him widespread international recognition and numerous awards, including the Cannes Palme d’Or in 2010 with Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives; the Cannes Competition Jury Prize in 2004 with Tropical Malady; and the Cannes Un Certain Regard Award in 2002 with Blissfully Yours. His latest feature Cemetery of Splendour was released to critical acclaim at the 68th Cannes Film Festival in 2015. Apichatpong began making films and video shorts in 1994 and completed his first feature, Mysterious Object at Noon in 2000. He has also mounted exhibitions and installations in many countries since 1998. Lyrical and often mysterious, his film works are non-linear, dealing with memory in subtle ways, invoking personal politics and social issues. Working independently of the Thai commercial film industry, Apichatpong devotes himself to promoting experimental and independent filmmaking through his company Kick the Machine Films, founded in 1999, which also produces all his films. Major installations have been presented at dOCUMENTA(13) (2012) and in solo exhibitions in Oslo, London, Mexico City, Kyoto, and New York.
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.
Billy Tang (China/United Kingdom) is Senior Curator, Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai.
Dr Clare Veal (United Kingdom/Singapore) is a lecturer in the MA Asian Art Histories programme at LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore. She undertakes research on Southeast Asian photography, art, and visual culture, with a particular focus on Thailand. She received her PhD from the Department of Art History and Film Studies at the University of Sydney for her thesis entitled Thainess Framed: Photography and Thai Identity, 1946-2010. Veal was the sub-editor for Asian Art for the Routledge Encyclopaedia of Modernism(2016) and has contributed papers to a number of publications, including Journal of Aesthetics and Culture and Trans-Asia Photography Review.
Dr Daniel Mann (Israel/United Kingdom) is a London-based writer and filmmaker. Mann’s writing has been published with journals such as Screen, Media Culture & Society and World Records. His forthcoming book, titled “Occupying Habits: Media and Warfare in Israel-Palestine”, will be out next year with Bloomsbury Press. His films have been exhibited at The Berlinale, The Rotterdam Film Festival, Cinéma du Réel, Hong Kong Film Festival and the ICA in London. Mann earned his PhD from the Media Department and the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths. Currently, he is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Film Studies Department at King’s College London.
Hyunjin Kim (South Korea) is a curator, writer, and researcher, currently teaching at R.A.T. School, Seoul. She is an advisor to Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong. Her recent curatorial and interdisciplinary practices explore disparate points of regional modernity, in various forms and productions. She was Director at Arko Art Center, Seoul (2014–15), and a co-curator of 7th Gwangju Biennale (2008). She curated numerous exhibitions and projects including Tradition (Un)Realized, Arko Art Center, Seoul, South Korea (2014); Perspective Strikes Back, L’appartement22, Rabat, Morocco (2010); Plug-In #3-Undeclared Crowd, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands (2006), and published extensively on contemporary artists including Park Chan-kyong.
Iris Dressler (Germany) is with Hans D. Christ the director of the Württembergischer Kunstverein (WKV) in Stuttgart since 2005. One of her focuses is on the exploration of collaborative, transcultural and transdisciplinary practices of curating. In 2019 Dressler and Christ were the artistic directors of the Bergen Assmebly, a triennial for contemporary arts in Norway. At the Kunstverein she presented solo exhibitions of artists such as Lorenza Böttner (curated by Paul B. Preciado), Imogen Stidworthy (2018), Alexander Kluge (2020 and 2017), Ines Doujak (2016), Pedro G. Romero (2012), Teresa Burga (2011, curated by Miguel Lopez and Emilio Tarazona), Michaël Borremans (2011), Daniel G. Andújar (2008), Anna Oppermann (2007, curated by Ute Vorkoeper), or Stan Douglas (2007). Recent group exhibitions include Actually, the Dead Are Not Dead (since 2019 in Bergen and Stuttgart with various constellations of co-curators), 50 Years after 50 Year of the Bauhaus (2018), Tito’s Bunker (2017, with Biennial of Contemporary Art Sarajevo, at Tito’s Bunker in Konjic and WKV), The Beast and the Sovereign (2016, with MACBA, Paul B. Preciado and Valentín Roma with at WKV and MACBA) or Acts of Voicing (2012, with a core group of twelve cocurators). Dressler teaches regularly at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Stuttgart and elsewhere. She largely published texts on contemporary art and its political and theoretical contexts. In 1996 she founded with Hans D. Christ the Hartware Medienkunstverein, which they directed till 2004.
Jan Peter Hammer is an artist who creates films and performances that connects literature and cinema. He is primarily interested in the narrative structure of a work. His videos, films, and synchronised slideshows allow for a literary reading or a point of view for criticism. He studied painting and sculpture before attending courses at the New School’s Film Theory department and graduating in Fine Arts at the Hunter College. In 2016 he was selected as artistic research fellow at KHiO – Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Norway. His works have been shown in international solo and group exhibitions and screened at several international film festivals.
Dr Philippa Lovatt (Scotland) is a Lecturer in Film Studies at University of St Andrews. Her research focusses on artists’ moving image, sound, eco-cinema, and independent film and video cultures in Southeast Asia. She is currently writing a monograph on the politics of sound and listening in artists’ film and is also working on an oral history project with Jasmine Nadua Trice: “Parallel Practices: Oral Histories of Southeast Asian Film and Video Cultures.” She has edited two dossiers for Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (“Theorizing Region: Film and Video Cultures in Southeast Asia” co-edited with Trice) and Screen (“Tracing the Anthropocene in Southeast Asian Cinemas” with Graiwoot Chulphongsathorn) both forthcoming in 2021. She has previously published her research in Screen; Sound, Music and the Moving Image; The New Soundtrack, SoundEffects, and Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia.
Karlos Gil is an artist whose multiple art practice thrives on paradox, memory, and navigation between the past and the present to articulate or question the codes that construct meaning. Through a variety of media, he researches the movement of sense regarding the art object and examines its cognitive value as a specific system of knowledge production. Gil studied at Facultad de Bellas Artes UCM and at the School of Visual Arts New York. He has shown his work in CA2M, Matadero and Casa Encendida in Madrid, and at LABoral (Gijón), as well as at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and the Moscow Biennale. In 2014 was recipient of the Fundación Botín Arts grant.
Larys Frogier (France/China) is the Director of the Rockbund Art Museum (RAM) in Shanghai since 2012. As a curator, critic and art historian, he is involved in artistic and social challenges in post-global contexts where ongoing social, economic, cultural transformations demand new ways of interrelations, citizenship and reinvented creativity. Since 2013 he is the Chair of the HUGO BOSS ASIA ART jury and he conceived this new award, exhibition and research programme as an evolving platform to question Asia as a construction to investigate rather than a monolithic area or fixed identities. Frogier is also engaged in sound, music, image and text creation under the artist name Ocean. He is the co-founder of Wavz with Alfie Chua.
Liam Young is a speculative architect and director who operates in the spaces between design, fiction, and futures. He is the founder of a think tank Tomorrows Thoughts Today, a group whose work explores the possibilities of fantastic, speculative, and imaginary urbanisms. Young also co-runs the Unknown Fields Division, a nomadic research studio that travels on location shoots and expeditions to the “ends of the Earth” to document emerging trends and uncover the weak signals of possible futures. He has taught internationally including the Architectural Association and Princeton University, and now runs an MA in Fiction and Entertainment at Southern California Institute of Architecture.
Interested in ideas of language, (anti)literature, vulnerability, vampirism, intimacy, double-agency, mourning, metaphor, genre, and the phenomenology of the event, Luca Lum (b. 1991, Singapore) works at the intersection of art, performance, poetry, and fiction. She is a co-founder of the artist-run space soft/WALL/studs and co-editor of CONCRETE ISLAND Reader. Her projects have been presented at Cemeti Institute of Art and Society, Yogyakarta, Indonesia (with soft/WALL/studs, 2018); Yeo Workshop, Ikkan Art Gallery, NUS Museum, Singapore (2016); LUMA Westbau, Zurich, Switzerland (2015).
Lucy Walker is an esteemed Emmy-winning film director who uses dramatic filmmaking techniques to make documentary films. Renowned for her ability to connect with audiences through creating riveting character-driven nonfiction, she follows memorable characters on transformative journeys that grant unique access inside closed worlds. Walker obtained her MFA from the Graduate Film Programme at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts on a Fulbright Scholarship after graduating at the top of her class with a BA Hons and MA Oxon in Literature at Oxford University. She has twice been nominated for an Academy Award and her films have been nominated for seven Emmys, having won over one hundred film awards.
Dr May Adadol Ingawanij (Thailand/United Kingdom) is a moving image theorist, teacher, and curator, and co-director of the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM), University of Westminster, London. She is currently writing a book titled Animistic Cinema: Moving Image Performance and Ritual in Thailand. Her publications include Exhibiting Lav Diaz’s Long Films:Currencies of Circulation and Spectatorship (2017); Nguyen Trinh Thi’s Essay Films (forthcoming); Animism and the Performative Realist Cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul (2013). May’s curatorial projects include Lav Diaz Journeys (London, 2017), and On Attachments and Unknowns (Phnom Penh, 2017).
Nguyen Trinh Thi is a Hanoi-based filmmaker and moving image artist. Her diverse practice—traversing boundaries between film and video art, installation and performance—consistently engages with memory and history, and reflects on the roles and positions of art and artists in society and the environment. Nguyen studied journalism, photography, international relations, and ethnographic film in the United States. Her films and video art works have been shown at festivals and art exhibitions including Asia Pacific Triennale of Contemporary Art (APT9) in Brisbane (2018); Sydney Biennale 2018; Jeu de Paume, Paris; CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux; the Lyon Biennale 2015; Asian Art Biennial 2015, Taiwan; Fukuoka Asian Art Triennial 2014; Singapore Biennale 2013; Jakarta Biennale 2013; Oberhausen International Film Festival; and the Rotterdam International Film Festival. Nguyen is founder and director of Hanoi DOCLAB, an independent centre for documentary film and the moving image art since 2009. She previously showed at NTU CCA Singapore in the exhibition Ghosts and Spectres – Shadows of History (2017).
Dr Nicolas Helm-Grovas (Spain/United Kingdom) is Lecturer in Film Studies Education at King’s College London. He completed a PhD on the films and writings of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen at Royal Holloway, University of London in 2018. His writing has appeared in Moving Image Review & Art Journal, Radical Philosophy and Oxford Art Journal (forthcoming in the latter) and in edited collections. With Oliver Fuke he is co-curator of a series of interrelated exhibitions on Mulvey and Wollen: ‘Art at the Frontier of Film Theory’ (Peltz Gallery, London, 2019), ‘A is for Avant-Garde, Z is for Zero’ (Cooper Gallery, Dundee, 2020) and ‘Intersections in Theory, Film and Art’ (GAK Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst, Bremen, 2021, forthcoming).
Artist and filmmaker Oliver Husain (b. Germany, 1969) currently lives and works in Toronto, Canada. In his work, he critically engages theatrical and cinematic notions of spectatorship drifting from performance and conceptual theatre to experimental film, animation, and installation to blur the boundaries between different visual codes. Oscillating between documentary and fictional approaches, Husain orchestrates surreal narratives with a keen sensibility for costume, make-up, and stage set. His most recent solo exhibition took place at Western Front, Vancouver, Canada, in 2016. Husain has participated in numerous international exhibitions and film festivals including: Forum Expanded, Berlinale Film Festival, Berlin, Germany, 2017; Kunstverein Nürnberg, Germany, 2017; Art Museum, University of Toronto, 2016; MAK Museum, Vienna, Austria, 2013; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, United States, 2011, among others. Special screenings of his films took place at Pleasure Dome, Toronto, Canada, 2015, and at Experimenta Film Festival, Bangalore, India, 2011.
Park Chan-kyong is a media artist, film director and writer. He graduated from Seoul National University with a BFA in Painting in 1988, and the California Institute of the Arts with a MFA in Photography in 1995. Park served as the Artistic Director of the SeMA Biennale Mediacity Seoul in 2014. His major works include Manshin: Ten Thousand Spirits (2013), Night Fishing (2011, co-directed by Park Chan-wook), Sindoan (2008), Power Passage (2004) and Sets (2000). Park’s work has been exhibited internationally in numerous solo and group exhibitions including Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2017), Taipei Biennial (2016), Anyang Public Art Project (2016), Iniva, London (2015), Art Sonje Center, Seoul (2013), and Atelier Hermès, Seoul (2012, 2008). Park was awarded the Hermès Korea Art Award in 2004, and the Golden Bear for best short film at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2011 for Night Fishing. His works are included in the collection of major art institutions, such as the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea; KADIST, Paris and San Francisco; Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes; Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul; Seoul Museum of Art; Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Ansan; and Art Sonje Center, Seoul.
Pratchaya Phinthong creates situations as an invitation made to the visitor to share an experience with him. His projects (without any specific or pre-defined form) suggest a crack in which the spectators are invited to fill the gaps. He builds a set, a fiction, or a process where he can test our perceptions. He proposes to his audience a story with multiple paths. A trip down memory lane combined with subjective perceptions. His projects are often constructed in a dialogue between the artist and the others, making the artist‚ movement glide towards the social field. Beyond any artistic or formal experience, the artist is looking to find his place and his identity playing on the economic representations and cultural existences. The ‚Äògallery‚ space becomes a free area.Therefore, Phinthong works in a dynamic area in between different realities underlining the space and distance that separates them: two geographical points, two societies, two economic systems.
Phinthong was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore between October and December 2014. As part of his residency, Phinthong explored the idea of airspace as monitored and ambiguous, researching into the histories and negotiations of airspace between Singapore and its neighbours, with particular attention given to Thailand.
Sir Ridley Scott is a visionary director, acclaimed producer and one of the greatest British filmmakers. His work, known for an atmospheric and highly concentrated visual style, continues to push boundaries in style and genre. He was awarded the BAFTA Fellowship in 2018 and an honorary doctorate by the Royal College of Art in 2015. In 2003, Scott was knighted at the Queen’s New Year Honours in the United Kingdom for having made substantial contribution to the British film industry.
Rosalia Namsai Engchuan (Germany/Thailand) is a social anthropologist and filmmaker based between Berlin and Southeast Asia. Her PhD research at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany looks at practices of community filmmaking in Indonesia, investigating how cinematic epistemologies produce and socialize knowledges. Her latest video work Complicated Happiness is a speculative research, pivoting around the Thai Park in Berlin, that aims to undo the underlying structures of colonialism, race, gender and class that shape the production of our worlds. Rosalia curates screenings and dialogical encounters with a focus on independent and experimental works from locales of the ‘epistemological’ South, often in collaboration with the Berlin based collective un.thai.tled and she is the 2021 Goethe-Institut fellow at Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin.
Silke Schmickl (Germany/Hong Kong) was previously curator at the National Gallery Singapore, the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, a researcher at the German Art History Center in Paris and the co-founding director of Lowave, a Paris/Singapore based curatorial platform and publishing house for artists’ moving images. She has initiated and directed numerous art and film projects dedicated to emerging art scenes in the Middle East, Africa, India, Turkey and Singapore. Recent exhibitions at the National Gallery include include Minimalism: Light. Space. Object, Rirkrit Tiravanija: untitled 2018 (the infinite dimensions of smallness) and Haegue Yang: Forum for Drone Speech – Singapore Simulations.
The videos, installations, and performances of Yuichiro Tamura (b. 1977, Japan) articulate multi-layered narratives which delve into the memory and history of localities and weave together unconnected events. By merging fact and fiction, his works investigate the contemporary significance of past events. Recent group shows includeReadings from Below, Times Art Center Berlin, Germany; Yokohama Triennale 2020, Japan andParticipation Mystique, Ming Contemporary Art Museum, Shanghai, China (all 2020), and 7th Asian Art Biennial, Taichung, Taiwan (2019), amongst others. He was a finalist for the Asia Pacific Breweries Foundation Signature Art Prize in 2018 and the Nissan Art Award in 2017.
Envisioned in 1956 by Indonesian artist Iljas Hussein*, along waves of gravity –a solidar y of holes was to be a monument to the short-lived Principal Liaison Centre (PLC) established in Singapore in 1926. Pivotal in the international surge of anti-colonial struggles, the PLC was a point of liaison between the 3rd International and the region and it was meant to serve as an organ for the amplification of the voices of the marginalised and the oppressed.
At the Asian-African Conference held in Bandung in 1955, Hussein was entrusted with the task of imagining a monument that encapsulated the spirit of the PLC. One year later, he presented the idea for along waves of gravity –a solidar y of holes: a triangulation of holes strategically placed across the island that would gather and continuously echo the voices uttered into them. Inspired by theories of general relativity and topological properties of continuous deformation, Hussein’s design articulates, spatially as well as acoustically, an anti-monumentalist stance. Rather than asserting an univocal shape, the monument retreats into the ground as a series of interconnected and shapeshifting vessels which reverberate and transform sound waves throughout time. Hussein kept experimenting with these ideas until his death in 1989 but, due to its scale and technical complexity, his visionary project remained unbuilt. The surviving renderings and audio experiments of the unrealised monument are now displayed in The Vitrine.
* Iljas Hussein is a fictional artist conceived by Kin Chui. The name is one of the many aliases used by Tan Malaka (1897 –1949), an influential revolutionary thinker and fighter in the political struggles for Indonesia’s independence. Specifically, this alias was used to pen Malaka’s magnum opus Madilog (1943), the Indonesian acronym for Materialisme Dialektika Logika (Materialism Dialectics Logics).
