Identity – NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore

Drawing from oral histories and unwritten memories, the works of Saroot Supasuthivech unearth the multiplicity of narratives embedded in specific locations. His installations often combine moving image and sound to conjure the affective aura of a site and bring forth its intangible socio-historical stratifications. Using photogrammetry techniques, he turns 2D images into 3D models as a way of to blur the lines between the real and the mythical. His latest video installation, River Kwai: This Memorial Service Was Held in the Memory of the Deceased (2022), was featured in the Discoveries Section at Art Basel Hong Kong 2022.

The multimedia practice of Ngoc Nau encompasses photography, holograms, and Augmented Reality (AR) and she is currently working with 3D software and other open source technologies to create new possibilities for video installation. In Nau’s work, different materials and techniques attempt to capture the subtle ways in which new media shape and dictate our views of reality. Blending traditional culture and spiritual beliefs with modern technologies and lifestyles, her work often responds to Vietnam’s accelerated urban development. She has participated in several exhibitions across Asia, including the Thailand Biennale, Korat (2021) and the Singapore Biennale (2019) among others. She also participated in documenta 15, Kassel, Germany (2022) with Sa Sa Art Projects.

This research is an inquiry into curatorial, artistic, and academic networks of exchange that foster a pluriversal understanding of Southeast Asia. It will highlight the potential of open-ended curatorial, artistic and textual endeavours that formulate their own modus operandi. Analysing motivations, methods, and audiences of three distinct art initiatives by local practitioners will provide valuable insights for the writing of future cultural policies and alternative metrics to evaluate the impact of nonconforming approaches within regional studies. This will reshape and expand policies and programmes that seek to internationalise or regionalise Singapore art scenes. Acknowledging the long-term impact of such critical thinking and the creation of alternative knowledges and transnational networks would advance traditional perspectives in Southeast Asian scholarship and its funding mechanisms.

Research Outputs

Understanding Southeast Asia as a “Geocultural Formation”: Three Case Studies of Artistic Initiatives from the Region Closed-Door Forum

Programme

Welcome by Ahmad Mashadi, Introduction by Ute Meta Bauer and David Teh

ROUND-ROBIN: INTRODUCING THE CASE STUDIES, response by John Tain

The Flying Circus Project, Introduction by SEON, Presentation by Ong Keng Sen

Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary Art and Modern Art in Asia, Introduction by Ho Tzu Nyen, Presentation by Thanavi Chotrapdit, Vera Mey and Roger Nelson

The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia, Introduction by Ong Keng Sen, Presentation by Ho Tzu Nyen

CONVERSATION: PATRICK FLORES & HSU FANG-TZE, moderated by Siddhartha Perez

CONVERSATION: GRIDTHIYA GAWEEWONG & MELATI SURYODARMO, moderated by Ute Meta Bauer

PANEL: HEIDI ARBUCKLE & KATHLEEN DITZIG, moderated by David Teh

Granted by

10 Nov 2020, Tue 05:30 PM – 07:00 PM
24 Nov 2020, Tue 05:30 PM – 07:00 PM
8 Dec 2020, Tue 05:30 PM – 07:00 PM
22 Dec 2020, Tue 05:30 PM – 07:00 PM
2 Feb 2021, Tue 05:30 PM – 07:00 PM
16 Feb 2021, Tue 05:30 PM – 07:00 PM
Online

This reading group will be held over three modules with each consisting of two sessions discussing a selection of texts on related topics. Participants are highly encouraged to attend both sessions for each module to ensure continuity and quality of discourse.

Led by visual artist and writer Nurul Huda Rashid and film scholar Phoebe Pua, both PhD candidates, National University of Singapore.

This reading group takes ideas central to Trinh T. Minh-Ha’s writing as points of access to raise questions about the imagined histories, geographies, and communities of Southeast Asia. Over six sessions, the group will discuss themes of storytelling, feminism, and identities, and explore terms such as “third world,” “nusantara,” “woman,” and “native” with an eye towards interpreting them as acts and articulations of counter-narrative.

BIOGRAPHY

Phoebe Pua (Singapore) is a PhD candidate with the Department of English Language and Literature at NUS. Her dissertation is concerned with the controversial figure of the third world woman, as seen particularly in contemporary films from Southeast Asia.

Nurul Huda Rashid (Singapore) is a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at NUS. Her research interests focus on images, narratives, visual and sentient bodies, feminisms, and the intersections between them.

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.

As part of his interest in trauma and the potential of ritual healing through performance, during the residency Irfan Kasban intends to work on a long-term research project tentatively titled Port of Reciprocity, with a special focus on “Acoustic Sculptures and Communal Activations for the Burn-out Artist”. Reacting to the tightly-knit architecture of Singapore’s public housing estates where the boundaries of individual and communal life are strictly compartmentalised and sound spillages are regarded as nuisances, the artist aims to unpack the socially-accepted notions that define noise pollution in the country. Irfan will experiment with building acoustic sculptures inspired by organic shapes that will augment the human voice without electronic intervention and enhance conscious listening through communal activations. Oscillating between different sonic dimensions, the human voice will be cast as a mode of disruption and forging connections. Throughout the residency, the artist also intends to conduct interviews and group discussions with fellow artists and creatives as a way of better understanding the causes of burnout and formulating strategies against it.

Building upon his long-standing engagement with performative storytelling, Shahmen Suku will spend his residency researching Failures, Deaths, and the ceremonies that surround them in his family histories. Having previously explored different aspects of the rich Tamil cultural traditions of his maternal lineage via the alter ego Radha, the artist now intends to let go of his persona and directly confront the conflicting and multipolar narratives of his family history which include economic struggles, heated arguments, health issues, and prolonged disagreements. The artist’s in-depth journey into the complex and fraught interpersonal relations that have shaped his emotional upbringing will entail the collection of oral histories from family members, fieldtrips to temples and cemeteries, and archival research into his family’s records, recipes, photographs, and films.

Shahmen Suku (b.1987, Singapore) is a performance artist who works between Sydney and Canberra, Australia. Drawing from his personal experience of growing up in a matriarchal Tamil household in Singapore, Shahmen’s body of work explore multifaceted perspectives on migration, displacement, race, culture, colonisation, and gender identity. The personal, poignant, and irreverent narratives generated around these themes are conveyed through performances, installations, and video works and they are often voiced by his alter ego, Radha. His recent projects include 5,6.7.8, Penrith Regional Gallery, Australia (2022); Oil Room, Club 4A, 4A Centre for Contemporary Arts, Sydney, Australia (2022); Queer Ecologies – Rivus, Biennale of Sydney, Sydney, Australia (2022); Skin Deep, Queer Contemporary, National Art School, Sydney, Australia (2021). From 2019 to 2022, he was part of Australian ABC TV’s live music television programme The Set. In 2022, Shahmen received the Incubator – NSW Theatre (Emerging) Fellowship with Griffin Theatre Company.

The transdisciplinary practice of Irfan Kasban (b. 1987, Singapore) weaves together multiple roles such as playwright, theatre director, lighting and sound designer, and multimedia artist. Often engaging in collaborations with fellow artists as a method of experimenting across mediums, Irfan creates intricate worlds guided by a principle of visceral ephemerality in an attempt to redefine boundaries between performance, artwork, artist, and audience. Since 2010, he is the Associate Artist at the Singapore-based theatre company Teater Ekamatra. His recent theatre directions include King (2020-2023) and performance lecture The Death of Singapore Theatre as Scripted By The Infocomm Media Development Authority of Singapore (2022), and the immersive theatrical installation The Silence of a Fallen Tree (2020) amongst many others. Irfan received National Arts Council Singapore’s Young Artist Award in 2020.

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).

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.

Dr. Yanyun Chen (b. 1986, Singapore) is a visual artist who works across drawings, new media, and installation. Her artistic practice unravels fictional and philosophical notions of embodiment exploring how heritage and legacies are grounded in the physicality of human and botanical forms. Her solo exhibitions include Stories of a Woman and Her Dowry, Grey Projects, Singapore (2019) and Scars that write us, part of the President’s Young Talents 2018, Singapore Art Museum (2018). She has participated in group exhibitions such as While She Quivers, Objectifs – Centre for Photography and Film, Singapore (2021); Thailand Biennale, Korat 2021 (2021); Clouds: The 6th International Exhibition on New Media Art 2020, CICA Museum, South Korea (2020); Fiction Non Fiction, Cultural Affairs Bureau, Macau (2019); 2291: Futures Imagined, Art Science Museum, Singapore (2019) among others. Yanyun has received the Young Artist Award in 2020 and the IMPART Art Prize in 2019. Her works were also awarded the Prague International Indie Film Festival Q3 Best Animation Award (2020), National Youth Film Awards Best Art Direction Award (2019), Singapore Art Museum President’s Young Talents People’s Choice Award (2018), and the Lee Kuan Yew Gold Medal Award (2009).

In the Singaporean-Malay slang, “world” is used to signal boastful aspirations towards a social status higher than one’s own, often conveyed through self-aggrandising story-telling. Utilising this as an alternative framework to the postcolonial notion of “worlding”, whereby one’s conceptualisation of the world is devised through colonial attachments, the artist will spend his residency investigating the multitude of meanings behind the word’s usages as a way of unravelling sociolinguistic constructs and processes of identity formation. This research will ultimately result in lens-based explorations that engage with “world” through conceptual propositions and visual arrangements comprising archival photos and sociohistorical accounts.

With a body of work spanning across film, installation, and photography, the artistic practice of Zulkhairi Zulkiflee (b. 1991, Singapore) is committed to exploring Malay identity and its social ontology. His lens-based artworks investigate themes of Malayness in relation to local and global contexts, social agency, knowledge production, and notions of taste. Zulkhairi recently concluded his first solo exhibition, Proximities at Objectifs – Centre for Photography and Film, Singapore (2022). His work has also been presented in group exhibitions such as Kenduri Seni Nusantara, Patani, Thailand, Singapore Shorts ‘22, Asian Film Archive, Singapore, Mini Film Festival, S-Express Singapore, Kuching, Malaysia, and The Singapore Pavilion, Expo 2020, Dubai, United Arab Emirates (all 2022); The Body as a Dream, Art Agenda SEA, Singapore (2021) and How to Desire Differently, Lim Hak Tai Gallery, Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Singapore (2020) among others. Zulkhairi is also an educator, independent curator, and founder of Sikap, a project group that engages with the creative value of ‘let do’ in the form of organizational experiments. He was the Curatorial Winner of the IMPART Awards in 2020.

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.

For his residency at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Saroot Supasuthivech will research the encounters of cultures, faiths and rituals among immigrant communities and local inhabitants. He is especially interested in the spiritual beliefs and ceremonial traditions by which humans ritualise the moment of death. With a focus on the historical impact of immigration on funerary practices across different regional and religious contexts, the artist will survey specific burial sites and rituals in Germany and Thailand looking at how foreign communities enact their funerary traditions abroad.

Major sites of interest for his research are the Protestant Cemetery in Bangkok and the Kurpark (Spa Park) in Bad Homburg, the only town outside of Thailand that features two Sala Thai (open pavilions). The Sala were gifted to the city of Bad Homburg by King Chulalongkorn of Siam (1853 to 1910) as a token of gratitude after the monarch’s illness was healed in the spa town in 1907. From the materials gathered through field trips, interviews and archival research, the artist plans to develop a video installation that will convey the mystical structures of those sites as well as the spiritual intersections engendered by global migrations.

During the residency, Ngoc Nau intends to research the impact of urbanisation and modernisation on contemporary living conditions, collective memories, traditional practices, and the natural landscape. Situating herself within the creative community of Rupert will allow her to explore Lithuanian cultural landscape and to access a new trove of materials, including oral traditions, historical archives, and ritual ceremonies. Through encounters will the local community, she intends to unearth the traditional values and ancient practices that have been lost to industrial and technological advancements in order to come to a better understanding of how different communities configure their values and identities within the fast-changing landscape of today. Nau is particularly interested in the gaps created by modern development in the intergenerational transmission of knowledge and she plans to experiment with new media technologies to imagine modes of being that reconcile the past and the future.

Tekla Aslanishvili (b. 1988, Georgia) is an artist, filmmaker and essayist based between Berlin and Tbilisi. Her works emerge at the intersection of infrastructural design, history and geopolitics.

Tekla graduated from the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts in 2009 and she holds a MFA from the Berlin University of the Arts – the department of Experimental Film and New Media Art. Aslanishvili’s films have been screened and exhibited internationally at PACT Zollverein, Neue Berliner Kunstverein, Baltic Triennial, Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Kasseler Dokfest, Kunsthalle Münster, EMAF – European Media Art Festival, Videonale 18, Tbilisi Architecture Biennial. She is a 2018–2019 Digital Earth fellow, the nominee for Ars-Viva Art prize 2021 and the recipient of the Han Nefkens Foundation – Fundació Antoni Tàpies Video Art Production Award 2020.

Environmental knowledge and the ways it is communicated through visual arts have been at the core of Wang Ruobing’s practice for the past twenty years. With rising water temperatures and the expansion of the Tropical Warm Pool—a large mass of ocean water that features water temperature above 28 degree within which maritime Southeast Asia is situated—the coastal ecosystems in the region have become a crucial field for environmental research and climate change studies. Drawing equal inspiration from scientific knowledge and from Donna J. Haraway’s theories of ‘sympoiesis’ (making-with), the artist hopes to develop new artworks that reconfigure more sustainable relations to the Earth and all its inhabitants.

In this episode, we hand over the microphone to curator Tamares Goh to interview our Artist-in-Residence Wang Ruobing. Ruobing and Tamares share a long history of working together throughout their careers, one that goes back to 2004 and will continue on in the years to come. This conversation between peers shines a spotlight on Ruobing’s practice rooted in materiality, the importance of found objects in her art-making process, as well as her ongoing research into the symbiotic relationship between environmental sciences and visual arts. They also touch upon the collaborations Ruobing has activated with deep-sea divers and marine scientists, and how these collaborations continue to shape the trajectory of her artistic practice.

Committed to exploring new ways of seeing and methods of knowledge production, the artistic practice of Dr Wang Ruobing stretches from drawing to photography, sculpture, kinetic art, and installation. With a diverse range of methodological approaches to present her ideas, her body of work addresses environmental issues and transcultural discourses on identity and hybridity.

Tamares Goh is the deputy director of Audience Engagement at National Gallery Singapore, overseeing festivals like Light To Night, Painting With Light and the Gallery’s Childrens Biennale. She was the former head of Visual Arts at Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay, and co-headed the Programming department overseeing festivals and programmes. In 2017, she was the Producer for the Singapore Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale.

Contributors: Wang Ruobing, Tamares Goh
Editor: Anna Lovecchio
Programme Manager: Nadia Amalina
Sound Engineer: Ashwin Menon
Intro & Outro Music: Yuen Chee Wai
Cover Image & Design: Arabelle Zhuang, Kristine Tan

[See Full Transcript]

Committed to exploring new ways of seeing and methods of knowledge production, the artistic practice of Dr Wang Ruobing (b. 1975, China) stretches from drawing to photography, sculpture, kinetic art, and installation. With a diverse range of methodological approaches to present her ideas, her body of work addresses environmental issues and transcultural discourses on identity and hybridity. Her work has been presented in venues such as Yuan Contemporary Art Museum, Chongqing, China (2019), The Esplanade– Theatres on the Bay, Singapore (2021, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2011, 2004), The Substation, Singapore (2019, 2004, 2003, 1999), and EVA International, Ireland’s Biennial of Contemporary Art, Limerick, (2010) among other venues. Ruobing is also an educator, independent curator, and the co-founder of Comma Space (逗号空间), an artist-run experimental platform that ‘creates thinking spaces between commas’. She holds a Ph.D. in Fine Art from Oxford University, United Kingdom.

Against Singapore’s persistent acceleration towards the future through redevelopment and modernisation, the artist is interested in the way certain memories are kept while others are discarded. From her point of view, “the past is more than objects waiting to be discovered; it is a series of perspectives waiting to be unearthed”. Investigating the present with the tools of archaeology, she plans to explore the physical sediments of contemporary life through a series of participatory sessions aimed at making, archiving, and combining fragments of the present into new scenarios, perspectives, and meanings.

In this episode, curator Samantha Yap digs deep into the practice of Artist-in-Residence Fazleen Karlan. We are happy to bring the two of them back together, after they first collaborated a couple of year ago on an exhibition titled Time Passes (2020-21), to talk about Fazleen’s evolving artistic sensibility and sources of inspiration.

In this circular conversation that revolves around a shared reading, the novel Lighthousekeeping by Jeanette Winterson, Fazleen and Samantha exchange memories, experiences, and thoughts about time, materiality, pop culture, and the vitality of archaeology in Fazleen’s work. And they do so with that special kind of fluid intimacy that interlaces persons of the same age. Just a few words to introduce them.

The practice of Fazleen Karlan weaves together art-making and archaeology to explore matters of time by mapping and reframing physical remains found within the landscape and socio-historical context of Singapore. By engaging the stratifications of a site and by reassessing the chronology of everyday objects through the tools of archaeology, her work generates news records of contemporary life that cast the relation between past, present, and future into a speculative framework.

Shuffling between writing and curation, Samantha Yap nurtures her interests in forms of reciprocity, the ethics of care, love, vulnerability as well as an ongoing exploration of feminist perspectives across literature and visual culture. She has curated a number of exhibitions in Singapore, including Time Passes, National Gallery Singapore (2020) which marked her first collaboration with Fazleen Karlan. Her curatorial texts are featured in several exhibition catalogues and her creative writing is included in My Lot is a Sky (Math Paper Press, 2018), an anthology of poetry by Asian women. She graduated with a BA (Hons) in English Literature and Art History from Nanyang Technological University of Singapore.

Contributors: Fazleen Karlan, Samantha Yap
Editor: Anna Lovecchio
Programme Manager: Nadia Amalina
Sound Engineer: Ashwin Menon
Intro & Outro Music: Yuen Chee Wai
Cover Image & Design: Arabelle Zhuang, Kristine Tan

[See Full Transcript]

Through the wide-angle lens of her research-based methodology, the artist will traverse the symbolic mapping of this migrant diaspora’s socio-cultural realities emblazoned in official accounts. She will focus on issues of exploitation and gender exclusion and employ computer-generated imagery and postcolonial linguistics to devise new storytelling approaches that subvert the hegemony of colonial epistemologies and bring to the surface silenced narratives, particularly those of Tamizh women.

Starting off the second season of AiRCAST, we hand over the microphone to curator and writer Anca Rujoiu to interview our Artist-in-Residence Priyageetha Dia. Priyageetha and Anca are fresh out of a year-long collaboration that culminated in Forget Me, Forget Me Not (2022), Priyageetha’s solo exhibition curated by Anca which opened last May. In this conversation they share about the background research, interests, and aesthetic strategies behind the new body of work presented in the exhibition. They also expand upon the significance of colonial histories and marginalised communities, agency and empowerment, as well as media and materials in Priyageetha’s practice.

Spanning moving image, sculpture, as well as performance and installation, the practice of Priyageetha Dia (b. 1992, Singapore) addresses identity politics by questioning dominant narratives, material histories, and socio-spatial relations. In the past few years, she has been experimenting with world-making gestures that rehash stories of repression and envision alternative futures. Her works have been included in 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).

Anca Rujoiu is a Romanian curator and editor who has been living and working in Singapore since 2013. Taking an artist-centred approach, she is committed to artistic practices beyond the West and to what falls through the cracks within its borders. She was a member of the founding team of NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, as Curator of Exhibitions (2013–15) and Head of Publications (2016–18) and she has curated numerous exhibitions, public programs, and publishing projects. Currently, she is a Ph.D. candidate at Monash University with a research focused on institution building, artists-led institutions, and transnational exchanges.

Contributors: Priyageetha Dia, Anca Rujoiu
Editor: Anna Lovecchio
Programme Manager: Nadia Amalina
Sound Engineer: Ashwin Menon
Intro & Outro Music: Yuen Chee Wai
Cover Image & Design: Arabelle Zhuang, Kristine Tan

CREDITS
03’03”: Audio excerpt from WE.REMAIN.IN.MULTIPLE.MOTIONS_MALAYA, 2022. Courtesy the artist.
17’17”: Audio excerpt from WE.REMAIN.IN.MULTIPLE.MOTIONS_MALAYA, 2022. Courtesy the artist.
19’10”: Audio excerpt from WE.REMAIN.IN.MULTIPLE.MOTIONS_MALAYA, 2022. Courtesy the artist.
32’07”: Audio excerpt from WE.REMAIN.IN.MULTIPLE.MOTIONS_MALAYA, 2022. Courtesy the artist.

[See Full Transcript]

Working primarily with painting, Hilmi Johandi (b. 1987, Singapore) also explores interventions with other mediums. The core of his practice mobilises symbols and sites where memory and nostalgia, leisure and desire are deeply entangled. Drawing on archival footage, stills from old films, and sundry imagery produced for mass consumption, his body of work subtly refigures the iconography of Singapore and our relation with images. He is part of Progressive Disintegration, an experimental collaboration between three artists and one curator formed around shared interests in the role and potential of images. Hilmi’s recent solo exhibitions include Landscapes and Paradise: Poolscapes, Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo, Japan (2021) and Painting Archives, Rumah Lukis, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (2019) and his works have been included in several international group exhibitions in France, the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, and Thailand. In 2018, he was a recipient of the Young Artist Award and a finalist at the President’s Young Talents. He received the NAC Arts Scholarship (Postgraduate) in 2017.

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.

Incorporating elements of performance in the most advanced capacities of VR technology, The Insensible Cities results from the artists’ shared interest in addressing and challenging the ideological and historical frameworks that govern one’s origins and identities. Through the sensory documentation of the multiple layers of time, memory, perception, and ideas, The Insensible Cities is a unique VR experience that reintroduces, reinterprets, and restructures the changing dimensions of everyday life in Asia beyond the conventions of cinema and performing arts.

The Insensible Cities is supported by Arts Council Korea (ARKO) and International Arts Joint Fund Korea-Singapore International Exchange Program.

Dr Ella Raidel (Austria/Singapore), is a filmmaker, artist, and researcher. She is an Assistant Professor at the School of Art, Design and Media and at the WKWSCI School of Communication and Information (both Nanyang Technological University). Her interdisciplinary practice—encompassing films, videos, and research—creates a discursive space for filmmaking, art, and research focused on the socio-cultural aspects of globalisation, urbanisation and the representation of images.

In his writings, films, and performance pieces, Dr Hyun-Suk Seo (South Korea) investigates places and senses. He is Professor at the Graduate School of Communication and Arts at Yonsei University (South Korea). His performance projects unfold in actual places as site-specific work. He often uses virtual reality technologies to construct layers of memories and experiences that question our senses and the boundaries of artworks.

Location
NTU CCA Singapore Residencies Studios
Blocks 38 Malan Road, #01-07
Singapore 109441

Date
Saturday 26 March, 2:00 – 6:00pm

In encountering Balinese cultural artifacts brought to European museums during the colonial period and examining the cultural diplomacy politics enacted by the colonizers, she aims to excavate pre-colonial Balinese culture and understand how the perspectives and aesthetic criteria formed under colonial rule persist until today. The artist is interested in developing a critical reading of the journey of colonial legacies into the present and in understanding how they still inform contemporary cultural consciousness.

By providing her with direct access to historical archives and museum collections, the residency will allow Citra to deepen her understanding of the influence of Dutch colonial power onto the development of visual arts and culture in Bali.

Find out more about SEA AiR.

During the residency, Lyno will explore the entangled histories of colonialism, modernisation, and urbanisation focusing on the Garden of Tropical Agronomy, located in the Bois de Vincennes, one of the largest public parks in Paris which hosted the International Colonial Exposition in 1931. The exposition featured several architectural representations of the colonies, including Cambodia and Indochina, the remnants of which are still extant today surrounded by modern facilities. The artist is interested in excavating the politics of the built environment to understand the historical role architecture has played in the construction of imperialist agendas and the lingering implications of colonial symbolism and power structures in the present.

Find out more about SEA AiR.

Vuth Lyno is an artist, curator, and educator who is interested in space, cultural history, and the production of knowledge through social relations. Drawing on a wide range of materials such as interviews, artifacts, and newly made objects, he creates spatial configurations that weave together personal stories and collective bodies of knowledge. Participatory and experimental in nature, his artistic and curatorial approach is rooted in communal learning and aims to engage a multiplicity of voices in the production of meaning. He is a member of Stiev Selapak, a collective which founded and co-runs Sa Sa Art Projects in Phnom Penh, a long-term initiative committed to the development of the contemporary visual arts landscape in Cambodia. His work has been presented at several group exhibitions and institutions such as the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, Thailand (2020) and the 9^th Asia Pacific Triennial, Brisbane, Australia (2019), amongst others.

Hoo Fan Chon is a visual artist whose practice explores taste and foodscapes as cultural and social constructs. His research-driven projects examine how value systems fluctuate as people move from one culture to another. Reframing mundane aspects of everyday life with irony and wry humour, his multimedia works address notion of cultural authenticity and they set in motion the frictions and the overlaps produced by the migration of cultural symbols between different sociocultural contexts. Hoo recently received a solo exhibition at The Back Room, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (2021) and he has participated in a number of group shows in Asia. Also active as a curator and a grassroot cultural producer, he is involved with Run Amok Gallery, an art gallery and alternative space in George Town he co-founded in 2013.

Committed to socially engaged practices, multi-disciplinary theatre practitioner Han Xuemei (b. 1987, Singapore) employs art as a tool for bringing communities together and engaging the audience in visceral and personal ways. In her practice, she creates spaces and experiences that incite participants to think outside the box of existing paradigms and articulate forms of hope and resistance. Since 2012, she is Resident Artist at the Singapore-based theatre company Drama Box. Her recent projects include the experiential installation FLOWERS (2019), the community project The Gift (2018), and the participatory experience Missing: The City of Lost Things (2018).

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.

Thinking in terms of borders and boundaries, either physical and symbolic, the artist intends to map out the lived experience of forced mobility and dispossession as well as its underlying power struggles and emotional trails. His research will revolve specifically on migrant songs, a cultural expression often characterized by melancholic melodies and sombre lyrics that speaks of longing, hard work, and perseverance. Conveying the experience of otherness and stirring emotions of communality, migrant songs haunts our times of unprecedented global mass migration and the contemporary debates surrounding exclusionary nationalist politics. Through participatory workshops aimed at lyric writing, music composition, and vocalisation, migrant songs will be created and disseminated in an effort to redraw boundaries of belonging.

In our third episode, we open up this platform for the first time to a guest interviewer. We invited artist and filmmaker Kent Chan to pick the brain of our Artist-in-Residence Yeo Siew Hua. Beyond being both filmmakers and artists, Siew Hua and Kent have been occasional collaborators in the past and, most importantly, they are also long-time friends. Hear them speak candidly about the intertwined cycles of art-making and fund-raising, the blurred line between cinema and visual arts, as well as the philosophical underpinnings and the importance of collaboration in Siew Hua’s practice.

The practice of Yeo Siew Hua (b. 1985, Singapore) spans film directing and screenwriting. His films probe the darkest side of contemporary society through narratives layered with mysterious atmospheres, inscrutable characters, and mythological references, all steeped in arresting visuals and sounds. His last feature film A Land Imagined (2018) harnessed recognition around the world receiving the Golden Leopard at the 71st Locarno Film Festival and the Best Original Screenplay and Best Original Music Score Awards at the 56th Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival.

After A Land Imagined, Siew Hua has created a number of short films, one of which, An Invocation to the Earth (2020), commissioned by the Singapore International Film Festival and TBA21, was co-produced with NTU CCA Singapore. An Invocation to the Earth can be viewed online at www.stage.tba21.org. During the residency, Siew Hua has been completing his next major production titled The Once and Future, an expanded cinema project which will premiere at the Singapore International Festival of Arts 2022. In 2021, he received the Young Artist Award, Singapore’s highest award for young arts practitioners.

Kent Chan (b. 1984, Singapore) is an artist, curator, and filmmaker currently based in Amsterdam. His practice weaves encounters between art, fiction, and cinema with a particular interest in the tropical imagination, colonialism, and the relation between heat and art. He has held solo presentations at Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht, Netherlands (2020-21), National University Singapore Museum (2019-21) and SCCA-Ljubljana, Centre for Contemporary Arts, Slovenia (2017). He was Artist-in-Residence at Jan van Eyck Academie (2019-20) and at NTU CCA Singapore (2017-2018).

Contributors: Yeo Siew Hua, Kent Chan
Conducted by: Anna Lovecchio
Programme Manager: Kristine Tan
Sound Engineer: Ashwin Menon (The Music Parlour)
Intro & Outro Music: Tini Aliman
Cover Image & Design: Arabelle Zhuang, Kristine Tan

Credits:
06’42”: Audio excerpt from Yeo Siew Hua, A Land Imagined, 2018. Courtesy the artist.
11’46”: Audio excerpt from Yeo Siew Hua, The Obs: A Singapore Story, 2014. Courtesy the artist.
22’55”: Audio excerpt from Yeo Siew Hua, The Once and Future, 2022. Courtesy the artist.
40’49”: Audio excerpt from Yeo Siew Hua, The Lover, The Excess, The Ascetic and the Fool, 2021. Courtesy the artist.

[See Full Transcript]

Francisco Camacho Herrera (b. 1979, Colombia) currently lives and works in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. His projects often experiment with communitarian and participatory approaches to generate social change and trigger the collective imagination of the future of society. Such endeavours include fulltopia.com (2015-ongoing), a web platform that articulates a desire to facilitate the exchange of services and ideas within local communities bypassing monetary economy. His works have been presented in several group exhibitions including the 21st Biennale of Sydney, Australia (2018); The Welfare State, Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp, Netherlands (2015); and The Museum of Rhythm, Museum Stucky, Lodz, Poland (2016). Camacho Herrera was a resident at Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunst in Amsterdam in 2008-9.

Malaysian artist chi too (b. 1981, Malaysia) moves across the mediums of film, music, performance, installations, sculptures, and photography. Shifting between the personal and the political, the public and the private, his performances and artworks touch upon a large spectrum of issues often with humor and a playful attitude. He has participated in several exhibitions in Malaysia, Japan, and Singapore, including Art Next Door, an exhibition about the shared heritage of Singapore and Malaysia held at White Box, Publika, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (2015) and the 2013 Singapore Biennale If the World Changed. In 2011 and 2012, he received the prestigious Asian Public Intellectuals Fellowship (API) from The Nippon Foundation.

During his residency, Xu Tan will continue to work and expand on his project Keywords Lab: Socio-botany. First initiated in 2012, the work consisted of investigations and interviews with disparate voices and inhabitants around the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong province, China on their views on urbanisation in China.

By bringing Keywords Lab: Socio-botany into the context of Singapore, Xu hopes to understand Singapore’s view on the complexities that govern our relationship with the natural and built environments that we live in. Proposed points of entry are through local discussions on the history of plants, criteria in urban construction and development, citizen participation in public tree planting programmes and lastly, conditions of food production.

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.

Investigating Singapore’s role within the growing global phenomenon of “green cities”, Coburn will pursue research into Singapore’s development from “Garden City” to “City in a Garden”. He aims to delve into historical and emerging notions of green urbanism, framing the garden as a pedagogical, philosophical, and literary construct. Focusing on two specific case studies, he will place the multiple functions of Singapore Botanic Gardens in a wider historical prospective and explore the social and economic conditions which underlie the complex eco-tourist structure of Gardens by the Bay.

In 2012, Liu Yu chanced upon a stack of love letters in a flea market in Taipei. Dating back to the 1970s, the letters were addressed by Dong-Zheng Lai, a seafarer working on cargo ships, to his wife-to-be. Interwoven in this correspondence are descriptions of port cities and fishing villages as well as hints to monsoon seasons and the political climate of the time which cast both history and geography on an intimate scale. During the residency, Liu Yu will work on the second film of a series inspired by Dong-Zheng Lai’s movements and memories. Titled Love Letter and A Map of Memory, this experimental documentary will focus on the monsoon route from Taiwan to Singapore, a busy shipping lane that cuts across the Riau islands and was historically frequented by pirates. Framing the sea as a space impervious to geopolitical boundaries and piracy as an instance of political upheaval, the artist will chart historical events and modern-day occurrences of piracy to create a work that speculates on power and personal relationships growing at the intersection of climatic patterns, geographical features, and human agency.

The artist was scheduled to be in-residence from April – June 2020. Due to the COVID-19 virus outbreak and international travel restrictions, the artist was unable to participate in the residency programme physically.

Liu Yu screened Somehow I feel relaxed here (2017) as part of the Residencies Online Screening Programme Stakes of Conscious(ness), conceived by Dr Anna Lovecchio for the three artists whose residency at NTU CCA Singapore has been disrupted by the viral pandemic.

Kent Chan (b. 1984, Singapore) is a Singaporean artist, filmmaker, and curator. Addressing the relationship between moving images and the contemporary city, his work often results in films and in installations that merge text and time-based media. Lately, he has focused his interest on the symbolic and political aspects of the tropical imagination, regarding the equatorial vegetation as a site generative of alternative aesthetics and narratives. Chan has participated in numerous group exhibitions abroad and has received solo exhibitions at SCCA-Ljubljana, Centre for Contemporary Arts, Slovenia (2017); Grey Projects, Singapore (2016); Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam, Netherlands (2014); The Substation, Singapore (2013). His recent curatorial projects include State of Motion 2017: Through Stranger Eyes and Superposition(s), ICA, Singapore (2016).

Currently based in Berlin Song-Ming Ang has spent almost ten years away from Singapore. The residency will allow him to research and reflect on the changes in Singapore society, in its ideals and ideology, through music. Ang will use resources available at the National Library and at the National Archives of Singapore to excavate posters, recordings of interviews and official speeches, and other audio-visual materials related to key and fringe figures of Singapore’s music scene, such as Zubir Saiz, composer of the national anthem. Chris Ho, a former radio DJ/journalist known for his anti-establishment stance; and the Chinese xinyao college folk movement that sprung in the 1980s. He also plans to address the performative aspects of patriotism and leadership by revisiting the state-commissioned National Day songs as well as the television broadcast of National Day Rallies.

As part of her residency, Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn will expand on The Archive as a Subject, a long-term project that positions photographs and other vernacular artefacts at the junction of the private and the public, as well as the personal and the political, raising complex global issues related to concepts of territory, migration, and identity. Looking at the traces of her own family’s history, she aims to explore the friction that is generated when such mundane items are appropriated by institutional narratives, especially when they are framed in different cultural contexts. While in Singapore, she intends to further her research looking specifically at the history of the refugee camp in Sembawang which housed Vietnamese refugees for twenty years.

Irina Botea Bucan (b. 1970, Romania) and Jon Dean (b. 1966, United Kingdom) have been working together since 2013. Their artistic collaboration unfolds through filmmaking enquiries premised on the close scrutiny of and active engagement with specific social contexts. Over the years, they developed a methodology based on the symbiotic triangulation of their roles as artists-educators-researchers. Bucan and Dean share an interest in socio-political dynamics, the de-centralisation of discourses, and they are committed to nurturing cultural differentiation outside hegemonic value systems. Their works have been shown internationally at several venues including Centre for Contemporary Art, Torun, Poland (2018); National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest, Romania (2017); The Phillips Museum of Art, Lancaster, United States (2017), and International Film Festival Rotterdam, Netherlands (2015) among others.

Rand Abdul Jabbar’s (b. 1990, Iraq/United Arab Emirates) multidisciplinary practice examines remnants of historic, cultural, and personal narratives surrounding Iraq, contesting with individual and collective history and memory to produce fragmentary reconstructions of historic events and past experiences. Her work has been recently exhibited at the NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery Project Space and Jameel Arts Centre (both United Arab Emirates), the inaugural Rabat Biennale (Morocco), and the Biennale d’Architecture d’Orléans, France (all 2019).

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.

iLiana Fokianaki is a writer and curator based in Athens and Rotterdam. Her research focuses on the notion of state and the power formations that manifest themselves under the influence of geopolitics, identity politics as well as cultural and anthropological histories. Through her exhibition-making practice, she articulates the institutional “performance” of the concept of the state. In 2013, she founded State of Concept Athens, the first non-profit institution with a permanent program and location in Athens. State of Concept promotes Greek and international artists through solo exhibitions and it also invites curators to create exhibitions that comment on the sociopolitical landscape of Greece and beyond. In 2016, together with Antonia Alampi, she founded Future Climates, a platform that aims to propose viable futures for small-scale organizations of contemporary art. Since 2017, she is curator and programmer of Kunsthal Extra City in Antwerp, Belgium. She is a contributing author to several books and has written for art-agenda, Art Papers, e-flux, Frieze, LEAP, Metropolis M, and Ocula. She is currently pursuing a PhD on economy, identity, and politics at Panteion University, Athens, and is a member of IKT International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art.

Spanning across performance, photography, and other mediums, ila (b. 1985, Singapore) weaves her own body and emotions into the peripheries of lived experience and unspoken narratives. Constantly in negotiations with different realms of existence and the aftermaths of trauma, she reconfigures and merges speculative fiction with factual histories conceiving them as sites for empathy and connectivity. Her performances (works) have been included in group shows such as Proposals for Novel Ways of Being, National Gallery Singapore and2219: Futures Imagined, ArtScience Museum (both Singapore, 2020); State of Motion: A Fear of Monsters, Asian Film Archive; and Arus Balik, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art (both Singapore, 2019).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Manuel Pelmuş is a choreographer active in the Bucharest dance community. Pelmuş graduated from the Floria Capsali dance school and worked at the Hamburg Opera; he eventually moved away from his classical training to explore more politically charged, avant-garde styles.

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.

Stagings. Soundings. Readings. Free Jazz II reviews the performative format that marked NTU CCA Singapore’s inauguration in 2013. Free Jazz 2013 was a series of talks and performances where participants of various disciplines were invited to imagine and envision a new institution and its potential. On its five-year anniversary, the Centre continues advocating for free spaces, celebrating the practice of improvisation, as well as of collective and performative approaches. Discussing ethical values with an expanded sense of community, territorial, and environmental concerns, Stagings. Soundings. Readings. employs an open, multidisciplinary structure that challenges traditional modes of presentation and re-presentation through a range of artistic practices and formats.

Situated within a complex and contemporary understanding of the Centre’s current overarching research topic CLIMATES. HABITATS. ENVIRONMENTS., the featured works link theory and practice, emphasising collectiveness. Today, the planet is witnessing a moment of unprecedented loss of biodiversity, habitat destruction, and cultural transformations. In the face of such agitated times juxtaposed with advanced communicative tools, contemporary social and environmental issues require responses from a collective body, through establishing processes of instigation, negotiation, and collaboration.

Can we learn from what we see as opposed to being merely seduced by images, becoming active participants instead of only passive observers? Stagings. Soundings. Readings. is an enactment between the artists and the audience. The invited artists engage with a less prescribed environment, reflecting on history, collective action, and human interaction.

Located outside the Centre, Maria Loboda‘s sculptural installation is grounded in historical narratives as a reminder that things can change and be taken down overnight, especially by the invisible mechanisms of power. In the Centre’s foyer, Tyler Coburn addresses forms of labour and examines the notion of writing in the 21st century by engaging with complexities of our legal, technological, and geopolitical networks, while Heman Chong analyses motifs of exchange and its boundaries, embracing the space of inter-human connections.

Unfolding in the exhibition space, Cally Spooner brings to Singapore an exercise in building new vocabulary and knowledge through bodily means. Using the space as a laboratory, the work investigates new ways of organising and working together. Alexandra Pirici’s choreography explores the possibility of collectively assembling memories of human and non-human presence on the planet. Carlos Casas presents his long-term multi-format ethnographic research based on the human ecology and richness of one of the world’s highest inhabited villages, Hichigh, located in the Pamir mountain range in Tajikistan. Together with composer Phill Niblock, they will create an audio-visual experience, traversing landscape, soundscape, and contemporary music that changes with every iteration.

In response to the five-year anniversary and by taking the topic of its celebration Free Jazz literally, Ming Wong will stage an improvisational performance. Similarly, Boris Nieslony (Germany), Co-founder of the artist collective Black Market International, will engage with pioneering Singaporean artist Lee Wen with a discussion and performance.

Further probing conventional formats, the accompanying programmes include readings by curator Anca Rujoiu (Romania/Singapore) and poets Peter Sipeli and 1angrynative (both Fiji), as well as Behind the Scenes conversations with contributing artists. In The Single Screen, works by Anton Ginzburg (Russia/United States), Mariana Silva (Portugal/United States), Luke Fowler (United Kingdom), Justin Shoulder and Bhenji Ra (both Philippines/Australia), and others, will add a filmic perspective to the dialogue.

This multitude of celebratory events instigates an active engagement with the now, following a conscious desire to become truly present.

Curated by Ute Meta Bauer, Founding Director, NTU CCA Singapore, and Professor, School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University, and Magdalena Magiera, Curator, Outreach and Education, NTU CCA Singapore.

Stagings. Soundings. Readings. Free Jazz II public programmes

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.

“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.

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.

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.

Campur, Tolak, Kali, Bahagi, Sama Dengan (Add, Subtract, Multiply, Divide, Equals) is a solo project by late and cherished artist Roslisham Ismail aka Ise. In 2016 during a short trip in Germany, Ise jotted down in his notebook the title of a much-contemplated solo project: Campur, Tolak, Kali, Bahagi, Sama Dengan (Add, Subtract, Multiply, Divide, Equals), to which he returned two years later when eventually, such an exhibition became possible in Kuala Lumpur. Ise saw in basic arithmetic operations and their specific properties, a reflection of his artistic process Actions are performed differently; the results could be the same. “Painters 100 years ago—” explains Ise in an interview “—also went to the market to buy vegetables and put them in a still life painting. For me it was the same. I went to the market and put the food on display. It’s just another way of working.”

An exhibition that takes place a little more than one year since the artist’s passing rightfully carries deeper significance and responsibility. While this exhibition was not conceived as a survey of Ise’s broad practice, it is defined, as the title suggests, by a reflexive scope. Although produced four years apart, the two bodies of work that shape this project intimately interconnect. Seamlessly they capture Ise’s art-making process, his distinctive ways of navigating the world and embedding the serendipity of life and social encounters in artistic practice.

Aimed to foster connections between artists and a new context, to provide much-needed time and space for reflection and encounters, artist-in-residence programmes represented an important catalyst in the development of Ise’s artistic practice. Their nature suit Ise’s method of working, social flair, endless curiosity and conceivably offered a means to take distance from a familiar environment and reflect on it from afar. A ramification of his residency project at Bangkok University Gallery, Operation Bangkok (2014) maps Ise’s encounters with the city and its inhabitants. From the abandoned New World Mall, Thieves’ Market, Crocodile Temple (Wat Chakrawat) to anti-government protests in Lumpini Park, to name a few, Ise guides us to places and events meaningful to those for whom Bangkok is home. We discover through Ise’s eyes and interactions, Bangkok as a living city rather than a tourist destination on the global market.

Fictional characters have been recurrent in Ise’s drawings informed by the visual vernacular of comics. In 2018, he started a collaboration with the comic book artist Ibrahim Hamid (Pak Him), whose work Ise knew since primary school. In the vicissitudes of life, they first met at the hospital in Kota Bharu, where both were undergoing dialysis treatment. Ise commissioned Pak Him to execute, following his instructions and study drawings, a series of graphic novel illustrations. These comics, displayed in mobile lightboxes, employ strategies of self-narration situating Ise inside the story as protagonist. Checked for hours at Christchurch’s customs under the odd suspicion of being a “drug designer”; mugged in Barcelona at knifepoint; stopped by the police in Jakarta after Malaysia won a regional cup in a football match against Indonesia but backed by his peers, and so on, Ise revived his micro-narratives through a fictionalised persona and Pak Him’s craftsmanship. Portraying himself within a world with many others, friends and strangers alike, Ise affirmed his continuous interest in the virtues and intricacies of the social.

The publication of this exhibition takes the format of a special issue of SentAp!, the magazine founded by curator Nur Hanim Khairuddin and Ise in 2005. Dedicated to Ise, this issue is designed by Yan; and it includes a welcome note by Ute Meta Bauer, a series of interviews by writer Tan Zi Hao with the curators Ark Fongsmut, Nur Hanim Khairuddin, and Russell Storer; an essay and a conversation with ruangrupa by curator Anca Rujoiu.

Roslisham Ismail aka Ise’s solo project is realised in collaboration with Ise parkingproject Foundation with the support of A+ Works of Art and NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore. The exhibition is presented in The Lab at NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore between 16 January – 28 February 2021.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ulrike Ottinger: China. The Arts – The People, Photographs and Films from the 1980s and 1990s public programmes

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.

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.

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.

Ade Darmawan lives and works in Jakarta as an artist, curator, and director of the artist collective ruangrupa. He studied at the Graphic Art Department at the Indonesia Art Institute, and was a resident at the Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam (1998–2000). He works with installation, objects, drawing, digital print, and video. Recently he has had solo exhibitions at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2016) and Portikus, Frankfurt (2015). Darmawan participated in the Gwangju and Singapore Biennales (both 2016), and was a curatorial collaborator in Condition Report (2017); Media Art Kitchen (2013); and Riverscape in-flux (2012). ruangrupa, an artist collective co-founded in 2000 with five other artists in Jakarta, focuses on visual arts and its relation with the social cultural context, particularly in urban environments. The collective has exhibited at the São Paulo Biennale (2014); Asia Pacific Triennial, Brisbane (2012); Istanbul Biennale (2005); and Gwangju Biennale (2002), among others. They were also curators of the 2016 Sonsbeek International. Darmawan was a member of the Jakarta Arts Council (2006–09) and became the Artistic Director of the Jakarta Biennale in 2009. Since 2013, he is executive director of the Jakarta Biennale.

Alexandra Pirici is an artist with a background in choreography that works undisciplined across different mediums, both in galleries and in public space. Her work has been exhibited within the decennial art exhibition Skulptur Projekte Munster 2017; the Romanian Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale; Tate Modern, London; New Museum, New York; 9th Berlin Biennale; Manifesta 10; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the Museum Ludwig Cologne; among others.

Anton Ginzburg is known for his films, sculptures, paintings, and text-based printed work that investigates historical narratives and poetic studies of place, representation, and post-Soviet identity. He earned a BFA from The New School for Social Research and an MFA from Bard College, Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts. His work has been shown at the 54th Venice Biennale; the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston; Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Canada; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; White Columns, New York; Lille 3000, Euralille, France; and the first and second Moscow Biennales. His films have been screened at the Whitechapel Gallery, London; Rotterdam International Film Festival; Dallas Symphony Orchestra; Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas; Les Rencontres Internationales, Paris; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; and New York Film Festival/Projections; among others.

Bhenji Ra is an interdisciplinary artist who reframes performance through a combination of dance, choreography, video, and installation. Her work is often concerned with the dissection of cultural theory and identity. She uses spectacle and her own personal histories to explore themes of race, sexuality, and gender, giving voice to hidden and marginalised communities, and suggesting alternative modules of community. He is part of Sydney-based collective Club Ate.

Boris Nieslony has worked intensively as a performance artist, curator, archivist, and independent scholar, staging various installations, interventions, and artist projects since the 1970s. He is the Co-founder of Black Market International, a performance group that meets regularly in various configurations to realise group performance projects. And also the instigator of the ASA Foundation, a platform for a self-organising rhizomatic network of performance artists and theorists. Nieslony is recognised as one of the most prolific and significant contributors to performance art. He creates unpredictable and unrepeatable improvisational performance works that manifest “an encounter and its effects.”

Cally Spooner is an artist based in Athens. Her installations unfold in evolutionary phases, in conjunction with the delivery of a project or an exhibition. Recent solo shows include Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève; Whitechapel Gallery, London; The New Museum, New York; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Her book Scripts was published by Slimvolume in 2016 and her novel Collapsing In Parts by Mousse in 2012.

Carlos Casas is a filmmaker and artist whose practice encompasses film, sound, and the visual arts. His films have been screened and awarded in festivals around the world such as the Venice Film Festival; International Film Festival Rotterdam; Buenos Aires International Film Festival; and Mexico International Film Festival; among others. His work has been exhibited and performed in international art institutions and galleries, including Tate Modern, London; Fondation Cartier, Palais de Tokyo, and Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Hangar Bicocca, Milan. He was an NTU CCA Singapore Artist-in-Residence from December 2017 to February 2018.

Ella Raidel, Ph.D., is a filmmaker, artist and researcher. Since April 2019 she is Assistant Professor at NTU Singapore at ADM School of Art, Design and Media and WKWSCI School of Communication and Information.

Eunsong Kim is Assistant Professor in the Department of English, and an affiliate faculty of the department of Cultures, Societies and Global Studies at Northeastern University, Boston.

Fritz Lang was an influential filmmaker, producer and actor. He moved to the United States at the age of 46 and is best known as an émigrés from the German school of Expressionism. He had directed 23 features in his 20-year American career and is considered to have set the precedence for the evolution of American genre cinema; more specifically to film noir. His work consists of a variety of genres revolving around fate and justice.

Genevieve Quick (United States) is an artist and arts writer in San Francisco.

Visual artist Geraldine Kang (b. 1988, Singapore) uses photography as a means of introspection and as a tool to negotiate identities within physical and psychological spaces. Combining photography with objects she creates installations that address a range of topics from family, community, and mental illness to site-explorations of the undercurrents and ambivalences of familiar places. Kang holds a Bachelor of Fine Art in Photography and Digital Imaging from Nanyang Technological University and has exhibited her work both locally and internationally with solo exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore and NTU CCA Singapore. She participated to group shows at the ifa Gallery in Berlin and Stuttgart, and ONESITE Art Festival in Taiwan. She was awarded the 2011 Kwek Leng Joo Prize of Excellence in Still Photography and participated to photography platforms such as Kuala Lumpur International Photo Awards, Photographer’s Forum, Px3 and the Asian Women Photographers’ Showcase. She is also the editor of Left to Right, an anthology of image-making in Singapore.

Heidrun Holzfeind is an artist and filmmaker, explores the interrelations between history and identity, individual histories and political narratives of the present.

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.

Jean Rouch is a ethnographer-turned-filmmaker, was the father of modern cinéma vérité together with his collaborator, Edgar Morin. Their work has had great influence on French New Wave filmmakers.

Jesper List Thomsen is an artist and writer. Recent exhibitions and performances include Hollis and Money, ICA, London and Künstlerhaus, Stuttgart; Speak Through You, Hot Wheels Projects, Athens; A Social Body Event, Serpentine Gallery, London; Micro-Composition, Rozenstraat, Amsterdam; The body, the body, the tongue, Reading International; Hand and Mind, Grand Union, Birmingham; The boys the girls and the political, Lisson Gallery, London; and One Hour Exhibition, South London Gallery, London. A book-length collection of his texts will be published in Autumn 2018 by Juan de la Cosa (John of the Thing). He is also a part of the artist collective Am Nuden Da.

Jonathas de Andrade is one of the most promising Brazilian artists of his generation. Over the last decade, he has developed works in photography, video, and installation that stem from observations of everyday life in Brazil and what he regards as its “urgencies and discomforts.” He considers how the Brazilian national identity and labour conditions have been constructed in the midst of colonialism and slavery, and reinterprets the methodologies of education and social sciences to question underlying assumptions. De Andrade studied communications at Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Brazil, and has had solo exhibitions worldwide.

Joris Ivens was a documentary filmmaker whose career spanned over 60 years. He filmed more than 50 international documentaries that explored leftist social and political concerns during the 20th century. Named film commissioner in 1944 for the Dutch East Indies, he later resigned in protest over the Dutch’s resistance to decolonisation. Among the notable films he has directed or co-directed, there are A Tale of the Wind (1988), The Spanish Earth (1937), and Far from Vietnam (1967). In 1988, Ivens received the Golden Lion Honorary Award at the Venice Film Festival and in 1989, he was knighted in the Order of the Dutch Lion.

Jungmin Choi is a campaigner and nonviolence trainer at World Without War, Seoul, an organisation that supports conscientious objectors. She also works at My Sister’s Place, an organisation that assists Korean and migrant women who live and work near US military bases in South Korea.

Justin Shoulder works in performance, sculpture, and video. His main body of work, Fantastic Creatures, comprises invented beings and alter-personas based on interpretations of mythology, folktale, and fantasy. These creatures are embodied through movement and elaborate, hand-crafted costumes and prostheses, forging connections between queer, migrant, spiritual, and intercultural experiences. He is part of Sydney-based collective Club Ate.

Karpo Godina is a prominent filmmaker and cinematographer. He is an essential figure and a pioneering member of the Yugoslav Black Wave film movement of the 1960s and 1970s. His film career was launched in the 1960s when he independently produced 8mm experimental shorts and numerous sociocritical films. His film Artificial Paradise was screened at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival.

Kim Nguyen (United States) is Curator and Head of Programmes at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts.

Kimi Takesue is an award-winning filmmaker and recipient of the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Fellowships in Film.

Laleen Jayamanne is a filmmaker and Professor of Cinema Studies at the Power Department of Fine Arts at the University of Sydney, Australia.

Lucy Raven received a BFA in studio art and a BA in art history from the University of Arizona, Tucson, and an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, New York. Primarily grounded in animation and the moving image, Raven’s multidisciplinary practice also incorporates still photography, installation, sound, and performative lecture. Throughout her oeuvre, Raven explores how images can convey networks of labour. The artist has received numerous awards, including the San Francisco Bay Area component of the Artadia Award (2013), and residencies at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2011–12) and Oakland Museum of California (2012). Her work has been exhibited in numerous international solo presentations, including Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2014); Portikus, Frankfurt (2014); Hammer Museum (2012–13); and Nevada Museum of Art, Reno (2010). She participated in group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum, New York (2013); Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Oregon (2013); MoMA PS1, New York (2013 and 2010); and Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (2010), among others. Her work was included in the 2012 Whitney Biennial, and can be found in permanent collections such as Tate Modern, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, and the Guggenheim.

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.

Maggie Segale is a dancer, artist, and teacher with a focus on performing and interdisciplinary, collaborative work. She graduated from the Juilliard School, where she received multiple awards and fellowships including the 2014 Entrepreneurship Fellowship for her writing on self-image and dance. Segale works with Helen Simoneau Danse, Bryan Arias, and artist Cally Spooner, having collaborated with A24 Films, Center for Innovation in the Arts, Roya Carreras in the upcoming Pussy Riot music video, composer Zubin Hensler, and Matilda Sakamoto. Segale choreographed the opera Role of Reason at the Interarts Festival 2018, and was an Artist-in-Residence at the New Jersey Dance Theatre Ensemble (2016).

Dr Marc Glöde is a curator, critic and film scholar. He is currently an Assistant Professor, School of Art, Design and Media, NTU, Singapore and Co-Director of the Master of Arts in Museum Studies and Curatorial Practices. He received his PhD at The Free University Berlin (FU Berlin). He taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden, FU Berlin, Academy of Fine Arts Berlin, and as Assistant Professor at the ETH Zürich. He curated the exhibition “STILL/MOVING/STILL – The History of Slide Projection in the Arts” at Knokke, Belgium. He was a senior curator of Art Film, Art Basel’s film program from 2008 – 2014. He was co-editor of Umwidmungen (2005), Synästhesie-Effekte (2011) and his writings are widely published. He was previously a Visting Research Fellow at NTU CCA Singapore from 25 February to 26 May 2016. Dr Glöde is a regular contributor to NTU CCA Singapore’s programmes.

Research Focus

Residency period: 25 February – 26 May 2016

Dr Marc Glöde’s work is informed by his interest in questions concerning images and image politics, as well as the correspondences between different artistic disciplines or cultural positions. For his research at NTU CCA Singapore he will specifically address the dynamics of the relation between images and the development of urban ideas and architecture – on the impact of images on a critical reflection of urbanism.By re-visiting the landmark project “Cities on the Move” almost 20 years after its occurrence, one of the key questions will be how this exhibition/debate has left its imprint on the discussion in Asia and how the situation has developed since then. From there Dr Glöde’s research will dig deeper into the impact of artists, filmmakers, and curators on the discussion. Dr Glöde’s research will be accompanied by a combination of workshops, film screenings, and discussions with artists and architects from the region.

Maria Loboda is a Berlin-based artist who creates enigmatic spaces that dive deep into rich historical narratives and the current state of affairs. She has exhibited at dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel; Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; Kunstverein Braunschweig; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; among others. She will have solo exhibitions at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, in November 2018, and at Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City, in 2019.

Mariana Silva has exhibited and screened her work at Anthology Film Archives, New York (2018); Gwangju Biennale (2016); Moscow Biennale (2016); and EDP Foundation, Lisbon (2015); among others. Solo shows include For more Information, fluent, Santander (2018); Camera Traps, Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon (2018); Audience Response Systems, Parkour, Lisbon (2014); P/p, Mews Project Space, London (2013); Environments, e-flux exhibition space, New York (2013); and The Organization of Forms, Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon (2011). She was a resident at Gasworks (2016), Zentrum Paul Klee Sommerakademie, Bern (2010), and at ISCP, New York (2009–10). Together with artist Pedro Neves Marques, she runs Inhabitants, an online channel for exploratory video and documentary reporting (inhabitants-tv.org).

Mark Nash is a curator and writer, and Professor, University of California Santa Cruz. He was Head of Department Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art London, and prior Director of Fine Art Research at Central St Martins. He was a senior lecturer in Film History and Theory at the University of East London, visiting lecturer at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, and visiting research fellow at the NTU CCA Singapore (2015). He holds a PhD from Middlesex University. Nash has written extensively on artists’ work with the moving image, having curated One Sixth of the Earth, ecologies of image at ZKM, Karlsruhe and MUSAC, Leon (2012-13) and Experiments with Truth, Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia (2004-5).

Research Focus

1. Historical legacy of independence and liberation struggles and cold war politics, including the non-aligned movement, in terms of the different affective relationships these alternative world views propose particularly as realised in South East Asian art

2. Alternative philosophies and aesthetics of the moving image – e.g. how Chinese or Indonesian artists approach the moving image, and the concepts of the image embedded in their linguistic etymology

3. Moving image and photographic works along the Asian part of the Silk Road

Melati Suryodarmo graduated in Performance Art from the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig, Germany, under the tutelage of Marina Abramović and Anzu Furukawa. Her practice, informed by butoh, dance, and history, is the result of ongoing research in body movement and its relationship to the self and the world.These are enshrined in photography, translated into choreographed dances, enacted in video, or executed in live performances. A belief in change or growth through bodily action belies her early induction in meditation, which she continues to practice. Suryodarmo has presented her work worldwide, including Fukuoka Art Museum; National Museum of Contemporary Art Korea, Gwacheon; Kiasma, Helsinki; National Art Centre Tokyo; National Portrait Gallery, Canberra; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Para Site, Hong Kong; Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; Seoul Museum of Art; and Singapore Art Museum. Her work was included in the 5th Guangzhou Triennale (2015); Incheon Women Artists’ Biennale (2009); Manchester International Festival (2009); and Manifesta 7, Bolzano (2008). Since 2007, Suryodarmo organises the annual Performance Art Laboratory and Undisclosed Territory, a performance art festival in Solo, Indonesia, having also founded the art space Studio Plesungan in 2012. She was Artistic Director for Jiwa, the 17th Jakarta Biennale (2017).

Mikhail Kalatozov was a prominent film director who largely contributed to both Georgian and Russian cinema. He studied economics before starting his extensive filmmaking career in 1923. He had his solo directorial debut in 1930 with the documentary Salt for Svanetia and directed several propaganda films during World War II. He also worked as a cultural attaché at the Soviet Embassy in the United States, and was later appointed Deputy Film Minister of the Soviet Union. He is best known for his World War II drama, The Cranes Are Flying (1958), which won the Palm d’Or at the 1958 Cannes Film Festival.

Ming Wong builds layers of cinematic language, social structure, identity, and introspection through re-telling world cinema and popular culture in videos, installations, and performances. He often “mis-casts” himself in multiple roles in a foreign language, interconnecting concepts of gender, representation, culture, and identity. Wong represented Singapore at the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009). He has had solo exhibitions at leading institutions worldwide and has participated in international biennials, including Performa, New York; Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane; and Sydney Biennale, among others.

Munem Wasif (b. 1983, Bangladesh) explores complex socio-political issues through photography and video. His artistic practice is marked by close engagement and intimate commitment, both physical and psychological, to his subjects of interest and it usually unfolds through long-term research processes. While interested in the archival and social value of documentary photography, his worksoften confound the boundaries between fact and fiction. An award-winning photographer, he hasparticipated in international exhibitions such as Sharjah Biennial 14, United Arab Emirates (2019);the 9th Asia Pacific Triennale of Contemporary Art, Brisbane, Australia (2018-19); An Atlas of Mirrors, Singapore Biennale (2016), amongst numerous others.

Ousmane Sembène was a preeminent Senegalese film director and writer. His writings observed the political scene in Senegal where he wrote several volumes on the developing national consciousness. In the early 1960s, he turned to film and went to study in Moscow. He is often called the “Father of African Cinema,” a title befitting the first African to make a film distributed outside of Africa. His works examine the multiplicities of a continent emerging from the colonial era, at grips with the tensions of independence and modernity, historicising Africa’s political and social transformation throughout the 20th century.

Phill Niblock is a New York-based minimalist composer and multi-media musician, and director of Experimental Intermedia, a foundation born in the flames of 1968’s barricade-hopping. He has been a maverick presence on the fringes of the avant-garde ever since.

The practice of Prapat Jiwarangsan (b. 1979, Thailand) is rooted in a deep fascination with archival materials which the artist peruses and reconfigures in order to question the relationships between nationalism and history, memory and politics in Thailand. In recent years, he has turned his focus tothe experience of migrant workers outside of their home countries. His films and installations havebeen included in international group exhibitions such as, most recently, Singapore Biennale 2019: Every Step in the Right Direction; DIASPORA: Exit, Exile, Exodus of Southeast Asia, MAIIAM ContemporaryArt Museum, Chiang Mai, Thailand (2018), and festivals including the 47th International Film FestivalRotterdam, Netherlands (2018) and the 27th Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival,Chicago, United States (2016).

Ranu Mukherjee (United States) is an artist and Associate Professor in Fine Art and Film at California College of the Arts, San Francisco.

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.

Shireen Seno studied architecture and cinema at the University of Toronto before relocating to Manila. Her work addresses memory, history and image-making, often in relation to the idea of home.

Shirley Clarke was an esteemed figure in the American avant-garde cinema of the 1950s and 1960s, and a pioneer of video in the 1970s. She brought a distinctive aesthetic of “choreography of images” to her work as a trained dancer and manipulated image, time, and space by applying choreographic editing and technical effects as a dramatic, expressive language. She co-founded Film-Makers Cooperative and Film-Makers Distribution Center in New York, which offered alternative distribution methods for independent filmmakers. She was also the winner of an Academy Award for her 1964 documentary film Robert Frost: A Lover’s Quarrel With the World.

Tomás Gutiérrez Alea is a prominent and highly celebrated Cuban film director. He is an influential figure in shaping Cuba’s film industry. Originally trained in law, he went on to study filmmaking in Italy. His socially-driven works expose the plight of the working class and the Cuban revolution. He explored various genres such as Neorealism, comedy, and historical film to reflect on the lives and people of Cuba.

Tyler Coburn is a New York-based artist and writer whose practice focuses on the entanglement of technology and human subjectivities, information systems and those who make them. Coburn’s work has been presented at Centre Pompidou, Paris; Kunsthalle Wien; South London Gallery; Kunstverein Munich; Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm; Art Sonje Center, Seoul; Sculpture Center, New York; and in the 11th Gwangju Biennale and 10th Shanghai Biennale. Coburn was an NTU CCA Singapore Artist-in-Residence from June to July 2017.

Vladimir Erofeev was a pioneer of expedition cinema in the Soviet Union, advocating for increased attention and investment in edifying non-fiction films made to win the interest of broad audiences. In summer 1927, a trek to the mountainous Pamir region, known as the “Roof of the World,” in present-day Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, was organised by the Sovkino studio in co-operation with the Geological Committee. Erofeev worked with prominent geologist Dmitrii Nalivkin and ethnographer Mikhail Andreyev, who had both extensively researched the area and contributed to the planning for the crew’s journey. The film starts off in Moscow, the symbolic centre of the new empire, leading through Samara and Orenburg, to Tashkent and Osh, and further on to the Pamir Mountains of Central Asia. The film features the expedition’s progress through crossing mountain rivers, traversing snowy passes and descending into valleys in bloom, while at the same time recording the daily practices of the Krygz nomads, the religious customs of a Tajik village community, finally entering Dushanbe, observing the city life in the capital of Soviet Tajikistan. The final result demonstrates a portrait of a rich and vibrant region in which the interaction of various cultures have not yet fully streamlined to the requirements of the uniformed all-Soviet world.

Vladimir Seput is a curator and researcher based in London. He studied film in Zagreb and did postgraduate research in film/video studies at University Paris 8 (2013-14), where he wrote about Mediterranean iconography in film and moving image, and researched the cinematic aspects of the sea as a place where politics, history, and mythology intersect. He holds a Masters in Film Curation from Birkbeck, University of London (2017). For the last 10 years, he has published on film and moving image art, and translated and edited books on philosophy, literary criticism, and contemporary art for various publications in Croatia and the United Kingdom.

Yee I-Lann is an artist. Her practice speculates on issues of culture, power, and the role of historical memory in our social experience by way of allusion to historical, popular, and everyday references, often through the medium of photography. Recent exhibitions include Away from the Long Night, MSAC, Taipei (2014); The Roving Eye: Contemporary Art from South East Asia, ARTER, Istanbul (2014); Welcome to the Jungle: Contemporary Art in Southeast Asia, Yokohama Museum of Art (2013); Suspended Histories, Museum Van Loon, Amsterdam (2013); Art of Memory: Contemporary Textile Expressions, Jim Thompson Art Center, Bangkok, Thailand (2013). She was a member of the curatorial team for the 2013 Singapore Biennale. Yee also works in the film industry in Malaysia.

Between April and July 2015, Yee was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore where she continued her research on folkloric ghost stories of female spirits, specifically the figure of the Pontianak, depictions of which are found throughout Southeast Asia.

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 7^th 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.

Engaging The Vitrine as a site imbricated with complex histories and practices of display, Fyerool Darma complicates our understanding of Telok Blangah, the area where Gillman Barracks is located and where the artist recently moved, through objects found or acquired, deconstructed and reoriented by the artist and his collaborators.

Vivarium (wii fl∞w w/ l4if but t4k£ ø f0rms,♥) is an exercise in four parts. Identified through keywords caches on internet-based community marketplaces and by skimming through nearby shops, the items are representations of the artist’s movements and encounters around Telok Blangah and of the possible future of the area: from its literal meaning of “cooking pot” to the forthcoming “Greater Southern Waterfront” development plan. Three items will be placed in The Vitrine, one at a time, with a monthly cadence and each accession will be captured in the Highlights section of the artist’s Instagram account (@fdarma).

Asking questions such as: What is Telok Blangah? And, more importantly if objects are to be taken as registers of the site: Where exactly is Telok Blangah?, Fyerool’s Vivarium (wii fl∞w w/ l4if but t4k£ ø f0rms,♥) encapsulates an object-based index of the area wherein the items slide like cursors along intricate trajectories and the realms of the physical and digital, the archive and the display, are merged.