Performance – NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore

NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (NTU CCA Singapore) presents the two-part research presentation Climate Crisis and Cultural Loss. First unfolding at TBA21–Academy’s Ocean Space in Venice, Italy, the research inquiry later materialises in another configuration at ADM Gallery, a university gallery under the School of Art, Design, and Media (NTU ADM) at Nanyang Technological University Singapore.

This twofold exhibition marks the conclusion of the eponymous research project led by Principal Investigator Ute Meta Bauer at NTU ADM. The inquiry started by asking: how has the slow erosion of diverse, multicultural, and more-than-human ways of living over time impacted the environments in which we live, and what are the longer-term consequences on habitats? Can we begin again with culture, to induce a necessary paradigm shift in the way we think about and respond to the climate crisis? Extending connections and conversations seeded during the inaugural cycle of TBA21–Academy’s The Current fellowship programme led by Bauer from 2015 to 2018, Climate Crisis and Cultural Loss continues to build archipelagic networks across the Alliance of Small Island Developing States, deepening existing collaborations with Oceania Centre for Arts, Culture and Pacific Studies in Fiji, and developing new ones further in the South Pacific Ocean, through the art and media non-profit organisation Further Arts in Vanuatu.

Bridging conversations from the Pacific to Singapore in the Riau Archipelago, former fellows of TBA21–Academy’s The Currentand current research collaborators artist Nabil Ahmed, social anthropologist Guigone Camus, artist Kristy H.A. Kang, legal scholar Hervé Raimana Lallemant-Moe, and artists Armin Linke and Lisa Rave, join Singapore-based researchers Co-Investigator Sang-Ho Yun and Denny Chee of the Earth Observatory of Singapore – Remote Sensing Lab (EOS–RS) and the Asian School of the Environment, NTU ADM research staff Soh Kay Min and Ng Mei Jia, historian Jonathan Galka, and community organiser Firdaus Sani, as they explore the impacts of extreme weather, rising seas, climate displacement, ocean resource extraction, and the disappearance of material cultural traditions, occurring across what the visionary Pacific thinker Epeli Hau’ofa has termed “our sea of islands.” Featuring interviews, data visualisations, documentation, writings, and artisanal crafts made in collaboration with or generously gifted to the research team by knowledge bearers, community leaders, scientists, scholars, and artists, including writer and curator Frances Vaka’uta, masi artist Igatolo Latu,human rights defender Anne Pakoa and anthropologist Cynthia Chou, the exhibitions present the rich, complex, and multi-layered research findings accumulated over three years, since the Climate Crisis and Cultural Loss project first started in 2021.

At TBA21–Academy’s Ocean Space, the Climate Crisis and Cultural Loss research inquiry sits adjacent to the exhibition Restor(y)ing Oceania, comprising two new site-specific commissions by Latai Taumoepeau and Elisapeta Hinemoa Heta. Curated by Bougainville-born artist Taloi Havini, whose curatorial vision is guided by an ancestral call-and-response method, the exhibition materialises as a search for solidarity and kinship in uncertain times, in order to slow down the clock on extraction and counter it with reverence for the life of the Ocean.

At ADM Gallery, Climate Crisis and Cultural Loss is presented alongside the companion show Sensing Nature, curated by Gallery Director Michelle Ho. The exhibition showcases artists representing diverse disciplines, each offering their interpretation of the natural world and its intersection with urban life. Through reflection and experimentation, these works invite viewers to reassess our perceptions and behaviors toward the environment and phenomena beyond human influence. They advocate for a renewed understanding of society’s connection to nature and the land.

Climate Crisis and Cultural Loss is supported by the Ministry of Education, Singapore, under its Academic Research Fund Tier 2 grant. The research presentation at Ocean Space coincides with the 60th International Art Biennale in Venice, Italy, with public programmes taking place through the exhibition durations in both Venice and Singapore.

Opening Dates
Ocean Space exhibition preview:
March 22, 6pm
Ocean Space, Venice, Chiesa di San Lorenzo Castello

Opening hours
March 23–October 13, 2024: Wednesday to Sunday, 11am–6pm
Ocean Space
Chiesa di San Lorenzo Castello 5069, Venice

April 12–May 24, 2024: Monday to Friday, 10am–5pm
ADM Gallery
81 Nanyang Drive, Singapore 637458

Climate Crisis and Cultural Loss Logo Bar

Progressive Disintegrations is a collaborative group that began out of the need to create a format and a space for creative exchange between the artistic practices of Chua Chye Teck, Marc Gloede, Hilmi Johandi and Wei Leng Tay. The project aimed to open up the normally individual artistic and curatorial pursuits of each participant, creating situations that allow them to explore and expand the notions that underlie their respective practices.

During STAR RECIDENCY, The Observatory will deepen their entanglement with subterranean phenomena and geological formations. Drawn to the complexity and non-linear nature of volcanoes as well as to their cultural significance in diverse belief systems, the artists will collaborate with the Volcano Group and other EOS researchers to grow their understanding of these unpredictable and explosive entities, with a focus on the volcanic arcs that shape Southeast Asia. In line with their sound-centred approach to experimentation and research, they are particularly interested in exploring the sonic emanations of volcanic phenomena. Furthermore, they also plan to look at the intricate processes of magma transport dynamics, viscous flow, rock formation/deformation, crystallisation, degassing, and solidification. By reinterpreting the data and knowledge produced by EOS researchers, The Observatory aim to develop new perspectives that, synthetising scientific research and artistic imagination, resonate from deep time to contemporary existence.

The Observatory is a band whose music and cultural ethos is to responds and speaks back to the contemporary afflictions in Singapore and the global milieu. Its current constellation comprises multi-instrumentalists Cheryl Ong, Dharma and Yuen Chee Wai who tread on improvisation, intermedia, experimentation and noise-adjacent territories. In confronting new forms of disorders, The Observatory restlessly turns upon itself to agitate, to comfort and to resist. Drawing on old and new lexicons, The Observatory seeks to bridge artists and expressions (a bit unclear, maybe consider: diverse artistic expressions?). Two decades on, the band’s polymath practice encompasses music and performance; in-person festivals and online radio shows; touring gigs and interdisciplinary exhibitions.

Embracing a constellatory and process-led approach in her collaboration with multiple researchers at EOS, Zarina Muhammad dedicates STAR RESIDENCY to further her engagement with hybrid forms of ecological witnessing and polycosmologies as well as her exploration of the interdependency of environmental knowledge systems. The artist intends to conduct fieldwork on selected sites where geological and ecological significance resonate with underwater cultural heritage and indigenous knowledge systems, seeking points of convergence with EOS’s work in monitoring and addressing the regional impact of climate change. By exploring remote-sensing techniques and data translations through creative and empirical processes, this research hopes to expand the epistemic frameworks of nonhuman witnessing in the context of environmental crisis. The artist plans to expand her collaborative practice through interdisciplinary exchange, convening scientists, artists, storytellers, and ancestral knowledge keepers to develop speculative maps and multi-layered cartographies inspired by the complexity of environmental data, ecological processes, and trans-indigenous cosmologies.

Zarina Muhammad (b. 1982, Singapore) is an artist, educator, and researcher whose practice critically re-examines oral histories, ethnographic literature, and historiographic narratives of Southeast Asia. Working at the intersections of performance, text, installation, ritual, sound, moving image, and participatory practice, her work explores the enmeshed contexts of ecocultural cosmologies, identities and interactions, mythmaking, haunted historiographies, and geo-spirited landscapes. Her long-term interdisciplinary project investigates Southeast Asia’s evolving relationship with spectrality, ritual magic, polysensoriality, and the immaterial, examining these themes against the backdrop of global modernity, the social production of rationality, and transcultural exchanges of knowledge. Her work has been widely presented at international biennales and institutions, including FotoFest Biennial, Houston, USA (2024), the 2nd Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale, Saudi Arabia (2024), the 7th Singapore Biennale (2022), and the 3rd Lahore Biennale, Pakistan (2024). She recently had a solo presentation, curated by Shubigi Rao, at the Singapore Pavilion at the 15th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2024). Zarina is the recipient of the 2022 IMPART Art Prize.

What worlds transpire and conspire when capitalist violence sparks radically different beings to meet?

In 1887, a 4.7 metre-long crocodile was shot and donated to the colonial-era institution known as The Raffles Library and Museum where a taxidermist stuffed it with straw. The crocodile’s stuffing saw the light of the day again in 2013 when the specimen was opened for conservation by Kate Pocklington, then Conservator at the Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum. Since then, several artists convened by Migrant Ecologies Projects have participated in “gleaning sessions” of these dried stalks more than a century old. Throughout the sessions, the straw released a sleeping ecology of cereal and flower seeds which Finnish and Swedish cultivators and specialists from the Kew Gardens in London are trying to awaken, while their provenance is being investigated by Australian plant geneticists.

In a newspaper article—found by Pocklington—published in The Straits Times in 1948,it was claimed that this very crocodile hosts the spirit of a 19th century tin-mine kongsi leader, mystic, and warrior in the Larut Wars (1861-74) turned anti-colonial fighter. Shrines for this spirit persist alongside the mangroves and rivers of Matang, in the northwestern Malaysian state of Perak. In 2023, a group of artists, researchers, and historians from Singapore and Malaysia went on a field trip there. However, along the way, the initial crocodile trail and tale of the 19thcentury anti-colonial hero began to bifurcate, sending out feelers and drawing the group through other more-than-human waterbodies, mountains, caves, and the devastated landscapes of historic and contemporary mining.

In this panel the project’s participants will share about their work-in-progress on this spirit ecologies, with each contributor variously addressing submerged and emergent sounds, senses, and cinematic practices developed during their research.

This event marks the Singapore launch of Progressive Disintegrations’ publication about [im]print, their last exhibition which took place at STORAGE¬—an artist-initiated space in Bangkok—from October to December 2023. Thai artist Tanatchai Bandasak, whose conversation with members of Progressive Disintegrations first began during his residency at NTU CCA Singapore in 2019, joined the group in this project. During [im]print: unboxed, members of Progressive Disintegrations will speak about the project’s inception and its relation with the historical and physical context of STORAGE, a former printing press. Together with their deep interest in the unique spatial configurations of exhibition sites, they will discuss how they explored concepts and practices of print and how they orchestrated the interplay of different mediums, such as photography, painting, installation, woodblock prints, and performance, within the exhibition space. This session will also include an activation of the artists’ materials.

Thursday, 14 November, 7 – 8:30 pm
The Hall, NTU CCA Singapore

To register, please click here.

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

POSTPONED:

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

Event is free.

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

BIOGRAPHIES

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

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

Yan Jun (China) and Yuen Chee Wai (Singapore)
Time is still and we are in revolution
Live performance streamed through LCD screens, approx. 30 min.

Saturday, 16 September 2023
3:30pm – 4:15pm
NTU CCA Singapore Seminar Room
37 Malan Road, #01-04
Singapore 109452

Performance will start on time.
Admission is free on a first-come first-served basis.

Isn’t there a paradox in any revolution in that they circle back as they move forward? A revolving disc spins the two performers, together with their respective environments and audiences, at the same speed across vast geopolitical distances: an apartment in Bejing (Yan Jun) and former military barracks converted into artist studios in Singapore (Yuen Chee Wai). Set in a mysterious code, Time is still and we are in revolution is an experiment in remote improvisation made of electronics and vocals, cyclical contacts and recurring departures.

Time is still and we are in revolution results from an experimental working methodology developed by Yan Jun and Yuen Chee Wai. The first outcome of this ongoing collaboration, The Riddle of the Machine, was presented at the Trans-Southeast Asia Triennial Research Exhibition Series Review, Guangzhou, China, earlier in 2023.

BIOGRAPHIES

Yuen Chee Wai (Singapore) is a musician, artist, designer, and curator. Often inspired by perspectives glimpsed through the filmic eye and photographic lens, Yuen’s stylistic oeuvre in improvised music is marked by internalised reflections on memory and loss, invisibility and indeterminacy. His latest research interests are in mycology and caves. In 2008, together with Otomo Yoshihide (Japan), Ryu Hankil (South Korea), and Yan Jun (China), he formed FEN (Far East Network), an improvised music unit focusing on the multifaceted networks and collaborations between musicians and artists in Asian countries. He is also a member of The Observatory, in which he plays guitar, synth, and electronics. He tours extensively with FEN and The Observatory, and has presented at MIMI Festival, Lausanne Underground Music and Film Festival, All Ears Festival, Ftarri Festival, Gwangju Biennale and CTM Festival. Yuen was an Artist-in-Residence with NTU CCA Singapore in Cycle 8.

Yan Jun (China) is a musician and poet based in Beijing. His works involve electronics, feedback, site-specific installations, and noise. His improvisation sets follow the unstable relationship between microphones, speakers, the space and his body movement, to create subtle and unstable sound. He is a member of FEN (FarEastNetwork), Tea Rockers Quintet and Impro Committee, and has toured in the US, Australia, Europe and Asia. He has performed at Shanghai Biennale and received an honorary mention by Ars Electronica (Austria), and is the founder of Sub Jam label/organization. As a writer he has published and translated several books and poetry collections and attended the Rotterdam International Poetry Festival, and Berlin International Poetry Festival. Yan Jun was an Artist-in-Residence with NTU CCA Singapore in Cycle 2.

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 purpose of the award is to encourage recent graduates of NTU ADM’s research-oriented MA and PhD programmes and the MA in Museum Studies and Curatorial Practices (MSCP, co-chaired by NTU CCA Singapore) to engage in practical projects utilising the SGD$5000 award to investigate the topic of Spaces of the Curatorial as an extension of their research and coursework. Now in its third year, the 2022 award goes to Thomas Ragnar, a 2021 graduate of the MA in Museum Studies and Curatorial Practices, for Endless Return Pack v.1, a compilation album featuring artists working within expanded and experimental dance music genres from Singapore and Southeast Asia. The project is co-curated with Sher Chew (aka XUE), founder of the series Endless Return.

The selection committee included Prof Ute Meta Bauer and two invited jurors: Ms Siddharta Perez, Curator at NUS Museum, and Dr Adele Tan, Senior Curator at National Gallery Singapore.

The album will be released in 2022. Ragnar describes Endless Return as “a regenerative rave experiment.” Upon the announcement of the award, he commented: “Since August 2020, Endless Return have hosted several online events programmed with music, dance, and video projects by artists across Southeast Asia who work with rave culture, energy, history and aesthetics. The Platform Projects Curatorial Award will support the migration offline of Endless Return in 2022 through publishing initiatives, music and video releases, and live events developed by XUE and myself together with Endless Return‘s larger artistic community.”

“The Platform Projects Curatorial Award is a rare opportunity for emerging curators to realise a project and is a necessary initiative especially during a time when arts funding is contracting globally” says Ute Meta Bauer, Founding Director, NTU CCA Singapore, and Professor, NTU School of Art, Design and Media.

Ragnar adds that: “The MA programme offered jointly by ADM and NTU CCA Singapore boldly champions curatorial approaches and positions that make a conscious effort to take risks and depart from the often delimiting contexts of contemporary art, and of its hyper-specialised conditions. I am honoured to realise these positions and approaches with my collaborator XUE with the support of the Platform Projects grant. Both XUE and I are grateful to be enabled to support and advance the forward-thinking underground and regenerative spirit of Endless Return‘s artistic communities.”

The Award’s Pilot Programme supported <!DOCTYPE work>, a collaborative curatorial effort conceived by 2019 MA MSCP graduates Tian Lim, Shireen Marican, and Leon Tan, presented in The Lab at NTU CCA Singapore from 22 August – 18 October 2020. The next edition of the award went to Of Limits Collective, a group of five 2020 MA MSCP alumni comprising: Sneha Chaudhury, Weiqin Chay, Ace Lê, Jason Leung, and Beatrice Morel. They realized their exhibition Of Limits in March 2021 at the Stamford Arts Centre, featuring work by six artists from Southeast Asia, with most artworks having been produced during the COVID-19 pandemic.

On the occasion of the Pilot Programme, launched in 2020, Savita Apte from Platform Projects commented on behalf of her former co-directors Shareen Khattar and Christine Pilsbury: “We are all of one mind and delighted that Platform Projects can still be significant for a younger generation of curators.”

From its first iteration in 2013, Free Jazz has pushed boundaries and expanded upon pressing concerns of our times. Free Jazz IV. Geomancers continues this approach, featuring artworks ranging from virtual reality to video, performance, and sound as an exercise in planetary awareness. The exhibition presents significant artistic practices from across the globe that are deeply invested in creating an environmental consciousness and that share an understanding of the world as a vulnerable, yet resilient, mesh of coexistences, correlations, and co-creations. As with geomancy, these artworks can help us to read the signs that our planet is trying to send us and that they can inspire a stronger commitment to create a sustainable future for life on Earth.

Alongside scientists, environmental activists, enlightened policy makers and civil society members, contemporary artists are increasingly concerned with future prospects of ecological collapse and planetary survival. They address these issues through the language of art, creating images, sounds, narratives, and experiences that allow us to establish affective and cognitive connections with the environment and partake in the planetary intelligence of the Earth. Stemming from NTU CCA Singapore’s ongoing engagement with the overarching subject of Climates.Habitats. Environments., Free Jazz IV. Geomancers brings together a selection of creative practitioners who are distinctly alert to these urgencies.

Conceived for Singapore Art Week 2022, this programme consists of a film screening series, a virtual reality installation, a performance and a sound installation. Some of the featured artworks zero in on signs of earthly demise, others indicate pathways of resilience and strategies for regeneration. All the works result from long-term research and extensive fieldwork and, when presented together, they engender a kaleidoscopic overview of the multitudinous forms of ecological entanglements.

Free Jazz IV. Geomancers is supported by National Arts Council Singapore and Nicoletta Fiorucci Russo De Li Galli. NTU CCA Singapore also wishes to thank our collaborators IHME Helsinki, and PUB Singapore’s National Water Agency at Marina Barrage.

Artists: Martha Atienza (Philippines), Ursula Biemann (Switzerland), Carolina Caycedo & David de Rozas (United Kingdom; Spain/United States), Chu Hao Pei (Singapore), Liu Chuang (China), Pedro Neves Marques (Portugal), Katie Paterson (Scotland), Rice Brewing Sisters Club (South Korea), Daniel Steegmann Mangrané (Spain/Brazil), Jana Winderen (Norway), Zarina Muhammad & Zachary Chan (Singapore), and Robert Zhao Renhui (Singapore).

Free Jazz IV. Geomancers is supported by National Arts Council Singapore and Nicoletta Fiorucci Russo De Li Galli. NTU CCA Singapore also wishes to thank our collaborators Appetite, IHME Helsinki, and PUB Singapore’s National Water Agency at Marina Barrage.

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Shifting between individual and communal dimensions, performed in public and private spaces, rest is a powerful counterpoint to the sprawling sense of exhaustion induced by the unrelenting emphasis on work, production, and consumption that prevails in contemporary society. Continuing this ongoing investigation, during the residency the artist will conduct interviews, archival research, and fieldwork to understand notions, practices, and postures of rest in different cultural, historical, and socio-political contexts across Singapore and Southeast Asia focusing specifically on the manifestations of “rest in public spaces”. Through potential collaborations with movement and sound artists, she aims to gradually develop an artistic and performative vocabulary of rest that maps out its personal, political, cultural, and economic meanings.

For our fifth episode of AiRCAST, we entrusted curator and scholar Hsu Fang-Tze to converse with our Artist-in-Residence Han Xuemei. In this insightful exchange, Xuemei discusses how her urgency for engagement steers her fluid theatre practice towards experimenting with different modes of audience participation. As she shares about her current efforts to carve out “intervals of quiet” and “plots of rest” in the hectic context of Singapore, you will also discover that the research on the topic of “rest as resistance” she conducted throughout her residency at NTU CCA Singapore grows out from another residency she did in Taipei a few years ago.

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. In 2021 she received Young Artist Award, Singapore’s highest award for young arts practitioners.

Hsu Fang-Tze is a lecturer at the Communications and New Media Department, National University of Singapore where she is also a coordinator of the M.A. in Arts and Cultural Entrepreneurship. Her research interests include the formation of audiovisual modernity in Asia, Cold War aesthetics, philosophies of sonic technology, and the embodiment of artistic praxis in everyday life. Apart from her academic work, she is also active as a curator and has curated exhibitions such as Art Histories of a Forever War: Modernism between Space and Home at the Taipei Fine Art Museum, Taiwan (2021-2022) and Wishful Images at National University of Singapore Museum (2020).

Contributors: Han Xuemei, Hsu Fang-Tze
Editor: 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
12’38”: Audio excerpt from MISSING: The City of Lost Things, 2018. Courtesy Drama Box.
15’07”: Audio excerpt from MISSING: The City of Lost Things, 2018. Courtesy Drama Box.
19’15”: Audio excerpt from FLOWERS, 2019. Courtesy Drama Box.
21’00”: Audio excerpt from FLOWERS, 2019. Courtesy Drama Box.
26’24”: Audio excerpt from Taipei Main Station & Research Field Recording workshop part of Asia Discovers Asia Meeting For Contemporary Performance Artist Lab, 2019. Courtesy the artist.
35’30’’: Audio excerpt from Han Xuemei, field recordings at Tanah Merah, January 2022. Courtesy the artist.

[See Full Transcript]

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).

Come by the studios of our Artists-in-Residence: Tini Aliman and Russell Morton (both Singapore) for a special insight into their artistic process. This session of Residencies OPEN will allow you to encounter works-in-progress, watch a film screening, browse archival materials, and talk to the artists in person!

Tini Aliman, detail of work in progress, 2021. Courtesy of NTU CCA Singapore

TINI ALIMAN
Open Studio

Saturday, 18 September, 1:00 – 7:00 pm
Block 37 Malan Road, #01-03
no registration required

As a new development of her long-term research on plant consciousness and biodata sonification, Tini Aliman has come to regard ‘dead’ trees as potential archives of environmental soundscapes, witnesses of urban development and extractive capitalism, ecological events and climate change. Breathing new life into tree stumps, fragments of felled trees, and repurposed wood from previous artworks, the artist is reconfiguring these materials into kinetic and sound sculpture prototypes and she is experimenting with a range of sensory and mechanical modes of activation. Conjunctly, inspired by the structural and functional similarities between Printed Circuit Board (PCB) etching designs and forest underground network ecosystems, Tini is also speculatively imagining a functioning network of closed electronic circuits that mimics how these trees would have communicated while they were still alive. This project is realised in collaboration with Trying.sg.

Working at the intersection of film, sound, theatre, and installation, often through collaborative projects, the sonic and spatial experiments of Tini Aliman (b. 1980, Singapore) focus on forest networks, plant consciousness, bioacoustics, and data translations via biodata sonification. Her recent projects and collaborations have been presented at Free Jazz III: Sound. Walks. NTU CCA Singapore (2021); An Exercise of Meaning in a Glitch Season, National Gallery Singapore (2020); Sound Kite Orchestra, Biennale Urbana, Venice, Italy and Stories We Tell to Scare Ourselves With, Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, Taiwan (both 2019).

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Studio of Russell Morton (detail), 2021. Courtesy of NTU CCA Singapore

RUSSELL MORTON
Open Studio

Saturday, 18 September, 1:00 – 7:00 pm
Block 37 Malan Road, #01-02 & Block 38 Malan Road, #01-06
no registration required

For the past six months, Russell Morton has dived deep into gathering research materials and audiovisual references for the script of his first feature film. Inspired by a not well-known historical event—a prison riot which took place in Pulau Senang before Singapore’s independence—, the film interweaves the horrific events of the bloody riot with regional folklore. This open studio session presents a generous selection of archival materials, oral histories, and sound recordings relevant to the development of the script as well as the documentation (shot on Super 8mm film) of the artist’ site visits to a kelong, a type of vernacular architecture on the verge of disappearing that will feature prominently in the film.
Furthermore, there will be the opportunity to watch Morton’s most recent short film Mystic and Momok (2021), see below for more details.

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

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RESIDENCIES INSIGHTS

Russell Morton, expired Super 8mm footage of life on a kelong in Singapore waters, 2021, film stills. Courtesy of the artist.

RUSSELL MORTON: ARTIST-LED STUDIO TOUR

Saturday, 18 September, 3:00 – 3:45pm
Block 37 Malan Road, #01-02

In this artist-led studio tour, Russell Morton will talk about his references and unpack some of the research materials that will be woven into the structure of his first feature film: a dark narrative of drifting away from crime and floating in punishment inspired by a grim historical episode which happened in Singapore in the early 1960s.

Due to safe-distancing measures, this event has limited capacity and is by registration only. Please register here.

Tini Aliman, untitled, 2021, photography and digital composition (detail). Courtesy of the artist.

TINI ALIMAN: OF UNDERGROUND SCHEMATICS & THE FALLEN TREE
Artist Talk and Performance

Saturday, 18 September, 4:30 – 5:30pm
Block 37 Malan Road, #01-03

In a two-part event consisting of a talk and a performance, Tini Aliman will share her findings and reflections on plant consciousness and on the parallels between the human and the vegetable sensorium, interweaving them with explorations in acoustic memory and sonic symbolism related to her personal musical journey. In the performance, she will engage with her long-standing collaborator, a ficus microcarpa (Malayan banyan tree) named Ara.

Due to safe-distancing measures, this event has limited capacity and is by registration only. Please register here.

Mystic & Momok, 2021, HD video (16:9), stereo, 18min 10sec. Courtesy of the artist.

MYSTIC & MOMOK BY RUSSELL MORTON
Film Screening (on loop)
HD video (16:9), stereo, 18min 10sec, 2021
Rating: PG

Saturday, 18 September, 1:00 – 7:00pm
The Screening Room
Block 38 Malan Road, #01-06
No registration required. Please expect waiting time if room capacity is reached.

Completed during the residency, Russell Morton’s latest short film revolves around the eclectic and versatile figure of Mohammad Din Mohammad (1955 – 2007). Artist and mystic, traditional healer and idiosyncratic collector of Southeast Asian cultural items, Mohammad Din Mohammad was also an actor and a silat master. Playfully disclosing the production limitations imposed by the pandemic, the film evokes Mohammad’s multifaceted personality through the faces, voices, and memories of the artist’s family members and an experimental process where affects and sounds are mediated by technology. As it unfolds, the film grows into an upbeat stream of visuals and sounds mixed by Momok, a computer algorithm created by artist bani haykal.

Mystic & Momok was commissioned by National Gallery Singapore for the exhibition Something New Must Turn Up: Six Singaporean Artists After 1965 (7 May – 22 August 2021) which featured Mohammad Din Mohammad’s works.

This event marks the opening of The Screening Room, NTU CCA Singapore’s cosy new space dedicated to film screenings and talks.

In a two-part event consisting of a talk and a performance, Tini Aliman will share her findings and reflections on plant consciousness and on the parallels between the human and the vegetable sensoriums, interweaving them with explorations in acoustic memory and sonic symbolism related to her personal musical journey. In the performance, she will engage with her long-standing collaborator, a ficus microcarpa (Malayan banyan tree) named Ara.

Working at the intersection of film, sound, theatre, and installation, often through collaborative projects, the sonic and spatial experiments of Tini Aliman (b.1980, Singapore) focus on forest networks, plant consciousness, bioacoustics, and data translations via biodata sonification. Her recent projects and collaborations have been presented at Free Jazz III: Sound. Walks. NTU CCA Singapore (2021); An Exercise of Meaning in a Glitch Season, National Gallery Singapore (2020); Sound Kite Orchestra, Biennale Urbana, Venice, Italy and Stories We Tell to Scare Ourselves With, Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, Taiwan (both 2019).

Admission is free but registration is required. Please register here.

This event is part of Residencies OPEN, 18 September 2021 (1.00 – 7.00pm), for more info click here.

Image: Tini Aliman, untitled, 2021 photography and digital composition (detail). Courtesy of the artist.

Yason Banal’s work-in-progress is inspired by a conceptual astronomy around abstraction and document, ranging from Jose Rizal’s transglobal coordination and Isabelo Delos Reyes’ experimental archive amidst 19th century politics and anti-imperialist imagination, to possible contemporary coordinates in supernatural reality TV, lo-fi internet culture, geomarket forces and neo-migrant formalism.

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

Yan Jun will recreate his Living Room Tour project, initiated in 2011,the project was developed as a solo project and later with guests to become the Impro Committe collaboration project (2014, Beijing).

The Living Room Tour project has to takes place at someone’s home, a place while he/she lives. whatever the size is, with or without speakers, has or has no electricity; at least one audience is required and the owner of the home is encouraged to invite audiences. The performers may use furniture, kitchenware or anything available. The initial idea of this project came from feeling tired about low-end speakers and wanting to create a sonic space without the expense or formalities which go with this. He says the concert is a temporary mandala, a metaphor for the world. Within this environment is a destabilisation of hierarchy and there is no difference between large and small or professional and amateur. The quality of listening is from participants’s devotion.

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

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

Object-orientated ontology (OOO) is a 21st-century school of thought that rejects the primacy of human existence over non-human objects, thus generating different perspectives on ecological thinking. Combining an ongoing interest in natural environments threatened by urban development with his practice of capturing sonic emanations of the non-human inhabitants of our planet, Tang aims to further his understanding of OOO and sharpen theoretical tools that challenge anthropocentric hierarchies and understanding of nature. The space of the studio provides him with the opportunity to test immersive multisensorial installations that visualize and animate field recordings taken in various natural environments in Singapore. During the residency, the artist is working on new sound compositions and modes of listening that forge alternative connections between humans and nonhumans. He is also experimenting with drawing to create “visual scores” in response to his soundscapes.

Working with a comparative methodology, Valentina Karga intends to delve deep into theories of prehistoric matriarchal societies. Still at an early stage of development, her inquiry embraces multiple sources and ultimately aims to intertwine myths, histories, and political implications of matriarchal societies with the Anthropocene discourse, engaging theories on the posthuman condition that advance the understanding of the planet as a homeostatic system where all living and non-living organisms are connected and interdependent. Among her current sources of inspiration are Helen Diner’s seminal work for women’s cultural history, Mothers and Amazons, published in 1932; Marija Gimbutas’ notion of “archaeomythology” which blends archaeology, comparative mythology, and folklore; and Bruno Latour’s reading of the Gaia Hypothesis formulated by James Lovelock in the 1970s. During the residency, the artist aims to expand her understanding of feminine symbolism by researching prehistoric symbols and archaeological excavations in Southeast Asia.

The artistic practice of Valentina Karga (b. 1986, Greece) spans the fields of architecture, socially engaged art, and performance. Interested in creating alternatives to existing societal and pedagogical structures, Kargadesigns conceptual infrastructures that encourage engagement and participation to facilitate practices of commoning and sustainability. Her works have been presented at Athens Biennale, Greece (2013); transmediale, Berlin, Germany (2016); and the inaugural Thailand Biennale (2018-19). She is a founding member of Collective Disaster, an interdisciplinary, transnational, and nomadic community that works in the intersections of art, architecture, and the social realm and is currently Professor for introduction to artistic work in Design at HFBK Hamburg, Germany.

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

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

During her residency, Weber will be collaborating with Annie Seaton. Annie Seaton and Tamara Weber work together as Close Readings, a collaborative project of visually informed investigative research. Close Readings’ recent works explore selective multimedia deconstruction. Their process involves, first, making photographs—then turning those images into xeroxes (or) otherwise altering them. In Singapore and New York, they will be simultaneously and asynchronously researching in various media. Through a collaborative process of visual and text-based interaction, Annie and Tamara will create book-like objects that will serve as blueprints for further work.

Originally trained in film, in his artistic practice Kin Chui (b. 1984, Singapore) inflects collaborative projects, performative interventions, and socially-oriented art initiatives with a sustained interest in emancipatory struggles. Recently, he had a solo exhibition, Station 13010, at Grey Projects, Singapore (2020) and was involved in group exhibitions such as In A Hard Place, Apply Soft Pressure (2018) and Unsettling Times (2017), both at Cemeti-Institute for Art and Society, Yogyakarta, Indonesia. He curated the exhibition Fantasy Islands, Objectifs, Singapore (2017). Chui is an active member of soft/WALL/studs, a Singapore-based collaborative project involving several artists, writers, film makers, art workers, and researchers. He periodically aspires to be a cat.

In line with his multidisciplinary interests, during the residency Kartik Sood intends to engage with a local theatre actor or dance performer as well as research into local literature focusing on the issue of cultural coexistence in Singapore.

Blurring the boundaries between visual arts, dance, design, and technology, Choy Ka Fai’s multidisciplinary practice employs media such as video, interactive installation, sound, as well as choreography to explore the intangible and the material forces that condition the human body, often focusing on the intersection between technology, memory, and movement. Most recently he has developed Soft Machine, a dance research project, presented in several countries around the world, that maps the lexicon of Asian choreography as well as the possible futures of contemporary dance in Asia.

Choy Ka Fai (b. 1979, Singapore) lives and works in Berlin, Germany. He graduated from the Royal College of Art, London, United Kingdom, with a M.A. in Design Interaction. Between 2014 and 2015 he was in residence at Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Germany, and from 2007 to 2009, he was associate artistic director of TheatreWorks, Singapore. In 2010, he was conferred the Young Artist Award by the National Arts Council, Singapore. His projects have been presented in major festival worldwide, including Sadler’s Wells, London, United Kingdom (2016), ImPulsTanz Festival, Vienna, Austria (2015), and Tanz Im August, Berlin, Germany (2013 ,2015).

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

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

Over the last eight years, siren eun young jung (b. 1974, Korea) has been investigating and challenging cultural expectations and genre constructs in Korean society through the lens of Yeosung Gukgeuk, a traditional type of Korean theatre combining singing and dancing that reached its peak of popularity in the 1950s and 1960s, falling out of favour thereafter. While Yeosung Gukgeuk maintains the conventional roles of melodrama, it exclusively features women actors who perform all characters in an intense process of genre-shifting. Working across a wide range of mediums such as films, photographs, performances, and installations, the artist has produced several works, endowed with a lush visual imagery, that deeply engage the aging community of Yeosung Gukgeuk practitioners addressing issues of resistance, affect, and performativity.

siren eun young jung holds a M.F.A. in Painting from Ewha Womans University, Korea and an M.A. in Feminist Theory and Practice in the Visual Arts from the University of Leeds, United Kingdom. In 2015 she earned a doctoral degree in Fine Art from Ewha Womans University with a dissertation titled, “The Politics of Gender and the Aesthetics of Dissensus.” Her works have been included in numerous group exhibitions such as: Taipei Biennial 2016 Taiwan (2016); Discordant Harmony, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan (2015); 8th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, QAGOMA, Australia (2015); The Future is Now, MAXXI, Italy (2014); Something in space escapes our attempts at surveying, Württembergischer Kunstverein, Germany (2014). In 2013, she was awarded the Hermès Foundation Missulsang Prize.

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).

Marianna Simnett (b.1986, United Kingdom) lives and works in London. Her interdisciplinary practice includes video, installation, performance, sculpture and watercolour. Simnett uses vivid and visceral means to explore the body as a site of transformation. Working with animals, children, organs, and often performing herself, she imagines radical new worlds filled with untamed thoughts, strange tales, and desires. Simnett has shown in major museums internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include LAB RATS, Kunsthalle Zürich, Switzerland (2019), My Broken Animal, Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, Netherlands (2019), CREATURE, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia (2019), Blood In My Milk, New Museum, New York, United States (2018) among others. She is a joint winner of the Paul Hamlyn Award 2020, received the Jerwood / FVU Award in 2015, and was shortlisted for the Jarman Award in 2017.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sudarshan Chandra Kumar has performed for the Asian Meeting Festival (Singapore); CHOPPA Music Fest (Singapore); Playfreely (Singapore); KLEX Festival (Malaysia); and Switch On Festival (Malaysia). He participates regularly in Serious Play Improv Lab (SPIL), a monthly experimental music series in Kuala Lumpur. Together with Yong Yandsen and Tey Beng Tze, he established LaoBan Records in 2017, which released its first album clinamina for His Hubris, a duo by Sudarshan and Yong.

Dharma (b. 1969, Malaysia/Singapore) is the guitarist from The Observatory and presents his work as a solo improviser and in different configurations with other improvisers. Having toured Europe and Asia, The Resistance is his last solo work released in 2019 as a split cassette with Wukir Suryadi from Senyawa. The approach in his playing incorporates extended techniques with various preparations and effects, resulting in percussive and textural sonics that go beyond what one would expect of the instrument.

The Analog Girl started out as a lo-fi bedroom project using portable synthesisers and cassette tape recorders, having evolved into a universe of dreamlike technicolour pop. She creates and performs using a myriad of illuminating electronic instruments including the Tenori-On, Monome, and Percussa AudioCubes. She has been named by TIME magazine as one of 5 Music Acts To Watch in 2008.

Wu Jun Han is a visual art practitioner and experimental musician who lives and works from Singapore. His current practice primarily consists of fields such as VJ-ing, installation, audio/visual improvisation and various others. Recent credits include being part of “Fantasy Islands”, a group show at Objectifs gallery.

Uriel Barthélémi is a drummer, composer and electro-acoustic musician. His language combines percussion, performance, sound & video programming and composition. He infuses each of his projects with this polymorphic and multicultural dimension. His multifaceted identity is found in the musical works he generates, dense and unclassifiable. Following his studies at the conservatoires of Reims, La Courneuve, Montreuil, and Ircam, he embarked upon electro-acoustic compositional work. This has led him to collaborate in numerous areas of the performing arts from 2002 onwards: dance, marionettes, theater, as well as the visual arts.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Joel Stern (Australia) is a curator, researcher, and artist living and working on Wurundjeri land in Melbourne, Australia. Since 2013, Stern has been Artistic Director at Liquid Architecture, a leading organisation that creates spaces for sonic experience and critical listening at the intersection of contemporary art and experimental music.

James Parker (Australia) is an academic and curator based at Institute for International Law and Humanities at Melbourne Law School. His research focuses on the relations between law, sound and listening.

Sean Dockray (Australia) is an artist, writer, and programmer whose work explores the politics of technology, with a particular emphasis on artificial intelligences and the algorithmic web. He is also the founding director of the Los Angeles non-profit Telic Arts Exchange, and initiator of knowledge-sharing platforms, The Public School and Aaaaarg.

Nanthiyni Aravindan (Singapore) is studying Visual Communication at Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts. Her passion for illustration and painting has brought her to explore both traditional visual languages and digital techniques. Her artistic production revolves around zoological and mythical creatures. “The New Ordinary” a mix media work she produced in 2020 was selected as a finalist at the Crowbars Award.

Munir Alsagoff (Singapore), or MOON, has 20 years of performance experience as a guitarist and DJ. He is equally adept on the electric and acoustic guitar, and is greatly influenced by classical, jazz, soul, world and dance music. MOON has performed at festivals in Singapore and around the Asia-Pacific region like the renowned Java Jazz in Jakarta. MOON does live collaborations with DJs at venues such as CE LA VI, W Singapore, Zouk and local conscious event, Tropika, and is part of Beatroot, a global inspired music collective that fuses visuals, beats and live music elements into their performances.

Sivakumar Palakrishnan (Singapore) is an actor who has worked in television, film and theatre. Some of his theatrical credits include The Kalinga Trilogy (Miror Theatre) and We Are Like This Only! (HuM Theatre). He has received nominations at the Pradhana Vizha, Vasantham Channel’s Television awards, and won for his performance in Veethi Varai. Siva is recognized for his role in K Rajagopal’s A Yellow Bird, which premiered at the International Critics’ Week at the Cannes Film Festival in 2016. Currently, he is a cast member in Channel 5’s television drama series, Tanglin.

Bharathi Moorthiappan (Singapore) has a Masters Degree in Tamil and interested about teaching, learning, writing and speaking in the Tamil language. Bharathi pursues her passion through her Tamil education company where she encourages reading among her students. Bharathi is also an avid reader of books translated from other languages as a way to experience various cultures and travel the world.

Ashwinii Selvaraj (Singapore) is an undergraduate studying Political Science in the National University of Singapore. Her keen interest to write in the Tamil language have produced works that have been published in short story collections such as Akkarai Pachai (Greener Pastures). In addition to being a writer, she translates English articles for the Serangoon Times, a Tamil literary magazine published in Singapore. She has also won multiple awards and prizes including the Prime Minister’s Book Prize Award (2015) and National Poetry Festival competition (2015), as well first prize for the ASEAN-India Pravasi Bharathiya Divas Conference Tamil poetry competition (2018).

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

Mohamed Noor (Singapore) grew up in a musical family, and began his music career playing percussion at the age of 5 for a performance at The Victoria Theater. A multi-instrumentalist, Noor grew up playing the tabla, drums, mandolin, keyboards, clarinet, Indian karnatic flute and saxophone, to name a few. Noor currently plays more than 25 percussion instruments from around the world and has performed in many music festivals including the ASEAN Jazz Festival (Malaysia), Heineken Jazz Festival (Singapore), Big Bang Percussion Festival (London), Singapore Arts Festival, Penang Jazz, Jarusum International Jazz Festival, Nanning International Folk Song Festival, and the Tokyo International Performing Arts festival.

Ramesh Krishnan (Singapore) is a sound designer, music creative and DJ. Ramesh’s inception as a sound designer started in 2004 when he collaborated on Marseilles-based artist Mathieu Briand’s Derrière Le Monde Flottant at the Musée d’art Contemporain in Lyon. He ventured into exploring stimulation, play and perception with electronic music and technology. In 2009, he took on Quest for Immortality and Singapore 1960, exhibitions held at National Museum of Singapore in which he created original compositions by re-arranging historical recordings into experimental soundscapes. Krishnan received the President’s Design Award 2010 for Quest for Immortality.

Liquid Architecture is an Australian organisation for artists working with sound. LA investigates the sounds themselves, but also the ideas communicated about, and the meaning of, sound and listening.

Noor Effendy Ibrahim is an interdisciplinary arts practitioner based in Singapore. He received the Japan Chamber of Commerce and Industry Singapore Foundation Culture Award in 2007. Effendy was the Artistic Director of The Substation (2010 – 2015) and Teater Ekamatra (2001 – 2006). Effendy had also served on the Singapore National Arts Council (NAC) Board (2004 – 2006; 7th term) and was selected for the NAC Cultural Fellowship programme in 2014. In 2016, Effendy founded the independent non-profit performance art collective akulah BIMBO SAKTI, or I am the MAGIC BIMBO in Malay.

Effendy was a Senior Academic Staff at Republic Polytechnic from 2007 – 2010 and returned as an Associate Lecturer from 2017 – 2019. He has also taught part-time at LASALLE College of the Art, National Institute of Education – an institute of Nanyang Technological University, Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts and DigiPen Singapore. Effendy has programmed for the Neon Lights international music festival from 2015 – 2016, and the traditional dance festival Padang Tari (Field of Dance) in 2016 presented by the NAC. Effendy has over 20 years of interdisciplinary art-making experience.

Cheong Kah Kit is a visual artist based in Singapore. He graduated from Umeå Academy of Fine Art, Sweden in 2008. Kah Kit was affiliated with p-10, a Singapore independent curatorial team (2004-2006). In 2016, he co-founded Peninsular, an artist studio / project space in Singapore. Operating in-between the spaces of production and exhibition, Peninsular seeks intimate dialogue in meaning-making and artistic subjectivity between objects and viewers. He is also currently developing an oral history project with Singapore artists, curators, art historians and administrators. Kah Kit was Manager for Research at NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore between 2016-2018. Prior to that, he was Reference Art Librarian at the Lee Kong Chian Reference Library, National Library Singapore (2009-2015).

Nina Djekić (Ljubljana, 1989), based in Ljubljana and Singapore, graduated with a BA in choreography from School for New Dance Development SNDO and an MFA from Sandberg Instituut, both in Amsterdam.

Her work revolves around choreographic notions in exhibitionary settings. It looks at the psycho-somatic engagements between the artwork and the visitor as well as the affect the uncanny presence of artworks has on the relationship between the visitors themselves. It is important to her practice to think of those encounters as processual and time bound. Her latest work focuses on the sensuality of the gaze and the reconsideration of vision as felt perception.

George Chuais a multidisciplinary artist based in Singapore. Active since the late nineties, he works in the intersection between the body and sound. He has presented works in the form of physical theatre, performance art and sound installations. As an instigator and explorer of sound, he resists development in a singular style or genre. Apart from his solo work and performances, George’s collaborative interests include live sound improvisation, sound design for film and theatre, as well experimental strategies for soundtracks.

Reetu Sattar (Bangladesh) works in Dhaka and Berlin. Her interdisciplinary practice encompasses live performance, documentation and objects as archival memories in an effort to re-examine history and human perception. Her search of a new language as response to the empathetic mind reaches her to working inside seemingly impossible spaces, allowing for contents to be emergent rather than determined as the body negotiates repetition, disruption, meaning and memory. She has presented her work at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Liverpool Biennial, and Dhaka Art Summit, among many other venues. Her performances have been staged internationally at venues in London, Birmingham, Bangkok and Goa.

Jimmy Ong (Singapore/Indonesia) is an artist who currently works from his studios in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Jimmy Ong’s practice involves highly personal inquiries into bodily forms and queer(ed) identities, expanding into broader entanglements with regional myths, archetypes, traditions, and historical narratives.

Arahmaiani (Indonesia) is one of Indonesia’s most respected and pioneering artists in the field of performance art. From the 1980’s, she has performed in many public spaces — even during the rule of an oppressive military regime. Since then, she has engaged with issues about the environmental, politics, violence, critique of capital, the female body, and in recent years, with her own identity, which although Muslim, lays between Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, and animist beliefs. Her interactive performances have developed into a community-based practice, bringing attention to subjects prevalent in Indonesia and to issues of violence against the environment on the Tibetan Plateau.

Vivian Wang diverged from her formal training as a classical pianist when she started the avant-rock outfit The Observatory in 2001. A former TV producer-presenter as well as a film music supervisor, Wang focuses solely on music, performance, and interdisciplinary work since 2008. She performs on synth, keyboard, voice, and percussion, and tags Alice Coltrane, Robert Wyatt, Mark Hollis, Bill Evans, and Annapurna Devi as her all-time favourite musical heroes.

Galina Mihaleva (Bulgaria/Singapore) is Associate Professor at the School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University, where she teaches Technology, Art and Fashion. Her research investigates the physical and psychological relationship we have with garments or what she calls “wearable technology.” Mihaleva taught at Arizona State University for more than 15 years in costume design, where she often worked with renowned choreographers worldwide. She is the founder of Galina Couture in Scottsdale, Arizona where her team develops exclusive and unique collections making use of new materials. Mihaleva received the Rumi award in the US and won first place at Tiffany’s Paris Fashion Week, 2016.

Cheryl Ong (Singapore) is a percussionist active in performance and education and a regular member of the avant-rock group The Observatory. In recent years she has been exploring improvisational and experimental practices for her music, while hunting down new ideas and sounds. Her recent performances include All Ears,Festival (2020, Norway) and AngelicA Festival (2019, Bologna) in a duo with Vivian Wang. Ong participated as a musician for the dance performance by Pichet Klunchun x Wu-kang Chen at Behalf (2019, UCC, Singapore). Her solo composition Hejira was used in Yeo Siew Hua’s award winning film, A Land Imagined.

Denim Szram (Poland/Switzerland) a sound and media artist, whose artistic work oscillates between music production, performance, multimedia installations and immersive sound compositions. As an electronic musician he creates compositions for spaces, dance and theatre. An expert in the field of 3D audio and uses this for his acoustic scenography, he expands sound with other media and creates audio visual systems and musical interfaces to explore expression with new technology. His work has been shown internationally and institutions like ZKM Karlsruhe, House of electronic arts in Basel, and the Audio Art Festival Krakow.

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

Andrew S Yang (United States) works across the visual arts, sciences, and history to explore emerging ecologies of the Anthropocene. Yang’s work has been exhibited from Oklahoma to Yokohama, including the 14th Istanbul Biennial (2015), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2016), the Spencer Museum of Art (2019), and the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History (2020). His writing and research can be found in Art Journal, Leonardo, Biological Theory, and Antennae. He is an Associate Professor in the Liberal Arts Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a research associate at the Field Museum of Natural History.

Christa Donner (United States) is an artist, writer, and organiser who investigates anatomy and its metaphors. Donner employs a range of artistic media in her creative research, including drawing, audio performance, large-scale installations and small-press publications that create multi-layered, community-centred but intimate projects. Her creative research focuses on the human and non-human body as a site for conflict and adaptation: from the internal activities of the microbiome to the creative potentials of care work and community. She is currently an adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Contemporary Practices at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Joyce Bee Tuan Koh (Singapore) composes concert music and creates sound installations and multi-media works. Versatile and collaborative, Joyce has a wealth of experience working with musicians, choreographers, theatre-makers, artists, writers, philosophers, filmmakers, and architects. Originating from her interests in architecture and interdisciplinarity, her work explores notions of sonic canvas, space, and theatre of music. As described by the International Piano Quarterly, her sound world “engages the intellect and requires a different approach”. Her works have been presented at international festivals notably, International Computer Music Conferences, International Symposium on Electronic Arts, World Stage Design, Biennale Musiques France, Sir Henry Wood Promenade UK, Melbourne Arts Festival, Sydney InsideOut Festival, Singapore Arts Festival, Singapore Dan:s Festival, and Soundislands Festival.

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

Collaborative and experimental by nature, Free Jazz III builds upon its past iterations by activating and challenging common understandings of exhibition-making and the use of space. Sound walks. Machines listen. We are living through unusual times.

As the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore approaches a major transformation away from a permanent exhibition space in early 2021, Free Jazz III continues to explore the possibilities of an international research centre for contemporary art, featuring many artists who have been part of NTU CCA Singapore’s exhibitions, residencies, and programs since 2013, when the Centre presented Free Jazz as its inaugural event. The project began as a form of inquiry and an active tool to generate new possibilities for conceptualizing and programming an art institution. Free Jazz III convenes diverse projects united by themes of adaptation via masterful improvisation, trans-mediatic pivots, and the conscious renegotiation of our relationships to nature, technology, and each other. The disparate components of Free Jazz III explore the elements of dissonance, resistance, and innovation embedded in its musical namesake and the ability for sound and art to transcend physical and social distance. Embracing sound and walking as two powerful ways to overcome distance and bring people together, Free Jazz III comprises projects that can take place in non-gallery spaces, independently, asynchronously, or in purposeful syncopation with the present moment, reflecting on the past and looking forward to the future.

Admission to all programmes and events is free.

Sound. Walks.
January–March 2021 (On-site and online)

Reflecting on the loss of physicality through increased virtual interactions as well as many histories of sound and walking, artists address common life and communality in times of social distancing. In this series of performative explorations of sound, music, and community building, reflections take the form of soundwalks, sonic wayfinding and other physical and aural experiences, offering multiple ways for the public to actively witness, listen and participate, both remotely and on-site. Soundwalks by Tini Aliman (Singapore), Christa Donner and Andrew S Yang (United States), and Diana Lelonek (Poland) and Denim Szram (Poland/Switzerland) are propelled by sonic outputs of nature. Storytelling, correspondence, and the impossibility of direct communication factor into projects by Cheryl Ong (Singapore), Ana Prvački (Romania/Germany) in collaboration with Joyce Bee Tuan Koh (Singapore) and Galina Mihaleva (Bulgaria/Singapore), and Vivian Wang (Singapore/Switzerland). Sound, history, culture, and space overlap and intertwine in works by Arahmaiani (Indonesia) and Jimmy Ong (Singapore), bani haykal (Singapore) and Lee Weng Choy (Malaysia), Reetu Sattar (Bangladesh), and anGie Seah (Singapore).

Free Jazz III. Sound. Walks. is curated by Magdalena Magiera (Germany/Singapore), NTU CCA Singapore Curator, Education and Outreach, and Dr Karin Oen (United States/Singapore), NTU CCA Singapore Deputy Director, Curatorial Programmes

Under the Skin
1 December 2020 – 31 January 2021 (Online)

World premiere and special performance
1 December 2020, 7pm SGT

This trio of performative works by artists George Chua (Singapore), Nina Djekić (Slovenia/Singapore/Netherlands), and Noor Effendy Ibrahim (Singapore) engages with sound, bodily movements, and performance. These new pieces are cinematically translated into the medium of video by filmmaker Russell Morton (Singapore) and viewed online, acknowledging the curatorial premise that, “the pandemic has pushed us into a space of dramatic convergence—where a deep tech, hyper-connected future collides with social political unrest,” in both the work itself and the medium in which it is presented.

Under the Skin is curated for Free Jazz III by artist Cheong Kah Kit (Singapore) as part of Proposals for Novel Ways of Being, a united response to the changes brought about by COVID-19 hosted by twelve Singapore arts institutions, initiated by the National Gallery Singapore and Singapore Art Museum.

Partner programmes:

Machine Listening, a curriculum
From October 2020 (Online)

Expanded collaborations and explorations of curatorial spaces also took form in support of Machine Listening, a curriculum instigated by Melbourne-based Liquid Architecture. This evolving online resource, comprising existing and newly commissioned writing, interviews, music and artworks is a new investigation and experiment in collective learning around the emergent field of machine listening. It premiered with three online sessions open to all as part of Unsound 2020: Intermission, an experimental sound festival in Krakow, Poland. NTU CCA Singapore and Liquid Architecture will convene another collaborative online session open to the public in early 2021.

Machine Listening, a curriculum is curated by Sean Dockray, Dr James Parker, and Joel Stern (all Australia).

Visit the evolving open source curriculum and the recorded Unsound sessions:

(Against) the coming world of listening machines
Lessons in How (Not) to be Heard
Listening with the Pandemic

Sollum Swaramum
26 February 2021, 7.30 – 9.00pm
On-Site at Blk 43 Malan Road

Presented in collaboration with The Arts House’s Poetry with Music series, the 4th edition of Sollum Swaramum, brings together musicians Ramesh Krishnan, Mohamed Noor and Munir Alsagoff in exploration of the synergies between music and text, with devised and improvised texts based on the work of Tamil literary stalwarts P Krishnan, Ma Ilangkannnan and Rama Kannabiran. These newly devised texts are written by Harini V, Ashwinii Selvarai and Bharathi Moorthiappan, performed by Sivakumar Palakrishnan, and art direction by Laura Miotto.

Curated by Magdalena Magiera, Curator, Outreach and Education, and Dr. Karin Oen, Deputy Director, Curatorial Programmes, NTU CCA Singapore.

Free Jazz III. Sound. Walks. presented in partnership with Proposals for Novel Ways of Being, The Arts House, Liquid Architecture, as part of Singapore Art week, supported by National Arts Council.

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

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.

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

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

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.

anGie seah’s multidisciplinary practice traverses the mediums of drawing, sculpture, performance art, installation, sound and video. Seah allows spontaneity and intuition to navigate a range of shifting emotional resonances and psychological states. Experimenting with articulations of spoken language, she searches for authentic expression and primal beauty. For more than a decade, she has been working with diverse communities on participatory projects. Since 1997 anGie has exhibited widely including at ZKM Centre for New Media, Germany; Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan; and the Palais de Tokyo, France; as well as at NTU CCA Singapore and the Singapore Biennale.

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

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

Tarek Atoui studied contemporary and electronic music at the French National Conservatory of Reims. He navigates between the vocabularies and aesthetics of the visual arts, performing arts, and music, redefining contemporary composition and sound production. In 2012, Atoui launched Serpentine Gallery’s Memory Marathon event in London with a five-hour performance that blended influences of traditional Arabic music with contemporary genres including electronic and hip-hop. He was co-artistic director of the Bergen Assembly 2016, a triennial in Norway. Recent projects have taken place at the Tate Modern, London (2016); Fondation Louis Vuitton, Bois de Boulogne (2015); Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm (2013); and Norbergfestival (2013). Selected exhibitions include Art or Sound, Fondazione Prada, Ca’ Corner della Regina, Venice (2014); Within, Sharjah Biennial 11 (2013); Metastable Circuit, la Lutherie and Dimis Reconnected, dOCUMENTA 13, Kassel (2012). His work has been part of biennials including the Marrakech Biennale (2016); 8th Berlin Biennial (2014); 9th Biennale do Mercosul, Porto Alegre (2013); and the 9th and 11th Sharjah Biennial (2009/13).

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

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

NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (NTU CCA Singapore) is pleased to present the first solo exhibition in Southeast Asia by sound artist and composer Tarek Atoui, conceived as a composition that unfolds in space with its unique sound library and instruments. It is the first large-scale exhibition that Atoui has created through interweaving objects, instruments, and recordings, some borrowed from pre-existing projects, others newly collected and produced.

The Ground: From the Land to the Sea comprises two layers of auditory experiences that interact with each other as well as with the spatial and sonic qualities of NTU CCA Singapore’s exhibition hall, merging them into a single composition. Enveloping the main exhibition space are a set of speakers that play the sounds of underwater environments as well as human and industrial activities in the harbours of Athens and Abu Dhabi, recorded for the project I/E (2015–ongoing). Building upon the sound collection, Atoui has, as part of this presentation in Singapore, recorded at local harbours and waterfronts, together with composer and sound artist Éric La Casa.

The recording process in Singapore took Atoui and La Casa to a range of waterfront sites and islands including the Jurong Fishery Port, Pulau Sebarok (an oil storage facility and refuelling port off the Southern coastline), on an oil tanker, and along the Singapore shores. During these trips, the duo picked out acoustic features of these environs, both underwater and on land, and captured them in their diverse forms—as vibrations, audible noise, and inaudible audio waves, etc.— using devices such as a recorder, a hydrophone, contact microphones, and selfmade omnidirectional microphones. Drawing reference to the emergence of acoustic ecology, which attempts to understand and analyse characteristics of sonic environments such as geological formations, organisms, and human interactions, Atoui’s auditory library is an artistic interpretation of the ecology of our times. Set within a “white cube,” the audience is transposed into an immersive audio-visual topography, becoming part of the installation.

Most of the instruments shown are part of The Ground project, the result of the artist’s five-year-long investigation of natural cycles in the Pearl River Delta, first presented at Mirrored Gardens, a project space in Guangzhou, China, in 2017. Also presented are instruments created for previous projects, such as The Reverse Collection (2014–16) and WITHIN (2012–13). This ensemble of unusual instruments is enriched with new additions, including a set of porcelain and ceramic discs, on which traditional Arabic rhythms are engraved, and a customised record player that rotates at irregular speeds, never reading a disc the same way twice.

At the core of Atoui’s practice lies an ongoing process of inviting composers, musicians, and artists to collaborate on his pieces in search of new ideas, gestures, and experiences. For the current exhibition, Atoui will engage with local and international musicians who will be invited to appropriate his composition and intervene in the exhibition space. He will work with acclaimed sound artists and musicians Vivian Wang and Yuen Chee Wai, as well as music curator Mark Wong, who in turn will invite other musicians and sound artists to inhabit the installation throughout the course of the exhibition.

The exhibition is curated by Ute Meta Bauer, Founding Director, NTU CCA Singapore, and Professor, School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University, and Khim Ong, Deputy Director, Curatorial Programmes, NTU CCA Singapore. Supported by Institut français, with the additional support of the Embassy of France in Singapore and Institut français Singapour.

Tarek Atoui has invited local and international musicians to engage with his exhibition and appropriate the installation for given periods of time. He worked with acclaimed sound artists and musicians Vivian Wang and Yuen Chee Wai, as well as music curator Mark Wong, who each will host three other musicians and sound artists. The guests will inhabit the exhibition and freely experiment with Atoui’s instruments throughout the course of the exhibition. Schedule for upcoming Guest Musicians in the Exhibition Hall: Vivian Wang (Singapore): 26 – 30 March Yuen Chee Wai (Singapore): 31 March – 3 April Darren Ng (Singapore): 7 – 10 April Uriel Barthélémi (France): 13 – 17 April Tini Aliman (Singapore): 28 April – 1 May Wu Junhan (Singapore): 2 – 5 May The Analog Girl (Singapore): 10 – 13 May Cheryl Ong (Singapore): 19 – 22 May Zai Tang (Singapore): 31 May – 3 June Bani Haykal (Singapore): 4 – 7 June Dharma (Singapore): 13 – 16 June Sudarshan Chandra Kumar (Malaysia): 19 – 22 June

Éric La Casa has worked in the field of sound creation since the early 1990s through recording, record production, installation, radio, and various types of written publications. Through his aesthetic of capturing sound, his work fits equally into the fields of sound art and music, offering an interesting critical approach to the practice of sound landscape, and questioning our listening methods and schemes. He has recently examined the sound dimension of public spaces and the places in which we spend our private and domestic lives in the context of the project entitled Habiter, and the relation between waiting and listening in L’attente. La Casa collaborated with Tarek Atoui on recording the harbour of Abu Dhabi in 2017 and of Singapore in 2018 for the I/E project.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Billy Tang (China/United Kingdom) is Senior Curator, Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai.

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.

Dr Daniel Mann (Israel/United Kingdom) is a London-based writer and filmmaker. Mann’s writing has been published with journals such as Screen, Media Culture & Society and World Records. His forthcoming book, titled “Occupying Habits: Media and Warfare in Israel-Palestine”, will be out next year with Bloomsbury Press. His films have been exhibited at The Berlinale, The Rotterdam Film Festival, Cinéma du Réel, Hong Kong Film Festival and the ICA in London. Mann earned his PhD from the Media Department and the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths. Currently, he is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Film Studies Department at King’s College London.

Iris Dressler (Germany) is with Hans D. Christ the director of the Württembergischer Kunstverein (WKV) in Stuttgart since 2005. One of her focuses is on the exploration of collaborative, transcultural and transdisciplinary practices of curating. In 2019 Dressler and Christ were the artistic directors of the Bergen Assmebly, a triennial for contemporary arts in Norway. At the Kunstverein she presented solo exhibitions of artists such as Lorenza Böttner (curated by Paul B. Preciado), Imogen Stidworthy (2018), Alexander Kluge (2020 and 2017), Ines Doujak (2016), Pedro G. Romero (2012), Teresa Burga (2011, curated by Miguel Lopez and Emilio Tarazona), Michaël Borremans (2011), Daniel G. Andújar (2008), Anna Oppermann (2007, curated by Ute Vorkoeper), or Stan Douglas (2007). Recent group exhibitions include Actually, the Dead Are Not Dead (since 2019 in Bergen and Stuttgart with various constellations of co-curators), 50 Years after 50 Year of the Bauhaus (2018), Tito’s Bunker (2017, with Biennial of Contemporary Art Sarajevo, at Tito’s Bunker in Konjic and WKV), The Beast and the Sovereign (2016, with MACBA, Paul B. Preciado and Valentín Roma with at WKV and MACBA) or Acts of Voicing (2012, with a core group of twelve cocurators). Dressler teaches regularly at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Stuttgart and elsewhere. She largely published texts on contemporary art and its political and theoretical contexts. In 1996 she founded with Hans D. Christ the Hartware Medienkunstverein, which they directed till 2004.

Dr Philippa Lovatt (Scotland) is a Lecturer in Film Studies at University of St Andrews. Her research focusses on artists’ moving image, sound, eco-cinema, and independent film and video cultures in Southeast Asia. She is currently writing a monograph on the politics of sound and listening in artists’ film and is also working on an oral history project with Jasmine Nadua Trice: “Parallel Practices: Oral Histories of Southeast Asian Film and Video Cultures.” She has edited two dossiers for Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (“Theorizing Region: Film and Video Cultures in Southeast Asia” co-edited with Trice) and Screen (“Tracing the Anthropocene in Southeast Asian Cinemas” with Graiwoot Chulphongsathorn) both forthcoming in 2021. She has previously published her research in Screen; Sound, Music and the Moving Image; The New Soundtrack, SoundEffects, and Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia.

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.

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.

Larys Frogier (France/China) is the Director of the Rockbund Art Museum (RAM) in Shanghai since 2012. As a curator, critic and art historian, he is involved in artistic and social challenges in post-global contexts where ongoing social, economic, cultural transformations demand new ways of interrelations, citizenship and reinvented creativity. Since 2013 he is the Chair of the HUGO BOSS ASIA ART jury and he conceived this new award, exhibition and research programme as an evolving platform to question Asia as a construction to investigate rather than a monolithic area or fixed identities. Frogier is also engaged in sound, music, image and text creation under the artist name Ocean. He is the co-founder of Wavz with Alfie Chua.

Lee Wenwas awarded the Cultural Medallion of Singapore in 2009. He entered the art scene comparatively late in the ‘80s, but quickly gained attention. His early practice was associated with The Artists Village in Singapore and later forged a more individuated artistic career. Lee Wen has been exploring different strategies of time-based and performance art since 1989. He helped initiate both R.I.T.E.S. (Rooted In The Ephemeral Speak) (2009-) and Future of Imagination (2003-), an international performance art event. Since 2012, he has taken an active interest in the memory of Singapore’s performance art history through the initiation of the Independent Archive. Recent group exhibitions include SUNSHOWER: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia 1980s to Now, The National Arts Centre and Mori Art Museum, Japan (2017), Secret Archipelago, Palais de Tokyo, France (2015) and a solo show at the Singapore Art Museum (2012). Lee Wen was an NTU CCA Singapore Artist-in-Residence from August 2014 to February 2015.

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).

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 Wong has been active in experimental music, sonic arts and independent music practice in the last decade, playing multiple roles as organiser, programmer, artist, curator, writer, and label producer. His sound compositions, site-specific works, sound walks, sound objects, and multi-channel installations have been exhibited at Singapore Art Museum, 8Q@SAM, Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, Jendela (Visual Arts Space), and Yavuz Gallery. In 2010, Wong conceived Ujikaji as a music label and event organiser with a focus on experimental music in Singapore and Southeast Asia.

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.

Dr Nicolas Helm-Grovas (Spain/United Kingdom) is Lecturer in Film Studies Education at King’s College London. He completed a PhD on the films and writings of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen at Royal Holloway, University of London in 2018. His writing has appeared in Moving Image Review & Art Journal, Radical Philosophy and Oxford Art Journal (forthcoming in the latter) and in edited collections. With Oliver Fuke he is co-curator of a series of interrelated exhibitions on Mulvey and Wollen: ‘Art at the Frontier of Film Theory’ (Peltz Gallery, London, 2019), ‘A is for Avant-Garde, Z is for Zero’ (Cooper Gallery, Dundee, 2020) and ‘Intersections in Theory, Film and Art’ (GAK Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst, Bremen, 2021, forthcoming).

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.

Rosalia Namsai Engchuan (Germany/Thailand) is a social anthropologist and filmmaker based between Berlin and Southeast Asia. Her PhD research at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany looks at practices of community filmmaking in Indonesia, investigating how cinematic epistemologies produce and socialize knowledges. Her latest video work Complicated Happiness is a speculative research, pivoting around the Thai Park in Berlin, that aims to undo the underlying structures of colonialism, race, gender and class that shape the production of our worlds. Rosalia curates screenings and dialogical encounters with a focus on independent and experimental works from locales of the ‘epistemological’ South, often in collaboration with the Berlin based collective un.thai.tled and she is the 2021 Goethe-Institut fellow at Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin.

The cross-media practice of Rossella Biscotti (b. 1978, Italy/Belgium/Netherlands) cuts across sculpture, performance,sound works, and filmmaking. Stemming from extended research processes, conceptual excavations,personal encounters, interdisciplinary collaborations, and the subtle interrogation of sites and stories,her works encapsulate meticulous stratifications of materials and meanings. She has taken part in majorinternational exhibitions such as Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh (2020); 55th Venice Biennale, Italy (2013); 13th Istanbul Biennale, Turkey(2013); dOCUMENTA 13, Kassel, Germany (2012), and Manifesta 9, Belgium (2012). Recent soloexhibitions were held at Witte de With, Rotterdam, Netherlands (2019); Kunsthaus Baselland, Muttenz,Switzerland (2018), and V‚A‚C Foundation, Moscow, Russia (2016). Biscotti received several awards including ACACIA Prize for Contemporary Art (2017) and Mies van der Rohe Stipendium (2013).

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.

Silke Schmickl (Germany/Hong Kong) was previously curator at the National Gallery Singapore, the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, a researcher at the German Art History Center in Paris and the co-founding director of Lowave, a Paris/Singapore based curatorial platform and publishing house for artists’ moving images. She has initiated and directed numerous art and film projects dedicated to emerging art scenes in the Middle East, Africa, India, Turkey and Singapore. Recent exhibitions at the National Gallery include include Minimalism: Light. Space. Object, Rirkrit Tiravanija: untitled 2018 (the infinite dimensions of smallness) and Haegue Yang: Forum for Drone Speech – Singapore Simulations.

Tejal Shah is an artist whose practice incorporates video, photography, performance, drawing, sound, and educational workshops. Their work unselfconsciously manifests “the inappropriate/d other” within a feminist and queer framework, and often challenges normative social hegemonies. They are interested in the intersections of art, ecology, and non-duality and their relationship to consciousness. Shah obtained a BA in Photography from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne, and is currently pursuing an MA in Nalanda Buddhist philosophy.

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.

Zai Tang (b. 1984, United Kingdom) is an artist, composer, and sound designer based in Singapore. Employing a wide range of analogue and digital technologies, his practice experiments with different ways to translate the audible in visual phenomena. Recent exhibitions and collaborations include 2nd Yinchuan Biennale, China (2018); Resident Frequencies, National Gallery Singapore (2017); Railtrack Songmaps, Gillman Barracks, Singapore (2016); SOUND: Latitudes & Attitudes, Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore (2014). Tang participated as a guest musician to Tarek Atoui‚ exhibition The Ground: From the Land to the Sea, NTU CCA Singapore (2018).

Free Jazz, NTU CCA Singapore’s inaugural programme brings together artists, curators, art critics and scholars to imagine and contribute to the thinking and envisioning of the potentials for this new Centre for Contemporary Art in Singapore. As the title suggests, Free Jazz is about improvisation, the ability to listen, to respond and engage into a less prescribed and controlled environment. Improvisation stands for a form of inquiry that can become an active tool to generate new possibilities for conceptualising and programming art institutions. Free Jazz at NTU CCA Singapore presents a series of paired presentations and juxtaposes different approaches into a single platform as a playful way to encourage conversational and performative interactions that can take spontaneous, fluid, unplanned moves.