Coastal communities and island populations, such as those in Singapore and Bintan, are increasingly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, particularly sea level rise. Coral reefs play a critical role as natural breakwaters, aiding to defend against coastal erosion. However, their survival is threatened by the implications of Singapore’s urbanisation on Bintan —through economic and touristic development—, alongside overfishing, rising sea temperatures, and the potential runoff impacts of industrial developments such as petrochemical plants. The lecture opens with a presentation by Professor Ute Meta Bauer (School of Art, Design and Media, NTU) on sea-based livelihoods in the Riau Archipelago and features lectures by coral restoration diver Rudi (Bintan Black Coral Dive) and Associate Professor Peter Todd, (Experimental Marine Ecology Laboratory, NUS; Director, Tropical Marine Science Institute, NUS) , with a response by Dr Karenne Tun (Director, Coastal and Marine Branch, National Biodiversity Centre, NParks) and moderated by Associate Professor Laura Miotto (School of Art, Design and Media, NTU). The session explores current coral restoration projects initiated by Rudi in Bintan, including nature-based solutions, highlighting their significance for coastal communities reliant on reef coastlines for their livelihood. Returning to urban Singapore, Associate Professor Todd will discuss eco-engineered seawalls that function as surrogates for natural habitats, supporting coral growth while simultaneously serving as coastal defense structures against rising tides. 

Tuesday Lecture 

26 August 2025, 6:30pm – 8:00pm 

The Hall, NTU CCA, Blk 6 Lock Road, #01-10 Gillman Barracks, Singapore 108934 

Register here

The Climate Transformation: Sustainable Societies Series is organised by members of the Climate Transformation Programme (CTP) Cross-Cutting Theme 1: Sustainable Societies research team, Senior Principal Investigator Professor Ute Meta Bauer, research fellow Joshua Vince Gebert, research associate Ng Mei Jia and research assistant AngelaRicasio Hoten.  

Sustainable Societies  
Senior Principal Investigator, Professor Ute Meta Bauer (NTU ADM)   
Principal Investigator, Associate Professor Laura Miotto (NTU ADM)   
Principal Investigator, Professor Dr Thomas Schroepfer (SUTD) 

This Lecture Series is supported by the Singapore Ministry of Education Academic Research Fund Tier 3 grant [MOE-MOET32022-0006] for the Climate Transformation Programme. 

As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly embedded in the systems that shape our world, its growing environmental impact cannot be ignored. This lecture brings into focus the often-overlooked environmental costs of AI: the vast energy consumption required to train and operate large-scale models, the expanding carbon footprint of data centres, and broader planetary implications. In this critical conversation, speculative architect and filmmaker Liam Young draws from his recent work The Great Endeavour (2023) in which he presents his vision of infrastructures capable of removing atmospheric CO₂ at scale. Framing climate mitigation as a monumental design challenge, his film imagines the largest machines ever conceived, inviting us to think in planetary terms and confront the climate crisis not just as a technical problem but a deeply imaginative one. In dialogue with him is Professor Weisi Lin, whose research advances machine-learning approaches for climate science. Moderated by Professor Ute Meta Bauer, this lecture brings together speculative design and cutting-edge AI research, inviting us to examine the environmental costs of intelligence and imagine sustainable futures. 

Tuesday Lecture 

16 September 2025
6:30pm – 8:00pm 
The Hall, NTU CCA Singapore

Free with Registration

Register here

The Climate Transformation: Sustainable Societies Series is organised by members of the Climate Transformation Programme (CTP) Cross-Cutting Theme 1: Sustainable Societies research team, Senior Principal Investigator Professor Ute Meta Bauer, research fellow Joshua Gebert, research associate Ng Mei Jia and research assistant Angela Ricasio Hoten

Sustainable Societies 
Senior Principal Investigator, Professor Ute Meta Bauer (NTU ADM)  
Principal Investigator, Associate Professor Laura Miotto (NTU ADM)  
Principal Investigator, Professor Dr Thomas Schroepfer (SUTD) 

This Lecture Series is supported by the Singapore Ministry of Education Academic Research Fund Tier 3 grant [MOE-MOET32022-0006] for the Climate Transformation Programme.  

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 EnvironmentNTU 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
Climate Crisis and Cultural Loss Logo Bar

The Climate Transformation Programme (CTP)—Cross Cutting Theme 1: Sustainable Societies, under which Professor Ute Meta Bauer serves as Senior Principal Investigator (Advisory Panel), consists of a suite of programmes that form a synergistic relay of interdisciplinary research and external outreach. The initiatives aim to cultivate a critical multiplicity of voices, perspectives, knowledges from both within and outside academic realms in the formation of ‘Sustainable Societies’ that engage with questions of climate change.

The Climate Transformation Programme is led by Professor Adam Switzer (Professor, Asian School of the Environment, Nanyang Technological University). The CTP aims to develop, inspire and accelerate knowledge-based solutions and educate future leaders to establish the stable climate and environment necessary for resilient, just, and sustainable Southeast Asian societies.

Key Research Outputs

Climate Transformation: Sustainable Societies Lecture Series Cycle 1 and 2
Climate Transformation Tuesday Gatherings Cycle 1 and 2

NTU EOS Logo

Course Details

Date: 10 September 2022, Saturday 
Time: 10:00am – 12:00pm
Venue: NTU CCA Singapore, Block 6 Lock Road, Gillman Barracks, Singapore 108934
Course Fee: $85.60 (incl. GST), per adult/child pair

For enquiries, please email ntuccaeducation@ntu.edu.sg

About The Course

Edible Wild is a 2-hour workshop aimed at bringing parents and their children closer to nature. Despite the greenery that surrounds us in our concrete jungle, it is easy to overlook the plants that flank our sidewalks. As the world moves at an ever-increasing pace, we need the occasional reminder to slow down and reconnect with the earth – and one of the best ways to do so is to learn how to care for it.

This workshop is a gentle introduction to the myriad of herbs – both common and uncommon – that can be found growing around our garden city, as well as a chance to understand their history and uses. Participants will learn simple plant identification techniques, understand the structure of a plant, as well as pick up basic gardening skills that they can use at home. The overall goal is to renew a sense of wonder in our green companions, while providing the skills to identify and care for them.

At The End of the Course, You Will…

● Learn how to identify edible local plants from The Farm at NTU CCA Singapore
● Learn general plant identification techniques (leaf shape, flowers, stem structure etc.)
● Pick up basic gardening techniques to grow and care for your own edible greens (proper watering, checking/enriching the soil, checking for pests, pruning & propagation)
● Create simple infusions with ingredients from the garden

Target Audience

Parent/child groups where the children are 7 years old and above.

Entanglements – Writing The Environment 

Course Details

Date: 21, 22, 24 & 25 Feb 2022 
Time:  9:00am – 4:00pm
Location: NTU CCA Singapore, The Seminar Room, Block 37 Malan Road, Singapore 109452
Course Fee: $856 (inc. GST) Skillsfuture credits applicable for Singaporeans.

Registration has closed. 

For enquiries please email ntuccaeducation@ntu.edu.sg

About the Course

Entanglements – Writing the Environment is a 4-day course which offers participants the opportunity to develop their writing skills and interests in ways that promote and illustrate environmental awareness, concerns, and sensitivities.

Participants will explore diverse issues of the environment captured in writing through experimenting with a variety of writing forms from the glossary definition, annotations, essay, review, poetry, short fiction and novel.

The course format will include examination of literary texts related to environmental themes, class discussions, as well as writing and editing practice to texts produced throughout the course.

By the end of this course, participants will have a new literary appreciation and increased confidence in writing about the natural world. Join us in the sandbox of literature to explore new ideas, experiment with language, and arrange words in new and exciting ways with like-minded individuals.

What You Will Learn 

1. To understand different formats of writing and writing conventions that can be applied to other facets of daily life.

2. To integrate environmental concerns in writing of fiction and non-fiction. 

3. To identify and analyse developments in the field of environmental literature through the study of specific works.

4. To develop a personal style of writing by connecting ideas and creating an effective narrative.

Who Should Sign Up

Artists, Cultural Producers, Curators, Researchers, Educators, Naturalists, Editors, Art Critics, Budding Writers or someone who simply enjoys writing 

JASON WEE AND ANCA RUJOIU, ENTANGLEMENTS – WRITING THE ENVIRONMENT. COURTESY NTU CCA SINGAPORE

Concepts of Concern – A Lexicology of Ecology

Course Details

Date: Monday, 6 December 2021 
Time: 7 – 10 pm
Delivery Mode: Online
Standard Course Fees: SGD 90.95 (inc. GST)

REGISTER HERE.

For enquiries please email ntuccaeducation@ntu.edu.sg

About the Course

Concepts of Concern – A Lexicology of Ecology is a survey of terminology in social, cultural and political ecology. Old and new terms such as recycle, sustainable, green, renewable, biomass, climate change, carbon footprint, global warming or anthropocene constitute what can be called concepts of concern. They are used to propose solutions to waste, advance environmental justice and imagine new worlds, but also to justify new forms of resource extraction, industrial production and economic globalisation as necessarily eco-centric.

The 3-hour online course traces the evolution of specific eco-centric terms and their corollary discourses since the global environmental movements of the 1960s, and examines a lexicology of ecology as a springboard to engage the emerging and heterogeneous field of ecocriticism. This course will also discuss several artistic responses that operate outside the bounds of terminological discourses and its trappings.   

This course is divided into three main sections:

Part 1: Overview of dominant terminology in social/cultural/political ecology since the 1960s.

Part 2: Critical examination of selected terms, such as their use in corporate propaganda and political narratives.

Part 3: Survey of non-terminological/artistic responses to the crisis of ecology. 

Your Course Instructor

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

Open College programmes are offered on 2 tracks; Discovery and Immersive Series. Discovery Series programmes are short exploratory courses that allow participants to explore topics outside their usual fields of interest, and acquire basic knowledge and skillsets that may be transferrable to other areas of study and work. By contrast, Immersive Seriesprogrammes are more in-depth and led by professional educators, researchers and critical thinkers in their fields of expertise. Through a blend of practical projects and discussions to stimulate critical thinking and dialogue, participants will deep dive into a subject matter and gain new perspectives.

Inspired by Cosmorama (2018), one of four sections in the exhibition Design Earth: Speculative Fiction for the Climate, this third Drawing Club invites artists, architects, designers, and students to respond to the geostories of asteroid mining, orbital debris, and climate refuge in the age of the “New Space.”

The workshop zooms in on architectural drawing as practice to examine planetary issues such as satellite debris and airspace conflicts, that may seem distant from us. Participants will trace the macrocosmic consequences of extractive economies and of their politics beyond Singapore, and beyond the Earth itself, launching critical conversations into speculative drawings.

The annotated sketches produced during the workshop will be displayed at the NTU ADM Foyer until 13 August 2025, alongside the works produced at the previous Drawing Club.

Participants are encouraged to bring dry drawing media (markers, found images, etc) and reading references (articles, books, etc) to share, annotate, and get inspiration from during the session. No technical drawing experience needed.

This workshop is facilitated by Eunice Lacaste, Programmes Associate, NTU CCA Singapore.

REGISTER

DATE: Thursday, 7 August 2025. 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm

VENUE: ADM Gallery 2, NTU School of Art, Design and Media, 81 Nanyang Dr, Singapore 637458

EXHIBITION DATES: Open by appointment from 14 June to 15 August 2025

GALLERY HOURS: Monday to Friday: 10:00am to 5:00pm. Saturday: By appointment only. Closed on Sunday and Public Holidays

BOOKING EMAIL: ADMgallery@ntu.edu.sg

This special issue strings together authorial perspectives from across disciplines and geographies that are concerned with topics at the nexus of the climate crisis and the links to cultural loss. This issue points to the needed legal approaches within the wider context of the Pacific. Writers include researcher Jake Atienza, artist Stefano Cagol, art critic and curator Maria Chiara Wang, law scholar Johanna Gussman, researcher Shabana Khan, climate advisor Renard Siew, computer scientist Nova Ahmad, and artist-activist Yoon Sun Woo.

Edited by Professor Nabil Ahmed, Professor Ute Meta Bauer, and Dr Herve Raimana Lallemant-Moe, assisted by Research Fellow Dr Adha Shaleh.

We thank the Editors-in-Chief Sage Yves-Louis and Tony Angelo.

This special issue is supported by the MOE AcRF Tier 2 Award, led by Principal Investigator Professor Ute Meta Bauer, with Research Associate Soh Kay Min, Research Assistant Ng Mei Hia, and Research Fellow Dr Adha Shaleh.

Journal on handwoven pandanus mat gifted by Further Arts, Vanuatu.

DESIGN EARTH‘s latest project is a series of fables that addresses the elephant in the room—the climate crisis—by animating charismatic figures from natural history museums. This design research identifies and leverages figures from the collections all while unsettling the museum apparatus—the devices, archives, histories, and audiences. Some such figures include a taxidermy of an African matriarch elephant, the skeleton of a stranded blue whale, and a composite structure of a Diplodocuscarnegii. The fragmentary remains of such creatures are animated, brought back to life, so to speak in rhyming verse, colorful imagery, and with some poignant humor. These speculative afterlives stir up potent trouble on the breath-taking capture of life in the Anthropocene to ask how cultural institutions may be responsible to calls for decolonisation and decarbonisation. In Singapore, this hands-on, participatory workshop will focus on the cultural prehistory, present, and speculative futures of the Singapore saltwater (estuarine) crocodile and the Malayan tiger. Facilitated by Rania GhosnEl Hadi Jazairy, and DESIGN EARTH team member Kelly Koh. Beginning with the Artist Talk on 13 June, participants will engage in DESIGN EARTH creative methodologies including site visits and the building of a research archive while looking into the facts and fictions of these creatures and their homes.

For registration, please visit here.

DESIGN EARTH was founded by Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy in 2011. The design research practice deploys the speculative project—drawing and narrative—to make public the climate crisis. Their work has been featured internationally—most recently at Venice Biennale, Bauhaus Museum Dessau, SFMOMA, Milano Triennale—and is in the New York Museum of Modern Art permanent collection. Ghosn and Jazairy are authors of Geographies of Trash (2015); Geostories: Another Architecture for the Environment (3rd ed. 2022), The Planet After Geoengineering (2021) and Climate Inheritance (2023). DESIGN EARTH has been recognized with several awards, including United States Artist Fellowship, Architectural League Prize for Young Architects + Designers, Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture Faculty Design Awards, and Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts Awards. 

Rania Ghosn (Beirut, b. 1977) is Associate Professor and Director of the Master of Science in Architecture Studies (SMArchS) in Urbanism at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. El Hadi Jazairy (Algeria, b. 1970) is Associate Professor of Architecture and Director of Master of Urban Design degree program at the University of Michigan.

Join DESIGN EARTH co-founders and co-directors Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy for their first presentation in Singapore, where they will share insights into their collaborative research practice centred on the speculative architectural project as a mode of making the climate crisis public. Their design research brings together spatial history, geographic representation, projective design, and material public assemblies to speculate on ways of living with legacy technologies on a damaged planet. Recipients of the United States Artist Fellowship and the Architectural League Prize for Young Architects and Designers, among other honors, Ghosn and Jazairy have made a practice of telling complex and unwieldy stories of the Earth. Learn more about their ongoing explorations of visual and spatial storytelling.

Friday, 13 June 2025 
6:30 – 8:30 pm

The Hall, NTU CCA Singapore
6 Lock Rd, #01-09/10 Gillman Barracks 108934

Free registration here.

How might the architectural imagination make sense of the Earth at a moment in which the planet is presented in crisis? For Design Earth, imagination fuels the production of stories and images that come together as geographically situated speculations—neither documentary nor completely fictional.
 
Today we live in an epoch shaped by extensive shifts in industrialization, with environmental risks and destruction felt at a planetary scale. Paradoxically, while the threats are serious, we remain little mobilized—in part because of the “abysmal distance between our little selfish human worries and the great questions of ecology.”[1] If we are worried once again that the sky may be falling on our heads, how is it that we have done so little about it? In this light, the environmental crisis can be seen not only as a crisis of the physical and technological environments; it is also a crisis of the cultural environment—of the modes of representation through which society relates to the complexity of environmental systems. 
 
Design Earth: Speculative Fiction for the Climate springs from the conviction that climate change demands urgent transformations in the ways we care for and design the Earth, moving away from a visual rhetoric of crisis that aestheticizes calamity. Design Earth, a research practice founded and led by Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy engages the medium of the speculative architectural project to make public the climate crisis. Their design research brings together spatial history, geographic representation, projective design, and material public assemblies to speculate on ways of living with legacy technologies on a damaged planet. This work is developed simultaneously through the medium of drawing and the creation of books, two of which are excerpted and put in conversation in this art exhibition.
 
The first book, Geostories: Another Architecture for the Environment (Actar Publishers, 2018), is a manifesto for environmental imagination in twelve architectural projects engaging the planetary scale through drawing divided by the organising principles of Aquarium, Terrarium, and Planetarium. This exhibition highlights three chapters from the larger work, each addressing a planetary common as matter of concern – the atmosphere, deep seabed, outer space:  After Oil (2016), Pacific Aquarium (2016), and Cosmorama (2018). It examines geographies of extractive technological systems, foregrounding externalities as political concerns for architecture. Geographic portraits employing axonometry, sections, and split-level views describe the political and ethical implications of our ecological actions while speculating on survival and adaptation strategies that invite us to make sense of the Earth envision it in ways that generate inquisitive, delightful, and potentially subversive responses.
 
The second book, The Planet After Geoengineering (Actar Publishers, 2021) is a graphic novel which imagines the worlds of climate modification technologies and their controversies. It thinks with and against geoengineering – technologies that counteract the effects of anthropogenic climate change by deliberately intervening in Earth systems as a form of planetary management. In five chapters, The Planet After Geoengineering assembles a planetary section that cuts through the underground, crust, atmosphere, and outer space. Each geostory— Petrified Carbon, Arctic Albedo, Sky River, Sulfur Storm, and Dust Cloud—depicts possible future Earths that we come to inhabit on the heels of a geoengineering intervention all while situating such promissory visions within a genealogy of climate-control projects from nineteenth-century rainmaking machines and volcanic eruptions to
Cold War military plans.
 
Together these projects help us begin to address the open question of how (else) could we tell the story of the Earth? Beyond the binaries of the preservation of a Blue Marble and the promises of technological solutionism, what geostories can we imagine or envision?

[1] Laura Collins-Hughes, “A Potential Disaster in Any Language: ‘Gaïa Global Circus’ at the Kitchen,” New York Times, September 25, 2014.
 

Design Earth: Speculative Fiction for the Climate is co-organised by NTU Centre for Contemporary Art and ADM Gallery

OPENING RECEPTION

Friday, 25 April 2025 
6:30 – 8:30 pm 

VENUE

ADM Gallery 2
NTU School of Art, Design and Media
81 Nanyang Dr, Singapore 637458

DATES

28 April to 13 June 2025
Open by appointment from 14 June to 15 August 2025

GALLERY HOURS 

Monday to Friday: 10:00am to 5:00pm 
Saturday: By appointment only
*Closed on Sunday and Public Holidays

EMAIL 

ADMgallery@ntu.edu.sg

 


Public Programmes

DESIGN EARTH Artist Talk: Geostories

Join DESIGN EARTH co-founders and co-directors Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy for their first presentation in Singapore, where they will share insights into their collaborative research practice centred on the speculative architectural project as a mode of making the climate crisis public. Their design research brings together spatial history, geographic representation, projective design, and material public assemblies to speculate on ways of living with legacy technologies on a damaged planet. Recipients of the United States Artist Fellowship and the Architectural League Prize for Young Architects and Designers, among other honors, Ghosn and Jazairy have made a practice of telling complex and unwieldy stories of the Earth. Learn more about their ongoing explorations of visual and spatial storytelling.

Friday, 13 June 2025, 6:30 pm – 8:30 pm

The Hall, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore
6 Lock Rd, #01-09/10 Gillman Barracks 108934

DESIGN EARTH Workshop: Elephant in the Room and Other Creatures

DESIGN EARTH‘s latest project is a series of fables that addresses the elephant in the room—the climate crisis—by animating charismatic figures from natural history museums. This design research identifies and leverages figures from the collections all while unsettling the museum apparatus—the devices, archives, histories, and audiences. Some such figures include a taxidermy of an African matriarch elephant, the skeleton of a stranded blue whale, and a composite structure of a Diplodocuscarnegii. The fragmentary remains of such creatures are animated, brought back to life, so to speak in rhyming verse, colorful imagery, and with some poignant humor. These speculative afterlives stir up potent trouble on the breath-taking capture of life in the Anthropocene to ask how cultural institutions may be responsible to calls for decolonisation and decarbonisation. In Singapore, this hands-on, participatory workshop will focus on the cultural prehistory, present, and speculative futures of the Singapore saltwater (estuarine) crocodile and the Malayan tiger. Facilitated by Rania GhosnEl Hadi Jazairy, and DESIGN EARTH team member Kelly Koh. Beginning with the Artist Talk on 13 June, participants will engage in DESIGN EARTH creative methodologies including site visits and the building of a research archive while looking into the facts and fictions of these creatures and their homes.

13 – 19 June 2025

The Hall, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore
6 Lock Rd, #01-09/10 Gillman Barracks 108934

Curator’s Exhibition (de)Tour

Join NTU CCA Singapore Director Karin G. Oen for a closer look at the collaborative practice of DESIGN EARTH, including drawing, writing, animation, and sound components of Design Earth: Speculative Fiction for the Climate. Explore the research and influences that comprise these multi-layered artworks, from the terrestrial principles of geoengineering and petroleum geology, to the supranational domains of the deep seabeds and outer space. Highlighting the long traditions of poetry, science fiction, and image creation that help us to conceptualise these realms, we will consider what it means to tell the stories of the earth, and to live with unsightly “externalities.”

Saturday, 17 May 2025 
11:00 am – 12:00 pm 

ADM Gallery 2
NTU School of Art, Design and Media
81 Nanyang Dr, Singapore 637458

Student-Led Exhibition (de)Tour

Join Vaishnavi Peddapalli, NTU School of Humanities Class of 2025, for a student-led (de)tour of Design Earth: Speculative Fiction for the Climate that will explore how speculative fiction can reconsider Southeast Asian geographical catastrophes borne from human intervention. Considering localised discourse around climate change and its impact on younger generations, this experience provides space for speculation for our planet’s future.

Saturday, 31 May 2025 
11:00 am – 12:00 pm

ADM Gallery 2
NTU School of Art, Design and Media
81 Nanyang Dr, Singapore 637458

Pacific Aquarium Drawing Club

Come walk, draw, and speculate. Drawing as a visual and creative practice can also be a tool for scientific inquiry and speculation. Plotting detailed lines can help process the larger picture of the distanced and abstracted planet crisis. Inspired by the exhibition, Design Earth: Speculative Fiction for the Climate, this drawing club invites artists, architects, designers, and students to probe how architectural drawings can unearth the more inconspicuous matters of climate change. Facilitated by Eunice Lacaste, Programme Associate, NTU CCA Singapore.

This Drawing Club invites artists, architects, designers, and students to present their annotated sketches at the NTU ADM Foyer from July to August 2025. 

No technical drawing experience needed—just a willingness to trace complexity. Participants are encouraged to bring dry drawing media (markers, found images, etc) and reading references (articles, books, etc) to share, annotate, and get inspiration from during the session.

Saturday, 24 May 2025 
3:00 pm – 5:00 pm 

ADM Gallery 2
NTU School of Art, Design and Media
81 Nanyang Dr, Singapore 637458

Drawing Dialogues: Stories of Decay

Decay, decomposition, weathering, rot. Landscapes eroding, architectures disintegrating, bodies breaking down, coming apart, becoming dirt. We hardly have a kinship with decay for, like dirt, decay is—in the words of anthropologist Mary Douglas—matter out-of-place in our perpetually renewing cities. Indeed, the city we are brought to inhabit and desire is built with ever-more weatherproof architectures, with cosmetic treatments that maintain the hardness of the buildings and the smoothness of their surfaces impervious to the traces of Nature’s time. In waterfront cities, which novelist Amitav Ghosh regards as a showcase of architectural mastery over the unruly environment, the cartography of terrestrial edges continues to reinforce the separation of interiorised human-made worlds from exteriorised more-than-human environment. Seen through the lens of the city, the design of the future Earth aspires to be atemporal. And like so many transient and shifting environments stilled in human projections of the Earth (from maps to masterplans), the “unweathered” city must thrive outside of time, devoid of stains and discolouration. But does the city have to be in an anxious race against Nature’s time? 

Created and led by Superlative FuturesDrawing Dialogues: Stories of Decay is a workshop for re-attuning our urban selves to Nature’s time. The programme focuses on rethinking the place of decay in the wellbeing of cities and on re-presenting stories of decay as matters of care. The workshop will start off with a walk in the Berlayer Creek­—a rare remnant of Singapore’s mangrove histories once denigrated as a place of dankness and disease—where participants will be led to uncover stories of decay and gather thoughts and materials of decomposition. The second part of the workshop will take place at NTU CCA Singapore where, drawing and dialoguing with decay, participants will be guided to create their own narratives and landscapes of decay culminating in a collaborative artwork. Expanding on Superlative Futures’ speculative design research on new ecological practices for weathering the future city, this workshop marks the beginning of a propositional archive—A Cartography of Decay—that charts different relationships between decay and the city. 

It is recommended to bring water, sunblock, umbrella, mosquito repellent, and notetaking materials (e.g. pencil/pen and paper). This is a rain or shine event.

This event is a public programme created in response to the exhibition Design Earth: Speculative Fiction for the Climate, on view by appointment at NTU ADM Gallery 2 until 15 August 2025. 

This programme is free with registration. Limited capacity.  

Workshop Schedule

9:00 – 10:00am
Meet at Labrador Park MRT, Exit A
Move as a group to Berlayer Creek

10:30am – 12:00pm
Drawing session at The Hall, NTU CCA Singapore

Letters from a Future Earth

This workshop will revolve around The Planet After Geoengineering(2021), a graphic animation by Design Earth, where planetary imaginaries unfold through narrative fragments and visual speculation. Responding to the animation, participants will be prompted to ponder over climate change, environmental design, and planetary care and compose letters and/or postcards from a future Earth. In creating memories of futures yet to be experienced, participants are asked to time-travel into future climates and channel perspectives from the human and other-than-human inhabitants of the Earth to come. The workshop will culminate in a final sharing session where participants will be invited to present their pieces, exchange insights, and reflect on the power of storytelling. In closing, the group will consider how such narratives might shape our actions in the present.

The workshop seeks to make the immediacy of climate change tangible, not only intellectually, but also emotionally by foregrounding personal visions and speculative storytelling with letters serving as intimate vessels for messages of loss, change, and resilience.

We welcome the general public as well as creatives, artists, writers, architects, designers, students, and everyone interested in the topic of climate change. Suitable for all writing skill levels.

This workshop is facilitated by Leila Vignozzi, Intern, NTU CCA Singapore.

Saturday, 5 July 2025
2:00 – 4:00pm 

The Hall, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore
6 Lock Rd, #01-09/10 Gillman Barracks 108934

Cosmorama Drawing Club

Inspired by Cosmorama (2018), one of four sections in the exhibition Design Earth: Speculative Fiction for the Climate, this third Drawing Club invites artists, architects, designers, and students to respond to the geostories of asteroid mining, orbital debris, and climate refuge in the age of the “New Space.”

The workshop zooms in on architectural drawing as practice to examine planetary issues such as satellite debris and airspace conflicts, that may seem distant from us. Participants will trace the macrocosmic consequences of extractive economies and of their politics beyond Singapore, and beyond the Earth itself, launching critical conversations into speculative drawings.

The annotated sketches produced during the workshop will be displayed at the NTU ADM Foyer until 13 August 2025, alongside the works produced at the previous Drawing Club.

Participants are encouraged to bring dry drawing media (markers, found images, etc) and reading references (articles, books, etc) to share, annotate, and get inspiration from during the session. No technical drawing experience needed.

This workshop is facilitated by Eunice Lacaste, Programmes Associate, NTU CCA Singapore.

Thursday, 7 August 2025. 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm

ADM Gallery 2
NTU School of Art, Design and Media
81 Nanyang Dr, Singapore 637458

Register

Rising temperatures induced by climate change as well as land-use development are two of the biggest threats to insect populations globally in what has been referred to as the “insect apocalypse.” Here in Singapore, a decline in insect populations could threaten the ecological diversity of our parks and reserves and diminish critical food sources for the migratory land birds that annually visit Singapore in places such as the Botanic Gardens and Pasir Ris Park. Insects also provide vital ecosystem services such as pollination provided by bees, pest regulation by wasps and nutrient cycling aided by dung beetles, which are indispensable to the ecological balance of our forests such as those in the Central Catchment Nature Reserve. In this lecture, moderated by Laura Miotto (Associate Professor, School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University), ecologist Eleanor Slade (Associate Professor, Forest Invertebrate Ecology, Asian School of Environment, Nanyang Technological University and Principal Investigator, Tropical Ecology & Entomology Lab) and artist Wendy Zhang (artist and insect conservation educator) will highlight the critical role insects play in the ecosystems that support our natural spaces in Singapore. Drawing on their expertise in ecology, entomology, insect conservation and art, they will discuss current strategies for biodiversity conservation and the actions needed to protect insect populations in the future.

Tuesday, 11 March 2025
6:30pm – 8:30pm
The Hall, NTU CCA Singapore

Free admission. Register here.

Angela Ricasio Hoten is a research assistant at the School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University supporting the research projects Climate Transformation Programme (2024–Present), Developing and Evaluating Digital Tools for Participatory Climate Change Mitigation (2025–Present) and previously the Environmentally-Engaged Artistic Practices in South, Southeast Asia and the Pacific (2023–2024). Angela holds a BA (Hons) in Environmental Studies and minor in Anthropology from Yale-NUS College, Singapore. She was also the undergraduate research assistant for ‘Lala Land: Singapore’s Seafood Heritage’ edited by Anthony Medrano, published by Epigram Books.

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

After a very successful first iteration of Climate Futures #1: Cultures, Climate Crisis and Disappearing Ecologies its second convening wants to build on its discussions and expand its understanding of the decline in cultural and ecological diversity in the region. It became very clear that such conversations require space and time to process complex issues, if we do not want to simplify and allow more than one way to process how people feel about their situations and want to be heard. Our futures require us to go beyond the status quo of current modes of operating. To not lose cultural knowledge and biodiversity Climate Futures #2: Belonging & Shared Responsibilities will share various narratives and practices that are already in place. It wants to further provide access to communities outside state and institutional structures to further nurture understanding of change in responsibilities and accountability.

The summit intents to further map how the climate crisis informs our contemporary world, and how diverse cultures can adjust or adapt without losing a sense of purpose. It comprises of discussions into alternative approaches to regional studies focusing on urgencies such as rising sea-levels and temperatures and the impact on natural resources of the region. A particular focus will be on areas such as the Mekong River and Delta (Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam) and its water street to Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines including the Straits that plays an essential role in the regions shared history.

The holistic approach of Climate Futures #1: Cultures, Climate Crisis and Disappearing Ecologies showed already how it can successfully stimulate a debate between artists, designers, and architects, scientists, environmentalists, as well as local voices and policy makers. We seek to reach out to an even wider public including younger scholars and practitioners, as well as community leaders and policy makers from the ASEAN region.

The future of our shared prosperity relies on our collective ability to create an inclusive and sustainable foundation for growth.

Read the programme brochure here.

Thursday, 26 October – Saturday 28 October 2023

Sokhalay Angkor Villa Resort, Siem Reap, Cambodia

Thursday, 26 October
Join the livestream here with the passcode 668981.

9:30am Registration & Coffee

10:00am Opening Addresses

Dr Piti Srisangnam, Executive Director, ASEAN Foundation

H.E. Min Chandynavuth, Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts, Cambodia

Prof. Tim White, Vice President (International Engagement); President’s Chair in Materials Science and Engineering; Professor, School of Materials Science & Engineering.

Welcome and Introduction by co-curators Prof. Ute Meta Bauer (Germany/Singapore), Founding Director NTU Centre for Contemporary Art, and Professor School of Art, Design, and Media, NTU Singapore and Magdalena Magiera (Germany/Singapore), Curator Residencies and Programms, NTU Centre of Contemporary Art, Singapore

10:30am The Art of Living Lightly, Keynote Lecture by Rachaporn Choochuey (Thailand), Architect, Co-founder, Design Director, all(zone) ltd

11:40am Between Bots and the Biosphere: Machine Philosophy, Media Ecologies, and Digital Hieroglyphs for Climate Adaptation, Case Study by Nashin Mahtani (Indonesia), Director, PetaBencana.id

12:00pm An Uncommon History of The Common Fence: A Prologue (To the Coast), Case Study by Jason Wee (Singapore), Artist, Writer, Curator

12:20pm Sharing Climate Futures: Developing tools for climate care and action, Case Study by Prof. Ute Meta Bauer (Germany/Singapore), Founding Director NTU Centre for Contemporary Art, and Professor School of Art, Design, and Media, NTU Singapore

1:00pm Discussion with Rachaporn Choochuey (Thailand), Nashin Mahtani (Indonesia), and Jason Wee (Singapore). Moderated by Prof. Ute Meta Bauer (Germany/Singapore)

3:30pm Belonging & Sharing Responsibilities, Closed Workshop by Claudia Lasimbang a.k.a Yoggie, Technical Coordinator Watersheds and Communities, Forever Sabah, Philip Chin a.k.a. Linggit, Technical Coordinator Certified Sustainable Palm Oil, Forever Sabah, and Yee I-Lan (all Malaysia), artist

Friday, 27 October
Join the livestream here with the passcode 400242.

8:45am Registration & Coffee

9:00am Welcome & Introduction

9:10am Creative Digital Lab: how artists, cultural and creative professionals and technologists work together to explore the potentials of XR technology in protecting heritage, safeguarding intangible cultural heritage and contributing to climate action. Lecture by Kamonrat Mali Chayamarit (Thailand), Culture Programme Officer, Lao PDR alternate Focal Point, UNESCO Culture related Conventions Advocate

9:40am Ecology for Non-Futures, Case Study by Binna Choi (South-Korea), Artists, part of Unmake Lab

10:20am Climate impact on social process and social structure, Case study by Daovone Phonemanichane (Laos), Strengthening Climate Resilience Project Manager, Oxfam Mekong Regional Water Governance Program

10:40am When Nature has Economic Value, Case Study by Som Supaprinya (Thailand), Artist

11:20am Discussion with Kamonrat Mali Chayamarit (Thailand), Binna Choi (South-Korea), Daovone Phonemanichane (Laos), and Som Supaprinya (Thailand). Moderated by Bejamin Hampe (Australia), Project Director, KONNECT ASEAN

1:00pm Glimpse of Life on the Water, Closed Workshop Sessions by Sovann Ke (Cambodia), Project Manager, OSMOSE

Saturday, 28 October
Join the livestream here with the passcode 353177.

8:45am Registration & Coffee

9:00am Introduction & Welcome

9:15am Every (de)Force Evolves into A (de)Form, Lecture by Gahee Park (South-Korea), Curator, Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul

10:00am Pedagogy, Community, Art: Bottom-up Urbanism at Phnom Penh’s Wat Chen Dam Daek, Case Study by Lyno Vuth (Cambodia), Artist, and Eva Lloyd (Australia), Lecturer, University of New South Wales (UNSW)

10:20am Luang Prabang: From Cultural Landscape into Practice, Case Study by Phonepaseth Keosomsak (Laos), Architect, Artist

11:00am Snare for Birds: Rebelling Against an Order of Things, Case Study by Kiri Dalena (Philipines), Artist

11:20am Travelling through time, Case Study by Malin Yim (Cambodia), Artist

11:40am The New Word for World is Archipelago, Case Study by Nice Buenaventura (Philippines), Artist

12:00pm Discussion with Nice Buenaventura (Philippines), Kiri Dalena (Philipines), Phonepaseth Keosomsak (Laos), Gahee Park (South-Korea), Lyno Vuth (Cambodia), and Malin Yim (Cambodia). Moderated by Magdalena Magiera (Germany/Singapore)

2:30pm Visit of Blue Art Centre. Welcome by Sareth Svay (Cambodia), Artists, Director, Blue Art Centre

3:00pm Closing workshop by Cynthia Ong (Malaysia), Chief Executive Facilitator Forever Sabah Institute, LEAP


Curated by NTU CCA Singapore

Ute Meta Bauer, Founding Director and Magdalena Magiera, Curator, Residencies and Programmes

Supported by

ASEAN Secretariat

ASEAN-Korea Cooperation Fund

Mission of the Republic of Korea to ASEAN

ASEAN Senior Officials Meeting for Culture and Arts

Programme support by Ministry of Culture and Fine Art, Cambodia

PROJECT PARTNERS

ASEAN FOUNDATION

Since the formation of ASEAN in 1967, ASEAN has embarked on a journey to accelerate economic growth, social progress, and cultural development in the region. After three decades, ASEAN leaders recognised there remained inadequate shared prosperity, ASEAN awareness, and contact amongst the people of ASEAN. As a result, ASEAN leaders established the ASEAN Foundation during the ASEAN 30th Anniversary Commemorative Summit in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia on 15 December 1997.

KONNECT ASEAN

As the post-Cold War reality of a new world has taken shape and formed new directions and conversations, ASEAN has re-entered the contemporary art space via collaborative efforts between various ASEAN bodies. The Republic of Korea celebrated 30 years of diplomatic relations with ASEAN in 2019 and in the same year established KONNECT ASEAN, an ASEAN-Korea arts programme. Supported by the ASEAN-Korea Cooperation Fund and administered by the ASEAN Foundation, KONNECT ASEAN signals both an eagerness by ASEAN to revitalise its once integral role in contemporary visual arts and Korea’s sincerity in establishing closer ties with ASEAN.

The programme celebrates Southeast Asian and Korean arts using different platforms (exhibitions, education and conferences, public programmes, residencies, and publications and archives) to explore and discuss social, political, economic, and environmental issues in the region. The artists’ works and activities engages and strengthen the public’s understanding of ASEAN’s role in facilitating cultural diplomacy. Furthermore, the programme intends to connect with the three major stakeholder groups of government, business, and civil society to achieve the vision of an ASEAN Community. Outcomes provide permanent resources recording why ASEAN matters and its ongoing contribution to the region’s growth, prosperity, and stability.

NANYANG TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY

A research-intensive public university, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) has 33,000 undergraduate and postgraduate students in the Engineering, Business, Science, Medicine, Humanities, Arts, & Social Sciences, and Graduate colleges. NTU is also home to world-renowned autonomous institutes—the National Institute of Education, S Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Earth Observatory of Singapore, and Singapore Centre for Environmental Life Sciences Engineering—and various leading research centres such as the Nanyang Environment & Water Research Institute (NEWRI) and Energy Research Institute @ NTU (ERI@N).

Under the NTU Smart Campus vision, the University harnesses the power of digital technology and tech-enabled solutions to support better learning and living experiences, the discovery of new knowledge, and the sustainability of resources. Ranked amongst the world’s top universities, the University’s main campus is also frequently listed among the world’s most beautiful. Known for its sustainability, over 95% of its building projects are certified Green Mark Platinum. Apart from its main campus, NTU also has a medical campus in Novena, Singapore’s healthcare district. For more information, visit ntu.edu.sg.

NTU CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART SINGAPORE

Situated within Singapore’s premier art precinct Gillman Barracks, NTU CCA Singapore is a pioneering institution that has been instrumental in shaping the contemporary art landscape in Singapore and beyond. With a focus on fostering creativity, innovation, and critical thinking, the Centre’s programmes have consistently challenged the status quo, encouraging artists to explore new realms of artistic expression. For more information, visit ntu.ccasingapore.org.

Image: Climate Futures #1, Jakarta (Indonesia), 2022. Courtesy NTU CCA Singapore, Konnect ASEAN & ASEAN Foundation.

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

World of Variation is a a visual/verbal essay addressing critical societal issues such as community versus privacy, public versus private realms, social justice and humane, sustainable developments from a global perspective. To avoid datedness and the cultural biases inherent in realistic representations, the two authors, Mary Otis Stevens and Thomas F. McNulty, both MIT graduates and noted for their projects in the Modern Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, formulated an abstract visual language to convey their conceptual ideas.

This new edition contains a facsimile of the original edition published in 1970 with added commentaries by Pelin Tan, sociologist and art historian, professor at Fine Arts Academy, Batman University, and senior fellow of CAD+SR; Karin G. Oen, principal research fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s School of Art, Design, and Media (NTU ADM); Ute Meta Bauer, Founding Director, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore and professor at NTU ADM; and a text by Beatriz Colomina, professor of the history of architecture at Princeton University, and Mark Wigley, professor of architecture and Dean Emeritus, Columbia University.

World of Variation
Published by NTU CCA Singapore and Weiss Publications, 2022
By Mary Otis Stevens, Thomas McNulty. Edited with text by Ute Meta Bauer, Karin G. Oen, Pelin Tan. Afterword by Mary Otis Stevens. Essay by Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley.
Design by Enver Hadzijaj
© 2022 by the editors, Mary Otis Stevens, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore and Weiss Publications, ISBN: 9783948318178
Distributed by D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers
Copies are available for sale at NTU CCA Singapore.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[See Full Transcript]

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

Working towards the production of a solo album, he will gather and sample physical elements present at Gillman Barracks, using forest foliage as sound conductors and collecting field recordings to expand the vocabularies featured in his music. Along the process, the studio will be treated as a site-specific musical instrument which—through a series of recording and interfacing sessions, either individual or collaborative—will be turned into an environment for feedback and interface.

Wrapping up the first season of AiRCAST, in the sixth and final episode former Artist-in-Residence Yuen Chee Wai speaks to Dr Anna Lovecchio, Assistant Director, Programmes.

Get acquainted with Chee Wai as he meditates on his long and expansive journey in experimental music, collaborative networks, and multimedia crossovers. Grown out of an interest in independent music, his creative practice has evolved into a vortex of acts of resistance, melancholic drifts, and world-making gestures that reverberate with critical perspectives on the status quo. Through the course of this exchange, you will also discover how the unprecedented challenges brought about by the pandemic triggered an outburst of creative energy and pushed him even further into the exploration of new alliances and forms of expression.

Musician, artist, designer, and curator Yuen Chee Wai (b. 1975, Singapore) is known for his commitment to improvised music and experimental projects that explore memory and loss, indeterminacy and invisibility. Ranging from the obsolescent and the newfangled, his eclectic toolbox comprises noise, field recordings, found sounds as well as guitars and various electronic instruments which reverberate with critical perspectives inspired by philosophy, literature, film, and politics. Together with FEN (Far East Network), an improvised music quartet he co-formed in 2008, Yuen is active in triggering multifaceted collaborations across Asia. Since 2014, he is Project Director of Asian Music Network for which he co-curates Asian Meeting Festival. Yuen is also a member of the experimental band The Observatory with whom he plays guitar, efx and objects, and organises a range of projects such Playfreely and BlackKaji.

Contributors: Yuen Chee Wai
Conducted by: Anna Lovecchio
Programme Manager: Nadia Amalina
Sound Engineer: Ashwin Menon (The Music Parlour)
Intro & Outro Music: Tini Aliman
Cover Image & Design: Arabelle Zhuang, Kristine Tan

Credits
02’15”: Audio excerpt from installation recordings of REFUSE. Courtesy The Observatory.
12’26”: Audio excerpt of George Chua and Yuen Chee Wai live session at Strategies v.02, The Substation, 2003. Courtesy the artist.
27’38”: Audio excerpt from unreleased studio recordings of Ishikawa Ko, Iman Jimbot, and Yuen Chee Wai, for Asian Meeting Festival. Courtesy the artist.
30’36”: Audio excerpt of The Observatory and Haino Keiji, Authority is Alive, Playfreely, 2019. Courtesy the artist.
48’40”: Audio excerpt of Imprisoned Mind from the upcoming album Demon State by The Observatory and Koichi Shimizu, 2022. Courtesy the artist.
56’59”: Audio excerpt from installation recordings of REFUSE. Courtesy The Observatory.
1h00’52”: Audio excerpt from Yuen Chee Wai’s recording of packing up the studio in the last hours of his residency at NTU CCA Singapore, 30 March 2022. Courtesy the artist. 

[See Full Transcript]

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

Reseach Focus

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

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

With an investment in creative research that combines art, science, and technology, Irene Agrivina’s research project, A Perfect Marriage, investigates the symbiotic relationship between Azolla, an aquatic water fern, and Anabaena, a microscopic blue-green cyanobacterium. The two organisms have never been apart for 70 million years, co-evolving in complementary ways that allow them to be increasingly efficient. Besides ensuring their survival, other outcomes of this remarkably sustainable and mutually beneficial relationship involve the production of biofuel and textile dyes, the purification of water, and the reduction of global warming. During her residency, Agrivina aims to expand on her research and conduct experiments inspired by this unique symbiotic process using eco-friendly materials. A Perfect Marriage intends to emphasise the global importance of patterns of co-dependency and the potential of the photosynthesis process in connection with environmental issues.

Diana Lelonek examines the complex interdependency between growing trends of overproduction and natural ecosystems. Her research Interests include Landfill ecologies, Post-consumer waste, Ecological engagement Interspecies encounters, Post-human and eco-feminist studies. Since 2016, she has been gathering waste-derived specimens under the aegis of The Center for Living Things, a long-term artistic project shaped as an independent grassroots research institute. Classified in collaboration with botanists and other natural scientists, The Center for Living Things’ collection includes discarded commodities and objects that, upon disposal, become part of the natural environment for a number of living organisms. Extending this fascination for how the ecosystems of landfills turn into fertile habitats and are reclaimed by non-human organisms, for her research in Singapore, Lelonek will focus on the offshore landfill Pulau Semakau and its own specific ecosystem. Together with the Liaison (Artistic Research), the artist will explore post-waste environments and the waste-derived specimens that come to life within those contexts. The Liaison should preferably have a strong interest in environmental issues, anthropocene studies, and/or botany. Research Liaison: Denise Lim Through photography, painting and three-dimensional explorations influenced by her background in architecture, Denise Lim examines narratives inherent to the human condition. Central to her research interests are circular design and co-creation with nature in the age of the Anthropocene.

The residency of Diana Lelonek was scheduled for October – December 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak rendered international travel impossible. In order to continue to support artistic research and foster collaborations beyond borders, the NTU CCA Residencies Programme initiated Residencies Rewired, a project that trailblazes new pathways to collaboration.

Denise yap (b.1998) is a re-packager, an inbetween of pre-writer and post-reader; They draws from different sources of information to build a world that is plausible. Their artworks explore the potentiality of sincere investments such as alternative kinships and entanglements (and all the embarrassments!) of the human condition.

Their recent group exhibitions include Immaterial Bodies at Objectifs, at NTU CCA Singapore, and The Open Workshop at Supernormal as part of Singapore Art Week.

Dan Susman is a writer, director and editor. Dan Susman with producer Jess Gormley at the Lovie Awards.

Misso Russell Keith (Singapore) is Head Chef of Open Farm Community, where he works closely with urban farmers and talented chefs to create locally sourced, seasonal, and innovative dishes. He has more than a decade of experience working in Singapore’s top luxury hotels and most celebrated restaurants, including three Michelin-starred Joël Robuchon Restaurant, Pollen, and Tippling Club.

Dan Susman is a writer, director and editor. Dan Susman with producer Jess Gormley at the Lovie Awards.

Victoria Marshall is the founder of Till Design (tilldesign.com). She is currently a President’s Fellow at the National University of Singapore, where she is pursuing a PhD in Geography. Marshall is also an Urban-Rural Systems researcher at the ETH Future Cities Laboratory in Singapore.

Foodscape Collective (Singapore) is a community centred on growing food well, cooking well, eating well and living well. Some are growing food, some choose to cook and eat better meals, others bring food to where it is needed, tackle surplus food or food waste issues, or simply want to tell the stories of our foodscape better. The community at Foodscape Collective envisions to grow and foster compassionate and resilient networks integral to our local food ecosystem, and explore better approaches to food and sustainability. They believe that the future needs better agro-ecological systems; better use, selection, and dissemination of information; and a more inquisitive, adventurous spirit in everyone to ask better questions on our foodscape(s).

Edible Garden City (Singapore) is dedicated to the “Grow Your Own Food” movement in land-scarce and import-dependent Singapore, advocating the use of under-utilised urban spaces such as rooftops and sidewalks for growing food. With more than 15 years of farming and construction experience, Edible Garden City designs, builds, and maintains food gardens in tropical urban Singapore, using sustainable growing methods, resource recycling, and waste minimisation.

Currently, more than half of the world’s human population lives in urban areas. Urban growth poses challenges to the various city dwellers, and creates material demands that cause lasting damage to the wider environment. The climate crisis is already announcing threatening scenarios particularly for coastal regions and megacities located at coastlines. Global urbanisation and the exploitation of resources happen on the expense of human and other species alike. The Posthuman City features artists who propose a shift in perspective.

Taking NTU CCA Singapore’s overarching research topic Climates.Habitats.Environments. as point of departure, the exhibition The Posthuman City considers the possibilities of a conscious sharing of resources, and a respectful and mindful coexistence between humans and other species. Through imaginative propositions at the intersection of art, design, and architecture, the selected artists engage questions addressing issues of sustainability, water scarcity, invisible communities, nature as a form of culture, and suggest the implementation of lived indigenous knowledges. Examining the urban fabric in its condition as a habitat for a diversity of life forms, the featured works range from installations to time-based media.

Lucy + Jorge Orta, OrtaWater – Portable Water Fountain, 2005. Courtesy the artists.

Stressing the vital importance of clean water and the challenges of its scarcity around the world, the artist and design duo Lucy + Jorge Orta have developed a long-term project on water collection, purification, and distribution. OrtaWater focuses on the general issues surrounding clean water and the privatisation and corporate control effecting access to it. Starting from a rigorous analysis of this crucial resource through visual and textual research and collaborative workshops with engineers, Lucy + Jorge Orta create sculptures, large-scale installations, and public artworks, that are both artefacts and functional design. One angle of their research—low-cost water purification devices enabling filthy water to be pumped and filtered directly from local sources—is translated into Portable Water Fountain (2005) and Mobile Intervention Unit (2007). These devices have been used to purify and distribute water from the Venice’s Canal Grande (2005) and the Huang Pu River in Shanghai (2012), among others, and now from the creek that runs through Gillman Barracks.

Similarly combating water pollution, Irene Agrivina’s Soya C(o)u(l)ture is a mixed media installation that demonstrates how to transform wastewater from tofu and tempeh production into usable biomaterials, such as fuel, fertiliser, and leather-like fabrics. Soya C(o)u(l)ture was developed in collaboration with XXLab, an all-female transdisciplinary collective that Agrivina co-founded. Usually, large amounts of wastewater pollute the water in the rivers surrounding the plants, which in turn causes cholera and skin and bowel diseases in humans. Soya C(o)u(l)ture intends to divert this wastewater from tofu factories and put it in a homegrown starter culture medium to create useful products. A biological process using various bacteria and cell cultures, for instance Acetobacter xylinum, generates alternative energy sources, foodstuffs, and biological material. This process creates cellulose sheets that can either be used for consumption—nata de coco, a variant made of coconut water, is a popular snack food—or further processed (pressed, dried, enhanced with colouring and coating) to make clothing and craft materials. This biological procedure can be reproduced in any household using normal kitchen utensils in combination with open-source software and simple hardware. In this way, the project could provide women in poverty-stricken regions with opportunities to increase their income.

Pierre Huyghe, Untitled (Human Mask) (film still), 2014. Courtesy the artist; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York; Hauser & Wirth, London; Esther Schipper, Berlin; and Anna Lena Films, Paris.

Indigenous peoples of various territories around the world, with deep historical and cultural ties to their land, have preserved sustainable ways of living that respect the limits of the planet’s resources. The artist and architect Marjetica Potrč’s Earth Drawings refer to these unique indigenous cosmogonies and their essential knowledges, based on research done over the past 15 years, centred on indigenous communities, such as the Asháninkas (in the Brazilian state of Acre in Amazonia), the Aboriginal (in Australian), and the Sami (in northern Norway), The Earth Drawings, a series on paper, point to the growing alliances between indigenous groups and bottom-up initiatives in the effort to ensure a more resilient future, beyond the social and economic agreement of the neoliberal order. Potrč stresses that the world’s diverse societies, taken together, form an intelligent organism: when necessary, they self-generate new models of existence and coexistence—a precondition for human resilience on Earth. Sharing life experiences is, after all, a basic human condition. Coexistence on Earth requires new foundations that foreground collective ownership of the land and a socially-conscious individualism.

Animali Domestici, Bangkok Opportunistic Ecologies (detail), 2019. Courtesy the artists.

Planetary coexistence of species acknowledges the presence and agency of diverse forms of intelligence. The artist Nicholas Mangan is inspired by termites and their capacity to build sophisticated and dynamic architectures that provide a model for decentralised social and economic organisation. The starting point of Termite Economies (Phase 1) was the anecdote that Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) researched termite behaviour in the hope that the insects might one day lead humans to gold deposits; a proposal to exploit the natural activity of termite colonies for economic gain. Mangan, on the contrary, proposes that the termites’ way of living in colonies might suggest other complex and global-scale systems for people to live and work together, better regulating and metabolising human consumption, production, and digestion. Termite Economies combines footage Mangan filmed on locations in Western Australia, alongside archival video and table-mounted sculptures, to speculate on the use of termites as miners and ruminating on how capitalism puts nature to work. The 3D-printed models reference existing infrastructures, for instance an underground tunnelling system for Tindals Mining Centre, a gold mine in Western Australia. The idea was to produce a 1:100 scale model to train termites.

In Bangkok Opportunistic Ecologies, the design practice Animali Domestici studied the urbanity of Bangkok from a non-anthropocentric perspective, focusing on the presence of pythons. Mapping the city through a snake’s experience, the resulting tapestry puts multiple beings of different species at the centre, displacing the human from its exceptionalism. The graphic realisation is freely inspired by the representation techniques, colour palettes, and composition of Thai traditional mural paintings. Their work process translates research and statistics on the Thai capital into multiple encapsulated narratives, including such elements as sewerage, canals, water swamps, and rain water “cracked” pipes—typical spots used by snakes, according to fire department experts—, as well as folkloric cultural practices like the numerology and superstitions connected to the shape and location of the animals.

In Untitled (Human Mask), the artist Pierre Huyghe films a monkey, Fuku-chan, who in real life has a work permit as a “waitress” in a traditional sake house in Tokyo. In the film, the animal is wearing a dress and a wig, as well as a white, human-like mask created by Huyghe. Made of resin, the mask is inspired by traditional Japanese Noh theatre masks, where only the main actor wears a mask, meant to show the essential traits of the character. The film’s first images are drone shots of a devastated landscape, that of Fukushima in 2011, after the earthquake-triggered tsunami caused the meltdown of three nuclear plant reactors. It then shifts to an empty restaurant and house, where we follow Fuku-chan moving around in the dark. Fuku-chan is seen acting, and seems to be waiting, shaking her leg, looking at her nails, playing with her hair. A cat appears, and we see close-ups of insects and cockroaches. Raising questions about the essence of human nature and of non-human forms of intelligence and communication, the work points at the prevailing relationship of domination between humans and other species.

Ines Doujak, Ghostpopulations, 2016–19. Courtesy the artist.

Ghostpopulations, a series of collages by the artist Ines Doujak, combines ill human bodies with flora and fauna, transforming drawings from 19th-century medical textbooks into provocative assemblages that investigate desperation as an economic force. Doujak points out that entire populations uproot and flee in the direction of the faintest glimmer of hope, only to find themselves in the worst of predicaments: abandoned and deported, sold, abused or stigmatised forever, circulating as extremely cheap and disposable commodities. While she is giving visibility to such marginalised, abused, and displaced populations, these collages draw a dystopian mirage, reminding us of the pending threat of pandemic illnesses.

Death, from a post-humanist perspective, is not only inevitable and part of life, but is an event that is already in our past. The artist and entrepreneur Jae Rhim Lee developed a burial suit as an environmentally-conscious alternative to conventional funerary processes, shifting the negative narratives around death. The presented Infinity Burial Suit, a handcrafted garment that is worn by the deceased, is completely biodegradable, and co-created with zero waste fashion designer Daniel Silverstein. In addition, the Forever Spot Pet Shroud is featured, also consisting of a built in bio­mix of mushrooms and other microorganisms that together do three things: aid in decomposition, work to neutralise toxins found in dead bodies, and transfer nutrients to plant life, enriching the earth and fostering new life. Highlighting the importance of decompiculture—the cultivation of waste-decomposing organisms—, this project also suggests a strong link between human resistance to mortality and climate change denial. She advocates for a post-mortem responsibility towards the natural world and a direct engagement with our own mortality, making funerals new beginnings instead of endpoints, becoming more emotionally and socially accessible.

A parable on economic crashes, financial trading, mixed martial arts, and general contemporary culture, artist and writer Hito Steyerl’s large-scale architectural environment features Liquidity Inc., a single-screen projection that uses water and liquidity as guiding tropes. Opening with the quote “be water, my friend” by martial arts legend and actor Bruce Lee, the film comments on the circulation of digital images, big data, information, financial assets, labour, and weather systems. The installation consists of a double-sided projection screen in front of a blue, wave-like ramp, where the viewers find themselves in “troubled water.” Steyerl merges CGI and green screen scenes with an assortment of embedded videos, swipes, clips, scrolls, and pop-up windows, that include the story of Jacob Wood, a former financial analyst who lost his job during the 2008 economic recession and decided to turn his mixed martial arts hobby into a new career. The intricate mesh of late capitalism structures needs to be hijacked in order to allow space for new ecological and sustainable policies that value people and life over profit.

The Posthuman City, through artistic propositions, intends to open a discussion about the imbalanced relationship between an anthropocentric thinking that puts the human at the centre, and the fact that the urban environment is a habitat for many life forms. In her book The Posthuman (2013), Rosi Braidotti calls for resilience, stating that “sustainability does assume faith in a future, and also a sense of responsibility for ‘passing on’ to future generations a world that is liveable and worth living in. A present that endures is a sustainable model of the future.”

Curated by Ute Meta Bauer, Professor, NTU ADM, and Founding Director, NTU CCA Singapore, and Laura Miotto, Associate Professor, NTU ADM

The accompanying public programmes include seminars addressing techno-optimism and eco-hacktivism on 23 November 2019, and biodiver-city and urban futurism on 18 January 2020, deepening the discussion around posthumanism and the urban condition.

Hito Steyerl is a German filmmaker, artist and writer whose work explores the complexities of the digital world, art, capitalism, and the implications of Artificial Intelligence for society. Steyerl studied cinematography and documentary filmmaking at the Academy of Visual Arts in Tokyo, the University of Television and Film in Munich, and holds a Ph.D in philosophy from the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. The most formative parts of her education, however, include working as a stunt-girl and bouncer.

Hito Steyerl is interested in the proliferation and circulation of images in our globalized world. She often works with the format of the video essay, combining a heterogeneous range of material, including interviews, found footage, fictional dramatizations, pop-music sound tracks, and first-person voiceovers. Her work focuses on the intersection of media technology, political violence, and desire by using humor, charm, and reduced gravity as political means of expression. Her sources range from appropriated low-fi clips and sounds to mostly misquoted philosophical fittings. These elements are condensed in rambling essayistic speculation in both text and imagery. Through her oversensitivity to analogies, Steyerl both collects and creates stories describing realities that are stranger than fiction and reflected upon in galloping thought experiments. Her work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions including documenta 12, Taipei Biennial 2010, and 7th Shanghai Biennial. Her written essays have proliferated more on- than offline in journals such as e-flux and eipcp. She has published filmic and written essays centred around questions of globalization, urbanism, racism and nationalism. She is also involved in the movement of feminist migrants and women of colour in Germany.

Steyerl teaches New Media Art at University of the Arts in Berlin. As well as being a visiting professor for Cultural and Gender Studies, at University of Arts, Berlin, she has lectured at Goldsmith’s College, London and at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, among other institutions. A collection of her essays was published in The Wretched of the Screen (2012).

Nicholas Mangan is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in Melbourne. He is senior lecturer at Monash University. Through a practice bridging drawing, sculpture, film, and installation, Mangan creates politically astute and disconcerting assemblages that address some of the most galvanising issues of our time; the ongoing impacts of colonialism, humanity’s fraught relationship with the natural environment, and the complex and evolving dynamics of the global political economy. His recent solo exhibitions include Limits to Growth, Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA), Melbourne, the Institute of Modern Art (IMA), Brisbane, Kunst-Werke Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin, Dowse Art Museum, Wellington (2016); Ancient Lights, Chisenhale Gallery, London, (2015); Some Kinds of Duration, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, (2012). His work has been included in major international exhibitions including Biennale of Sydney (2018); Let’s Talk About the Weather: Art and Ecology in A Time of Crisis, Guangdong Times Museum, Guangzhou (2018); 74 million million million tons, Sculpture Center, New York (2018); The National 2017: new Australian art, AGNSW, Sydney (2017); 4.543 BILLION. The Matter of matter, CAPC, Bordeaux, (2017); New Museum Triennial: Surround Audience, New York (2015); 9th Bienal do Mercosul, Porto Alegre (2013); and the 13th Istanbul Biennial (2013).

Lucy + Jorge Orta are a French husband-wife art duo made up of Lucy Orta (b. United Kingdom, 1966) and Jorge Orta (b. Argentina, 1953). Their collaborative visual arts practice employs a diversity of media including drawing, sculpture and performance to realize major bodies of work that address key social and ecological challenges of our time. Amongst their most emblematic bodies of work are: Refuge Wear and Body Architecture, portable minimum habitats bridging architecture and dress; Nexus Architecture investigates alternative models of the social link; The Gift, the biomedical ethics of organ donation and the heart as a metaphor for life; HortiRecycling and 70 x 7 The Meal question the local and global food chain and rituals of community feasting; OrtaWater and Clouds reflect on water scarcity and the problems arising from its pollution and corporate control; Antarctica considers the effects of climate change on migration; and Amazonia explores interwoven ecosystems and their value to our natural environment.

Lucy + Jorge Orta’s artwork has been the focus of important survey exhibitions, including: the Argentine representation at the 46th Venice Biennale International Art Exhibition, Italy (1995); The Curve, Barbican Art Gallery, London, UK and Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Venice Biennale, Italy (2005); Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Holland (2006); Biennial of the End of the World, Ushuaia and the Antarctic Peninsula (2007); Hangar Bicocca spazio d’arte, Milan, Italy (2008); Natural History Museum, London, UK (2010); MAXXI National Museum of XXI Century Arts, Rome, Italy and Shanghai Biennale, China (2012); Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK (2013); Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, USA and Parc de la Villette, Paris, France (2014); London Museum Ontario, Canada (2015); Attenborough Arts Centre, Leicester and City Gallery and Museum, Peterborough, UK (2016); Humber Street Gallery, Hull, UK (2017); Ikon Gallery Birmingham, UK (2018).

Jae Rhim Lee is a visual artist, designer, researcher as well as the founder and director of the Infinity Burial Project. From developing city-wide soil remediation plans for the City of New Orleans to teaching art and design at MIT and building recycling systems, furniture and wearables, Jae Rhim’s work spans multiple disciplines, including art and design, city planning, psychology, and science. JR has lectured about and exhibited her work internationally and is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, including the Creative Capital Foundation, MIT, the MAK Center for Art +Architecture, and the Universitate der Kunste Berlin. She is a TED Fellow and Lecturer and Fellow at the ‘d.School’ (Hasso Plattner Institute of Design) at Stanford University.

Pierre Huyghe attended the École Supérieure d’Arts Graphiques (1981–82) and the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (1982–85). Based in New York, he is the Artistic Director of Okayama Art Summit 2019. In the 1990s, Huyghe emerged as part of a wave of second generation Conceptualists known for their relational aesthetics approach towards art. Throughout his career, he has been involved in multimedia collaborations with other artists. His works, which seek a high degree of control over the viewer’s experience, often present themselves as complex systems characterised by a wide range of life forms, inanimate things, and technologies. His constructed organisms combine not only biological, technological, and fictional elements, they also produce an immersive, constantly changing environment, in which humans, animals, and nonbeings learn, evolve, and grow. In 2001, he received a Special Award from the Jury of the Venice Biennale and in 2002, he was awarded the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s Hugo Boss Prize. His recent projects/exhibitions include UUmwelt at the Serpentine Gallery, London (2018); Skulptur Projekte Münster (2017); The Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2015); a touring solo exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and other museums (2013–14); and Documenta 13 (2012).

Ines Doujak is an artist, researcher, and writer, who teaches in the areas of visual culture and material aesthetics with a queer-feminist, anti-racist, anti-colonial focus. Doujak received two research grants from the Austrian Science Fund: Loomshuttles, Warpaths (2010–18), a study of textiles to investigate their global history characterised by cultural, class, and gender conflict; and Utopian Pulse: Flares in the Darkroom (2013–15). She studied at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna (1988–93). Selected exhibitions include Actually, the Dead are not Dead, Bergen Assembly (2019); Possibilities for an Non-Alienated Life, Kochi Muziris Biennale, Kerala (2018); A Beast, a God, and a Line, Dhaka Art Summit, Para Site, Hong Kong, TS1 Yangon, and Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2018); Arte para pensar la nueva razón del mundo, Muntref, Buenos Aires (2017); The Conundrum of Imagination, Leopold Museum, Vienna (2017); Not Dressed for Conquering, Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart (2016); The Beast and the Sovereign, MACBA, Barcelona (2015); Ape Culture, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2015); The School of Kyiv, Kyiv Biennial (2015); Universes in Universe, São Paulo Biennial (2014); Garden of Learning, Busan Biennale (2012); The Potosi Principle, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2010); and Documenta 12, Kassel (2007).

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

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

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

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

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

Arachnid Orchestra. Jam Sessions public programmes

Research Interests:

– Food systems
– Policies and politics related to food
– Food sovereignty
– Agricultural solidarity
– Comparative methodologies

As a co-founder of the interdisciplinary study group Bakudapan, Nurvista is immersed in a long-term research that revolves around the material, cultural, and socio-political implications of food from production to distribution, from consumption to disposal. For this project, the artist aims to undertake a critical mapping of food systems in Singapore and Southeast Asia excavating agricultural production systems, trade routes and agreements, environmental factors, food security policies, food technologies, and consumption habits. By looking at the history and politics that regulate food exchanges between Singapore and Indonesia, the project will unfold within a comparative framework exploring a variety of issues in the two neighbouring countries which—in spite of their radically different scales, developmental emphasis, and levels of wealth distribution—are nonetheless related by multiple cultural kinships. Research Liaison: Yom Bo Sung Yom Bo Sung is an artist and arts worker who recently graduated from Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. His practice is invested in food as a material and as an art object, and explores the socio-political implications of food systems.

The residency of Elia Nurvista was scheduled for October – December 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak rendered international travel impossible. In order to continue to support artistic research and foster collaborations beyond borders, the NTU CCA Residencies Programme initiated Residencies Rewired, a project that trailblazes new pathways to collaboration.

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

Animali Domestici (Antonio Bernacchi and Alicia Lazzaroni) is a duo and design practice based in Bangkok. They focus on the development of experimental and speculative projects, products and processes, beyond the dichotomies of culture and nature, ‘infra-ordinary’ and ‘ab-normal’, human and non-human.
With admittedly fragmented and heterogeneous sources of inspiration, they are interested in post-anthropocentric spaces, subjects and materialities, in human and animal behavior, vernacular crafts and traditions, popular tastes and everyday life references, rendered ‘lifestyles’ and marketing strategies. Animali Domestici is also intensively involved in teaching and research and have been coordinating the International Program in Design and Architecture (INDA) at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand.

Ant Farm was founded in 1968 in San Francisco by architects Chip Lord and Doug Michels as a countercultural collective intersecting between media art and architecture. Their influential work, which integrated art into everyday life with an ironic humour, highlighted environmental degradation, promoted sustainability, and challenged the ideologies and pervasiveness of American mass media, culture, and consumerism. They disbanded in 1978 after a fire destroyed their studio.

Calvin Chua is an architect, urbanist, and educator. He leads Spatial Anatomy, a firm that designs spaces, objects, and strategies for cities. In parallel, he serves as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Singapore University of Technology and Design, leading seminars and design studios on adaptation and urban regeneration. He is recognised as one of the leading voices on Korean peninsula issues. For the past eight years, Chua has piloted capacity-building programmes and urban advisory work in the DPRK. His works and opinions have been featured in various news media, including Monocle, Reuters, and CNN. Prior to founding his practice, Chua worked for various architecture and urban-planning firms in Europe and Asia. A registered architect in the UK, he graduated from the Architectural Association School of Architecture.

Cecilia Tortajada (Mexico and Spain/Singapore), Senior Research Fellow, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore (NUS). The main focus of her work at present is on the future of the world’s water, especially in terms of water, food, energy and environmental securities through coordinated policies. Tortajada has been an advisor to major international institutions including the United Nations Development Programme, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Canada International Development Research Centre, World Bank, and Asian Development Bank. She is a member of the OECD Initiative in Water Governance, and she was previously President of the International Water Resources Association and also the Third World Centre for Water Management in Mexico

Charmaine Toh is currently Curator at National Gallery Singapore where she researches on contemporary art and photography from Southeast Asia. Recent exhibitions includ Danh Vo, Earth Work 1979 (2016) and Siapa Namu Kamu?: Art in Singapore since the 19th century (2015–). Previously, she was the Programme Director at Objectifs Centre for Photography and Film. Toh was one of the curators for the Singapore Biennale 2013 an the i Light Festival 2012, and founder of The Art Incubator, a residency programme that ran from 2009 to 2014.

Wong Chen-Hsi (Singapore) is a filmaker and educator. Her debut feature film, Innocents (2012), won Best Director -New Talents Award at the Shanghai International Film Festival. Wong’s short films include Who Loves the Sun (2006), which premiered at Clermont-Ferrand, and the documentary short Conversations on Sago Lane (2010). She is an alumna of the Berlin Talents, the Torino Film Lab, and a Film Independent Los Angeles fellow. Wong’s films are often about displacement and the nature of our environment. She is an Assistant Professor in Film at the School of Art, Design and Media Nanyang Technological University.

Conrad H. Philipp (Germany/Singapore), Future Cities Laboratory, Singapore-ETH Centre

Eugene Heng (Singapore), Founder and Chairman, Waterways Watch Society;

Hito Steyerl is a German filmmaker, artist and writer whose work explores the complexities of the digital world, art, capitalism, and the implications of Artificial Intelligence for society. Steyerl studied cinematography and documentary filmmaking at the Academy of Visual Arts in Tokyo, the University of Television and Film in Munich, and holds a Ph.D in philosophy from the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. The most formative parts of her education, however, include working as a stunt-girl and bouncer.
Hito Steyerl is interested in the proliferation and circulation of images in our globalized world. She often works with the format of the video essay, combining a heterogeneous range of material, including interviews, found footage, fictional dramatizations, pop-music sound tracks, and first-person voiceovers. Her work focuses on the intersection of media technology, political violence, and desire by using humor, charm, and reduced gravity as political means of expression. Her sources range from appropriated low-fi clips and sounds to mostly misquoted philosophical fittings. These elements are condensed in rambling essayistic speculation in both text and imagery. Through her oversensitivity to analogies, Steyerl both collects and creates stories describing realities that are stranger than fiction and reflected upon in galloping thought experiments. Her work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions including documenta 12, Taipei Biennial 2010, and 7th Shanghai Biennial. Her written essays have proliferated more on- than offline in journals such as e-flux and eipcp. She has published filmic and written essays centred around questions of globalization, urbanism, racism and nationalism. She is also involved in the movement of feminist migrants and women of colour in Germany.
Steyerl teaches New Media Art at University of the Arts in Berlin. As well as being a visiting professor for Cultural and Gender Studies, at University of Arts, Berlin, she has lectured at Goldsmith’s College, London and at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, among other institutions. A collection of her essays was published in The Wretched of the Screen (2012).

Hyungmin Pai (South Korea) is a historian, critic, and curator. Currently a Professor at the Univeristy of Seoul, he recieved his PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, and is a two-time Fulbright Scholar. Pai is author of The Portfolio and the Diagram (2002), Sensuous Plan: The Architecture of Seung H-Sang (2007), and The Key Concepts of Korean Architecture (2013). He was twice curator for the Korean Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2008, 2014), and in 2014 was awarded the Golden Lion for best national participation. Pai was Head Curator of the 4th Gwangju Design Biennale (2010-11), guest curator for numerous international exhibitions and is presently Director of the inaugural Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism.

Lucy Orta (B. Sutton Coldfield, UK, 1966) and Jorge Orta (B. Rosario, Argentina, 1953) founded Studio Orta in 1991. Lucy and Jorge’s collaborative practice focuses on the social and ecological factors of environmental sustainability. They present their work using a diverse range of media that includes drawing, sculpture, installation, couture, painting, silkscreen, photography, video and light, as well staged interventions and performances. Among their most iconic series are: refuge wear and body architecture portable minimum habitats bridging architecture and dress; hortire cycling the food chain in global and local contexts; 70 x 7 the meal the ritual of dining and its role in community networking; nexus architecture alternative modes of establishing the social link; the gift a metaphor for the heart and the biomedical ethics of organ donation; ortawater and clouds water scarcity and the problems arising from pollution and corporate control; Antarctica international human rights and freer international migration; and Amazonia – the value of the natural environment to our daily lives and to our survival. In recognition of their contribution to sustainability, the artists received the Green Leaf award in 2007 for artistic excellence with an environmental message. This was presented by the United Nations environment programme in partnership with the natural world museum at the Nobel peace center in Oslo, Norway. In 2013 the artists’ monumental meteoros clouds was selected for the inaugural terrace wires public art commission for St Pancras international in London.

Lukas Feireiss (Germany) works as curator, writer, art director, and educator in the international mediation of contemporary cultural reflexivity beyond disciplinary boundaries. He attained his graduate education in Comparative Religious Studes, Philosophy and Ethnology. Feireiss’ Berlin-based creative practice Studio Lukas Feireiss aims at the critical cut-up and playful re-evaluation of creative and intellectual production modes and the diverse socio-cultural and medial conditions. He is author and editor of numerous books, and curator of manifold exhibitions. Feireiss has lectured and taught at various universities worldwide, and is Head of the new Masters Programme Radical Cut-Up at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam. With the publisher Gestalte, Feireiss had edited numerous volumes, including Imagine Architecutre: Aristic Visions of the Urban Real (2014), Utopia Forever: VIsions of Architecutre and Urbanism (2011), and Architecture of Change 1 &2: Sustainability and Humanity in the Built Environment (2008 and 2009).

Mierle Laderman Ukeles is an influential pioneer of maintenance art. Her work also revolves around feminist art. She is best known for her Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! Proposal for an Exhibition “CARE” (1969), a proposal for an exhibition to display maintenance work as contemporary art. Since 1977, she has been an unsalaried artist-in-residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation where she creates art that deals with urban waste flows, recycling, ecology, urban sustainability, and our power to transform degraded land and water into healthy inhabitable public places.

Nikolaus Hirsh is an architect, editor and curator. He was the Director of Städelschule and Portikus in Frankfrut, Germany, and currently teaches at Columbia University in New York, United States. His architectural work includes the award-winning Dresden Synagogue (2001), Hinzert Document Center (2005), Cybermohalla Hub in Delhi (2008-2012), an artist residency building at The Land (with Rirkrit Tiravanija), and Museum of Immortality in Mexico City (2016). Hirsch curated numerious exhibition at the Portikus, the Folly project for the Gwangju Biennale (2014), and Wohnungsfrage (Housing Question) at HKW in Berlin (2015). He is the co-founder and editor of the Critical Spatial Practice series at Sternberg Press and the new e-flux Architecture platform.

Paul Teng (Singapore) is Principal Officer at the National Institute of Education, and Adjunct Senior Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of Internaitional Studies, Nanyang Technology University. His experience on agrifood security issues is from the WorldFish Center, the International Rice Research Institute, and Monsanto Company. Professor Teng is a Fellow of the American Phytopathological Society and The World Academy of Sciences, and he has won prestigious awards such as the Eriksson Prize (Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences), and an Honorary Doctorate in Science for his work on food security. He chairs several international and national scientific groups and has published 9 books and over 250 technical papers.

Philippe Pirotte is Rector of Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste – Städelschule, and Director of Portikus, Frankfurt, and Visiting Professor (2018/19) of MA Museum Studies and Curatorial Practices, School of Art, Design and Media, NTU.

Samson Young, Para Site, Hong Kong (2016); A Luxury We Cannot Afford, Para Site, Hong Kong (2015); Why Stay If You Can Go?, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2012); Three Artists Walk Into A Bar…, de Appel, Amsterdam (2012); and Telah Terbit: Out Now,, Singapore Art Museum (2006).

Xyza Cruz Bacani, Arrow Factory, Beijing (2016); Orchestrations

Qinyi Lim (Singapore) is an independent curator and writer. She previously held curatorial positions at Para Site, Hong Kong: National University of Singapore Museum, and the Singapore Art Museum. Lim completed the de Appel Curatorial Programme in 2012. Her past projects include The Outlier

Regina Bittner (Germany) studied Cultural Theory and Art History at Leipzig University, and recieved her doctorate from the Institute for European Ethnology, Humboldt University of Berlin. As Head of the Academy and Deputy Director of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, she conceptualises and teaches the postgraduate programme for architecture and modern research. Bittner has curated numerous exhibitions on the architectural, urban and cultural history of modernism, her research focus being international architectural and urban research, the modern era and migration, the cultural history of modernism and heritage studies. Recent publications include In Reserve: The Household! Historic Models and Contemporary Positions from the Bauhaus (with Elke Krasny, 2016), and The Bauhaus in Calcutta: An Encounter of the Cosmopolitan Avant-Garde (with Kathrin Rhomberg, 2013). She has also conducted extensive research on Singapore’s public housing commonly referred to as HDBs.

Ursula Biemann is an artist, writer, and video essayist who investigates global relations under the impact of the accelerated mobility of people, resources, and information. Her works explore space and mobility, and more recently ecology, oil, and water. Her video installations have been exhibited in museums and international art biennials worldwide. She received a doctor honoris causa in Humanities by the Umeå University, Sweden, and the Prix Meret Oppenheim, the national art award of Switzerland. She has a BFA from the School of Visual Arts and attended the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York (1988). Biemann’s research is currently based at the Zurich University for the Arts.

Dr Yvonne P. Doderer is Professor for Gender & Cultural Studies at the University of Applied Sciences in Düsseldorf, and runs the Office for Transdisciplinary Research & Cultural Production. Her work focuses on the linkage of urbanism, gender, and contemporary art. Her most recent publication is Shining Cities. Gender and Other Issues in Urban Development of the Twenty-First Century (2017). Doderer was Visiting Research Fellow at NTU CCA Singapore in 2014, and returned in 2017 as a participant of the Centre’s public summit Cities for People NTU CCA Ideas Fest 2016/17.

NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore and the New Museum are pleased to announce participants and collaborators for the second edition of the NTU CCA Ideas Fest, IdeasCity Singapore, guest-curated by IdeasCity, taking place in Singapore and across Southeast Asia from February 15 to 22, 2020.

Building upon the NTU CCA Singapore’s research theme Climates. Habitats. Environments. and IdeasCity’s exploration of the role of art and culture beyond the walls of the museum, IdeasCity Singapore’s residency and public program will examine the urgency of solidarity structures in negating climate change and its impact on Southeast Asia and communities worldwide.

Twenty practitioners have been selected from an international open call for the residency program at the NTU CCA Singapore to develop independent research at the intersection of art and ecology. Throughout the residency, participants will engage in workshops and lectures presented by local artists, practitioners, and community leaders, including Heman ChongLynette ChuaDrama BoxCharles LimZarina Muhammad, and Post-Museum, along with organizations such as New NaratifThe ProjectorSingapore Community Radiosoft/WALLS/studs, and The Substation.

Residency Fellows include: Francisco Brown (United States), Jane Chang Mi (United States), Kar-men Cheng (Singapore), Lingying Chong (Singapore), Chloe C. Chotrani (Philippines/Singapore), Calvin Chua (Singapore), Fataah T. Dihaan (United States), ila (Singapore), Heider Ismail (Singapore), Lily Kwong (United States), Clarissa Ai Ling Lee (Malaysia), Michelle Lai (Singapore), Kwan Q Li (Hong Kong), Angela Mayrina (Indonesia/United Kingdom), John Kenneth Paranada (Philippines/United Kingdom), Patricia Sayuri (Japan/Brazil), Pen Sereypagna (Cambodia), Shahmen Suku (Singapore/Australia), Ruby Thiagarajan (Singapore), Dat Vu (Vietnam), Nikan Wasinondh (Bow) (Thailand) and Jason Wee (Singapore). For more information please visit: http://www.ideas-city.org.

On February 22, 2020 at NTU CCA Singapore, IdeasCity Singapore will present and broadcast a series of dialogues between local and international artists and community leaders on topics including food sovereignty (Angela Dimayuga and Emeka Ogboh), underground archives (Heman Chong and Monica Narula of Raqs Media Collective), image and power (Ho Rui An and Shumon Basar), ecofeminism (Marwa Arsanios), and traces of migration (Kunlé Adeyemi, Eleena Jamil, Bouchra Khalili and Alfian Sa’at). A sequence of debate circles will examine the roles of solidarity and speculation in addressing climate injustice, featuring interdisciplinary perspectives from speakers such as Becca D’Bus, Kirsten Han, Prasoon Kumar and Zarina Muhammad.

Workshops and conversations facilitated by Bakudapan Food Study Group and a presentation of new VR work by artist Rindon Johnson will invite select audiences to engage directly with artists envisioning pathways to equitable and sustainable futures. The programme will also feature screenings, showings, and remarks by performance artist ila and Digital Minister of Taiwan, Audrey Tang.

Responding to the context of climate crisis, in which artists, activists, and scholars around the world are working today, IdeasCity Singapore will include a series of programmes across Southeast Asia in collaboration with The Forest Curriculum and Nomina Nuda (Los Baños, Philippines), Malaysia Design Archive (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia), House of Natural Fiber (Yogyakarta, Indonesia), The Land (Chiang Mai, Thailand),  Sàn Art (Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam) and Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (Boston, United States).

Facilitated by IdeasCity and workshopped at NTU CCA Singapore with an advisory council of Singaporean community members whose work exemplifies equitable practices, a community agreement was developed that details best practices for achieving an accountable, sustainable, and authentic collaboration in Singapore.

Programme on 22 February 2020 
10.00am
Start and Finish by Ute Meta Bauer and Vere van Gool
10.15am
Dialogues by Shumon Basar and Ho Rui An on capitalism and the extreme self
11.00am
Lecture by Kirsten Han on emergent medias and speech
11.20am
Film screening by ila
12.00pm
Presentation by Heman Chong on archives as commons
12.15pm
Lecture Screening by Marwa Arsanios on ecofeminism and community
1.00pm
Presentation by Monica Narula on submarine horizons
1.30pm
Performance by Radha “Midnight Masala”
1.55pm
Hologram lecture by Audrey Tang
2.00pm
Conversation between Becca D’Bus and Fellows on solidarity with nature
3.00pm
Discussion by Shumon Basar, Heman Chong, Vere van Gool, Charles Lim, and Zarina Muhammad on sovereignty and indigenous contexts
4.00pm
Lecture by Emeka Ogboh on food diasporas
4.15pm
Reading by Alfian Sa’at on the poetics of migration
4.30pm
Presentations by House of Natural Fiber and the Land Foundation on strategies for combatting climate change
5.00pm
Video Presentation by Angela Dimayuga on culture and cookbooks
5.10pm
Discussion by Ute Meta Bauer, Vanessa Ho, and Prasoon Kumar on trust networks and sustainability
6.00pm
Kitchen Mapping Workshop by Bakudapan Food Study Group
6.30pm
VR Demo by Rindon Johnson on speculative futures
7.00pm
Roundtable by Fellows
7.45pm
Live Music by Bani Haykal
8.00pm
Lecture Screenings by Kunlé Adeyemi, Eleena Jamil, and Bouchra Khalili on the poetics of migration
10.00pm
Start and Finish by Ute Meta Bauer and Vere van Gool

NTU CCA Ideas Fest 2020 is guest-curated by IdeasCity, New Museum, New York.

SEA STATE by artist Charles Lim Yi Yong, commissioned for the Singapore Pavilion for the 56th Venice Biennale and curated by Shabbir Hussain Mustafa, will be presented at the NTU CCA Singapore from 30 April to 10 July 2016. For over a decade, Lim’s ongoing project SEA STATE examines the biophysical, political and psychic contours of Singapore through the visible and invisible lenses of the sea. SEA STATE is an in-depth inquiry by an artist that scrutinises both man-made systems, opening new perspectives on our everyday surroundings, from unseen landscapes and disappearing islands to the imaginary boundaries of a future landmass.

SEA STATE pubic programmes

First held at the Palazzo Franchetti on the occasion of the Singapore Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale, the symposium The Geopolitical and the Biophysical: a structured conversation on Art and Southeast Asia in context will continue and expand upon the debate with a second iteration at NTU CCA Singapore during Lim’s exhibition on 17 and 18 June 2016.

The Geopolitical and the Biophysical: a structured conversation on Art and Southeast Asia in context, Part II symposium

The presentation of SEA STATE and the symposium The Geopolitical and the Biophysical: a structured conversation on Art and Southeast Asia in context, Part II held at NTU CCA Singapore are generously supported by the Ministry of Culture, Community & Youth, National Arts Council Singapore and the Singapore Tourism Board.