Topography – NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Climate Crisis and Cultural Loss Logo Bar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The research-driven conceptual practice of Anthony Chin (b. 1969, Singapore) grows out of site-specific engagements with the historical, social, and architectural stratifications of a place. Through the articulation of ordinary materials into poetic installations, his work unravel the latent power structures and complex geopolitical narratives that undergird the colonial past and the post-colonial present. He has regularly presented his work in Singapore and abroad. His recent solo exhibitions include ~~S$1,996/-~~ S$831.06/-, Comma Space, Singapore (2021); TROPHY, Metropolitan Museum of Manila, Philippines (2020); and Western Pacific, Mo Shang Experiment, Beijing, China (2016). Among the group exhibitions are SAM Contemporaries: Residues & Remixes, Singapore Art Museum, Singapore (2023); For the House; Against the House, Gillman Barracks, Singapore (2022); Concept 88, Comma Space, Singapore (2022); three editions of OH! Open House, amongst others. Anthony has previously taken part in other residency programmes such as National NAC-MET international Artist Residency, Manila, Philippines (2020) and Taipei International Artists Residency season 4, Taiwan (2018).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Against the developmental emphasis on order, cleanliness, and control, weeds are often singled out as plants that grow in the wrong place where they can flourish in spite of being unwanted. In their resistance against human impulses to control and manicure nature, weeds are regarded by the artist as a manifestation of the beauty and resilience of wilderness and chaos. By observing both the physiology and formal qualities of weeds, Chua plans to experiment with a variety of light-sensitive and other photographic techniques to capture their intricate beauty and frame their value for nature and society.

Artist-in-Residence Chua Chye Teck speaks to Dr Anna Lovecchio, Assistant Director, Programmes, in our fourth episode of AiRCAST. Follow Chye Teck’s stream of consciousness as he tells us about his journey with the medium of photography and his enduring fascination for fleeting forms and makeshift compositions. In recent years, Chye Teck is developing a more experimental attitude towards the image-making process creating works that respond to the specificity of a site, rather than to a subject matter, and reverberate with emotional vibrations. He has also become involved in several collaborations with other artists and he is cultivating a new fascination for cellphone images and the creative potential of readily available, off-the-shelf digital technologies.

The evocative and subtly layered works of Chua Chye Teck (b. 1974, Singapore) result from prolonged visual and experiential quests. His body of work draws attention to the discarded and the overlooked articulating a reflection on the multiple processes of disappearing that result from the impact of progress and development on the natural environment. His works have been exhibited in venues such as at Singapore Art Museum (2021), Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2020), Jendela Esplanade, Singapore (2018, 2015), Institute of Contemporary Arts, Singapore (2017), Chiang Mai University Art Centre, Thailand (2015), and Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Germany (2010).

Contributor: Chua Chye Teck
Conducted by: Anna Lovecchio
Programme Manager: Kristine Tan
Sound Engineer: Ashwin Menon (The Music Parlour)
Intro & Outro Music: Tini Aliman
Cover Image & Design: Arabelle Zhuang, Kristine Tan

[See Full Transcript]

Building on the unique opportunity to explore wilderness within the urban context, Izat Arif’s research project aims to survey the topography, history, social memory, and natural environment of the patch of jungle located within the compound of Gillman Barracks. Provisionally titled Living Methods in City Jungle, this investigation is a continuation of an earlier project initiated in 2016 by the artist collective Malaysian Artists’ Intention Experiment (MAIX), of which the artist is a member. The group engaged in manifold activities including planting trees, collecting samples, and gathering information from the locals about traditional beliefs and practices in a tract of forest reserve situated in Perak, Northern Malaysia. Employing similar methodologies, he aims to conduct extensive fieldwork during the residency. The findings will materialise as drawings, photocollages, sound and video recordings, a tool cabinet, and they might potentially coalesce into a guidebook which mobilises both the familiar and the unfamiliar aspects of the territory.

During the residency, Monica Ursina Jäger will examine the shifting topography of Singapore and Southern Malaysia and how it changed over the last century by engaging with urban development, and architecture. Of particular interest is the relationship between built environments and natural landscapes in “the vertical shift” incurred in the notion of landscape. Looking at Singapore as a unique case study, her research aims to focus on and excavate histories related to the social, political and sensorial conversations between natural and built elements and to rethink ‘topography’ as a mental landscape, rather than as a form of visual representation.

In recent years, Claudia Losi’s artistic research has journeyed around the perception of places creating erratic configurations of language, memory, and imagination that unfold multiple layers of our subjective relationship to the world. For the artist, “being there” denotes a state of being located in the mind of the subject, in the memories and imagination related to a physical environment. These series of investigations coalesced into the publication How do I imagine being there?, realized in 2016 alongside an eponymous exhibition. Following the same train of thought, the research project for the residency is titled Being There or Life is a State of Mind, after the 1979 film by American director Hal Ashby. Losi intends to conduct a series of interviews with people from diverse disciplines, generations, and socioeconomic backgrounds asking them to describe a certain typology of place. Texts, drawings, and possibly a video will be created on the basis of the gathered materials.

Mapping memories by mobilising narratives, images, and sites has been a recurrent gesture for Boedi Widjaja in the last decade of his practice. Moving beyond cartographic representation, his approach to mapping embraces a multiplicity of angles—from phenomenological responses to archaeological dives into far-off times—through which he retraces our understanding of history and memory. During the residency, he will focus on Medang Kamulan (“Medang the origin” in Javanese), an ancestral site prominently embedded in Javanese collective memory. Believed to be located in Grobogan (Central Java), Medang Kamulan is a place of beginning, the mythical cradle of Javanese civilisation that appears in oral histories, epic literature, and countless legends. In harking back to this site of origin, the artist will speculate on how cultural kinships could be moulded by unhindered flows and unconstrained connections before the rise of colonialism and of the border politics of nation-states. This research is part of Path. (2012 – ongoing), a body of work revolving around migration, movement, and belonging that reframes our existence by recasting our relationship to the past.

Ari Wulu is a solo electronic music performer also known as midiJUNKIE or WVLV. He has been actively creating arrangements and performing since 1998, and his works have been presented at various events and festivals in Indonesia. Apart from his audio works, he is also the Program Director of SoundBoutique (2005–present), and Yogyakarta Gamelan Festival (2009–present), and was a member of the board of directors of Yogyakarta Art Festival (2013–18). Together with his collective, Jogjakarta Video Mapping Project (also known as JVMP, 2013–present), Ari Wulu organises SUMONAR, an annual video projection and interactive art festival in Yogyakarta (since 2018).

Lulu Lutfi Labibi studied textile craft in Indonesian Institute of the Arts in Yogyakarta (ISI Yogyakarta). In 2012, LULU LUTFI LABIBI was launched: a ready-to-wear fashion label that promotes the use of Indonesian traditional textiles such as lurik, tenun, and batik in a more up-to-date look. The technique of drapery became its own identity by forming the fabric directly onto the mannequin or living model, without creating many patterns. Apart from presenting his works at various local and international festivals, Lulu Lutfi Labibi collaborated with artists indieguerillas to present Petruk Jadi Supermodel at Artjog 2015, and with art collective Piramida Gerilya to present Warung Murakabi at Artjog 2019.

Emerging from an exhibition, conference, and festival that explored architect and urban theorist William S. W. Lim’s concept on “Incomplete Urbanism” and his call for “Cities for People,” this publication juxtaposes research essays, visual and textual documentation. Organised into three chapters — “The City as Living Room,” “The City as Multiple,” and “The City as Stage,” the contributions — by architects, scholars, planners, artists, activists, and curators —constitute a diverse set of analyses. Unexpected notions of planning, building, and living in Asian cities suggest multiple paths into critical spatial practice of Asian urban space. The volume positions Lim’s thoughts, concepts, and plans for action as that of a humanist who addresses the complex topography of an ever-changing urban Asia.

Contributors include: Laura Anderson Barbata, Jiat-Hwee Chang, Thanavi Chotpradit, Calvin Chua, Yvonne P. Doderer, Chomchon Fusinpaiboon, indieguerillas, Marc Glöde, Sacha Kagan, Lulu Lutfi Labibi, Magdalena Magiera, Laura Miotto, Marjetica Potrč, Pen Sereypagna, Shirley Surya, Sissel Tolaas, Etienne Turpin and Nashin Mahtani, John Wagner, H. Koon Wee, Woon Tien Wei, and Ari Wulu. Foreword by Nikos Papastergiadis. Afterword by William S. W. Lim.

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

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.

indieguerillas, founded in 1999, is a duet of artists from Yogyakarta, Indonesia. They are the couple Santi Ariestyowanti (b. 1977, Semarang) and Dyatmiko “Miko” Bawono (b. 1975, Kudus). The former has a background in visual communication design and the latter in interior design. Both are alumni of the Faculty of Art of the Indonesian Institute of the Arts in Yogyakarta (ISI Yogyakarta). In addition to their being known for their interest in folklore, indieguerillas are also recognised for their proficiency in visual effects and inter-media experimentation in their works.

Jiat-Hwee Chang is Associate Professor at the Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore. He is the author of A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture: Colonial Networks, Nature and Technoscience (2016), which was awarded an International Planning History Society Book Prize 2018, and shortlisted for the European Association for Southeast Asian Studies Humanities Book Prize 2017. He is also co-editor of Southeast Asia’s Modern Architecture: Questions in Translation, Epistemology and Power (2019) and (with William S. W. Lim) Non West Modernist Past (2011). Chang was recently a Canadian Centre for Architecture-Mellon Foundation Researcher, 2017–19. In 2019–20, he will be Manton Fellow at the Clark Art Institute and Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society, Germany, researching the sociocultural histories and techno-politics of air conditioning and climate change in urban Asia. He is also co-writing a book on everyday modernism in Singapore with Justin Zhuang and photographer Darren Soh.

John Wagner’s architectural practice is defined by engagement with diverse community members, artists, activists, leadership, and financial stakeholders. His design practice creates spaces of interaction unique to the communities they serve. His collaboration with Matthew Mazzotta applies architectural practice to artistic creation addressing issues rooted in the convergence of public space, art, justice, and the built environment. Wagner, NCARB, is a licensed architect, received a B.Arch from Virginia Tech, a Masters in Architecture from Harvard Graduate School of Design, and is currently an Irving Innovation Fellow at Harvard University.

Nashin Mahtani is the director of PetaBencana.id, a non-profit organisation developing methods and integrated software infrastructures for community-led disaster co-management. She leads a multi-disciplinary design research team in developing real-time visualisations of disaster events to support democratised practices of mutual aid for climate adaptation. Mahtani also creates new representational forms and data visualisation strategies to explain humanitarian information and communication technologies and systems. With a background in architecture, her research and design work investigates the relational complexities of urban infrastructure, computation, and neuroscience.