As the urgency of climate-change induced sea level rise threatens Singapore’s coastlines, many technological solutions have been offered to mitigate its worsening effects. In this lecture, moderated by Professor Ute Meta Bauer, Professor Adam Switzer and media artist, researcher, and NTU ADM PhD student Dewi Tan will explore the different strategies adopted to mitigate urban flood risk and build flood resilience in Jakarta and Singapore, including a discussion on The Long Island Plan. This lecture will address coastal development through the lens of engineering solutions and critical artistic practices to understand the socio-economic and ecological potentials and consequences of this newest terraforming endeavour.

Tuesday,12 November 2024, 6:30 – 8:00pm
The Hall, NTU CCA
Gillman Barracks, Singapore, 108934

About the Climate Transformation: Sustainable Societies Lecture Series
This series brings together artists, policymakers and advocates with academic researchers from NTU’s ‘Climate Transformation Programme’ (CTP) and other academic programmes. Through the triangulation of science-culture-society, we hope to foster a conversation that expands our knowledge of the challenges that confronts us in Singapore and in the broader region.

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

This project examines how climate crisis and cultural loss interconnect. The core objective is the co-production of knowledge that can lead to a changed understanding of environmental justice, which, in turn, will suggest changes in existing legal and policy frameworks. The project hypothesises that a fundamental connection between people and their environments has been lost in contemporary urban contexts, resulting in feelings of indifference towards the climate crisis or unexplained feelings of climate anxiety.

It deploys a research team with transdisciplinary methods to build on emerging environmental jurisprudence in the Pacific region and produce narrative visualisations demonstrating the links between cultural loss and climate change. By combining scholarly knowledge with cultural and artistic practices, the project will develop an innovative framework for addressing the impact of accelerated climate change. Using tools from visual studies and forensic architecture, from ethnography and law, to make scientific evidence on climate change socially robust and impactful, it will also create a relay between local perspectives and knowledge generated in different academic fields. Data visualisation and audiovisual presentations of ecological and cultural loss will be instrumental to transform ecological grief and loss into catalysts for climate action. Such narrative visualisations make visible the necessity to re-establish a direct relation between human societies and the environment, especially in the rapidly-changing urban fabric of a metropolis like Singapore.

Research Outputs

Climate Crisis and Cultural Loss Research Presentation, 23 March–13 October 2024, TBA21-Academy Ocean Space, Venice, Italy

Climate Crisis and Cultural Loss Research Presentation, 12 April–24 May 2024, ADM Gallery, 81 Nanyang Drive, Singapore

Special Issue: Climate Crisis and Cultural Loss (Vol. XXVII, 2024), Comparative Law Journal of the Pacific (CLJP), Victoria University of Wellington

Research Publications:

Ahmed, N., Bauer, U. M., & Lallemant-Moe, H. R. (2024, October). Introductions to Cultural loss and climate change. Comparative Law Journal of the Pacific, Special Issue: Climate Crisis and Cultural Loss.

Ahmed, N., Camus, G., Lallemant-Moe, H. R., & Rave, L. (2022, November). Cultural loss and climate change – A new field of research. Comparative Law Journal of the Pacific, 28.

Soh, K. M. (2024, May). Monsoon equinox. Issue 13: Weather. LASALLE College of the Arts.

Shaleh, A. (2024, October). Linking the commons and climate change to collective actions. Comparative Law Journal of the Pacific, Special Issue: Climate Crisis and Cultural Loss.

This walk is developed to explore how a city can be, if experienced outside of one’s routines. When we change environment, the new conditions affect the senses. Through light, sound and scent, our awareness of space changes dramatically. Composer and sound researcher Dr PerMagnus Lindborg will focus on the perception of sound and its design in complex environments and how this extends to all our senses.

The aim of this walk is to experience the city anew, outside of one’s routines under the guidance of Sissel Tolaas, who has been studying smells since the early 1990s. By a conscious use of the sense of smell, participants will navigate and explore various parts of Singapore, rediscovering the city through a different sense perception.

28 Oct 2016, Fri 4:00pm – 6:00pm
17 Jan 2017, Tue 05:30 PM – 07:00 PM
19 Jan 2017, Thu 09:00 AM – 10:30 AM

Registration required via Peatix: medicinalherbs.peatix.com
This programme will be conducted in Mandarin.

Programme will start at NTU CCA Singapore, Block 43 Malan Road and end at NTU Community Herb Garden, Nanyang Technological University, Nanyang Avenue near Jalan Bahar Gate. One-way transportation from NTU CCA Singapore to NTU is provided.

In conceptualising Quadra Medicinale (2009), Jef Geys asked local collaborators to identify plants that grew on the street, and to research their potential medicinal or beneficial properties. The NTU Community Herb Garden is dedicated to the cultivation of such plants and is home to more than 300 species of tropical plants and herbs with medicinal properties. Ng Kim Chuan founded the Garden in 2009, together with a small group of volunteers consisting of staff, students, and members of the public, to serve as a charitable resource of medicinal herbs for the poor and the needy. Ng will give a tour of the Garden, with the assistance of Lee Jin Long, NTU student, and share his knowledge and work surrounding these medicinal herbs, especially as alternative treatments for cancer and chronic illnesses.

A public programme of Jef Geys Quadra Medicinale Singapore.

“Weeds” are not a group of related plants (like “orchids” or “gingers” or “palms”), nor are they plants with shared physical characteristics (like “trees” or “shrubs”). Although weeds defy easy definition, their name suggests something unwanted or out of place. Many, however, are quite beautiful and merit closer examination and appreciation. This talk will explore different aspects of weeds – what they are, their place in the human psyche, their fascinating life histories – and their inextricable link to human existence.

BIOGRAPHY

Shawn Kaihekulani Yamauchi Lum (United States/Singapore) helped form the Nature Society (Singapore) Plant Group with the intention of promoting an interest in plants and plant conservation as part of a broader effort to promote Singapore’s natural heritage. He is a strong advocate of public participation in nature discovery and monitoring, and believes that our quality of life is made better by becoming acquainted with the beautiful and diverse living world around us.

A public programme of Jef Geys Quadra Medicinale Singapore.

Join us for an afternoon of drawing, walking, and inquiry inspired by 𝘿𝙚𝙨𝙞𝙜𝙣 𝙀𝙖𝙧𝙩𝙝: 𝙎𝙥𝙚𝙘𝙪𝙡𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙫𝙚 𝙁𝙞𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙛𝙤𝙧 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝘾𝙡𝙞𝙢𝙖𝙩𝙚. In this session, we’ll explore how architectural drawing can be a critical tool to visualise the unseen externalities of deep-sea mining, land reclamation, sand exports, and marine geopolitics—especially in Singapore and its neighbouring shores where earth extraction meets fragile ecosystems.

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.

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

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

EXHIBITION 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

As the climate crisis intensifies, Southeast Asia will experience more intense and frequent extreme weather patterns – including flooding, hurricanes and tornadoes. According to PUB, Singapore faces the risk of flash floods, from abrupt and heavy storms, and coastal flooding in low-lying coastal areas due to rising sea levels and storm surges. As disaster events increase around the region, how can Singapore become a climate-resilient city in light of these projections? Beginning with a presentation by artist Ong Kian Peng (Adjunct Lecturer, NTU Art, Design and Media) he draws on his AI film Disaster Free (2024), visualising urban flooding that challenges the public perception of Singapore as a disaster-free zone. Paired with PhD Candidate, Ning Ding (NTU Asian School of the Environment) and moderated by Dr Karin G Oen(Director, NTU CCA Singapore; Senior Lecturer and Head of Art History, NTU School of Humanities), this dialogue brings together engineering solutions and speculative filmmaking to consider how to prepare for future scenarios.

15 April 2025, 6:30pm – 8:30pm
The Hall, NTU CCA, Blk 6 Lock Road, #01-10 Gillman Barracks, Singapore 108934

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 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.

What messages echo back to us from the future Earth? What will remain, and what will be mourned of the world as we know it? In a time when planetary futures are continuously mapped, engineered, and imagined, Letters from a Future Earth invites participants to step across the threshold of speculation and listen for voices shaped by rising tides, geoengineered skies, and adaptive ecosystems.

This workshop revolves 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.

The workshop welcomes 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 participatory event is part of a series of public programmes for the exhibition DESIGN EARTH: Speculative Fiction for the Climate on view by appointment at NTU ADM Gallery. Participants are welcome to visit the exhibition before attending the workshop.

This workshop is recommended for participants who are 18 years old and above.

Drawing and writing materials will be provided, participants are also welcome to bring their own.

The works produced will be photographed, and a selection will be featured on NTU CCA Singapore’s media platforms.

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

Saturday, 5 July 2025
2:00 – 4:00pm
The Hall, NTU CCA Singapore

REGISTER

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.

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

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 Futures, Drawing 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.

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.

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

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 Ghosn, El 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

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

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

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

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.

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

Singapore, a high-density tropical city, regularly faces environmental challenges such as the urban heat island effect and air pollution. As these issues intensify due to rising temperatures and increasing urbanisation, how can urban ecosystems provide solutions that prioritise wellbeing for all? This lecture will explore how landscape design – such as rewilding and the Rail Corridor – can improve air quality as air pollution intensifies with rising temperatures. For this lecture, we bring together international renowned scientist of air pollution Steve Yim (Associate Professor, Asian School of Environment and Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, Nanyang Technological University, and Director, Centre for Climate Change and Environmental Health), and Dr. Srilalitha Gopalakrishnan (Associate Director [Research], Future Cities Laboratory Global and President, Singapore Institute of Landscape Architects), to discuss architectural and scientific innovations to enhance green-city livability, focusing on integrated architecture, urban sustainability, and public health. This lecture will be moderated by Dr. Thomas Schroepfer (Professor of Architecture and Sustainable Design, Singapore University of Technology and Design and Director, Future Cities Laboratory Global, Singapore-ETH Centre) with a welcome address by Ute Meta Bauer (Professor, School of Art, Design, and Media, Nanyang Technological University and Senior Principal Research Fellow, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore).

Tuesday, 18 February 2025
6:30pm – 8:30pm
The Hall, NTU CCA Singapore

Register here

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.

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

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

The Ideal Communist City (Andrei Baburov, Georgi Djumenton, Alexei Gutnov, Zoya Kharitonova, Ilya Lezava, Stanislav Zadovskij), comprised urban concepts by architects and planners at the University of Moscow written during the late 1950s and first published in a journal of a communist youth organisation in 1960. The architects’ collective imagines urban life “structured by freely chosen relationships represents the fullest, most well-rounded aspects of each human personality.”

The Ideal Communist City was first published in English in 1971 within the influential series on architecture and urban theory, the i press series on the human environment, initiated by Mary Otis Stevens and Thomas McNulty. This volume comprises a facsimile edition of the original title with a foreword by Ana Miljacki, professor of architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The Ideal Communist City
Published by NTU CCA Singapore and Weiss Publications, 2022
By Andrei Baburov, Georgi Djumenton, Alexei Gutnov, Zoya Kharitonova, Ilya Lezava, Stanislav Zadovskij. Edited with text by Ute Meta Bauer, Karin G. Oen, Pelin Tan. Afterword by Mary Otis Stevens. Essay by Ana Miljački.
Design by Enver Hadzijaj
© 2022 by the editors, Mary Otis Stevens, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore and Weiss Publications, ISBN: 9783948318161
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

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

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

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).

Inspired by the idea of expanded sculptural environments, the artworks explore the interplay between landscape, architecture, and the broader social and economic environments they are placed in. More than being monumental or site-specific, each work alters or permeates its local context to invite visitors to a broader, richer engagement.

Mapletree Business City II Public Art Trail Video Tour

NTU CCA Singapore developed this virtual tour to give context on the Culture City. Culture Scape. project and create awareness of the Mapletree Public Art Trail as well as the walking tours that our Centre conducts. Used in combination with the Educational Resource Guide for schools, this tour will serve as a starting point to encourage people to come see the work in person at MBC II.

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

Erika Tan (b. 1967, Singapore) is an artist and Lecturer at Central Saint Martins, London. Her research-led practice develops from an interest in received narratives, contested heritage, subjugated voices, and the transnational movement of ideas, people, and objects. Between July and August 2015, Tan was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore where she continued her research into the minor historical figure of the Malay weaver Halimah and the conditions surrounding the 1924 British Empire Exhibiton, an inquiry that has since developed into the video installations APA JIKA, The Mis-Placed Comma and The ‘Forgotten’ Weaver (both in 2017).

Dirk Snauwaert is Artist Director of WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels, and was involved in its creation since July 2004. At WIELS, Snauwaert has curated exhibitions of Tauba Auerbach (2013) and Mike Kelley (2008). Prior, Snauwaert was Co-Director of the Institut d’art contemporain Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alps where he was in charge of the exhibition programme and the development of the FRAC Rhône-Alpes collection. He was Director of the Kunstverein Munich from 1996 to 2001, where he curated solo shows by Rita McBride (1999), William Kentridge (1998), David Lamelas (1997), and Fareed Armaly (1997). He was also the curator of Jef Geys at the Pavilion of Belgium, 53rd Venice Biennale International Art Exhibition. Snauwaert was an NTU CCA Singapore Curator-in-Residence in 2015.

Art Labor is an artist collective. Comprised of artists Phan Thao Nguyen and Truong Cong Tung, and curator Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran, Art Labor works across visual arts and social sphere. In December 2015, Art Labor were Artists-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore where they recreated a Hammock Café serving traditional Vietnamese coffee, similar to itinerant roadside-resting spots for drivers and passengers along provincial highways of the Central Highlands in Vietnam. The name Jrai Dew Hammock Café relates to the philosophy of Jrai people of Vietnam’s Central Highlands, according to which, in the last stage of life cycle, humans evaporate into the environment and transform into “dew,” a state of non-being (ia ngôm in Jrai language).

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

Launched in 2014 by the Singapore government, the Smart Nation initiative aims to enhance economic productivity and urban efficiency through technological streamlining and boundary-marking of both territories and bodies. Since the onset of her residency, Luca Lum has turned to the “soft architectures” and “non-events” of the city, that loose and ungraspable entanglement of sentiment and decoration, behaviours and bodies that defines urban life. Her research focuses on the diffractive relationship between two specific sites: Geylang, a little-known testbed to many Smart Nation initiatives, and Marina, Singapore’s anchoring “global” image. Understanding the optical phenomena of diffraction and iridescence as relational geometries that connect positions of proximity and distance, generate states of affection, and undergo multiple interferences, the artist is conducting repeated visits to the areas. Through her open-ended explorations, she is in the process of mapping and morphing the distinct attitudes and streaks of desires that inform the two sites. Her eclectic approach spans across various media and materializes in the form of photographs, objects, drawings, recordings, scores, and texts.

In recent years, as globalisation accelerates the process of urbanisation, both developed and developing countries are experiencing a significant influx of immigrants. The reality of cities erected entirely through foreign labour has become increasingly common and the flows of temporary migration lead to the formation of “mini-nations” nestled within rapidly growing cities, that is enclaves of migrant workers that congregate, cohabit, and share material and immaterial resources in foreign countries. Pursuing his interest in the social, political, cultural, and economic impact of globalisation, during the residency Lim Sokchanlina investigates bureaucratic and political apparatuses as well as the personal and psychological aspects that define Singapore’s communities of migrant workers in Little India and “Little Burma” considered as case studies to be compared with similar enclaves in Cambodia and Thailand.

Kray Chen’s practice brings attention to the peculiar characteristics of forms, gestures and behaviours in society to discuss the value of progress. While in residence, Chen continues this line of research into the absurd, such as ‘Waiting’, reflecting on the psyche of a place that pits labour against gratification, fragments against the whole, traditions against modernization.

Regarded as a successful model of strategic governance and urban planning across Asia, Singapore has shared her infrastructure plans and industrial development expertise with other countries since the 1990s. Choy Ka Fai intends to research the tensions and ideals that underlie the establishment of Singapore as a utopian “prototype city” investigating the multiple narratives that frame the efforts to export and, occasionally to forge, such an utopia.

Interested in the cycle of redevelopment that is endemic to the life of Asian global cities, Jason Wee intends to investigate the phases of demolition, clearance, and destruction triggered by urban renewals and the complex ways in which they affect our understanding of ecology, urban planning, memory, and architecture. Starting from Singapore where destruction in the name of development results particularly aggressive, Wee will research these destructive events focusing on the underlying sets of laws, policies, procedures and technologies—involving a wide variety of experts such as geologists, architects, urban planners as well as financial and legal agencies— that determine them. His residency at the NTU CCA Singapore is inscribed within a longer-term comparative research project titled The City That Eats Itself, Lives, for which he will also examine the cases of Seoul, Delhi, Bangkok, Jaffa, and Tokyo.

Sean Connelly (b.1984, United States) is an artist, urban ecologist, and architect. His research addresses the role of innovative design in recovering ahupua’a, a traditional Hawaiian spatial configuration. Connelly operates both independently and collaboratively out of his studio practice After Oceanic which pursues projects in the realms of architecture, landscape, and infrastructure. He is also the author and producer of Hawai‚Äòi Futures, a virtual intervention and educational tool for island urbanism. His work has been shown across the United States at the Honolulu Biennale (2017); Honolulu Museum of Art (2015) and Santa Fe Art Institute (2016).

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.

Concentrating on Singapore, Philippines, and South Korea as fields of inquiry, Andaur will develop his research on multi-colonial zones. He will examine urban landscapes, cultures, ethnicities, and artistic practices within these chosen countries in order to build an online resource platform with a socio-spatial analysis of the intersections between landscape, culture, and political practice. Throughout his curatorial research process, Anduar will connect with visual artists, researchers, and curators in order to gain a better understanding of local contemporary art practices and their importance within the cultural ecosystem of the region.

Pelin Tan is involved in research-based artistic and architectural projects that focus on urban conflict & territorial politics, gift economy, the condition of labour and mixed methods in research. She has also done research into artist-run-spaces whilst she was a research fellow with The Japan Foundation in 2012. While in residence, Tan will connect with local artists and institutions whilst exploring the larger region of Southeast Asia.

Orit Gat will lead an Exhibition (de)Tour: Townhall or Marketplace, Can Art find a Public Space on the Internet? Can it Create One? which is part of Incomplete Urbanism: Attempts of Critical Spatial Practice’s public programme. She will look at a number of specific artworks, which conflate the urban and digital space as well as the hidden aspects of the internet’s infrastructure. In light of internet changes since 1995, Gat will examine possibilities art opens up to make the internet a genuine public space of the commons.

Miguel Andrade Valdez (b. 1979) lives and works in Peru, Lima. His practice blends building methodologies and the language of sculpture in order to shape a different understanding of architectural construction and urban development. Through his large scale sculptures and installations which take the human body as a standard unit of measurement, he casts built objects as representations of shared social spaces. His works have been included in numerous group shows including Mana Contemporary, Jersey City United States (2015); Museo Mario Testino, Lima, Peru (2014); Museum of Contemporary Art, Lima, Peru (2013), Art Basel Miami Beach, United States (2012).

During the residency, Lee will expand his interest in urban phenomena and inner structures by focusing on cutaways: openings created through the partial removal of the external surface of an object that makes its internal features visible. The artist will research and select a number of case studies in Singapore to explore the function of cutaways with in the urban context and engage with overlooked issues regarding art, architecture, and urban design.

Informed by several theories in the fields of film studies, linguistics, and graphic design, Lee regards cutaways as a method of investigation, a concealment device that can open up a different understanding of urban processes and anxieties as well as provide a penetrating insight into the deep-seated desires of the city.

Nikos Papastergiadis is the Director of the Research Unit in Public Cultures, and a Professor in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. Furthermore, he is a co- founder (with Scott McQuire) of the Spatial Aesthetics research cluster. He is the Project Leader of the Australian Research Council Linkage Project, “Large Screens and the Transnational Public Sphere,” and Chief Investigator on the ARC Discovery Project “Public Screens and the Transformation of Public Space.” Prior to joining the School of Culture and Communication, he was Deputy Director of the Australia Centre at the University of Melbourne, Head of the Centre for Ideas at the Victorian College of Arts, and lecturer in Sociology and recipient of the Simon Fellowship at the University of Manchester. Throughout his career, Papastergiadis has provided strategic consultancies for government agencies on issues of cultural identity and has worked in collaborative projects with international renowned artists and theorists.

During his residency, Chun will pursue his exploration of the inconspicuous fixtures of the urban environment shifting from a detached approach to a more active engagement that involves connecting with the public agencies in charge of the design, production, and installation of such elements. He is also contemplating to create a performance piece which will lend voice to a range of common objects.

During the residency Chong will develop The Economy of Birds (and Maximum Standard of Living), a research-based project that looks at how contemporary societies in Southeast Asia determine the minimum standard of living. The artist investigates the notion of “human dwelling” through a comparison between the human and the animal world by drawing a parallel between the practice of farming swiftlet birdhouses for sale and consumption and the typology of the metropolitan apartment block. In the artist’s vision, a comparative analysis of airflows, relative humidity, air temperature distribution, and light intensity that characterize the farming of edible bird’s nests and the technical requirements that make a human dwelling comfortable and efficient, is instrumental to rethink the guidelines for socially acceptable living environments as well as their implications in terms of economics and human rights.

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.

Wang has been working on an on-going project on Hong Kong. The project that began in 2012 is an examination of Hong Kong’s cultural anxiety and crisis through a set of cinematic explorations of the city’s space. In Singapore while in the residency, he will study the role of sand in Singapore, by not only tracing its physical circulation as a fundamental element for the state’s development but also its symbolic role in the cultural sphere.

Arjuna Neuman works towards a diagnostic of the economic, affective and ideological systems that envelop us; he uses the history of the nuclear industry and technology more generally to this end. Neuman researched Singapore as a “City within a Garden” through the concept of “Borrowed Scenery”, an ancient Chinese and Japanese garden design as it re-appears in unusual places: from an Israeli-Singaporean Military collaboration on various weapons, to the Singapore Tourism Board’s masterplan, to local gateway architecture built by foreign stars.

Vera Mey is an independent curator and PhD candidate at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She is part of the curatorial team for SEA Project (2017) at the Mori Art Museum, Japan, and National Art Center, Tokyo. She is also co-founder of the scholarly journal Southeast of Now. Between 2014 and 2016, she joined Ambitious Alignments, a research initiative of the Getty Foundation. She was part of the founding team of NTU CCA Singapore as Curator for Residencies from 2014 to 2016.

Mona Vătămanu and Florin Tudor are artists who have worked together since 2000. Their artistic practice involves bringing history into the present tense. Between July and September 2014, Vătămanu and Tudor were Artists-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore where they focused on the prevalent presence of migrant labour in Singapore. During their residency, the artists also produced Le Monde et les Choses, a map based on statistical studies by the Central Intelligence Agency that shows the dominant industries in each world country. The map exposes the contradictions of global neoliberalism, revealing the large domination over industries by a small number of countries.

During the residency, Ang Song Nian will continue his ongoing investigation into human interventions on the urban landscape by focusing on plant nurseries and the potted plants industry in Singapore. This research unfolds in the wake of a residency at Bangkok University Gallery that culminated with the work As They Grow Older and Wiser (2016). Ang was fascinated by the legal loopholes that allowed for a massive transplanting of rare and exotic trees from the region of Chiang Mai to the fast-changing city of Bangkok for decorative purposes. Framed against Singapore’s nation-building narratives, the artist is interested in the manipulation of nature through state-driven initiatives and policies of environmental control, greening, and city-branding. Such endeavours include the Tree Planting campaign of 1963 and the government’s subsequent initiatives directed to fabricate a new understanding of nature and obliterate the country’s past of clearing forests to make way for plantation economy.

CITIES FOR PEOPLE is the pilot edition of the annual NTU CCA Ideas Fest, a platform to catalyse critical exchange of ideas and encourage thinking “out of the box”. It is a bottom-up approach linking the artistic and academic community with grassroots initiatives. This pilot edition expands artistic interventions and engages contemporary issues such as air, water, food, environment, and social interaction in connection to artistic and cultural fields, academic research, and design applications.

The 10-day programme, coinciding with Singapore Art Week 2017 and Art After Dark at Gillman Barracks, comprises a conglomerate of performances, public installations, participatory projects and social experiment, urban farming initiatives, public dialogues, and a variety of workshops. It cumulates in a three-day summit that brings together a prominent group of architects, theorists, researchers, curators, and community groups to discuss and exchange ideas about urbanism, modes of exchange, critical spatial practice, and to envision a future city. CITIES FOR PEOPLE offers a platform to contemplate the possibilities for our shared space, reformulate our demands accordingly, and project solutions and desires for the future.

CITIES FOR PEOPLE, borrowing the title from a book by eminent Singapore architect William S. W. Lim published in 1990, expands on some of the ideas Lim developed, particularly in relation to tropical environments and recycling, as well as his call for a humanistic architecture. Organised on the occasion of the exhibition Incomplete Urbanism: Attempts at Critical Spatial Practice, this event is an invitation to share and engage in cooperative projects and collective experiences that critically reflect on current challenges in urban and social development.

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.

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.

In partnership with Mapletree Investments Pte Ltd., Culture City. Culture Scape. is a public art education programme launched in 2017. A first of its kind in Singapore, the programme features a series of newly commissioned public art works by Dan Graham, Zulkifle Mahmod, Tomás Saraceno and Yinka Shonibare CBE (RA), nestled at Mapletree Business City II, and aims to bring the arts closer to the communities.

Conceived as a research presentation at NTU CCA Singapore’s The Lab, Art, Urban Change, and the Public Sphere engages with the making of the Public Art Trail at Mapletree Business City II in the context of Privately-Owned Public Spaces (POPS) together with other artistic and urban developments in Singapore. The works of the Public Art Trail by international renowned artists Dan Graham, Zulkifle Mahmod, Tomás Saraceno and Yinka Shonibare CBE (RA)are animated through augmented reality in a unique spatial setting. The presentation reflects on emerging discourses such as Future Asian Spaces or Art in the Public Sphere and situates the interconnectedness of cultural politics, urban developments and economic conditions in today’s Singapore. A same-titled Public Art Education Summit in October will reflect on the socio-poltical changes and challenges of Art in the Public Sphere with a focus on community engagement, social (corporate) responsibility, and new artistic approaches in an ever-expanding urban setting.

Contributors include: Lewis Biggs, Chairman, Institute for Public Art; Lilian Chee, Associate Professor & Deputy Head (academic), Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore; Connie Chester, Head of Research and Communication, Studio Tomás Saraceno; Heman Chong, artist; Speak Cryptic, artist; Priyageetha Dia, artist; Eileen Goh, Assistant Manager, Art-In-Transit; Jeremy Hiah, artist and founder, Your Mother gallery; Ruth Hogan, Studio Manager; Yinka Shonibare CBE (RA); Kevin Hsiu, Assistant Director, Liveable Cities; Eileen Lee, Manager, Corporate Communications, Mapletree Investments; Vincent Lee, Principal Architectural Assistant, Art-In-Transit; Samantha Lo/SKL0, artist; Zulkifle Mahmod, artist; Khim Ong, independent curator; Seelan Palay, artist and founder, Coda Culture; Aurel von Richthofen, Senior Researcher, Singapore-ETH Centre SEC; Regina de Rozario, PhD candidate, NTU ADM; Peter Schoppert, Managing Director, National University of Singapore Press; Mustafa Shabbir, Senior Curator, National Gallery Singapore; Angela Tan, Assistant Director, Sector Development (Visual Arts), National Arts Council; Isaiah Tan, 3D Modeler; Ludovica Tomarchio, Research Assistant, Singapore-ETH Centre SEC; Ian Woo, artist; Robert Zhao, artist; Epigram Books; Lisson Gallery; DCA Architects,; Shma Company Limited,; Shimizu Corporation; and among others.

SHIMURAbros are a brother/sister artist duo composed of Yuka (b. 1976, Japan) and Kentaro Shimura (b. 1979, Japan). Since 2014, they have been working as researchers at the Studio Olafur Eliasson in Berlin, Germany. Film is a catalyst for their works wherein the equilibrium between light and matter and the material representation of film become a focal point. Between November and December 2016, SHIMURAbros were Artists-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore. During the residency, the duo continued their investigations on the archaeology of film and its structural components, focusing on light as the power source in the cinematic process and the essential condition for seeing.

Bo Wang is an artist, filmmaker, and faculty member at Visual and Critical Studies, School of Visual Arts, New York. Wang’s work depicts provocative portraits of China, presenting contradictions in its cultural identity, changing urban spaces, and power structures. Wang was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore, between August and September 2016, where he studied the role of sand in Singapore, tracing its physical circulation as a fundamental element for the state’s development but also its symbolic role in the cultural sphere.

Interested in the “semiotic thickness” of Geylang, an area located on the east-central side of Singapore where bustling street life, covert activities, information technologies, and data mining protocols are increasingly intertwined, Luca Lum has been observing the diffuse entanglements of bodies and surfaces, behaviours and networks that define contemporary urban life. impasse to verbal comes out from her continued engagement with the neighbourhood and from her speculations on the slippage between what things are, how they look, and what they do—which the artist defines as the play between description and disposition.

The work is a visual assemblage that merges wall notices, official zoning maps, personal routes, and various extracts sampled from the urban landscape. Through an intricate interplay of stratifications and transparencies, it creates an imploded visual environment where information is simultaneously displayed and withdrawn, revealed and cloaked. Steeped in a pervasive blue glow reminiscent of the light of electronic devices, the signs are left to float and clash into leaky configurations that shatter conventional patterns of readability.

Interested in the contiguities and frictions between the natural and urban environment, Izat Arif has conducted experiential and erratic fieldwork in various landscapes in Singapore observing plants, soil, insects, and traces of human presence. This investigation is presented in The Vitrine as a form of a provisional “cabinet of essential items,” which contains a selection of the artist’s notes and drawings, research tools, and findings.

Ulrike Ottinger (b. 1942) grew up in Constance, Germany, where she opened her own studio at an early age. From 1962 until 1968, she lived and worked as an artist in Paris, where she exhibited at the Salon de la Jeune Peinture and elsewhere. She studied etching techniques at the studio of Johnny Friedlaender and attended lectures at the Sorbonne on art history, religious studies, and ethnology with Claude Lévi-Strauss, Louis Althusser, and Pierre Bourdieu. In 1966, she wrote her first screenplay, entitled The Mongolian Double Drawer.

After returning to West Germany, she founded the filmclub visuell in Constance in 1969, as well as the galeriepress gallery and press, presenting Wolf Vostell and David Hockney, among others. With Tabea Blumenschein, she realised her first film in 1972–73, Laocoon & Sons, which had its premiere at Arsenal Berlin. She moved to Berlin in 1973 where she filmed the happening documentation Berlinfever – Wolf Vostell. After The Enchantment of the Blue Sailors (1975) with Valeska Gert, came the female pirate film Madame X (1977), a coproduction with the ZDF television network. The film was a sensation and prompted substantial controversy.

Ottinger’s “Berlin trilogy” began with Ticket of No Return (1979), followed by Freak Orlando (1981) and Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press (1984). Collaborating on the films were Delphine Seyrig, Magdalena Montezuma, Veruschka von Lehndorff, Eddie Constantine, and Kurt Raab, as well as the composer Peer Raben. In the short film Usinimage (1987), she revisited imagery derived from industrial wastelands and alienated urban landscapes.

Amar Kanwar is an artist and filmmaker. Kanwar has distinguished himself through films and multimedia works, which explore the politics of power, violence, and justice. His multilayered installations originate in narratives often drawn from zones of conflict and are characterised by a unique poetic approach to the social and political. Kanwar’s long-term research project, The Sovereign Forest (2012–ongoing) was presented at NTU CCA Singapore in 2016.

NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore presents Quadra Medicinale Singapore, the late Belgian artist Jef Geys’s first institutional exhibition in Asia. Geys’s conceptual practice adopted an interdisciplinary and collaborative process of research and knowledge-formation, and was driven by his belief that art should be intertwined with the everyday.

For Quadra Medicinale (2009), Geys invited residents of Villeurbanne, New York, Moscow, and Brussels to demarcate a geometrical quadrant, with their home or workplace at the centre, and document 12 unassuming street plants, or “weeds.” From this collection, the collaborators uncovered the productive, and often times medicinal, properties of these plants.

Quadra Medicinale is structured as a universal manual capable of being replicated anywhere and has, since its first presentation at the Pavilion of Belgium during the 53rd Venice Biennale International Art Exhibition in 2009, been realised and shown in various cities including at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2010). The exhibition was followed by similar methods of botanical and medicinal plant studies as documented in the accompanying publication Kempens Informatieblad. This alternative model set up by Geys for collective knowledge production, sharing, and documentation has, underlying its process, a socially-active role: Geys asked questions such as, “What can a homeless person who has a toothache, for example, chew-on to ease the pain, and to eventually cure the problem?”

On view will be four chapters of the project, including a newly-created Singapore chapter following Geys’s instructions with contributions by local collaborators, Louise Neo and Teo Siyang. Each chapter includes framed plant specimens with their characteristics labelled, photographs of the site where the plants were originally found, as well as maps of the geographical quadrant explored. Through inciting a collaborative process, Geys created a unique model for knowledge production and sharing.

Questioning mainstream and organised systems of urban planning and information dissemination, Geys casted doubt on the fundaments of language and visual representation, interrogating art’s relation to meaning-making. He produced a text explaining the Quadra Medicinale project that has been translated into 10 languages, with annotations by the artist himself on the translations. Their display as large-format scrolls, further probes systems of interpretation, communication, and accessibility. A selection of these text scrolls and a Malay translation, produced for this exhibition, will be shown.

Quadra Medicinale Singapore introduces an artistic practice that questions the hierarchies and adaptability of nature and society, provoking reflections on both their communicable and imperceptible structures. It also poses the question of whether conceptual artworks can be continued after an artist’s passing.

In addition to the elements from Quadra Medicinale, the exhibition includes two paintings from Geys’s Seed-bags series (1963–2018), a long-term project the artist started when, during his own gardening process, he discovered that the image of the vegetables or flowers pictured on the bag did not match the actual plant. With these paintings, which Geys would create every year, he challenged the accuracy and truth of commercial photography. The medium, however, played a significant role in the artist’s practice enabling him to accumulate an extensive archive of his own projects and interests.

In The Single Screen, Day and Night and Day… (2002), his 36-hour-long film produced for Documenta 11 (Kassel, Germany), will be screened in parallel to the exhibition. This film is a mesmeric sequence composed of thousands of black-and-white photographs Geys took from the mid-1950s to 1998.

The exhibition is made possible by generous loans from the Jef Geys Estate and Air de Paris.

Quadra Medicinale Singapore is curated by Dirk Snauwaert, Artistic Director at WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels, in collaboration with Ute Meta Bauer and Khim Ong, NTU CCA Singapore. Snauwaert was the Curator of Jef Geys: Quadra Medicinale in Venice 2009, commissioned for the National Pavilion of Belgiumby the Flemish Community. Snauwaert was an NTU CCA Singapore Curator-in-Residence in 2015.

The Singapore Chapter, Quadra Medicinale Singapore (2018), is now permanently installed at NTU, Earth Observatory of Singapore, as a gift of Jef Geys Estate. Please click here for the English translation of the Malay scroll on view.

Jef Geys Quadra Medicinale Singapore public programmes

Mary Otis Stevens (b.1928) is a pioneering American architect. Her architectural designs, along with the founding of i Press (1968-1978), an important publisher of books on architecture, urbanism, and social space, were linked to her ability to radically re-envision space and relationships. In the context of the Cold War and American political activism in the 1960s, her work, which were often in collaboration with her partner, fellow architect and i Press co-founder Thomas McNulty, revealed her foundational training in philosophy and her commitment to de-centralising hierarchies. Revisiting her work more than fifty years later, the themes of active citizen participation in government, integrated planning, and genuine risk-taking to make substantial change in people’s lives remain relevant and crucial means of incorporating a social context into the practice of architecture. On view is Mary’s sensitivity to variations, large and small, visible in her work as a publisher as well as her drawings and architectural designs. This research presentation also explores The Ideal Communist City, an i Press publication by Alexei Gutnov et al. from 1970 that offers a deep dive into a utopian proposition that “the new city is a world belonging to all and to each.”

In order to help introduce the i Press series on the human environment to a wide audience, NTU CCA Singapore, with series editors Ute Meta Bauer (Founding Director, NTU CCA and Professor, NTU ADM), James Graham (Director of Publications, Columbia University GSAPP), and Pelin Tan (2019-2020 Keith Haring Fellow in Art and Activism, Bard College), is currently working with i Press and Mary Otis Stevens to republish several original i Press books with revisions and commentary by contemporary theorists and practitioners.

Mary Otis Stevens. The i Press Series is curated by Dr Karin Oen, Deputy Director, Curatorial Programmes, NTU CCA Singapore

The title of the book refers to the framework employed at NTU CCA Singapore in its first cycle of activities, from 2013 to March 2017, which took Singapore, the world’s second-largest trading port and the economic epicentre of Southeast Asia, as a point of departure to investigate the notion of place, the intersection between locality and the global, labour, and flows of capital.

Unfolding across four broad sections of “The Making of an Institution,” “The Geopolitical and the Biophysical,” “Incidental Scripts,” and “Incomplete Urbanism,” this publication reads as an exhibition. Drawing connections across disciplines and merging theory with practice, Place.Labour.Capital. weaves together a constellation of different bodies of materials from essays, poetry, and fiction to artworks and documentation of the Centre’s past exhibitions

Richly illustrated, the publication brings together the voices of more than 80 contributors, from former Research Fellows such as Tony Godfrey (Philippines), Regina (Maria) Möller (Germany), T. K. Sabapathy (Singapore), Yvonne Spielmann (Germany), to former Artists-in-Residence including Tiffany Chung (Vietnam/United States), Amanda Heng (Singapore), Shooshie Sulaiman (Malaysia), Lee Wen (Singapore), and Yee I-Lann (Malaysia). Other contributions include those from the Centre’s exhibitions and public programmes such as artists, academics, and curators including Amar Kanwar (India), Lee Weng Choy (Malaysia), David Teh (Australia/Singapore), and June Yap (Singapore).

This extensive publication “reminds us that institution building remains enormously significant as a means of opening up new spaces, claims, communities, dialogues, publics, and trajectories for critical artistic practice.” (Felicity D. Scott, Associate Professor Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University, New York)

“Drawing together stories, voices, and thinking by leading artists and academics, Place.Labour.Capital. traces the invention of a remarkable model of an institution. The publication is an inspiration and a valuable tool to anyone trying to find ways of building releveant arts institutions for the future.” (Sally Tallant, Director, Liverpool Biennial)

Place.Labour.Capital. takes a reflective look the art institution, and serves as a means to review the parameters of its own position in the present globalised art world and knowledge-production economies.

The visual concept of the book was conceived by renowned Singapore design firm H55.

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

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

In this continuation of Fyerool Darma’s research, the area of Telok Blangah becomes a landscape of introspection and the backdrop for a range of artistic exercises. During the residency, the artist will attempt to excavate textual archives and physical artefacts that are found both online (in his web browser caches) and offline. Along the process, he aims to question, reclaim, and speculate upon lesser known histories of the area by figuring forth an imaginary landscape where literary and textual evidence is merged with hearsay and folklore. Through this exercise, Fyerool intends to explore how today’s power relations are shaped by the ways in which we navigate the past.

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.

Alan OEI currently serves as the Artistic Director at The Substation. Founded in 1990, The Substation is Singapore’s first independent contemporary arts centre. Under Oei’s stewardship, The Substation has initiated programmes engaging in discourse on public space such as Discipline the City (2017) and A Public Square (2019). Oei is also co-founder and executive director of OH! Open House and was the former Artistic Director for Sculpture Square from 2012 to 2014. He holds a bachelor’s degree in art history from Columbia University and a diploma in fine arts from LASALLE College of the Arts.

Alex Mawimbi is a visual artist. Her multimedia practice investigates the hybrid nature of African identity, contesting notions of authenticity as well as gender and female sexuality. Since 2012, she has been working on a series of drawings of half-human, half-animal creatures caught up in intimate situations and pensive poses. Mawimbi was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore between August and October 2016. During her residency, she produced a new series of self-portraits, Out of Africa, Out of Reach, and several portraits of one of Singapore’s most famous drag queens. *formerly Ato Malinda

Alvin Tan (Singapore) is the Founder and Artistic Director, The Necessary Stage, Singapore.

Amanda CRABTREE (United Kindgom/France) established artconnexion, an independent non- profit cultural production agency based in Lille in 1994 and joined the organisation full-time in 2001. Prior to this, she worked at the British Council, Paris; Le Fresnoy, Studio national des arts contemporains, Tourcoing; Le Magasin contemporary art centre, Grenoble, and the Centre d’art contemporain of Geneva. She teaches at the University of Lille and directs the Master’s programme in Art and Society with a particular focus on the production of contemporary artworks within the public realm. She has just established a short-course University Diploma entitled Reclaiming Art/Reshaping Democracy based on the protocol of New Patrons public art projects.

Dr Andrew Johnston is a musician, interaction/software designer, and Associate Professor, School of Software, Faculty of Engineering and IT, the University of Technology Sydney. His work focuses on the design of systems that support experimental approaches to live performance. Johnston is also co-director of the Creativity and Cognition Studios, an interdisciplinary research group working at the intersection of creativity and technology.

Antonia CARVER (United Arab Emirates) is a member of NTU CCA’s International Advisory Board and is currently the Director of Art Jameel, Dubai, an organisation that fosters and promotes a thriving arts and culture scene and support the development of creative enterprises in the region of Middle East, North Africa, Turkey and beyond. Art Jameel is the founding partner of Edge of Arabia, The Crossway Foundation, Jeddah Art Week, and The Archive. Prior to joining Art Jameel, Antonia was the director of Art Dubai, where she has overseen its development into the leading art fair of the Middle East and South Asia, along with its diverse programmes, artists residencies and commissions as well as other educational initiatives and prizes. Before relocating to the UAE, Antonia was editor at Phaidon Press and had roles at Institute of international Visual Arts and G+B Arts International.

Ashley THOMPSON (United Kingdom) is Hiram W. Woodward Chair in Southeast Asian Art at SOAS University of London, where she leads the Research and Publications division of the Southeast Asian Art Academic Programme. She is a specialist of Cambodian cultural history, with a focus on classical and pre-modern arts and literatures, in the larger South and Southeast Asian context, with a view to theorising politico-cultural formations. Formative experiences include working under Vann Molyvann for the creation of a Cambodian national management structure for Angkor, and with the Théâtre du Soleil and Phare Ponleu Selpak on the direction of a Cambodian production of Cixous’ Terrible but Unfinished Story of Norodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia. Recent publications include Hiding the female sex: a sustained cultural dialogue between India and Southeast Asia and Emergenc(i)es: History and the Auto-Ethnographic Impulse in Contemporary Cambodian Art (both 2017).

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.

Catherine DAVID (France) is the Deputy Director of the Musée National d’Art Moderne at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. From 1982 to 1990, David was curator at the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and from 1990 to 1994 she was curator at the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris. From 1994 to 1997, David served as Artistic Director for documenta X in Kassel (1997). Since 1998, she has been director of the long-term project Contemporary Arab Representations, which began at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona. Between 2002 and 2004, David was director of the Witte de With Center of Contemporary Art in Rotterdam. In 2016, David curated Reframing Modernism at the National Gallery Singapore, which brought together over 200 iconic works from the collections of the National Gallery Singapore and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

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.

Chomchon Fusinpaiboon, PhD, is a lecturer at the Faculty of Architecture, Chulalongkorn University, and a practising architect. His research interests cover modern and contemporary architecture in Asia. His doctoral dissertation examines how a modern architectural culture was established in Thailand, and how it transformed traditional ideas of architecture and vice versa. His published and ongoing works include studies on unconventional works of Thai architect Prince Vodhyakara Varavarn, who reinterpreted English arts and crafts philosophy to adapt to modern Thai architecture of both the pre-war and the post-war periods, and the establishment of Thailand’s first architecture school that involved a Belgian architect and Chinese migrants. Currently he is doing design research on the shophouse, a non-pedigree modern architecture that played a major role in the urbanisation of Thailand during the 1960s and 1970s, questioning its legacy and its future in relation to contemporary architectural practice and urban issues.

Christina Leigh Geros (United States/Indonesia) is a Design Research Strategist at PetaBencana.id, Jakarta, Indonesia.

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

Constance Singam (Singapore) is an author and civil society activist.

Tan Dan Feng (Singapore) is the Director of Asian Urban Lab, Singapore.

Daniel Mudie CUNNINGHAM (Australia) is Director of Programs at Carriageworks in Sydney, Australia. He has held curatorial roles at Artbank and Hazelhurst Regional Gallery, and academic positions at Western Sydney University, where he completed his doctorate in cultural studies in 2004. At Carriageworks he is currently leading the curatorial delivery of a major public art strategy tied to the redevelopment of South Eveleigh in Sydney. Cunningham is a widely published academic and arts writer and has authored numerous artist monographs and edited publications, including the magazine Sturgeon (2013–16).

Eileen GOH (Singapore) is an Assistant Manager for the Art in Transit programme at the Land Transport Authority (LTA), Singapore. Goh oversees and leads a team in the initiation, development, and implementation of the Art in Transit programme as well as other special art-related projects undertaken by LTA. Goh plays a large part at every stage of the process of conceptualising, developing and delivering the artworks commissioned to be displayed in the Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) stations managed by LTA. This includes working closely with various internal and external stakeholders— including civil contractors—in the fabrication and installation of artwork to presenting the artworks to Ministers and public communities. Goh is a graduate of LASALLE College of the Arts with a BA (Hons) in Arts Management.

Dr Etienne Turpin is a philosopher, research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and founding director of anexact office in Jakarta, Indonesia. He is principal co-investigator of the exhibition-led inquiry Reassembling the Natural and co-editor of the intercalations: paginated exhibition series. In 2016, he was Visiting Research Fellow at NTU CCA Singapore where he continued his research on the role of urban labs, maker spaces, and hacker collectives in the context of urbanisation in Asia.

Research Focus

Fellowship period: 1 June – 31 December 2016

During his residency, Dr Etienne Turpin will be researching the role of urban labs, maker spaces, and hacker collectives, in the context of South and Southeast Asian urbanisation. His work will help to develop the Urban Lab Network Asia, simultaneously investigating the work of urban labs through ethnographic research and inviting organisations to participate in the platform which enables the network. With the support of his design practice—anexact office—Dr Turpin will further the work of “making the multiple” by documenting encounters with activists, organisers, and community groups who are experimenting with urbanisation processes through various types of design-led inquiry and applied research. The outcome of this research, a film titled “Is the City a Laboratory?” and a working-documentary process assembled as “The Multiple Must Be Made,” will be included in the forthcoming NTU CCA Singapore exhibition Incomplete Urbanism: Attempts of Critical Spatial Practice, and will help to develop the web-based platform labnet.asia.

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

Fareed Armaly is an artist and curator. He was the Artistic Director for Künstlerhaus Stuttgart (1999–2002) and as an artist he has collaborated with several institutions including more recently Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva, and SALT Galata, Istanbul. Armaly considers the open definition of artistic practice as the medium by which to render a contemporary syntax implicit to a politics of representation, culture, and identity. In 2015, Armaly translated spatially the curatorial framework Place. Labour.Capital. through a new interior architecture of the NTU CCA Singapore’s exhibition area.

Grace Samboh lives and works between Yogyakarta, Jakarta and Medan, doing curatorial work as well as groundwork research. In 2011, she co-founded Hyphen —, a research initiative that aims to publish reference books on recent art practices. She is program manager for the Equator Symposium (2012–2022, Yogyakarta Biennale Foundation) and programme director of RUBANAH Underground Hub, a gallery-based initiative in Jakarta, established in 2018.Grace Samboh has been involved in a variety of exhibition projects as curator, advisor or contributor, including Unorganised Response (AutoItalia, London, 2019), Contemporary Worlds: Indonesia (National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2019), Choreographed Knowledges (Institute for Art and Society, Yogyakarta, 2019).

H. Koon Wee is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Architecture and Faculty Member of the Hong Kong University Advanced Cultural Leadership Program. He served as the former Academic Director of the HKU Shanghai Study Center and Adjunct Professor of the New York University Shanghai Program. He taught previously as a visiting critic and teaching fellow at Pratt Institute and Yale University. At HKU, Koon teaches classes in urbanism, memory and identity, globalisation, and architectural design. As a registered architect and founding principal of art and architecture practice SKEW Collaborative, Koon gained a number of awards and recognitions from the Asia Pacific Design Center, Condé Nast, Architectural Record Magazine (China), ID Magazine, Modern Media Group, Design Singapore Council, National Arts Council, and Lee Foundation. Koon supports government and non-profit bodies in a number of advisory roles, including the Leaders in Urban Governance Program at the Singapore Centre for Liveable Cities, the Haiti International University Center, Orphans International, AA Asia, Asian Urban Lab, and Design Singapore Council.

Dr Helena Varkkey is Senior Lecturer at the Department of International and Strategic Studies, University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. She specialises in environmental politics of the Southeast Asian region, specifically transboundary haze pollution and its links to the palm oil industry. The findings of her PhD research have been published as a book under the Routledge Malaysian Studies Series, entitled The Haze Problem in Southeast Asia: Palm Oil and Patronage (2016). In 2016, Varkkey contributed to NTU CCA Singapore’s public programming by conducting an Exhibition (de)Tour as part of Amar Kanwar’s exhibition, The Sovereign Forest (2016).

Ho Weng Hin is partner and conservation specialist consultant of Studio Lapis, an architectural conservation consultancy involved in major local and regional projects. He is also a founding director of the Singapore Chapter of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), an advisory body to UNESCO on heritage conservation, and represents Singapore as expert voting member on its International Scientific Committee on 20th Century Heritage. He serves on government advisory panels on heritage policy and planning. Ho Weng Hin is an adjunct senior lecturer at the Department of Architecture at National University of Singapore, and he obtained his specialist postgraduate degree in conservation from the University of Genoa, Italy. He is the co-author of several books including Our Modern Past: A Visual Survey of Singapore Architecture, 1920s-70s, and former co-editor of The Singapore Architect, the professional journal of the Singapore Institute of Architects.

Hong Phuc Dang (Vietnam) is Founder of FOSSASIA, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

Hongjohn LIN (Taiwan/Singapore) is an artist, writer and curator. Lin has a PhD in Arts and Humanities from the New York University. He has participated in exhibitions including Taipei Biennial (2004), Manchester Asian Triennial 2008, Rotterdam Film Festival 2008, and Taipei Biennial (2012), China Asia Biennial (2014), and Guangzhou Triennial (2015). Lin was curator of the Taiwan Pavilion Atopia, Venice Biennial (2007), co-curator of Taipei Biennial (with Tirdad Zolghadr, 2010). Currently he is serving as Professor at the Taipei National University of the Arts. His writings can be found in international magazines, journals, and publications. He wrote the Introductions for Chinese edition of Art Power (Boris Groys) and Artificial Hells (Claire Bishop and his publications in Chinese include Poetics of Curating (2018).

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.

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.

Jasmeen PATHEJA (India) lives and works in Bangalore. She is founder andfacilitator of Blank Noise, a community of Action Sheroes, Heroes, Theyroes, citizens and persons, taking agency to end sexual and gender based violence. Patheja initiated Blank Noise in 2003, in response to the normalisation and the silence surrounding street harassment. Over the last 16 years, Patheja has designed a wide range of interventions to trigger discourse and shift public consciousness. Her work rests on the power of collaborations and community. Patheja is a TED speaker and Ashoka Fellow. In 2015, she received the International Award for Public Art, for the project Talk to Me (Blank Noise). She is currently shortlisted for the Visible Award and was shortlisted for the Vera List Center for Arts and Politics. She works as artist in residence at Srishti Institute of Art Design and Technology.

Jason Wee lives and works in Singapore and New York. His practice is concerned with hollowing out singular authority in favour of polyphony. He transforms singular histories and spaces into various visual and written materials, with particular attention to architecture, idealism, and unexplored futures. Wee is the founder and director of Grey Projects, an artists’ space, library, and residency programme that focuses on emerging artists, experimental curatorial practices, new forms of writing, and design propositions. He is editor of the poetry journal Softblow.

His work has been included in group shows at the Chelsea Art Museum, New York, United States; Casino Luxembourg, Luxembourg; Singapore Art Museum, Singapore. He has been Artist-in-Residence at Artspace, Sydney, Australia; Tokyo Wonder Site, Tokyo, Japan; Gyeonggi Creation Center, Ansan-si, South Korea. He received the 2008 Young Artist Award for visual arts in Singapore and has been Studio Fellow in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.

Between October 2016 and January 2017, Wee was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore where he continued his research interest in the cycle of redevelopment that is endemic to the life of Asian global cities.

Jef Geys was among Europe’s most respected yet under-acknowledged artists. Producing artwork since the 1950s, Geys’ practice probes the construction of social and political engagement, and his work radically embraces art as being intertwined with everyday life. Geys graduated from the Antwerp Arts Academy before settling in Balen in the Kempen region of Belgium, where from 1960 to 1989, he taught art at a state school, focusing on educational experimentation in the arts. Since the late 1960s, Geys has been the editor and publisher of his local newspaper, the Kempens Informatieblad, and subsequently produced them in line with his exhibitions. He is known for his meticulous archive of his work, which in turn becomes generative of other works.

Jeremy Chia (Singapore) is a Researcher at Asian Urban Lab and AA Asia, Singapore.

Jesko Fezer is an architect, designer, and Professor for Experimental Design, University of Fine Arts of Hamburg, co-manager of the thematic bookshop Pro qm, Berlin, and co-editor of the political architecture magazine An Architektur. Fezer has authored several publications including Design in and Against the Neoliberal City (2013). He was Visiting Research Fellow at NTU CCA Singapore in 2014, when he worked on the design for the Centre’s Research and Office space.

Research Focus

Urban subjects, politics, pop, economic criticism, architecture, design, art and theory

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 Low (b.1958, Singapore) is an artist and independent researcher. In the last decade, his practice has shifted its focus from the representation of urban and rural landscape to the tensions between the local and the global. He is especially interested in understanding how cross-cultural and transnational discourses influence the production of art practices and critical writing in Singapore and Southeast Asia. His work has been featured in the 3rd Singapore Biennale (2011). He was a contributor to the publication Histories, Practices, Interventions: A Reader in Singapore Contemporary Art (2016).

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.

Katherine Tuider, Executive Director and Co- founder of Honolulu Biennial Foundation, will speak about building a biennial from the ground up in what has been described as the most isolated, populated landmass in the world, Hawai‘i. Despite the perceived challenges associated with building an international, city-wide exhibition with no start-up capital in a seemingly isolated place, the contributions and involvement of the local community in Hawai‘i made the Honolulu Biennial a success. Prioritising the needs and desires of the local community was an integral part of the planning process in order to create a biennial that was locally relevant, while also being reflective of what makes Hawai‘i so unique for those who were visiting. A biennial that honours and involves its community is not only more sustainable, but also more interesting for those who visit because the biennial serves as a portal for understanding the history and culture of that place. As urban spaces rapidly grow and change, Tuider will explain why a “community-first” approach is essential in order to create successful public art exhibitions that are reflective of the past, while also relevant in the future.

Professor Kenneth Dean is Professor, Head of the Department of Chinese Studies, and Senior Researcher at the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore (NUS). He received his PhD from Stanford University and his current research concerns transnational trust and temple networks linking Singapore Chinese temples to Southeast China and Southeast Asia. Professor Dean contributed to NTU CCA Singapore’s public programming in March 2016 when he conducted an Exhibition (de)Tour as part of Joan Jonas’s exhibition: They Come to Us without a Word.

Khim Ong is Head & Curator, Biennale and Residencies at Singapore Art Museum. Previously, she was Deputy Director, Curatorial Programmes at NTU CCA Singapore (2016–19) where she co-curated solo exhibitions of internationally acclaimed artists Tarek Atoui, Amar Kanwar, and Yang Fudong, and research exhibitions Trees of Life — Knowledge in Material (2018), Ghosts and Spectres — Shadows of History (2017), and Incomplete Urbanism: Attempts of Critical Spatial Practice (2016). She is co-editor of the publication The Impossibility of Mapping (Urban Asia) (NTU CCA Singapore and World Scientific Publishing 2020). Previously, Ong held curatorial positions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, LASALLE and Osage Gallery, Hong Kong. Ong was curator of the Southeast Asia Platform at Art Stage Singapore in 2015 and was part of the curatorial team of Escape Routes, Bangkok Art Biennale 2020.

Professor Kwok Kian-Woon is a sociology faculty and currently Associate Provost (Student Life) at Nanyang Technological University. His research interests include the study of social memory, mental health, civil society, and heritage and the arts. As a sociologist and a citizen, he has been actively involved in public life. He has served on many key committees of the Heritage Board, on the boards of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Arts and the Intercultural Theatre Institute, and as external advisor to the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts. He was President (1997-2001) of the Singapore Heritage Society, which has worked with many Singaporeans to shape the national agenda on heritage conservation.

KOK Heng Leun is a prominent figure in the Singapore arts scene, having built his artistic career as a theatre director, playwright, dramaturg and educator. Koh is known for his ability to engage the community on various issues through the arts, championing civil discourse across different segments of society. Having begun his work in the theatre almost 30 years ago, some notable directorial works include Manifesto (2016), Drift (2007), Trick or Threat (2007), and Happy (2005). His explorations with multi-disciplinary engaged arts has produced works like It Won’t Be Too Long (2015), which touched on the dynamics of space in Singapore, Both Sides, Now (2013, 2014), a project that seeks to normalise end-of-life conversations, and Project Mending Sky (2008, 2009, 2012), a series on environmental issues. Koh’s contributions to the arts have landed him the National Arts Council Singapore Young Artist Award in 2000 and the National Arts Council Cultural Fellowship in 2014. Koh is currently the Arts Nominated Member of Parliament.

Wee H Koon is Assistant Professor at the HKU Department of Architecture, and founding director of the Cities in Asia Summer Program. He served as the Academic Director of the HKU Shanghai Study Center between 2008-2011. He received a number of international accolades for the design of industrial buildings and campuses, such as Blueprint, Green Dot, LEAF, and the Chicago Athenaeum Awards. Koon was selected to be the co-director for the 2017 Architecture Festival “Archifest” by the Singapore Institute of Architects. He is a founding member of the Docomomo Hong Kong Chapter, and advisory board member of Asian Urban Lab. He supports governments and NGOs in advisory roles, including the Singapore Centrefor Liveable Cities’ Leaders in Urban Governance Programme, Design Singapore Council, Hong Kong Buildings Department, Haiti International University Centre, Orphans International, AA Asia, and Modern Asian Architecture Network.

Larry Ng is the Group Director of Architecture & Urban Design Excellence, URA.

Laura Anderson Barbata, born in Mexico City, is a transdisciplinary artist currently based in Brooklyn and Mexico City. Since 1992, she has worked primarily in the social realm, and has initiated projects in the Venezuelan Amazon, Trinidad and Tobago, Mexico, Norway, and the United States. Barbata is also known for her project Transcommunality (2001–ongoing), working with stilt walkers, artists, and artisans from Mexico, New York, and the Caribbean. This project has been presented at various museums, schools, and other venues in the US, Mexico, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, and Singapore. Her work is in various private and public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; El Museo de Arte Moderno, México D.F.; Landesbank Baden-Württemberg Gallery, Stuttgart, Germany; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, California; Museo Jaureguía, Navarra, Spain, and Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Austria. Her work has been featured in numerous publications, including the New York Times, Sculpture Today, Kunstforum Germany, ARTnews, Art in America, ArtNexus, and 160 Años de Fotografía en México (INBA).

Laura Miotto is Associate Professor at the School of Art, Design and Media (ADM) at Nanyang Technological University, and co-chair of the MA programme in Museum Studies and Curatorial Practices at ADM. She is also Design Director of GSM Project in Singapore, an international firm specialised in exhibition design originating from Montréal, Canada. With 20 years of experience in the design field, both as a creative director and an architectural designer, Miotto has worked on exhibitions focusing on heritage interpretation and sensorial design strategies in the context of museums, thematic galleries, and public spaces

Leon van Schaik AO is Professor of Architecture and Innovation Chair in Design Practice Research at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT). From his base in Melbourne, he has promoted local and international architectural culture through an influential practice-based research programme and the commissioning of innovative architecture. His Architecture and Design PhD programme at RMIT has become an important template for institutions worldwide. In 2005, at the 75th anniversary awards of the Australian Institute of Architects, Professor Van Schaik was awarded the inaugural Neville Quarry Architectural Education Prize. In 2006, he was made an Officer (AO) in the General Division of the Order of Australia for his services to architecture and education. Some of his recent publications include Practical Poetics in Architecture (Chichester: Wiley, 2015) and Ideograms (Melbourne: Lyon Foundation and Lyon Housemuseum, 2013).

Lewis BIGGS (United Kingdom) is an independent curator (Co-Curator, Aichi Triennale 2013; Curator, Folkestone Triennial 2014, 2017, 2020; Curator, Land Art Mongolia 2018; advisory curator Kaunas Biennial 2019). As International Adviser and now Distinguished Professor of Public Art at Shanghai University (since 2011) he is also Chairman of the Institute for Public Art, dedicated to the research, propagation, and advocacy of artist-led urbanism. He was a Director of Tate Liverpool (1990–2000); and General Series Editor for Tate Modern Artists Series, Tate Publishing 2001–14. Lewis was the Artistic Director / CEO of Liverpool Biennial 2000–11. The Biennial exhibitions under his leadership focused on newly-commissioned art, much of it site specific for the urban environment, researched collaboratively and realised by a team of locally based curators.

Liam Young is a speculative architect and director who operates in the spaces between design, fiction, and futures. He is the founder of a think tank Tomorrows Thoughts Today, a group whose work explores the possibilities of fantastic, speculative, and imaginary urbanisms. Young also co-runs the Unknown Fields Division, a nomadic research studio that travels on location shoots and expeditions to the “ends of the Earth” to document emerging trends and uncover the weak signals of possible futures. He has taught internationally including the Architectural Association and Princeton University, and now runs an MA in Fiction and Entertainment at Southern California Institute of Architecture.

Lilian Chee is an Associate Professor at the Department of Architecture in the National University of Singapore (NUS). She is a writer, academic, designer, curator, and award-winning educator who has lecturered at the Bartlett, Delft, ETH Zurich, Melbourne, and the Berlage Centre. Her work is situated at the intersections of architectural representation, gender, and affect in a contemporary interdisciplinary context. Her research explores the emergence of architecture through, and from within, everyday encounters and its archives, influenced by film, art and literature. She conceptualised, researched, and collaborated on the award-winning architectural essay film about single women occupants in Singapore’s public housing 03-FLATS (2014), which won the best ASEAN documentary Salaya (2015); shortlisted for the Busan Wide Angle Documentary Prize 2014; and screened at the Singapore Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2016. She is working on a book about public art in Singapore, and co-editing a volume on domesticity in architecture.

Lorenzo PETRILLO (Italy/Singapore) is a designer and community driver. He began his career in Italy, designing for esterni, an association that develops cultural projects for public spaces (among them, the Public Design Festival). Petrillo then moved to Asia in 2007, first to Shanghai and then three years later to Singapore. His experience over the last eight years has been predominantly in the brand experience space, as a lead designer for MNCs such as Bata and Samsung. His travels around the globe inspired him to start his own business, LOPELAB, a design consultant agency that redesigns public spaces through marrying urban structures and social ideas for a more enjoyable and sustainable city. Since then, Petrillo and his team at Lopelab have organised eight Urban Ventures events that have seen over 50,000 visitors.

Louise Neo is a botanical researcher and the co-author of Wayside Flowers of Singapore, a full-colour guidebook that showcases the diversity of wildflowers in Singapore and interesting facts about each species. Neo is a contributor to Urban Forest (uforest.org), a non-profit online platform that aims to provide an accessible and convenient identification guide to the diversity of plants in Singapore and the region.

Low Eng Teong (Singapore) is an Assistant Chief Executive, Sector Development, National Arts Council Singapore.

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).

Marie Menken was an underground experimental filmmaker known as “the mother of the avant-garde,” having influenced and worked with internationally renowned artists such as Andy Warhol. She progressed from painting to filmmaking in 1945, when she made her first avant-garde film using a handheld Bolex camera. Since then, she was celebrated for her intuitive, free-form cinematic style and for taking filmmaking to a new direction with the way she created poetic patterns of light, colour, and texture. Her films are fragmentary encounters with friends, landscapes, and her urban surroundings.

Massamba MBAYE (Senegal) is an art critic, exhibition curator, and communication theories historian. Mbaye is a lecturer at Dakar Cheikh Anta Diop University and at the Virtual University of Senegal (UVS). Mbaye is a member of the Dakar Biennale of Contemporary African Art, Dak’Art Steering Committee and the Communication Officer of the Biennale. A member of the International Association of Art Critics (IAAC), he is the Executive Director of a media and communications group. Furthermore, Mbaye is a member of the editorial board of Afrik’Arts, an international visual arts magazine published by Dak’Art. He is an associate curator at Raw Material Company (RAW) and he is the lead curator of Kemboury Gallery. He has been regularly writing about aesthetics for the last 20 years. In 2019 Mbaye was a juror for the International Award for Public Art.

Matthew Mazzota is a conceptual artist whose work lies at the intersection of art, activism, architecture, design, and urban planning. His interactive public projects explore the relationship between people and their environments, as well as between each other. Between November 2014 and January 2015, Mazzotta was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore where he recreated his community-specific public art project Outdoor Living Rooms at a hawker centre in Singapore. In 2017, Mazzotta was one of the speakers in the Centre’s public summit Cities for People NTU CCA Ideas Fest 2016/17. He received an undergraduate degree from the School of the Art Insitute of Chicago, and a Master of Science in Visual Studies from the Massachusetts Institue of Technology, Cambridge, United States.

Michael Lee (b. 1972, Singapore) is an artist, curator, and publisher based in Singapore. Researching urban memory with a marked interest in loss, its contexts, and implications, Lee’s observations often merge personal and national narratives and are variously translated into objects, diagrams, situations, curations, and texts. He has presented his work in solo exhibitions at Yavuz Fine Art, Singapore, 2014; Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Germany, 2013; Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong, 2010. His work has also been included in international group exhibitions such as Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale, China, 2014, and Asia Triennial Manchester, United Kingdom, 2011, among others. Lee is the founding director of Studio Bibliothèque, a platform which facilitates experiments in art making, curating, and publishing. He was a co-curator of An Atlas of Mirrors, Singapore Biennale, 2016. His editorial projects include the series Corridors: Notes on the Contemporary (Singapore: Studio Bibliothèque, 2013) and Who Cares: 16 Essays on Curating in Asia, co-edited with Alvaro Rodriguez Fominaya, (Hong Kong: Para/Site Art Space, 2010.)

He was awarded the APBF Signature Art Prize People’s Choice Award in 2011 and the National Arts Council’s Young Artist Award (Visual Arts) in 2005.

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.

Milenko PRVAČKI (Singapore) was born in 1951 in (former) Yugoslavia. He graduated with a Master of Fine Arts (Painting) from the Institutul de Arte Plastice “Nicolae Grigorescu” in Bucharest, Romania. Prvački is one of Singapore’s foremost artists and art educators, teaching at LASALLE College of the Arts since 1994. He was Dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts for 10 years, and is currently Senior Fellow, Office of the President at the College. He is also Founder of ART WALK Little India and Tropical Lab. Prvački participated in major exhibitions, most notably the Biennale of Sydney (2006). His work is in various private and public collections, such as the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australia; Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, Serbia; Singapore Art Museum, National Gallery Singapore; amongst others. He was awarded the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 2011, and Singapore’s Cultural Medallion for Visual Arts in 2012.

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.

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.

Orit Gat (b. 1984, Israel) is a writer whose work focuses on contemporary art, publishing, internet culture, and their different meeting points. Gat is currently the feature editor of Rhizome, managing editor of WdW Review, and contributing editor at The White Review. Gat has taught at CCS Bard and the City College of New York, United States and founded a monthly reading group of art magazines, organised in various cities around the world, including New York, London, and Singapore. In 2015, she won the Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant in the short-form writing category and is currently nominated for the 2017 Absolut Art Writing Award.

Paul Tan is Deputy Chief Executive Officer of the National Arts Council (NAC) Singapore. Previously, Tan was Director of Sector Development (Literary Arts) at NAC and helmed the Singapore Writers Festival. He has also published four volumes of poetry. Tan is the Co-Chair of NTU CCA Singapore’s Governing Council.

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.

Pen Sereypagna is the director of the Vann Molyvann Project and a freelance architect and urban researcher based in Phnom Penh City. He has been awarded scholarships and fellowships including the Chevening Scholarship (2017–18), US/ICOMOS and East West Center (2015–16), Sa Sa Art Projects (2014–15), Asian Cultural Council (2012–13), and the School of Constructed Environments PARSONS as a visiting scholar (2012). Sereypagna’s work on Genealogy of Urban Form Phnom Penh, Genealogy of Bassac, and Phnom Penh Visions has been the subject of several exhibitions and presentations in Cambodia and selected venues in Asia, Australia, and the US. His publications on urban transformation with a focus on Phnom Penh, Cambodia, include: Cité de l’Architecture & du Patrimoine (forthcoming 2019), National University of Singapore’s Urban Asias (2018), Chulalongkorn University’s Nakhara journal (2015), and Parsons Journal (2014).

Philip TINARI has served as Director of UCCA, Beijing, the institution at the heart of Beijing’s 798 Art District, since late 2011. His programme has brought to China international figures including Robert Rauschenberg, Elmgreen & Dragset, Haegue Yang, William Kentridge, Taryn Simon, and Tino Sehgal, and has tracked China’s evolving art scene through retrospectives and surveys of artists including Zhao Bandi, Zeng Fanzhi, Liu Wei, Xu Zhen, Wang Keping, Wang Xingwei, Kan Xuan. In 2009, he launched LEAP, an internationally distributed, bilingual art magazine published by the Modern Media Group. He is a contributing editor of Artforum, and was founding editor of the magazine’s online Chinese edition. He holds degrees from Duke University and Harvard University, and is currently a PhD candidate in art history at the University of Oxford.

Dr. Pwint is Professor and Deputy Head of the Department of Architecture at Yangon Technical University (YTU), Myanmar. She received her PhD in Architecture from Yangon Technical University in 2006. Sheworks in the areas of heritage conservation management, architecture education, sustainable architecture, and vernacular architecture. She is a local expert for the development of building control guidelines for the Pyu Ancient Cities, a UNSECO World Heritage Site. Apart from YTU, Pwint has worked with the Myanmar Ministry of Science and Technology. She is a member of the Bagan Master Plan Team, Myanmar ICOMOS, a former executive member of the Association of Myanmar Architects (2015–2018),and was a member of the Three Pyu Ancient Cities Property Management Plan Team (2012–2014).

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.

Richard LIM (Singapore) is an art management professional, currently caring for CapitaLand’s corporate art collection in four broad ways: acquisition, display, promotion, and maintenance. As a champion of art and education, Lim regularly runs art-related activities for the enrichment of family, friends, and colleagues. He is also passionate about supporting emerging regional artists, with a special focus on Singaporean, Indonesian, and Thai art. Lim was invited to be a guest speaker at Art World Forum 2016, and has authored several articles related to corporate art acquisition processes in both English and Mandarin. In Lim’s personal artistic practice, he creates installations, paintings, and various craft-linked media, which often speak as social commentary on contemporary life.

Sharon Siddique is Director, Asian Urban Lab, Singapore; Visiting Professiorial Fellow, Lee Kuan Yew Centre for Innovative Cities, Singapore University of Technology and Design; and Adjunct Professor, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore.

Sissel Tolaas is a smell researcher and artist. Since 1990 she has collected an archive of 7,800 scents and has conducted City SmellScape research of and for 52 cities around the world. Tolaas is the founder of the Institute of Functional Smells and SMELL Re_searchLab. In 2016, Tolaas was Visiting Research Fellow at NTU CCA Singapore where she researched on the smell identities of Singapore’s diverse neighbourhoods and presented her work as part of the exhibition Incomplete Urbanism: Attempts of Critical Spatial Practice (2016–17).

Research Focus

Fellowship period: 1 July – 31 December 2016

During her fellowship, Sissel Tolaas will be carrying out fieldwork and research on everyday smells in urban environments: smell and tolerance, smell and communication, smell and navigation, etc. Her research focus is on the smell identities of Singapore’s diverse neighbourhoods. Tolaas will carry out fieldwork in selected neighbourhoods, particularly areas that have been developed by Singaporean architect William Lim. She will collect and investigate the smell phenomena of each neighbourhood, mapping these neighbourhoods according to their smells. The outcome of Tolaas’ research will be presented in NTU CCA Singapore’s forthcoming exhibition Incomplete Urbanism: Attempts of Critical Spatial Practice.

Stefano Harney is Professor of Strategic Management Education at Singapore Management University and co-founder of the collective Ground Provisions. He is a regular speaker on the subject of business ethics, manage- ment, sociology, anthropology, and postcolonial studies. Recent publications include The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013) co-authored with Fred Moten. Harney has contributed to NTU CCA Singapore’s public programming in 2014, presenting the lecture “Post-colonial critique today,” and an Exhibition (de)Tour together with Tonika Sealy Thompson, as part of the exhibition Theatrical Fields.

T. K. Sabapathy is an art historian and curator. Sabapathy has published extensively on the art histories of Southeast Asia. His publications include: Vision and Idea: Re-Looking Modern Malaysian Art (1994), Modernity and Beyond: Themes in Southeast Asian Art (1996), Road to Nowhere: The Quick Rise and the Long Fall of Art History in Singapore (2010), and recently Intersecting Histories: Contemporary Turns in Southeast Asian Art (2014), the catalogue for the eponymous exhibition he curated at NTU ADM Gallery. He is Adjunct Associate Professor at NUS since 1981; and he has lectured at NTU since 2006. Sabapathy was the first Research Fellow at NTU CCA Singapore.

Teo Siyang is a full-time data analyst with a biology degree and the founder of Urban Forest (uforest.org), which aims to provide information about the diversity of plants in Singapore. The platform was built on the belief that the first step in conservation is enabling people to identify the nature around them so they can foster a deeper connection with it.

Thanavi Chotpradit is a lecturer in modern and contemporary Thai art history at the Department of Art History, Faculty of Archaeology, Silpakorn University, Bangkok, Thailand, and a member of the editorial collective of Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia. She completed her PhD in art history from Birkbeck, University of London. She has contributed essays for both Thai and international scholarly journals such as Aan, Fah Diew Kan, and Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture and South East Asia Research, art magazines, as well as exhibition catalogues. In 2015–16, she participated in a cross-regional research programme, “Ambitious Alignments: New Histories of Southeast Asian Art.” Her current research on photographs of the 6th October Massacre (1976) is funded by the Thailand Research Fund (TRF) for 2019–21. Chotpradit’s areas of interest include modern and Thai contemporary art in relation to memory studies, war commemoration, Thai politics, and archival practices.

Tiffany Chung is an artist and co-founder of Sàn Art, an independent art space in Ho Chi Minh City. Her practice examines conflict, migration, and displacement in relation to history and cultural memory through geographical shifts in countries traumatised by war, human destruction, or natural disaster. Chung was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore between July and September 2014, when she explored the notion of “colonialism as civilising mission” in Singapore and in Indochina and continued The Syria Project, a cartographic research of forced migration in the current refugee crisis.

WANG Dawei (China) is PhD supervisor, Executive Dean of Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts, Editor- in-Chief of Public Art Magazine, Vice Director of the Graphic Design Art Committee of the Chinese Artists Association, a member of the Design Discipline Review Group of the State Council Academic Degrees Office, Vice Chairman of the Shanghai Federation of Cultural and Art Circles, and Chairman of the Shanghai Creative Designers Association. His “Public Art Teaching and Research Practice” won the first prize of Shanghai Teaching Achievement in 2009 and himself was awarded the title of “Shanghai Leading Figure.”

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.

Culture City. Culture Scape. documents a major public art commission for a newly designed business park in Singapore, Mapletree Business City II, featuring works by international and local artists Dan Graham, Tomás Saraceno, Yinka Shonibare CBE, and Zul Mahmod, which draw upon regional histories and urban politics.

The curators’ conversations with the artists and with Edmund Cheng, Chairman of Mapletree Investments Pte Ltd, as well as reflective essays on the development process and the potential of art in public spaces, lend context on the multiple points of view that must be reconciled to create meaningful public spaces and explore the role art can play in public education and social corporate investment.

Culture City. Culture Scape.
Published by NTU CCA Singapore, 2021
Edited by Ute Meta Bauer, Sophie Goltz, and Khim Ong
Design by Studio Vanessa Ban
© 2021 by NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore ISBN: 978-981-14-4377-0
Distributed by NUS Press (Asia Pacific and the Americas)
Copies are available for sale at NTU CCA Singapore and through NUS Press

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

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

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

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

Incomplete Urbanism: Attempts of Critical Spatial Practice is an open-ended exhibition that serves as a laboratory of ideas, exploring the indeterminacy and changeability of urban living. Borrowing its title from eminent Singaporean architect William S.W. Lim’s book Incomplete Urbanism: A Critical Urban Strategy for Emerging Economies (2012), this multifaceted project takes Lim’s practice and the initiatives of the Asian Urban Lab that he started with colleagues in 2003, as a point of departure. It presents various researches into the spatial, cultural and social aspects of city life according to the publications Lim was involved with.

Acknowledging Lim’s contributions as a prolific urban theorist and catalyst of ideas, whose vision asks that we reconsider the traditions of Asian architecture for the “contemporary vernacular”, Incomplete Urbanism is a direct response to his critical ideas – a space is generated to encourage participation and agency.

Lim’s key ideas will be explored by commissioned projects from several contributors, including Dr Marc Glöde (Germany/Singapore), film curator, Visiting Scholar, School of Art, Design (ADM) and Media, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore; Laura Miotto (Italy/Singapore), Associate Professor, NTU ADM; Shirley Surya (Indonesia/Hong Kong), Associate Curator for Design and Architecture, M+, Hong Kong and NTU CCA Singapore Visiting Research Fellows; Dr Etienne Turpin (Canada/Indonesia), Research Scientist, Urban Risk Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States; and Sissel Tolaas (Norway/Germany), smell researcher and artist.

Incomplete Urbanism seeks to present a dynamic space to engage urban issues, through discussions, debates, a programme on classic Singapore films, workshops and other collective efforts.

Incomplete Urbanism: Attempts of Critical Spatial Practice public programmes