Bring it to LIFE

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

Kray Chen is an artist. His practice brings attention to the peculiar characteristics of forms, gestures, and behaviours in society to discuss the value of progress. Between April and August 2016, Chen was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore where he developed a Feng Shui survey of his residency studio and the larger Gillman Barracks precinct, with the aim to enliven and invigorate a site of art that is aiming to establish itself as a vibrant cultural hub.

Sufian Samsiyar is an artist. Their work was featured in exhibitions at the National Gallery Singapore and the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore.

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

Syaheedah Iskandar works with vernacular ideas of visuality within Southeast Asia, drawing on contemporary discourses on hyper-visuality and its opposite, the unseen. Her projects aim to unpack knowledge(s) that inform and counter hegemonic systems of seeing. Recent curatorial projects include State of Motion 2021: [Alternate/Opt] Realities (2021), An Exercise of Meaning in a Glitch Season (2020) and Nyanyi Sunyi (Songs of Solitude) (2018). Syaheedah was the inaugural Emerging Writers’ Fellow for the academic journal Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia and the recipient of the IMPART Awards 2020 (Singapore) in recognition of her emerging curatorial practice. She holds an MA in History of Art and Archaeology at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. She was previously Curatorial Assistant at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (2014–18).

Shona Mei Findlay (Singapore, 1989) is Curatorial Assistant Residencies of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (NTU CCA Singapore), a contemporary art research centre of Nanyang Technological University (NTU). Since its inauguration in January 2014, the Residencies Programme has brought together artists, curators and writers in a research driven residency with particular emphasis on artists from Singapore and Southeast Asia alongside artists from the rest of the world. She was project assistant for No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia, UBS Guggenheim Global Art Initiative’s MAP exhibition (2014) and co-curated the Artist Resource Platform: Bring it to Life (2015), both at NTU CCA Singapore. Findlay was a participant in the inaugural Workshop for Emerging Professionals of Para Site in Hong Kong (2015) and received her BA in Fine Art and History of Art from Goldsmiths College, London (2007). In the curriculum year 2016-17 she participates in the De Appel Curatorial Programme.

Samantha Leong is Executive, Conference, Workshops & Archive at NTU CCA Singapore from 2016-2018.