Free Jazz

Anca Rujoiu is a curator and editor based in Singapore. As curator for exhibitions and later head of publications (2013–2018), she was part of the founding team of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore. In 2019, she was the co-curator of the third edition of the Art Encounters Biennial, Timișoara, approached as a one-year institutional programme. Whether working in a contemporary art centre, an independent space, an art school, or in the context of a biennial, she has been passionate about stretching art’s publicness, working across formats. First-Person Institutions, her PhD research at Monash University in Melbourne is focused on institution building, artists’ archives, and transnational imaginaries.

Ute Meta Bauer is a Professor at the School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University Singapore (NTU). She is currently the Acting Director and Principal Research Fellow at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (NTU CCA Singapore); and is the Chair of the Masters in Museum Studies and Curatorial Practices (MA MSCP) programme. Having served as the Founding Director of NTU CCA Singapore for over a decade, her work as educator and curator over the past years has focused on Climates. Habitats. Environments. At the Centre, she curated and co-curated The Oceanic (2017/2018), Trees of Life. Knowledge in Material (2018), and The Posthuman City (2020). In 2022, she served as curator for the Singapore Pavilion at the 59th Biennale di Venezia, featuring artist Shubigi Rao. Her recent large scale projects include the 17th Istanbul Biennial (2022), co-curated alongside David Teh and Amar Kanwar, and the artistic direction of the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale 2024. She is a Trustee of the Art Foundation TBA21 and a member of the Governing Council of n.b.k. Berlin. Bauer was recently conferred an Honorary Doctorate of Art and Design by Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Helsinki, Finland.

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

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

Artist and writer Lucy Davis’ (b. 1970, United Kingdom) interdisciplinary practice examines notions of nature in art and visual culture, science and indigenous knowledge, natural histories, materiality and urban memory primarily but not exclusively in Southeast Asia. Most notably, Davis is the founder of The Migrant Ecologies Project – the product of her longstanding interest in the mid-twentieth century Singapore Modern Woodcut movement which later informed a six-year long, material-led cumulative series of investigations under the auspices of The Migrant Ecologies Project. Davis was also the founding editor of the Singapore critical publication series focas: Forum on Contemporary Art & Society from 2000-2007. She was previously Assistant Professor at School of Art, Design and Media (ADM) at Nanyang Technological University.

Lee Weng Choy is president of the Singapore Section of the International Association of Art Critics, and a part-time consultant with A+ Works of Art in Kuala Lumpur. Previously, Lee was Artistic Co-Director of The Substation, Singapore; he has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and the Sotheby’s Institute of Art—Singapore. His essays have appeared in journals such as Afterall, and anthologies such as Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art: An Anthology (Cornell SEAP, 2012), Over Here: International Perspectives on Art and Culture (MIT Press, 2004), and Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985 (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). He writes the “Ask a Critic” column for Plural Art Mag.

Ade Darmawan lives and works in Jakarta as an artist, curator, and director of the artist collective ruangrupa. He studied at the Graphic Art Department at the Indonesia Art Institute, and was a resident at the Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam (1998–2000). He works with installation, objects, drawing, digital print, and video. Recently he has had solo exhibitions at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2016) and Portikus, Frankfurt (2015). Darmawan participated in the Gwangju and Singapore Biennales (both 2016), and was a curatorial collaborator in Condition Report (2017); Media Art Kitchen (2013); and Riverscape in-flux (2012). ruangrupa, an artist collective co-founded in 2000 with five other artists in Jakarta, focuses on visual arts and its relation with the social cultural context, particularly in urban environments. The collective has exhibited at the São Paulo Biennale (2014); Asia Pacific Triennial, Brisbane (2012); Istanbul Biennale (2005); and Gwangju Biennale (2002), among others. They were also curators of the 2016 Sonsbeek International. Darmawan was a member of the Jakarta Arts Council (2006–09) and became the Artistic Director of the Jakarta Biennale in 2009. Since 2013, he is executive director of the Jakarta Biennale.

Mark Nash is a curator and writer, and Professor, University of California Santa Cruz. He was Head of Department Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art London, and prior Director of Fine Art Research at Central St Martins. He was a senior lecturer in Film History and Theory at the University of East London, visiting lecturer at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, and visiting research fellow at the NTU CCA Singapore (2015). He holds a PhD from Middlesex University. Nash has written extensively on artists’ work with the moving image, having curated One Sixth of the Earth, ecologies of image at ZKM, Karlsruhe and MUSAC, Leon (2012-13) and Experiments with Truth, Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia (2004-5).

Research Focus

1. Historical legacy of independence and liberation struggles and cold war politics, including the non-aligned movement, in terms of the different affective relationships these alternative world views propose particularly as realised in South East Asian art

2. Alternative philosophies and aesthetics of the moving image – e.g. how Chinese or Indonesian artists approach the moving image, and the concepts of the image embedded in their linguistic etymology

3. Moving image and photographic works along the Asian part of the Silk Road

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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