Free Jazz III. Sound. Walks.

Ana Prvacki’s (b. 1976, Serbia) work has been included in many international exhibitions including dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel (2012); Sydney Biennial (2007); Singapore Biennial (2006); Turin Triennale (2005). She has developed projects for venues and institutions such as Greeting Committee, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, United States (2011); Mardi, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2010); Music Derived Pain Killer, Castello di Rivoli, Italy (2009); T1 Pantagruel Syndrome, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin, Italy (2005); Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art, Smart Museum of Art, Chicago, United States (2012); Speculative Futures, Bloomberg HQ, New York, United States (2011); 25 Years Later…, Art in General, New York, United States (2007); Time Becomes Form, Artists Space, New York, United States (2008); Neutralize Negative Feelings, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City, United States (2013); Performing Practice, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, United States (2012).

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. 

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.

anGie seah’s multidisciplinary practice traverses the mediums of drawing, sculpture, performance art, installation, sound and video. Seah allows spontaneity and intuition to navigate a range of shifting emotional resonances and psychological states. Experimenting with articulations of spoken language, she searches for authentic expression and primal beauty. For more than a decade, she has been working with diverse communities on participatory projects. Since 1997 anGie has exhibited widely including at ZKM Centre for New Media, Germany; Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan; and the Palais de Tokyo, France; as well as at NTU CCA Singapore and the Singapore Biennale.

Magdalena Magiera is Curator, Outreach & Education at NTU CCA Singapore. She was an independent curator, Managing Editor of frieze d/e, and currently Editor of mono.kultur, a quarterly interview magazine. She co-curated Based in Berlin (2011) as well as exhibitions for The Building and SPLACE in Berlin. Magiera was Project Manager of The Maybe Education and Other Programs at dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel (2012), and UNITEDNATIONSPLAZA, Berlin (2006–08). Prior to joining NTU CCA Singapore, she worked for e-flux exhibitions and public programmes in New York City.

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

Working at the intersection of film, sound, theatre, and installation and often through collaborative projects, the sonic and spatial experiments of Tini Aliman (b. 1980, Singapore) focus on forest networks, plant consciousness, bioacoustics, and data translations via biodata sonification. Her recent projects and collaborations have been presented at Free Jazz III: Sound. Walks. NTU CCA Singapore (2021); An Exercise of Meaning in a Glitch Season, National Gallery Singapore (2020); Sound Kite Orchestra, Biennale Urbana, Venice, Italy and Stories We Tell to Scare Ourselves With, Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, Taiwan (both 2019). 

Christa Donner (United States) is an artist, writer, and organiser who investigates anatomy and its metaphors. Donner employs a range of artistic media in her creative research, including drawing, audio performance, large-scale installations and small-press publications that create multi-layered, community-centred but intimate projects. Her creative research focuses on the human and non-human body as a site for conflict and adaptation: from the internal activities of the microbiome to the creative potentials of care work and community. She is currently an adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Contemporary Practices at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Andrew S Yang (United States) works across the visual arts, sciences, and history to explore emerging ecologies of the Anthropocene. Yang’s work has been exhibited from Oklahoma to Yokohama, including the 14th Istanbul Biennial (2015), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2016), the Spencer Museum of Art (2019), and the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History (2020). His writing and research can be found in Art Journal, Leonardo, Biological Theory, and Antennae. He is an Associate Professor in the Liberal Arts Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a research associate at the Field Museum of Natural History.

Working with photography, installations, and found objects, the interdisciplinary practice of Diana Lelonek (b. 1988, Poland) interrogates the notion of nature in the anthropocene. Through the collection of newly formed waste-derived organisms across dump sites and landfills, she explores the impact of overproduction of waste on existing ecosystems. Her recent solo exhibitions include Diana Lelonek: Buona Fortuna, Fondazione Pastificio Cerere, Rome, Italy (2020); Raport, BWA Galeria Meijska Bydgoszcz, Poland and Center for Living Things, Buerobasel, Basel, Switzerland (both 2019). She has exhibited in international shows such as Nature nature, Kunstraum Niederoesterreich, Vienna, Austria andThe Art of Being Good, Tallinna Kunstihoone, Estonia (both 2019); and Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art, Latvia (2018), among others.

Denim Szram (Poland/Switzerland) a sound and media artist, whose artistic work oscillates between music production, performance, multimedia installations and immersive sound compositions. As an electronic musician he creates compositions for spaces, dance and theatre. An expert in the field of 3D audio and uses this for his acoustic scenography, he expands sound with other media and creates audio visual systems and musical interfaces to explore expression with new technology. His work has been shown internationally and institutions like ZKM Karlsruhe, House of electronic arts in Basel, and the Audio Art Festival Krakow.

Cheryl Ong (Singapore) is a percussionist active in performance and education and a regular member of the avant-rock group The Observatory. In recent years she has been exploring improvisational and experimental practices for her music, while hunting down new ideas and sounds. Her recent performances include All Ears,Festival (2020, Norway) and AngelicA Festival (2019, Bologna) in a duo with Vivian Wang. Ong participated as a musician for the dance performance by Pichet Klunchun x Wu-kang Chen at Behalf (2019, UCC, Singapore). Her solo composition Hejira was used in Yeo Siew Hua’s award winning film, A Land Imagined.

Joyce Bee Tuan Koh (Singapore) composes concert music and creates sound installations and multi-media works. Versatile and collaborative, Joyce has a wealth of experience working with musicians, choreographers, theatre-makers, artists, writers, philosophers, filmmakers, and architects. Originating from her interests in architecture and interdisciplinarity, her work explores notions of sonic canvas, space, and theatre of music. As described by the International Piano Quarterly, her sound world “engages the intellect and requires a different approach”. Her works have been presented at international festivals notably, International Computer Music Conferences, International Symposium on Electronic Arts, World Stage Design, Biennale Musiques France, Sir Henry Wood Promenade UK, Melbourne Arts Festival, Sydney InsideOut Festival, Singapore Arts Festival, Singapore Dan:s Festival, and Soundislands Festival.

Galina Mihaleva (Bulgaria/Singapore) is Associate Professor at the School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University, where she teaches Technology, Art and Fashion. Her research investigates the physical and psychological relationship we have with garments or what she calls “wearable technology.” Mihaleva taught at Arizona State University for more than 15 years in costume design, where she often worked with renowned choreographers worldwide. She is the founder of Galina Couture in Scottsdale, Arizona where her team develops exclusive and unique collections making use of new materials. Mihaleva received the Rumi award in the US and won first place at Tiffany’s Paris Fashion Week, 2016.

Vivian Wang diverged from her formal training as a classical pianist when she started the avant-rock outfit The Observatory in 2001. A former TV producer-presenter as well as a film music supervisor, Wang focuses solely on music, performance, and interdisciplinary work since 2008. She performs on synth, keyboard, voice, and percussion, and tags Alice Coltrane, Robert Wyatt, Mark Hollis, Bill Evans, and Annapurna Devi as her all-time favourite musical heroes.

Arahmaiani (Indonesia) is one of Indonesia’s most respected and pioneering artists in the field of performance art. From the 1980’s, she has performed in many public spaces — even during the rule of an oppressive military regime. Since then, she has engaged with issues about the environmental, politics, violence, critique of capital, the female body, and in recent years, with her own identity, which although Muslim, lays between Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, and animist beliefs. Her interactive performances have developed into a community-based practice, bringing attention to subjects prevalent in Indonesia and to issues of violence against the environment on the Tibetan Plateau.

Jimmy Ong (Singapore/Indonesia) is an artist who currently works from his studios in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Jimmy Ong’s practice involves highly personal inquiries into bodily forms and queer(ed) identities, expanding into broader entanglements with regional myths, archetypes, traditions, and historical narratives.

Reetu Sattar (Bangladesh) works in Dhaka and Berlin. Her interdisciplinary practice encompasses live performance, documentation and objects as archival memories in an effort to re-examine history and human perception. Her search of a new language as response to the empathetic mind reaches her to working inside seemingly impossible spaces, allowing for contents to be emergent rather than determined as the body negotiates repetition, disruption, meaning and memory. She has presented her work at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Liverpool Biennial, and Dhaka Art Summit, among many other venues. Her performances have been staged internationally at venues in London, Birmingham, Bangkok and Goa.

Karin G. Oen is Deputy Director, Curatorial Programmes, at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore. She received her PhD in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Art and Architecture from MIT. A global modernist, she has recently focused on curatorial projects that explore transmediatic, transcultural, and transhistorical discourse. Oen is the curator of the forthcoming exhibition, teamLab: Continuity, at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, where she was a curator from 2015-2019.

George Chuais a multidisciplinary artist based in Singapore. Active since the late nineties, he works in the intersection between the body and sound. He has presented works in the form of physical theatre, performance art and sound installations. As an instigator and explorer of sound, he resists development in a singular style or genre. Apart from his solo work and performances, George’s collaborative interests include live sound improvisation, sound design for film and theatre, as well experimental strategies for soundtracks.

Nina Djekić (Ljubljana, 1989), based in Ljubljana and Singapore, graduated with a BA in choreography from School for New Dance Development SNDO and an MFA from Sandberg Instituut, both in Amsterdam.

Her work revolves around choreographic notions in exhibitionary settings. It looks at the psycho-somatic engagements between the artwork and the visitor as well as the affect the uncanny presence of artworks has on the relationship between the visitors themselves. It is important to her practice to think of those encounters as processual and time bound. Her latest work focuses on the sensuality of the gaze and the reconsideration of vision as felt perception.

The filmic and performative practice of Russell Morton (b. 1982, Singapore) explores folkloric myths, esoteric rituals, and the conventions of cinema itself. His film Saudade (2020) was commissioned for State of Motion: Rushes of Time, Asian Film Archives, Singapore, and presented at the 31^st Singapore International Film Festival (2020); The Forest of Copper Columns (2015) won the Cinematic Achievement Award at the 57^th Thessaloniki Film Festival, Greece (2016) and was selected for several festivals including the Short Shorts Film Festival, Tokyo, Japan (2017); the Thai Short Film and Video Festival, Bangkok, Thailand and Jogja-NETPAC Asian Film Festival, Indonesia (both 2016).

Mohamed Noor (Singapore) grew up in a musical family, and began his music career playing percussion at the age of 5 for a performance at The Victoria Theater. A multi-instrumentalist, Noor grew up playing the tabla, drums, mandolin, keyboards, clarinet, Indian karnatic flute and saxophone, to name a few. Noor currently plays more than 25 percussion instruments from around the world and has performed in many music festivals including the ASEAN Jazz Festival (Malaysia), Heineken Jazz Festival (Singapore), Big Bang Percussion Festival (London), Singapore Arts Festival, Penang Jazz, Jarusum International Jazz Festival, Nanning International Folk Song Festival, and the Tokyo International Performing Arts festival.

Noor Effendy Ibrahim is an interdisciplinary arts practitioner based in Singapore. He received the Japan Chamber of Commerce and Industry Singapore Foundation Culture Award in 2007. Effendy was the Artistic Director of The Substation (2010 – 2015) and Teater Ekamatra (2001 – 2006). Effendy had also served on the Singapore National Arts Council (NAC) Board (2004 – 2006; 7th term) and was selected for the NAC Cultural Fellowship programme in 2014. In 2016, Effendy founded the independent non-profit performance art collective akulah BIMBO SAKTI, or I am the MAGIC BIMBO in Malay.

Effendy was a Senior Academic Staff at Republic Polytechnic from 2007 – 2010 and returned as an Associate Lecturer from 2017 – 2019. He has also taught part-time at LASALLE College of the Art, National Institute of Education – an institute of Nanyang Technological University, Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts and DigiPen Singapore. Effendy has programmed for the Neon Lights international music festival from 2015 – 2016, and the traditional dance festival Padang Tari (Field of Dance) in 2016 presented by the NAC. Effendy has over 20 years of interdisciplinary art-making experience.

Cheong Kah Kit is a visual artist based in Singapore. He graduated from Umeå Academy of Fine Art, Sweden in 2008. Kah Kit was affiliated with p-10, a Singapore independent curatorial team (2004-2006). In 2016, he co-founded Peninsular, an artist studio / project space in Singapore. Operating in-between the spaces of production and exhibition, Peninsular seeks intimate dialogue in meaning-making and artistic subjectivity between objects and viewers. He is also currently developing an oral history project with Singapore artists, curators, art historians and administrators. Kah Kit was Manager for Research at NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore between 2016-2018. Prior to that, he was Reference Art Librarian at the Lee Kong Chian Reference Library, National Library Singapore (2009-2015).

Liquid Architecture is an Australian organisation for artists working with sound. LA investigates the sounds themselves, but also the ideas communicated about, and the meaning of, sound and listening.

Ramesh Krishnan (Singapore) is a sound designer, music creative and DJ. Ramesh’s inception as a sound designer started in 2004 when he collaborated on Marseilles-based artist Mathieu Briand’s Derrière Le Monde Flottant at the Musée d’art Contemporain in Lyon. He ventured into exploring stimulation, play and perception with electronic music and technology. In 2009, he took on Quest for Immortality and Singapore 1960, exhibitions held at National Museum of Singapore in which he created original compositions by re-arranging historical recordings into experimental soundscapes. Krishnan received the President’s Design Award 2010 for Quest for Immortality.

Harini V (Singapore) is a bilingual poet and a member of the Tamil Language Council. Her Tamil poems have been featured in the recent SG50 Singapore women poetry anthology titled Nithimisai Nagarum Koorangazhkal, as well as in Love at the Gallery 2017 — a book of poems inspired by art from the National Gallery Singapore. Outside of her writing activities, she has also organised open mic nights and literary panels over the past few years.

Ashwinii Selvaraj (Singapore) is an undergraduate studying Political Science in the National University of Singapore. Her keen interest to write in the Tamil language have produced works that have been published in short story collections such as Akkarai Pachai (Greener Pastures). In addition to being a writer, she translates English articles for the Serangoon Times, a Tamil literary magazine published in Singapore. She has also won multiple awards and prizes including the Prime Minister’s Book Prize Award (2015) and National Poetry Festival competition (2015), as well first prize for the ASEAN-India Pravasi Bharathiya Divas Conference Tamil poetry competition (2018).

Bharathi Moorthiappan (Singapore) has a Masters Degree in Tamil and interested about teaching, learning, writing and speaking in the Tamil language. Bharathi pursues her passion through her Tamil education company where she encourages reading among her students. Bharathi is also an avid reader of books translated from other languages as a way to experience various cultures and travel the world.

Sivakumar Palakrishnan (Singapore) is an actor who has worked in television, film and theatre. Some of his theatrical credits include The Kalinga Trilogy (Miror Theatre) and We Are Like This Only! (HuM Theatre). He has received nominations at the Pradhana Vizha, Vasantham Channel’s Television awards, and won for his performance in Veethi Varai. Siva is recognized for his role in K Rajagopal’s A Yellow Bird, which premiered at the International Critics’ Week at the Cannes Film Festival in 2016. Currently, he is a cast member in Channel 5’s television drama series, Tanglin.

Munir Alsagoff (Singapore), or MOON, has 20 years of performance experience as a guitarist and DJ. He is equally adept on the electric and acoustic guitar, and is greatly influenced by classical, jazz, soul, world and dance music. MOON has performed at festivals in Singapore and around the Asia-Pacific region like the renowned Java Jazz in Jakarta. MOON does live collaborations with DJs at venues such as CE LA VI, W Singapore, Zouk and local conscious event, Tropika, and is part of Beatroot, a global inspired music collective that fuses visuals, beats and live music elements into their performances.

Nanthiyni Aravindan (Singapore) is studying Visual Communication at Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts. Her passion for illustration and painting has brought her to explore both traditional visual languages and digital techniques. Her artistic production revolves around zoological and mythical creatures. “The New Ordinary” a mix media work she produced in 2020 was selected as a finalist at the Crowbars Award.

Sean Dockray (Australia) is an artist, writer, and programmer whose work explores the politics of technology, with a particular emphasis on artificial intelligences and the algorithmic web. He is also the founding director of the Los Angeles non-profit Telic Arts Exchange, and initiator of knowledge-sharing platforms, The Public School and Aaaaarg.

James Parker (Australia) is an academic and curator based at Institute for International Law and Humanities at Melbourne Law School. His research focuses on the relations between law, sound and listening.

Joel Stern (Australia) is a curator, researcher, and artist living and working on Wurundjeri land in Melbourne, Australia. Since 2013, Stern has been Artistic Director at Liquid Archi­tec­ture, a leading organ­i­sa­tion that creates spaces for sonic expe­ri­ence and crit­i­cal listening at the inter­sec­tion of con­tem­po­rary art and exper­i­men­tal music.