Joan Jonas: They Come to Us Without a Word

Joan Jonas is one of the most significant video and performance artists and important female artists active in the 1960s and 1970s. She pioneered the use of the two genres in visual art and was influential also in other art forms. Incorporating different media, she presents multiple viewpoints and layers of material, texture, and meanings in her work to address current issues. In 1972, she began producing video works that were ground-breaking in emphasising the experience of the medium as a conceptual device and is known for merging various genres in her fragmented video narratives.

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.

Paul Ha is currently the Director of the List Visual Arts Center, the contemporary art museum at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Known for presenting experimental and timely exhibitions, the List also oversees the active MIT’s Percent-for-Art program, which has created one the of the outstanding national collections of public art. The collection includes 50 plus site-specific commissions from artists such as Dan Graham, Cai Guo-Qiang, Anish Kapoor, Sol LeWitt and Sarah Sze. The List also oversees more than 3,500 works in the permanent collection as well as 600 works in an innovative student loan art collection program. In 2014 Ha was chosen to be commissioner of the U.S. Pavilion for the La Biennale di Venezia 56th International Art Exhibition. Ha and co-curator Ute Meta Bauer, presented artist Joan Jonas, a pioneer of performance and time based art.