Simryn Gill: Hugging the Shore

Simryn Gill grew up in Port Dickson, Malaysia, and has returned to make her work there since 1993. The key photographs in this book, in which the artist becomes an oil palm tree, are a continuation of her work Vegetation (1999– ongoing), where she records herself in various places disguised as local plants: tumbleweed and agave in Texas, grass tree and paperbark tree in rural New South Wales, and an epiphytic fern in a rare derelict site in Singapore.

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.

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.