The Disappearance

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.

Vera Mey is an independent curator and PhD candidate at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She is part of the curatorial team for SEA Project (2017) at the Mori Art Museum, Japan, and National Art Center, Tokyo. She is also co-founder of the scholarly journal Southeast of Now. Between 2014 and 2016, she joined Ambitious Alignments, a research initiative of the Getty Foundation. She was part of the founding team of NTU CCA Singapore as Curator for Residencies from 2014 to 2016.

Shubigi Rao is a writer and visual artist. Her interests include archaeology and neuroscience, libraries, archival systems, histories, literature, contemporary art theory, and natural history. Between October 2015 and January 2016, Rao was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore where she continued her research on a decade-long project on the histories of print and book destruction, leading to Pulp: A Short Biography of the Banished Book (2016), a first volume in a series of five.

Dr David Teh is Assistant Professor, Department of English Language and Literature at National University of Singapore. He is also a writer, curator, art advisor, and researcher specialising in SoutheastAsian contemporary art. Before moving to Singapore, he worked as an independent curator and critic in Bangkok (2005-2009), and has since realised projects in Germany, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore. His writings have appeared in Third Text, Afterall, LEAP Magazine, Art Asia Pacific, artforum.com and The Bangkok Post. His new book on Thai contemporary art will be published in 2017 by MIT Press.

Sonya Lacey (b. 1976, New Zealand) is a Wellington-based artist whose practice focuses on forms of communications within spoken, printed, and online scenarios. She works with a variety of mediums including performance, video, and installation often drawing on historical references to speculate on the specificity of socio-technological discourses. Alongside her studio practice, Lacey is also interested in curatorial, publishing, and collaborative methodologies. Together with Sarah Rose, she established the collaborative research project lightreading.

Her works have been shown at Govett Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, Taranaki, New Zealand (2017, 2016), Glasgow Centre for Contemporary Art, United Kingdom (2016), and London International Film Festival, United Kingdom (2015).

Cyprien Gaillard lives and works in Berlin. In his work, he reflects upon meanings and memories of monuments and landscapes that have been erased and replaced by the effects of time and social and cultural transformation. He had numerous solo exhibitions, including MOMA P.S.1, New York (2013); Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2011, 2008); the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2011). In 2011 he was awarded the Preis der Nationalgalerie für junge Kunst and the Prix Marcel Duchamp.

Malak Helmy lives and works in Cairo, Egypt. Her work explores relationships between constructions of language and constructions of place; the line between private and public, science and magic, and metaphor. Helmy’s work has been exhibited at the 63rd and 64th Berlinale Forum Expanded,(2014 and 2013); the 9th Mercosul Biennial (2013); Frankendael Foundation (2013); Beirut (2013); Camera Austria (2013); 9th Gwangju Biennial (2012); amongst others.

Manuel Pelmuş is a choreographer active in the Bucharest dance community. Pelmuş graduated from the Floria Capsali dance school and worked at the Hamburg Opera; he eventually moved away from his classical training to explore more politically charged, avant-garde styles.

Laure Prouvost is a French artist living and working in Antwerp, Belgium. She won the 2013 Turner Prize. In 2019, she represented France at the Venice Biennale with the multi-media work The Deep Blue Sea Surrounding You.

Nigel Rolfe lives and works in Dublin, Ireland. He has most recently performed and featured in Performance Art Festivals, in galleries and museums in many countries. Nigel Rolfe is recognized as a seminal figure in performance art and has been active as an Action Artist since 1969. Since 2008 live working has become once again in his primary form. He is a senior course tutor in Fine Art (Perfomance) at the Royal College of Art, London.

Marie Shannon is an New Zealand-based artist. Her work has always been concerned with her immediate surroundings, and has at times addressed the work of other artists. Following the death of her partner, the artist Julian Dashper, in 2009, she has been cataloguing his art works and archive in their shared Auckland studio. It is from this process that she has gathered the material for her text-based videos.

Diego Tonus lives and works in Amsterdam. His works addresses the boundaries between truth and fact, reality and fiction, presentation and representation, mediation and lived experience. His work has been recently presented at Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2013); the 9th edition of Furla award (2013), Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam (2013).

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.

While in residence, Erin Gleeson gave a public talk with her nomination for the NTU CCA Singapore Artist-in-Residence, Luke Willis Thompson. She also had introductory visits and curatorial tours to important institutional spaces and made a number of first-contact studio visits, finding synergies with CCA artist-in-residence Koh Nguang How’s research for Shui Tit Sing – 100 Years of an Artist through his Archives as part of his Singapore Art Archive Project @ CCA (SAAP@CCA).

Planting Rice is a curatorial collaboration of Lian Ladia and Sidd Perez. This platform is aimed at fostering the rise of cross-pollination among artistic communities and has been in existence since 2011. Planting Rice’s major component is a web-based platform that generates and circulates an archive of open source republished texts that highlight scholarship on art history and criticism that is at the risk of being inaccessible. The team’s curatorial practice extends off-site and their projects include repotentializing spaces, rehistoricizing narratives of art, and expanding the roles, forms and gestures of curatorial practice.