Credits and Acknowledgements:
This project is funded in part by a Creative Research Grant of the National Arts Council Singapore. The 2023 field trip was co-organized by NUS Museum (Singapore) and Migrant Ecologies Project. It was managed by Malaysian artist chitoo and funded by Aalto University (Finland). A subsequent 2024 field trip and a series of film shoots received further funding from Kenno Filmi, The Promotion Centre for Audiovisual Culture (AVEK), Aalto University KONE fund (all Finland) and Lucy Davis herself.
Migrant Ecologies Projects also wishes to acknowledge the foundational role for this project of the research conducted by Kate Pocklington, Conservator at the Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum from 2012 to 2024, together with Siddharta Perez, Curatorial Lead, NUS Museum.
Migrant Ecologies Projects and their collaborators aim to develop this research in a series of exhibitions-as-offerings that will combine moving image, performance, masks, sound art, installation, kinetic sculptures, puppets, photography and those elusive crocodile seeds.
Speaker Bios
Migrant Ecologies Projects
(Lucy Davis, Kee Ya Ting, Zai Tang)
Lucy Davis is a visual artist, film maker, art writer, educator, sometimes curator and founder of Migrant Ecologies Projects, an artist collective whose practice encircles plant genetics, tree lore, bird song as well as art/science, naturecultures, memory, materiality, narrative environments, and most recently, pyscho-ecologies of resilience. Her multi-award winning transdisciplinary projects have been featured in numerous international biennales and film festivals around the world. Lucy lived 30 years in Singapore, where she was a founding member of the NTU School of Art, Design and Media. She was forced to leave in 2016 but has found shelter in Helsinki at Aalto University, Finland, where she is Associate Professor (Contemporary Art) and Head of the Visual Cultures, Curating and Contemporary Art (ViCCA) MA programme in the Department of Art & Media.
Zai Tang is a artist, composer, sound designer and a member of The Migrant Ecologies Projects based in Singapore. He works across the fields of film, visual arts, and performance both locally and internationally. Recent solo and collabortative projects include Mali Bucha: Dance Offering with Kornkarn Rungsawang performed at Art Spectrum: Dream Screen, Leuum Museum, Seoul, Wild Somaat Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale, No. 60 with Pichet Klunchun Dance Company at Hong Kong Arts Festival (all 2024); Sonic Medi(a)tions, National Gallery Singapore (2023); Escape Velocity V (Solo Version), Seoul Mediacity Pre-Biennale (2022); Redder at the Thailand Biennale, Korat (2021).
Kee Ya Ting is a Singaporean artist and a core collaborator of Migrant Ecologies Projects to which she contributes her photographic, cinematographic, and editing skills. Projects realised with her contributions have been shown at Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai, UAE, Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale, Saudi Arabia; Ludwig Forum, Aachen, Germany (all 2024); Istanbul Biennale, Turkey (2022), The National Gallery of Singapore (2021), Singapore Art Museum site specific commission (2020), Jendela Visual Arts Space, The Esplanade (all Singapore, 2020), among othes.
Faisal Husni is a researcher of Singapore and Southeast Asian art histories, with an M.A.(Research) from the NTU School of Art, Design and Media. His research interests include multi-religious and multicultural heritage of worship, and religious art and traditions of Singapore and the Malay world. His main study centres on keramat graves, the focus of his M.A. thesis titled “The Grave that Became A Shrine: The Lives of Keramat Graves in Singapore.” He was assistant curator for Island Southeast Asia at Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore. In 2023, he curated Her Kebaya at the Peranakan Museum, Singapore, an exhibition that celebrated the history of kebaya and the lives of the women who wore them. He presented talks such as “Must We Decolonise the Museum? Sacred and Ritual Art and the Raffles Collection in Singapore” hosted by SOAS University of London and “And From Her Navel Grew Rice: Dewi Sri And Her Manifestations” at Asian Civilisation Museum (both 2021).
Marcus Ng is an independent researcher and writer based in Singapore. His hodge-podge of interests include the insects of Southeast Asia (in particular dragonflies and moths); the curious intersections between people, places and nature; and the natural and human histories of Singapore’s islands and coastal communities. These obsessions have resulted in a book on Singapore’s odonates, heritage trails on peripheral neighbourhoods such as Sembawang, Balestier and Woodlands and exhibitions featuring Singapore’s islands and William Farquhar’s natural history drawings.
The Observatory (Dharma, Cheryl Ong & Yuen Chee Wai), a name that may suggest passive objectivity, but which really describes a band whose music is an impassioned response to the society it is enmeshed in. A world where politics have failed us, power and greed rule us, and hate and ignorance divide us. This is a band that has, in its 20-year history, been ever ready to speak truth to power, whether through the symbolic force of words or physical intensity of sound. Where change is the only constant, and where new forms of oppression must be actively met with new strategies for resistance, a persistent reinvention defines the heart and soul of The Observatory. Since its formation in 2001, the band has expressed itself in multiples ways from folk electronica to prog and avant rock, taking a stylistic sledgehammer to each and every one of its previous releases.
The latest constellation of The Observatory features Yuen Chee Wai and Dharma on guitars, efx and objects; and Cheryl Ong on drums; with Ong and Yuen multitasking on electronics. This marks The Observatory’s latest sojourn into wordless territories and atonalism, with influences from post-punk to free improv and experimental electronics – a vibrant ecology of pulsing vibrations, extended freeplay and propulsive motorik-tions.
Marian Pastor Roces is an independent curator, cultural critic, and policy analyst working out of her base in Manila, Philippines. She founded and leads TAOINC, a corporation that curates the establishment of museums and develops exhibitions, parks, and publications. TAOINC recently accomplished the creation of the online museum 21AM for the Cultural Center of the Philippines, for which Roces supervised the creation of a new Accession Record System with a decolonizing trajectory. An internationally published author, Roces’ critical writing has recently addressed cultural heritage (What to Let Go?, Sternberg Press and Para Site, 2024); art and activism (in Monumental Shadows, Jameel Arts Center Dubai, 2023); the biennale form (in Over Here, MIT Press, 2007, and The Biennale Reader, Bergen Kunsthall and Hatje Cantz 2010). Her anthology of 45 years of writing, Gathering: Political Writing on Art and Culture, was published in 2019 by the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (Manila) and Art Asia Pacific (Hong Kong). She is co-editor of the website Mapping Philippine Material Culture Overseas, which negotiates with museums globally for online open access as a form of digital repatriation. Her interest in social justice issues in relation to artmaking during the climate crisis is informed by work with human rights advocates.
Zarina Muhammad is an artist, educator, and researcher whose practice is deeply entwined with a critical re-examination of oral histories, ethnographic literature and other historiographic accounts about Southeast Asia. Working at the intersections of performance, installation, text, ritual, sound, moving image and participatory practice, she is interested in the broader contexts of ecocultural and ecological histories, myth-making, haunted historiographies, water cosmologies and chthonic realms. Her work has largely explored the role of the artist as “cultural ventriloquist” who lends polyphonic voices to data-driven systems and shapeshifting worlds. She has been working on a long-term interdisciplinary project on Southeast Asia’s transmutating relationship to spectrality, ritual magic, polysensoriality and the immaterial against the dynamics of global modernity, the social production of rationality and transcultural exchanges of knowledge.
