BIOGRAPHIES
Ute Meta Bauer
Founding Director of NTU CCA and Professor, NTU School of Art, Design, and Media
Keynote Speaker: The Potential and Impact of Environmentally-Engaged Artistic Practices in Collaboration with Academic Research
Friday, 26th January 2024
Ute Meta Bauer (Singapore/Germany) is the Founding Director of NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore and a Professor in the School of Art, Design and Media at Nanyang Technological University. She co-chairs the Master of Arts in Museum Studies and Curatorial Practices and is the Principal Investigator for “Environmentally-Engaged Artistic Practices in South, Southeast Asia and the Pacific ” under the Ministry of Education Singapore Tier 1 Academic Grant. Most recently, Bauer curated the Singapore Pavilion at the 59th Biennale di Venezia, featuring Shubigi Rao’s Pulp III: A Short Biography of the Banished Book. She also served as a curator of the 17th Istanbul Biennial alongside David Teh and Amar Kanwar (both in 2022). She is currently the artistic director of Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale (2024). Bauer’s current edited volumes include Climates.Habitats.Environments. (MIT Press and NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, 2022); Joan Jonas: Moving of the Land (Walther König, 2022); and Of Haunted Spaces: Cinema, Heterotopias, and China’s Hyper Urbanization on the films of Ella Raidel (NUS Press, 2023).
Angela Ricasio Hoten
Research Assistant, NTU School of Art, Design, and Media
Moderator | In Conversation | Intersecting Ecosystems: Possibilities across the Arts and Sciences
Friday, 26th January 2024
Angela Ricasio Hoten (Singapore) is a research assistant at the NTU ADM under the Ministry of Education Tier 1 Grant Environmentally-Engaged Artistic Practices in South, Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Graduating with a degree in Environmental Studies from Yale-NUS College, she has a particular interest in multispecies anthropology and political ecology. Her role largely focuses on building the Environmentally-Engaged Artistic Practices database and working towards possibilities of cross-discipline collaboration through digital mediums. She is also a contributing writer of Linking the Digital Humanities to Biodiversity History in Singapore and Southeast Asia, a digital database at the National University of Singapore.
Ang Song Nian
Artist, Lecturer NTU School of Art, Design, and Media
Panellist | In Conversation | Intersecting Ecosystems: Possibilities across the Arts and Sciences
Friday, 26th January 2024
Ang Song Nian (Singapore) works with materials and traces of human behaviours made visible within landscapes through photographic documentations and installation. Intrigued by the narration of thoughts and ideologies through visuals, he has always favoured a microscopic approach to concepts, a style which he always employs to open up details in his practice. His work questions the relationship of human interventions and invasions on landscapes. He received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Photography from the UAL Camberwell College of Arts and the London College of Communication respectively. Song Nian currently lectures in the Photography department at the School of Art, Design and Media at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Song Nian’s solo exhibition, Artificial Conditions: Something To Grow Into was held at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum in 2019. His other earlier solo exhibitions include Hanging Heavy On My Eyes, exhibited at both DECK (Singapore) and the Sunderland University Priestman Gallery (UK) in 2017. Group exhibitions include Unearthed at the Singapore Art Museum and Engaging Perspectives at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art (Singapore).
Zen Teh
Artist, Singapore
Panellist | In Conversation | Intersecting Ecosystems: Possibilitie across the Arts and Sciences
Friday, 26th January 2024
Zen Teh (Singapore) is an artist and educator interested in the interdisciplinary studies of nature and human behavior. Her art practice spans across photography, sculpture and installation art. Teh initiated numerous collaborative projects with artists, art professionals and scientists over the years: A Familiar Forest is a long term ongoing collaboration with scientist, Dr Ching Jianhong from DUKE-NUS that has been exhibited at the ArtScience Museum (2015) and Lee Wee Nam Library, NTU (2021-2022). Her residency at Selasar Sunaryo Art Space (2019) and Sa Sa Art Projects (2022) involved collaboration and research with geologist, urban planner and architect, investigating the impact of rapid urban development on Indonesia and Cambodia.
Dr Chin Jianhong
Scientist, Duke-NUS
Panellist | In Conversation | Intersecting Ecosystems: Possibilities across the Arts and Sciences
Friday, 26th January 2024
Jianhong Ching (Singapore) is an Assistant Professor at the Cardiovascular and Metabolic Disorders Programmed of Duke-NUS Medical School. He is a specialist in metabolomics studies using mass spectrometers and applying his techniques in metabolism research. His long-standing collaboration with Zen Teh spans across multiple projects including Sensing States: Healing Spaces (2015), A Familiar Forest (2021-2022), and Infectious Collaboration: An Inquiry into Forests and the Pandemic (2022).
Nice Buenaventura
Artist, The Philippines
Panellist | In Conversation | Islands in Flux: Weathering the Future
Friday, 26th January 2024
Nice Buenaventura (Philippines) is a visual artist from Manila. Her methods revolve around the offloading of tensions, often between ethics and aesthetics, through drawing, painting, installation, citizen-ethnography and writing. Using various modes of productivity allows her work to generate expressions of concern, exploring new semantics adapted to changing scenarios and future conditions. Nice holds a postgraduate degree in media and arts technology from Queen Mary, University of London, UK, and is a returning lecturer at the Ateneo de Manila University, The Philippines. She has presented work and participated in art-adjacent projects in Bangkok, London, Manila, Melbourne, Paris, Ruang, Singapore and Zurich.
Serina Rahman
Lecturer, Department of Southeast Asian Studies, NUS
Panellist | In Conversation | Islands in Flux: Weathering the Future
Friday, 26th January 2024
Serina Rahman (Singapore/Malaysia) is a lecturer at the Department of Southeast Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore. Her current areas of research include Malaysian rural and ethnic politics, Malaysian rural studies (especially of coastal and fishing communities), sustainable development and large infrastructural projects in Johor, as well as community empowerment and development. She has also written on the ethnography of Malaysian women and Islamic radicalisation, and is now looking into issues of poverty in Malaysia, and Sabah’s oil palm industry. These are all tributaries of her overarching fascination with Malaysian rural communities. She is a practicing conservation scientist and environmental anthropologist, with specific interest in the fishermen and youth of the western Tebrau Strait, amongst whom she has lived and worked with since 2008.
Soh Kay Min
Research Associate, NTU School of Art, Design, and Media
Moderator | In Conversation | Islands in Flux: Weathering the Future
Friday, 26th January 2024
Soh Kay Min (Singapore) is a researcher, writer, and curator currently working at the School of Art, Design, and Media, Nanyang Technological University Singapore (NTU ADM), with an interest in elemental aesthetics and the ways in which they evidence historical and future entanglements between art, environment, and geopolitics. Recent research projects at NTU ADM include Climate Crisis and Cultural Loss (2021–2024), Environmentally-Engaged Artistic Practices in South, Southeast Asia and the Pacific(2021–2023), and Understanding Southeast Asia as a ‘Geocultural’ Formation (2021–2023). Previously, Kay Min was assistant curator for the 17th Istanbul Biennial (2022) co-curated by Ute Meta Bauer, Amar Kanwar, and David Teh, and participated in the 7th Singapore Biennale (2022) as part of the collective AWKNDAFFR. Prior to that, they were part of the research team at NTU CCA Singapore (2018–2021), during which they co-curated the research presentation Vapour Islands: To live and die well together in a thick present (2019) with Sophie Goltz. Kay Min holds a BSc (Hons) in Anthropology from University College London and MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths College.
Eunice Lacaste
PhD Candidate, NTU School of Art, Design and Media
Moderator | In Conversation | Collaboration in Crisis: Technology in Disaster Response
Eunice Lacaste was born in the Philippines and she grew up in Singapore. After obtaining her bachelor degree from the University of the Philippines, she continued her postgraduate studies back in Singapore at Nanyang Technological University. She is currently researching screen cultures. Eunice focuses on participatory art that engages the public through digital media. As an emerging research practitioner, she intends on decompartmentalising the aesthetic and the ethical, only to repackage them together in a more inclusive approach. Eunice is currently a member of the Artist Village Singapore, one of the pioneering art collectives in the country.
Nashin Mahtani
Director of Peta Bencana, Indonesia
Panellist | In Conversation | Collaboration in Crisis: Technology in Disaster Response
Saturday, 27th January 2024
Nashin Mahtani (Indonesia) is the director of Yaysan Peta Bencana (Disaster Map Foundation), a Southeast Asian NGO developing humanitarian technologies for community-led disaster risk reduction, as well as the co-founder of the Climate Emergency Software Alliance (CESA). She led the expansion of the life-saving platform PetaBenacna.id from a real-time flood mapping platform serving 50 million people in Indonesia to a multi-hazard mapping platform serving over 350 million people in Southeast Asia. Mahtani is also the co-founder of the Climate Emergency Software Alliance, developing and maintaining one of the largest open-source infrastructure projects for climate adaptation. In 2021 she was recognised by Forbes Asia 30 Under 30 for her contributions to the region’s social issues.
Sang-Ho Yun
Director, Remote Sensing Lab, Earth Observatory of Singapore
Associate Professor, Asian School of the Environment and School of Electric and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University Singapore
Panellist | In Conversation | Collaboration in Crisis: Technology in Disaster Response
Saturday, 27th January 2024
Sang-Ho Yun (Singapore/Korea) is the Director of the Earth Observatory of Singapore – Remote Sensing Lab (EOS-RS) and Associate Professor of the Asian School of the Environment (ASE) and the School of Electric and Electronic Engineering (EEE) at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore. To date, he has supported over 150 major disaster response efforts globally. Prior to joining NTU in 2021, he was a geophysicist and radar scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for 14 years. Sang-Ho received the 2023 NASA Honor Award for “Proactive development of a world-leading, disaster damage-mapping system supplying vital data to a broad range of disaster assessment and relief agencies worldwide.” He was the recipient of the 2018 NASA Exceptional Public Achievement Medal and the 2014 NASA Exceptional Early Career Medal for innovative use of satellite Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data in support of rapid post-disaster response. He also received JPL’s Voyager Award in 2015 and Mariner Award in 2012 for his outstanding achievements in humanitarian assistance using satellite observations. Prior to his work at NASA JPL, Sang-Ho was a postdoctoral fellow at the US Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California. He received his PhD in geophysics and MS in electrical engineering from Stanford University in California and his BS in earth system science from Seoul National University in Korea.
Som Supaprinya
Visual Artist, Thailand
Panellist | In Conversation | Liquid Landscapes: Designing for Climate Resilience in Water-Based Communities
Saturday, 27th January 2024
Som Supaparinya (Thailand) is a visual artist. She studied painting in Thailand and media arts in Germany. Her work encompasses a wide range of mediums including objects, installations, still and moving images with a documentarian approach, focusing on the impact of human activities on other humans and landscapes through political, historical and literary lenses. Her work is currently on show at the DC Collection, Maiiam Contemporary Art Museum, Chiang Mai; Art-Centre Silpakorn University, Bangkok, Thailand; Biennale de l’Art et de la Nature Urbaine – Beyond Water, Geneva, Switzerland; and the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, USA.
Stefan Huebner
Senior Research Fellow, Asia Research Institute, NUS
Panellist | In Conversation | Liquid Landscapes: Designing for Climate Resilience in Water-Based Communities
Saturday, 27th January 2024
Stefan Huebner (Hübner) (Singapore/Germany) is a Senior Research Fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Asia Research Institute. He is also a historian whose work centres on modern Japan and its connections to other parts of Asia and the West. He has a PhD in History with special distinction (best degree) from Jacobs University Bremen, Germany. His current research project is a global history of the industrialisation and urbanisation of the world ocean during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He is writing a monograph in which he argues that since the Age of Coal, Earth has been experiencing an amphibious transformation. Through novel forms of the built environment, this transformation has turned many sea surfaces, particularly those of East Asian waters, into a new part of the amphibious human habitat.
Dr Erich Wolff
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Asian School of Environment and Earth Observatory of Singapore, NTU
Panellist | In Conversation | Liquid Landscapes: Designing for Climate Resilience in Water-Based Communities
Saturday, 27th January 2024
Dr Erich Wolff (Singapore) is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Asian School of Environment at Nanyang Technological University. His research delves into topics of green infrastructure, nature-based solutions and climate adaptation in the context of informal settlements and the Asia Pacific with a particular interest in citizen science as a tool to decentralise decision-making and engaging non-scientists in knowledge production. Most recently, Dr Erich Wolff leads work on speculative design for coastal adaptation as part of the project ‘Adapting Waterfronts: Postcards from the Future, Singapore 2122’ at the Earth Observatory of Singapore, NTU.
Lauro Miotto
Associate Professor (Practice), NTU School of Art, Design, and Media
Panellist | In Conversation | Liquid Landscapes: Designing for Climate Resilience in Water-Based Communities
Saturday, 27th January 2024
Laura Miotto (Singapore) is an award winning exhibition designer and educator. With 20 years of experience, in the field of design both as a creative director and an architectural designer Miotto has worked on the creation of a multitude of permanent and temporary exhibitions. Her focus is on heritage interpretation and design strategies that involve the sensorial experience in the context of museums, thematic galleries and public spaces. Her recent exhibition project include ‘Trees of Life. Knowledge in Materials, 2018, NTU CCA Singapore; Incomplete Urbanism: Attempts of Critical Spatial Practices, 2016, NTU CCA Singapore; Port Cities: Multicultural Emporiums of Asia, 1500 – 1900, 2016, Asian Civilisation Museum, Singapore; Artist and Empire, 2016, National Gallery of Singapore, Singapore. Among her projects, the Living Galleries at the National Museum of Singapore received the Design Exchange Award in Canada in 2007.
Yeo Siew Hua
Filmmaker, Singapore
Film Screening & Panel discussion with the Director of An Invocation to the Earth
Saturday, 27th January 2024
Yeo Siew Hua’s (Singapore) practice spans film directing and screenwriting. An Invocation to the Earth is dedicated to the fallen environmental defenders of Southeast Asia. The film was coproduced by Singapore International Film Festival and Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21) for st_age with the support of NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, Akanga Film Asia, GRYD, and 13 Little Pictures. Yeo Siew Hua was also awarded the Golden Leopard at the 72st Locarno Film Festival, Switzerland (2019) for his previous film, A Land Imagined. Extending beyond conventional cinema festivals and networks, Yeo’s films have also been shown at contemporary art venues including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, United States (2018), and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Taipei, Taiwan (both 2018). He is co-founder of 13 Little Pictures, a vanguard film collective which organises experimental film labs around Southeast Asia.
Dr Marc Glöde
Assistant Professor, NTU School of Art, Design, and Media
Film Screening & Panel discussion with the Director of An Invocation to the Earth
Saturday, 27th January 2024
Marc Glöde (Singapore) is a curator, critic and film scholar. His work focuses on the relationship between images, technology, space, the body, and the dynamics between art, architecture and film. He was senior curator of Art Film, Art Basel’s film programme (2008-14) and has curated exhibitions including “STILL/MOVING/STILL – The History of Slide Projection in the Arts” (Knokke/Belgium). More recently, Glöde curated To Draw A Line at NTU ADM Gallery, Suzanne Victor: Of Waters and On Time: Adeline Kueh, Jason Lim, Ian Woo, Zul Mahmod at STPI, Singapore. He has also been involved in film programmes, curating NTU CCA’s film programmes such as Resonating Structures to accompany the “Siah Armajani: Spaces for the Public Spaces for Democracy” exhibition (2019), and co-curating the A+ Online Festival of Video Art (2020). Glöde has collaborated with independent spaces such as Objectifs Centre for Photography and Film, Heritage Space and DocLab, Hanoi, as a curator and mentor. He authored the book Farbige Lichträume/Colored Space of Light (2014), was co-editor of Synästhesie-Effekte (2011), and was recently published in The Impossibility of Mapping [Urban Asia] (2020). He received his PhD at the Free University of Berlin and since 2017 has been Assistant Professor and Co-Director of the MA in Museum Studies and Curatorial Practices at NTU/ADM.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This symposium is supported by the Ministry of Education Academic Research Fund Tier 1 project (RG39/21)“Environmentally-Engaged Artistic Practices in South, Southeast Asia and the Pacific and their potential impact as contribution for transdisciplinary research in Singapore” led by Principal Investigator Professor Ute Meta Bauer
Organised by Professor Ute Meta Bauer and Research Assistant Angela Ricasio Hoten, School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University Singapore
Hosted by NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore
Special thanks to Eunice Lacaste
