Moderator

Karin G Oen is an art historian and curator based in Singapore where she is Director of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore and Head of Art History at NTU’s School of Humanities.

She is most interested in transdisciplinary and transnational art practices that resist classification, and in examining modes of writing about, displaying, and collecting art in diverse cultural contexts. Her work is characterised by attention to historiographies and genealogies, institutional power structures, and a broader project of balancing the global, the local while making space for non-canonical art histories. Recently, she was co-editor with Ute Meta Bauer and Tan Boon Hui of the 2022 book SEA: Contemporary Art in Southeast Asia. She previously served as a curator of contemporary art at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco where her exhibition projects included teamLab: Continuity (2021), Haroon Mirza: The Night Journey (2018), and Koki Tanaka: Potters and Poets (2016). She received her BA from Stanford, MA from Christie’s New York, and PhD in the history, theory, and criticism of art and architecture from MIT.

Panel

Isabelle Desjeux is a Umeå (Sweden) and Singapore-based artist and researcher. Using her training in Molecular Biology, she creates new kinds of scientific method-based artworks. Working closely with scientists, she encourages others to cross the divide and take on the role of scientists in her interventions, whether in a class, during a workshop, or as part of an installation. As such her work has often been labelled as participatory, with “experiment” being a strong part of her practice.

She received her MAFA from Lasalle (2011), was the recipient of both the French-Singapore New Generation Artist (2011) and the Lasalle Research Fellowship (2017). Her work has been exhibited in museums across Singapore, in Japan and USA. She teaches regularly across disciplines from pre-school to post-graduate level, inviting students into her practice.

Teru Miyake is an Associate Professor in the Philosophy Programme at NTU’s School of Humanities. His research focuses on trying to understand the growth of scientific knowledge in the wake of criticisms raised against traditional notions of scientific progress by such philosophers as Thomas Kuhn, mainly through studying the history of sciences such as seismology, celestial mechanics, and physics. Miyake has a BS in applied physics from the California Institute of Technology, an MA in Philosophy from Tufts University, and a PhD in Philosophy from Stanford University. He was a Predoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. He has received one MOE Tier 1 grant for a project on the history of seismology, and another for a project on the history of measurement of the fundamental constants of physics. He is associate editor for the journal HOPOS, and is on the editorial boards of the journals Philosophy of Science and Studies in History and Philosophy of Science.

Vaishnavi Chandramouli is a Research Associate at NTU’s Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine. She has been using molecular methods such as PCR for a range of applications including wildlife forensics (field-based), rapid infectious disease diagnostics for low resource settings (lab-based) and zebrafish transgenesis for neuro-microbiome studies. She is passionate about making science enjoyable and accessible to the general public. In 2023, she initiated a project to bring molecular biology and microbiology tools to a variety of lay audiences in Singapore, and was a recipient of the NISTH INnovation and TRansformation for Outstanding ECRs (INTRO-ECR) Grant for that project.