Azra Akšamija is a Sarajevo born artist and architectural historian. She is the Career Development Professor and Assistant Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Art, Culture and Technology Programme. In her multi-disciplinary work, Akšamija investigates the politics of identity and memory on the scale of the body (clothing and wearable technologies), on the civic scale (religious architecture and cultural institutions), and within the context of history and global cultural flows.

Akšamija was trained in architecture at the Technical University Graz, Austria (Dipl.Ing. in 2001) and Princeton University (M.Arch. in 2004), and received her PhD in History of Islamic Art and Architecture from MIT (History Theory and Criticism of Art and Architecture / Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture) in 2011.

Akšamija’s work has been published and exhibited in leading international venues such as at the Generali Foundation Vienna, Valencia Biennial, Gallery for Contemporary Art Leipzig, Liverpool Biennial, Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, Sculpture Center New York, Secession Vienna, Manifesta 7, Stroom The Hague, the Royal Academy of Arts London, Jewish Museum Berlin, Queens Museum of Art in New York, and the Fondazione Giorgio Cini as a part of the 54th Art Biennale in Venice.

Research Focus

Azra Akšamija’s projects explore the potency of art and architecture to facilitate the process of transformative conflict mediation though cultural pedagogy, and in so doing, provide a framework for analysing and intervening in contested socio-political realities. Her recent work focuses on the representation of Islam in the West, architectural forms of nationalism in the Balkans since the 1990s, and the role of cultural institutions and heritage in constructing common good in divided societies. Akšamija investigates the role of cultural and religious identity in conflicts, especially in the recent history of the Yugoslavian war and its aftermath.

Jesko Fezer is an architect, designer, and Professor for Experimental Design, University of Fine Arts of Hamburg, co-manager of the thematic bookshop Pro qm, Berlin, and co-editor of the political architecture magazine An Architektur. Fezer has authored several publications including Design in and Against the Neoliberal City (2013). He was Visiting Research Fellow at NTU CCA Singapore in 2014, when he worked on the design for the Centre’s Research and Office space.

Research Focus

Urban subjects, politics, pop, economic criticism, architecture, design, art and theory

Dr Marc Glöde is a curator, critic and film scholar. He is currently an Assistant Professor, School of Art, Design and Media, NTU, Singapore and Co-Director of the Master of Arts in Museum Studies and Curatorial Practices. He received his PhD at The Free University Berlin (FU Berlin). He taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden, FU Berlin, Academy of Fine Arts Berlin, and as Assistant Professor at the ETH Zürich. He curated the exhibition “STILL/MOVING/STILL – The History of Slide Projection in the Arts” at Knokke, Belgium. He was a senior curator of Art Film, Art Basel’s film program from 2008 – 2014. He was co-editor of Umwidmungen (2005), Synästhesie-Effekte (2011) and his writings are widely published. He was previously a Visting Research Fellow at NTU CCA Singapore from 25 February to 26 May 2016. Dr Glöde is a regular contributor to NTU CCA Singapore’s programmes.

Research Focus

Residency period: 25 February – 26 May 2016

Dr Marc Glöde’s work is informed by his interest in questions concerning images and image politics, as well as the correspondences between different artistic disciplines or cultural positions. For his research at NTU CCA Singapore he will specifically address the dynamics of the relation between images and the development of urban ideas and architecture – on the impact of images on a critical reflection of urbanism.By re-visiting the landmark project “Cities on the Move” almost 20 years after its occurrence, one of the key questions will be how this exhibition/debate has left its imprint on the discussion in Asia and how the situation has developed since then. From there Dr Glöde’s research will dig deeper into the impact of artists, filmmakers, and curators on the discussion. Dr Glöde’s research will be accompanied by a combination of workshops, film screenings, and discussions with artists and architects from the region.

Tony Godfrey is an art historian and curator. His most recent curatorial collaboration was “Far away, but strangely familiar: twenty-three contemporary artists from the Philippines” (2019). From 2014 to 2020, he published Tuesday in the Tropics, an online-distributed illustrated weekly letter. In 2020, his book on the Chinese painter Ding Yi was published (co-written with Wang Kaimei, publ. Lund Humphries), as was his history of contemporary art, The Story of Contemporary Art (Thames and Hudson). He was a research fellow at NTU CCA Singapore in 2015.

Research Focus

1. Conceptual art in Southeast Asia (Maritime) and its relationship to conceptual art globally

2. The status of conceptual art and nature of installation art in Southeast Asia

Piers Masterson is a writer, curator, and lecturer based in London with professional interests in contemporary visual arts development, gallery management, museums, and public art. He has has curated and commissioned numerous exhibitions and projects by artists including Sinta Tantra, Chila Burman, Suki Chan, Mona Hatoum, Faisal Abdu’Allah, and Isaac Julien, and has been closely working with the British Museum’s Raffles Collection.

Research Focus

In addition to publishing of History of Java (1817), Raffles curated displays of objects and pictures from Southeast Asia in his London homes. Through these displays, Raffles promoted several archetypes for colonial fantasies of Southeast Asia that were recirculated through the 20th century. During the fellowship, Masterson will examine the ways in which contemporary Singaporean artists appropriate and re-contextualise these images of the tropics for their specific aims.

Regina (Maria) Möller is an artist and previously Visiting Professor at NTU ADM, Singapore, and Visiting Research Fellow at NTU CCA Singapore. With an interest in practices of design and histories of textiles, Möller is the founder of the magazine regina (1994–ongoing), which appropriates the format of mainstream women’s fashion magazines, and of the label “embodiment” focused on the interaction between body and environment at large. As part of her research fellowship, Möller developed Interrogative Pattern – Text(ile) Weave (2015–17), a project unfolded in various formats that explored the relation between labour, identity construction, and cultural assimilations in an emerging global sameness through the case study of the Samsui women’s iconic headdress.

Mark Nash is a curator and writer, and Professor, University of California Santa Cruz. He was Head of Department Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art London, and prior Director of Fine Art Research at Central St Martins. He was a senior lecturer in Film History and Theory at the University of East London, visiting lecturer at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, and visiting research fellow at the NTU CCA Singapore (2015). He holds a PhD from Middlesex University. Nash has written extensively on artists’ work with the moving image, having curated One Sixth of the Earth, ecologies of image at ZKM, Karlsruhe and MUSAC, Leon (2012-13) and Experiments with Truth, Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia (2004-5).

Research Focus

1. Historical legacy of independence and liberation struggles and cold war politics, including the non-aligned movement, in terms of the different affective relationships these alternative world views propose particularly as realised in South East Asian art

2. Alternative philosophies and aesthetics of the moving image – e.g. how Chinese or Indonesian artists approach the moving image, and the concepts of the image embedded in their linguistic etymology

3. Moving image and photographic works along the Asian part of the Silk Road

Roger Nelson is an art historian interested in the modern and contemporary art of Southeast Asia. He was previously a curator at National Gallery Singapore and Postdoctoral Fellow at Nanyang Technological University and NTU CCA Singapore. Nelson is co-founding co-editor of Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, a journal published by NUS Press. He completed his PhD at the University of Melbourne on Cambodian arts of the 20th and 21st centuries. Nelson has contributed essays to scholarly journals, as well as specialist art magazines such as Artforum, books, and exhibition catalogues. He has curated exhibitions and other projects in Australia, Cambodia, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. Nelson’s translation of Suon Sorin’s 1961 Khmer novel, A New Sun Rises Over the Old Land, will be published in 2019. His Modern Art of Southeast Asia: Introductions from A to Z was published in 2019.

Research Focus

Roger Nelson’s research is on modern and contemporary art in Southeast Asia, with a particular focus on trans-media intersections between visual and other forms of art, as well as with urban spaces and other texts. The role of women in discourses of the modern and the contemporary is a recurring concern in his research, which is mostly concentrated on Cambodia, Laos, and other areas of peninsular Southeast Asia. Interested in historiographies of art in Southeast Asia, Nelson recently published a major research report on terminologies of “modern” and “contemporary” “art” in nine Southeast Asian vernacular languages, co-authored with ten other contributors, all based in the region, and published in Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia. Also historiographical in nature, Nelson recently completed a journal article on recent independent curatorial initiatives in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, which is currently under peer review; in that essay, he argues that independent curatorial research and practice performs art historical functions in these contexts. Nelson’s translation of a 1961 Khmer nationalist novel by Suon Sorin, titled A New Sun Rises Over the Old Land, is forthcoming with NUS Press; in his introduction to that publication, he argues for the value of the literary text as a resource for art historical and other forms of research. He is a participating scholar in a two-year Getty Foundation-funded project titled “Site and Space in Southeast Asia.” There, Nelson’s research focuses on downtown Rangoon in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, considering the dynamic relationships between painting, photography, sex work, and discourses about women in the booming and cosmopolitan Burmese port city. Also relating to discourses about women, gender, and feminisms, Nelson is co-editor with Yvonne Low and Clare Veal of a forthcoming special issue of Southeast of Now, and co-convenor with them of international research gatherings on gender in Southeast Asian art histories. 

Dr Yvonne Spielmann is a researcher and academic writer. Previously she was Dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts at LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore. She is the author of Hybrid Culture (2012) and Video: The Reflexive Medium (2007), both published in English by MIT Press. Between January and March 2016, Spielmann was Visiting Research Fellow at NTU CCA Singapore. During her fellowship, she continued to work on her survey Contemporary Indonesian Art: Artists, Art Spaces, and Collectors (2017) published by NUS Press.

Research Focus

Residency period: 1 January – 31 March 2016

Yvonne Spielmann’s research aims to explore contemporary arts in Southeast Asia comparatively, discussing the contexts of contemporary arts practices with a focus on infrastructure, social and political framework, aesthetic and cultural tradition, colonial/postcolonial history, religious and ethnic diversity, and the point of departure of the development of modern and contemporary arts practices in each country. Spielmann’s comparative study will give an overview on the Southeast Asian region, focusing on the countries Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

Apolonija Šušteršič, is an architect and visual artist, is a former Visiting Researher at NTU CCA Singapore. Her work is related to a critical analysis of space, usually focused at the processes and relationships between institutions, cultural politics, urban planning, and architecture. Šušteršič broad-ranging interest starts at a phenomenological study of space and continutes its investigation into the social and political nature of our living environment. Together with architect and researcher Meike Schalk, she formed an operative unit, which occasionally produces research, projects, actions, and discussions. Šušteršič is currently Professor of Art & Public Space, Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Norway and has her own art / architecture studio practice in Lund, Sweden and in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Reseach Focus

Contemporary art/ activist practices and current urban struggles over the provision of green spaces in large cities

Sissel Tolaas is a smell researcher and artist. Since 1990 she has collected an archive of 7,800 scents and has conducted City SmellScape research of and for 52 cities around the world. Tolaas is the founder of the Institute of Functional Smells and SMELL Re_searchLab. In 2016, Tolaas was Visiting Research Fellow at NTU CCA Singapore where she researched on the smell identities of Singapore’s diverse neighbourhoods and presented her work as part of the exhibition Incomplete Urbanism: Attempts of Critical Spatial Practice (2016–17).

Research Focus

Fellowship period: 1 July – 31 December 2016

During her fellowship, Sissel Tolaas will be carrying out fieldwork and research on everyday smells in urban environments: smell and tolerance, smell and communication, smell and navigation, etc. Her research focus is on the smell identities of Singapore’s diverse neighbourhoods. Tolaas will carry out fieldwork in selected neighbourhoods, particularly areas that have been developed by Singaporean architect William Lim. She will collect and investigate the smell phenomena of each neighbourhood, mapping these neighbourhoods according to their smells. The outcome of Tolaas’ research will be presented in NTU CCA Singapore’s forthcoming exhibition Incomplete Urbanism: Attempts of Critical Spatial Practice.

Dr Etienne Turpin is a philosopher, research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and founding director of anexact office in Jakarta, Indonesia. He is principal co-investigator of the exhibition-led inquiry Reassembling the Natural and co-editor of the intercalations: paginated exhibition series. In 2016, he was Visiting Research Fellow at NTU CCA Singapore where he continued his research on the role of urban labs, maker spaces, and hacker collectives in the context of urbanisation in Asia.

Research Focus

Fellowship period: 1 June – 31 December 2016

During his residency, Dr Etienne Turpin will be researching the role of urban labs, maker spaces, and hacker collectives, in the context of South and Southeast Asian urbanisation. His work will help to develop the Urban Lab Network Asia, simultaneously investigating the work of urban labs through ethnographic research and inviting organisations to participate in the platform which enables the network. With the support of his design practice—anexact office—Dr Turpin will further the work of “making the multiple” by documenting encounters with activists, organisers, and community groups who are experimenting with urbanisation processes through various types of design-led inquiry and applied research. The outcome of this research, a film titled “Is the City a Laboratory?” and a working-documentary process assembled as “The Multiple Must Be Made,” will be included in the forthcoming NTU CCA Singapore exhibition Incomplete Urbanism: Attempts of Critical Spatial Practice, and will help to develop the web-based platform labnet.asia.

Mercedes Vicente is a curator, writer, and currently interim Director of Education and Public Programmes at the Whitechapel Gallery, London. Vicente was Darcy Lange Curator-at-Large at Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Zealand and expanded her research on the pioneering work of Lange through an AHRC-funded PhD at the Royal College of Art, London. In conjunction with the NTU CCA exhibition Allan Sekula: Fish Story, to be continued (2015), Vicente curated in The Lab the project Darcy Lange: Hard, however, and useful is the small, day-to-day work.

Jegan Vincent de Paul is an artistic researcher with an interest in large-scale technopolitical phenomenon with a focus on physical infrastructures. He received his Ph.D in Art, Design and Media from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore in 2021. His doctoral thesis Infrastructure, Narrative, Impact: A Counter-Reading of Belt and Road uses art as a research methodology to show how “the Belt and Road” is a rhizomatic global narrative constructed in the process of interpretation and analysis. He has worked internationally as a researcher and designer and was a visiting scholar and lecturer at the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology (2010–12). He has exhibited at the 4th ZERO1 Biennial in San Jose, California, Space in Kingston, Jamaica and the Centre for Contemporary Art in Singapore. Vincent de Paul holds a Master of Architecture from University of Toronto and a Master of Science in Visual Studies from MIT.