Contributors

Artist-in-Residence 

Citra Sasmita

With a background in literature and physics, Citra Sasmita is a self-taught painter who turned to the visual arts after working as an illustrator at a local newspaper in Bali. By unravelling myths and misconceptions that persist in Balinese culture, her work imagines secular mythologies for a post-patriarchal future. She is deeply invested in the social empowerment of women and in questioning gender hierarchies and normative constructs. Her work is regularly exhibited within Indonesia and has been presented internationally at the Kathmandu Triennale, Nepal (2021–2022); and ParaSite Hong Kong (2020). In 2020, she received for the UOB Museum MACAN Children’s Art Space Commission and she is the Gold Award Winner of the  UOB Painting of The Year 2017.

Institutional Partner 

HIAP – Helsinki International Artist Programme

HIAP – Helsinki International Artist Programme is an international artist residency organisation which was established in 1998. The HIAP residency programme offers time and space for developing new work in dialogue with the local art scene. The goal is to support experimental, cross-disciplinary art practices and to actively contribute to topical debates within and around the context of art.

Artist-in-Residence 

Hoo Fan Chon

Hoo Fan Chon is a visual artist whose practice explores taste and foodscapes as cultural and social constructs. His research-driven projects examine how value systems fluctuate as people move from one culture to another. Reframing mundane aspects of everyday life with irony and wry humour, his multimedia works address notion of cultural authenticity and they set in motion the frictions and the overlaps produced by the migration of cultural symbols between different sociocultural contexts. Hoo recently received a solo exhibition at The Back Room, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (2021) and he has participated in a number of group shows in Asia. Also active as a curator and a grassroot cultural producer, he is involved with Run Amok Gallery, an art gallery and alternative space in George Town he co-founded in 2013.

Artist-in-Residence 

Vuth Lyno

Vuth Lyno is an artist, curator, and educator who is interested in space, cultural history, and the production of knowledge through social relations. Drawing on a wide range of materials such as interviews, artifacts, and newly made objects, he creates spatial configurations that weave together personal stories and collective bodies of knowledge. Participatory and experimental in nature, his artistic and curatorial approach is rooted in communal learning and aims to engage a multiplicity of voices in the production of meaning. He is a member of Stiev Selapak, a collective which founded and co-runs Sa Sa Art Projects in Phnom Penh, a long-term initiative committed to the development of the contemporary visual arts landscape in Cambodia. His work has been presented at several group exhibitions and institutions such as the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, Thailand (2020) and the 9^th Asia Pacific Triennial, Brisbane, Australia (2019), amongst others.

Institutional Partner 

Villa Arson

Villa Arson is a highly regarded public institution of the French ministry of culture and a member of Université Côte d’Azur located in Nice on an exceptional site overlooking the Bay of Angels. Its architectural ensemble includes an 18th century Italian-style villa set in a Mediterraneangarden and modern constructions built in the 1960s by French architect Michel Marot that have been labeled «Remarkable contemporary architecture. Villa Arson combines several complementary functions in favor of contemporary creation: teaching, research, experimentation, production, dissemination, promotion and support. The Villa Arson school of art, contemporary art center, artists’ residency and specialised library form a unique ecosystem dedicated to supporting young generations of artists towards professional practices, presenting original artistic visions and facilitating critical exchange with an international perspective. Villa Arson welcomes residents for its teaching and research activities and within the framework of tailored partnerships for artistic production and research.

Instructor 

Clara Peh

Clara Peh is the founder of NFT Asia, the biggest digital-native community focused on Asian and Asia-based artists and creatives within the NFT space. She curated Right Click + Save, Singapore’s first large-scale NFT exhibition in 2021.

Clara is currently Art Lead and Curator at Appetite Singapore, and also an Adjunct Lecturer at LASALLE College of the Arts in the School of Fine Arts. She was an Ambassador for the Singapore Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale and has held positions at Christie’s, the Economic Development Board and NTU CCA Singapore. She is also an independent arts writer and researcher. Her works are published on Hyperallergic, Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Art and Market, and more.

Instructor 

Jonathan Liu

Jonathan Liuis a Visual Artist working primarily with photography within his practice. He is interested in the narratives formed through text and photographs. Drawn from his fascination of narratives and the relationship between the artist and the poet, his recent works attempt to mirror and question our reality through representation and fragmentation of the landscape. His work deals with concepts such as memory, post-memory and the search for the layers in-between with works having exhibited in the United Kingdom, China and Singapore. He graduated from London College of Communication with a BA (Hons) Degree in Photography and currently lectures in LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore.

Artist-in-Residence 

Priyageetha Dia

Spanning moving image, sculpture, as well as performative installations, Priyageetha Dia (b. 1992, Singapore) addresses identity politics by questioning dominant narratives and socio-spatial relations. In the past few years, her practice has been consistently experimenting with a variety of world-making gestures that envision alternative futures. Her works have been part of several group exhibitions including, Attention Seeker, La Trobe Art Institute, Bendigo, Australia (2022); An Exercise of Meaning in a Glitch Season, National Gallery Singapore (2020); 2219: Futures Imagined, ArtScience Museum Singapore (2019). She was a recipient of the IMPART Art Award in 2019.

Artist 

Fazleen Karlan

Situated between art-making and archaeology, the artistic practice of Fazleen Karlan (b. 1993, Singapore) explores the themes of loss and time by mapping out the patterns of physical erasures within landscapes and socio-historical contexts. By engaging the historical stratifications of a site, her work navigates methods of archiving and reassembling fragments of overlooked histories to reimagine personal and cultural realities. Fazleen graduated with a BA in Fine Arts (First Class Honours) from LASALLE College of the Arts, conferred by Goldsmiths, University of London. Her works are regularly presented in Singapore, including in exhibitions such as d3ar succ3ss0r at Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay (2022); Between the Living and the Archive and Pivot Point, Gillman Barracks (2021); and Time Passes, National Gallery of Singapore (2020). She received the Anugerah Cemerlang Mendaki Award in 2019 and the Winston Oh Travel Award in 2016.

Artist 

Hilmi Johandi

Working primarily with painting, Hilmi Johandi (b. 1987, Singapore) also explores interventions with other mediums. The core of his practice mobilises symbols and sites where memory and nostalgia, leisure and desire are deeply entangled. Drawing on archival footage, stills from old films, and sundry imagery produced for mass consumption, his body of work subtly refigures the iconography of Singapore and our relation with images. He is part of Progressive Disintegration, an experimental collaboration between three artists and one curator formed around shared interests in the role and potential of images. Hilmi’s recent solo exhibitions include Landscapes and Paradise: Poolscapes, Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo, Japan (2021) and Painting Archives, Rumah Lukis, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (2019) and his works have been included in several international group exhibitions in France, the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, and Thailand. In 2018, he was a recipient of the Young Artist Award and a finalist at the President’s Young Talents. He received the NAC Arts Scholarship (Postgraduate) in 2017.

Instructor 

Desmond Kon

Desmond Francis Xavier Kon (Zhicheng-Mingdé) is the author of an epistolary novel, a quasi-memoir, two lyric essay monographs, four hybrid works, nine poetry collections, a creative guided journal, and several chapbooks. Founding editor of Squircle Line Press, the former journalist has edited more than twenty-five books and co-produced three audio books, several pro bono for non-profit organizations. Trained in book publishing at Stanford University, Desmond studied sociology and mass communication at the National University of Singapore, and later received his theology masters (world religions) from Harvard University and fine arts masters (creative writing) from the University of Notre Dame. In addition to grants from the National Arts Council and Singapore International Foundation, Desmond has enjoyed literary appointments at the Notre Dame Poetry Fellowship, NAC Gardens by the Bay Writing Residency, and NTU-NAC Creative Writing Residency. Among other accolades, he is the recipient of the IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award, Illumination Christian Book Award, Independent Publisher Book Award, National Indie Excellence Book Award, Poetry World Cup, Singapore Literature Prize, two Beverly Hills International Book Awards, and three Living Now Book Awards. Desmond has taught creative writing and publishing for over two decades.

Artist 

Min-Wei Ting

Working primarily with the moving image, Min-Wei Ting (b.1976, Singapore) explores the politics of space and the dynamic of belonging in his native Singapore. Adopting a first-person perspective where the tension between embodiment and disembodiment is often at play, his films enact gestures of protracted observation and slow movement. His works have been presented at venues, screenings, and festivals such Images Festival, Toronto, Canada (2022); Singapore Art Museum and Asian Film Archive, Singapore (2021); Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art, Manchester, United Kingdom (2019); The Substation, Singapore (2018); the 46th International Film Festival Rotterdam, Netherlands (2017); 26^th and 27^th Singapore International Film Festival (2016 – 2017). He was shortlisted for the Berlin Art Prize (2019) and the Tiger Awards Competition for Short Films (2015).

Artist 

Zachary Chan

Spanning several mediums, the work of Zachary Chan’s (b. 1990, Singapore) reflects his composite background in visual communications, graphic design, and sonic arts. His practice often unfolds through collaborations with other artists and he has written music and designed sound for experimental films, theatre plays, video games, storytelling, and art installations. His most recent solo work was part of the group exhibition Inheritance of Parts, Starch, Singapore (2021). Among his major collaborative projects are Restless Topographies, with Joel Tan and Zarina Muhammad (2021-2022); earth, land, sky and sea as palimpsest with Zarina Muhammad (2021); Pokoknya: Intrusive Transducers, with Tini Aliman (2021); and The Migrant Ecologies Project, with Lucy Davis (2017–ongoing). He is also a co-founder of the design collective crop.sg.

Instructor 

Joy Chee

Since 2020, Joy Chee has been the resident bartender/gardener (or bardener, if you will) at Native, a Singaporean restaurant-bar focused on working with local and regional craftsmen and communities. Drawn to them for their ethos of sustainability and commitment to highlighting native produce, she has been working on rewilding the gardens with local kampung herbs and supporting the garden-to-table concept. When she’s not elbow-deep in compost, she can be found shaking up a cocktail or two at 52 Amoy Street.

Artist-in-Residence 

Yanyun Chen

Dr. Yanyun Chen (b. 1986, Singapore) is a visual artist who works across drawings, new media, and installation. Her artistic practice unravels fictional and philosophical notions of embodiment exploring how heritage and legacies are grounded in the physicality of human and botanical forms. Her solo exhibitions include Stories of a Woman and Her Dowry, Grey Projects, Singapore (2019) and Scars that write us, part of the President’s Young Talents 2018, Singapore Art Museum (2018). She has participated in group exhibitions such as While She Quivers, Objectifs – Centre for Photography and Film, Singapore (2021); Thailand Biennale, Korat 2021 (2021); Clouds: The 6th International Exhibition on New Media Art 2020, CICA Museum, South Korea (2020); Fiction Non Fiction, Cultural Affairs Bureau, Macau (2019); 2291: Futures Imagined, Art Science Museum, Singapore (2019) among others. Yanyun has received the Young Artist Award in 2020 and the IMPART Art Prize in 2019. Her works were also awarded the Prague International Indie Film Festival Q3 Best Animation Award (2020), National Youth Film Awards Best Art Direction Award (2019), Singapore Art Museum President’s Young Talents People’s Choice Award (2018), and the Lee Kuan Yew Gold Medal Award (2009). 

Artist-in-Residence 

Anthony Chin

The research-driven conceptual practice of Anthony Chin (b. 1969, Singapore) grows out of site-specific engagements with the historical, social, and architectural stratifications of a place. Through the articulation of ordinary materials into poetic installations, his work unravel the latent power structures and complex geopolitical narratives that undergird the colonial past and the post-colonial present. He has regularly presented his work in Singapore and abroad. His recent solo exhibitions include S$1,996/- S$831.06/-, Comma Space, Singapore (2021); TROPHY, Metropolitan Museum of Manila, Philippines (2020); and Western Pacific, Mo Shang Experiment, Beijing, China (2016). Among the group exhibitions are SAM Contemporaries: Residues & Remixes, Singapore Art Museum, Singapore (2023); For the House; Against the House, Gillman Barracks, Singapore (2022); Concept 88, Comma Space, Singapore (2022); three editions of OH! Open House, amongst others. Anthony has previously taken part in other residency programmes such as National NAC-MET international Artist Residency, Manila, Philippines (2020) and Taipei International Artists Residency season 4, Taiwan (2018).

Artist-in-Residence 

Irfan Kasban

The transdisciplinary practice of Irfan Kasban (b. 1987, Singapore) weaves together multiple roles such as playwright, theatre director, lighting and sound designer, and multimedia artist. Often engaging in collaborations with fellow artists as a method of experimenting across mediums, Irfan creates intricate worlds guided by a principle of visceral ephemerality in an attempt to redefine boundaries between performance, artwork, artist, and audience. Since 2010, he is the Associate Artist at the Singapore-based theatre company Teater Ekamatra. His recent theatre directions include King (2020-2023) and performance lecture The Death of Singapore Theatre as Scripted By The Infocomm Media Development Authority of Singapore (2022), and the immersive theatrical installation The Silence of a Fallen Tree (2020) amongst many others. Irfan received National Arts Council Singapore’s Young Artist Award in 2020. 

Artist 

Jana Winderen

‘Dead zones’ are water bodies that suffer from hypoxia, low oxygen concentrations in the water that make marine life unsustainable. Hypoxia is caused by algal overgrowths, a phenomenon occurring when an excess of nutrients in the water sparks the proliferation of algae. The bacterial decomposition of the algae is a high oxygen consuming process that depletes the amount of oxygen available for other species to survive. Although dead zones can form spontaneously, scientists have observed the exponential increase in their number since the 1960s and remarked that there is a causal relation between their formation and the polluting inputs produced by human activity. Listening Through the Dead Zones is a sonic contemplation over the disruptive impact of human activities on subaqueous environments. Sounds from the Arctic Ocean in Greenland, Iceland, and Norway as well as from the tropical waters around Thailand, the Caribbean Sea, and Panama have been recorded by Jana Winderen with hydrophones and composed in a richly layered sound installation. The work invites the audience to eavesdrop onto underwater soundscapes populated by various animal species that depend on sound to communicate, hunt, and orientate while shipping, oil extraction, military sonars, leisure boat traffic and other anthropogenic factors inflict acoustic distress on marine life.

Monday to Thursday: 8.00am to 9.00pm (last entry 8.00pm)
Fridays to Sundays: 8.00am to 10.00pm (last entry 9.00pm)
Green Roof, Marina Barrage
8 Marina Gardens Drive, Singapore 018951

The sound installation is located on the Green Roof at Marina Barrage, above the Sustainable Singapore Gallery, accessible either via the walking ramp or the elevator. Once on the rooftop, visitors will find the work in the proximity of the glass house, on the southern edge of the rooftop. Visitors are encouraged to take the time to pause and experience Listening Through the Dead Zones while facing the open sea.

Find out more about Free Jazz IV. Geomancers

Faculty 

Anne Lochoff

Programme Director Agri-Food Innovation Lab, Nanyang Technological University

Anne was the senior advisor partnerships at the United Nations Development Programme Global Centre for Technology, Innovation and Sustainable Development in Singapore. The centre focused on sustainable finance, sustainable agriculture, and the digitalisation of cities.

Anne’s background spans government, academia, NGOs, and private-sector businesses. Anne was the Strategic Advisor to the Executive Director of Asia P3 Hub, a partnership incubator hosted by World Vision. She was also the chair and business advisor in the New Zealand Trade and Enterprise’s Beachheads network. During her time in private sector, Anne was an Executive Director at McCann Erickson, part of the global team managing the MasterCard account for APMEA (Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa).

Anne Lochoff is one of 9 Women rated as the Top Global Influencers of Tech Innovation in Cities featured in Inc.com in 2016.

Institutional Partner 

A+ Works of Art

A+ WORKS of ART is a contemporary art gallery based in Kuala Lumpur, with a geographic focus on Malaysia and Southeast Asia. Founded in 2017 by Joshua Lim, the gallery presents a wide range of contemporary practices, from painting to performance, drawing, sculpture, new media art, photography, video and installation. Its exhibitions have showcased diverse themes and approaches, including material experimentation and global conversations on social issues. Collaboration is key to the ethos of A+ Works of Art. Since its opening, the gallery has worked with artists, curators, writers, collectors, galleries and partners from within the region and beyond, and continues to look out for new collaborations. The gallery name is a play on striving for distinction but also on the idea that art is never without context and is always reaching to connect — it is always “plus” something else.

Speaker 

åbäke

Åbäke is a transdisciplinary graphic design collective, founded in 2000 by Patrick Lacey, Benjamin Reichen, Kajsa Ståhl and Maki Suzuki in London, England, after meeting at the Royal College of Art.

Artist-in-Residence 

Hamra Abbas

Hamra Abbas is an artist. Her practice crosses a wide range of media, appropriating and transforming culturally loaded imagery, iconography, and traditional motifs and styles to raise questions of conflict within society. Between May and June 2015, Abbas was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore. During her residency, Abbas explored the complex intertwining of histories, class, race, and culture that defines Singapore, working with the courtly Chinese painting style of Gongbi to address the story of Indian migration in Singapore.

Artist-in-Residence 

Rand Abdul Jabbar

Rand Abdul Jabbar’s (b. 1990, Iraq/United Arab Emirates) multidisciplinary practice examines remnants of historic, cultural, and personal narratives surrounding Iraq, contesting with individual and collective history and memory to produce fragmentary reconstructions of historic events and past experiences. Her work has been recently exhibited at the NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery Project Space and Jameel Arts Centre (both United Arab Emirates), the inaugural Rabat Biennale (Morocco), and the Biennale d’Architecture d’Orléans, France (all 2019).

Artist 

Bani Abidi

Bani Abidi’s early engagement with video led her to performance and photography. The Guggenheim acquired three works by Abidi, The Boy Who Got Tired of Posing (2006), The Ghost of Mohammed Bin Qasim (2006), and This Video Is a Reenactment (2006), which include installations of video photography, and text. Through these elements, the figure of Mohammad bin Qasim, considered Pakistan’s early colonial founder in state history, is brought to life in a lighthearted and candid portrayal that provides an opportunity to reflect on the history of the South Asian nation. Solo exhibitions of Abidi’s work have been presented at the Baltic Center for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, United Kingdom (2011); and Experimenter, Kolkata (2012–13). Important group exhibitions include: Making Normative Orders: Demonstrations of Power, Doubt and Protest, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt (2012); and Documenta 13 (2012). Abidi lives and works in Karachi and New Delhi.

Artist-in-Residence 

Julian 'Togar' Abraham

Julian ‘Togar’ Abraham is an artist and musician. His practice develops at the junction between art, environment, science, technology, and culture. Between April and June 2016, Togar was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore where he researched on the possibilities of converting diabetic urine into a renewable source of energy. Drawing on his research and his interest in DIY production, Togar led several workshops during his residency, spreading knowledge and first-hand experience about processes of fermentation and distillation.

Curator-in-Residence 

Riksa Afiaty

Riksa Afiaty (b. 1986, Indonesia) lives and works in Jakarta. She recently co-curated with Charles Esche the exhibition Power and Other Things: Indonesia & Art (1835-NOW) at Bozar‚ Palais des beaux arts in Brussels for Europalia Art Festival 2017. She was part of the Curators Lab of the Jakarta Biennale 2015. As a member of the contemporary art organization ruangrupa from 2011 to 2016, she was involved with OK Video ‚ Indonesia Media Art Festival and ARTLAB. In 2013, she received a grant from Rumah Seni Cemeti to pursue her research on street art and graffiti. Her current research on non-Western models for art institutions is supported by a grant from the Foundation for Arts Initiatives.

Artist 

Reza Afisina

Employing video, performance, and installation, and often using his own body in his work, Reza Afisina explores the manifestations and meanings of physical and emotional pain. Afisina’s early experimental work What . . . (2001), part of the Guggenheim’s collection, records a performance by the artist in which biblical verses about truth and confession are referenced, and are underscored with an act of violence. Afisina has performed and screened his work in such group exhibitions as Simple Actions and Aberrant Behaviors, PICA, Portland (2007), Jakarta Biennial (2009); Move on Asia: The End of Video Art, Para/Site Art Space, Hong Kong (2010 and 2012); and City Net Asia, Seoul Museum of Art (2011). Afisina is a member of the artists’ collection ruangrupa and lives and works in Jakarta.

Artist-in-Residence 

Irene Agrivina

Artist, technologist, and educator Irene Agrivina (b.1976, Indonesia) works at the intersection between art, science, and technology. A founding members and current co-director of House of Natural Fiber (HONF) in Yogyakarta, she is engaged in collaborative, cross-disciplinary, and multimedia actions responding to social, cultural, and environmental challenges. She also co-founded XXLab in 2013, an all-female collective focusing on arts, science, and free technology. Her projects have been presented internationally at IFVA New Media Art Festival, Hong Kong (2017); 5th Anyang Public Art Project, South Korea (2016); Ars Electronica Festival, Linz, Austria (2015) and Pixelache Festival, Helsinki, Finland (2013).

Artist 

Nabil Ahmed

Nabil Ahmed holds a PhD in Research Architecture from Goldsmiths, University of London, and is a senior lecturer at the Cass School of Architecture at London Metropolitan University. As an artist and researcher, Ahmed looks at environmental violence and new forums for environmental justice through spatial analysis, writing, and interdisciplinary projects. Since 2013, he has been investigating the impact of mining, land grabs, and self-determination in West Papua. He is the founder of Inter-Pacific Ring Tribunal (INTERPRT), a long-term project on ecocide in Oceania and the Pacific region, commissioned by TBA21–Academy. He has participated in the two-year Anthropocene Project at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin; the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennial; the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial (2016); and numerous other exhibitions. More recently he has published in art, science, and architecture publications such as Third Text, Scientific Reports, Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth (Sternberg, 2014), Volume, and South Magazine (Documenta 14).

Artist 

Atif Akin

Atif Akin (Turkey/United States) is an artist and designer, and Associate Professor at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Akin’s work examines science, nature, mobility, and politics through an (a)historical and contemporary lens. Through a series of activities made up of research, documentation, and design, his work considers transdisciplinary issues through a techno-scientific lens, in aesthetic and political contexts. In 2015, Akin received the apexart Franchise Program award in New York, organising the zine project and exhibition Apricots from Damascus, hosted by SALT, Istanbul. His ongoing long-term research-driven project on nuclear mobility and archaeology, Mutant Space, was presented at the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial (2016). Tepoto Sud morph Moruroa was exhibited in Tidalectics, curated by Stefanie Hessler, at TBA21–Augarten in Vienna.

Artist 

John Akomfrah

John Akomfrah is a highly respected artist and filmmaker of Ghanaian descent, living and working in London. His works are characterised by their investigations into memory, postcolonialism, temporality, and aesthetics, often exploring the experiences of migrant diasporas globally. He combines text, music, and archival documents to shift debates on politics, media, and conventional historic narratives. Akomfrah was a founding member of the influential Black Audio Film Collective, which started in London in 1982 alongside the artists David Lawson and Lina Gopaul, who he still collaborates with today. He has had numerous solo exhibitions including ICA Boston (2019); New Museum, New York (2018); Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, Durham (2018); SFMOMA, San Francisco (2018); Barbican, London (2017); Nikolaj Kunsthal, Copenhagen (2016); and Tate Britain, London (2013-14). He has participated in the Ghana Pavilion, 58th and 56th Venice Biennale (2019 and 2015); Prospect 4, New Orleans (2017); La Triennale di Milano (2017); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2017); SeMA, Seoul (2014); Sharjah Biennial 11 (2013); Liverpool Biennial (2012); and Taipei Biennial (2012). He was awarded the Artes Mundi Prize in 2017.

Research Fellow 

Azra Akšamija

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.

Filmmaker 

Tomás Gutiérrez Alea

Tomás Gutiérrez Alea is a prominent and highly celebrated Cuban film director. He is an influential figure in shaping Cuba’s film industry. Originally trained in law, he went on to study filmmaking in Italy. His socially-driven works expose the plight of the working class and the Cuban revolution. He explored various genres such as Neorealism, comedy, and historical film to reflect on the lives and people of Cuba.

Artist-in-Residence 

Tini Aliman

Working at the intersection of film, sound, theatre, and installation and often through collaborative projects, the sonic and spatial experiments of Tini Aliman (b. 1980, Singapore) focus on forest networks, plant consciousness, bioacoustics, and data translations via biodata sonification. Her recent projects and collaborations have been presented at Free Jazz III: Sound. Walks. NTU CCA Singapore (2021); An Exercise of Meaning in a Glitch Season, National Gallery Singapore (2020); Sound Kite Orchestra, Biennale Urbana, Venice, Italy and Stories We Tell to Scare Ourselves With, Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, Taiwan (both 2019). 

Collaborator 

Munir Alsagoff

Munir Alsagoff (Singapore), or MOON, has 20 years of performance experience as a guitarist and DJ. He is equally adept on the electric and acoustic guitar, and is greatly influenced by classical, jazz, soul, world and dance music. MOON has performed at festivals in Singapore and around the Asia-Pacific region like the renowned Java Jazz in Jakarta. MOON does live collaborations with DJs at venues such as CE LA VI, W Singapore, Zouk and local conscious event, Tropika, and is part of Beatroot, a global inspired music collective that fuses visuals, beats and live music elements into their performances.

Curator-in-Residence 

Hildegund Amanshauser

Dr Hildegund Amanshauser is an art historian, author and curator and since 2009, Director of the Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts, Austria. Previous appointments include professor of art history and theory in Muenster Westfalia, Germany and director of the Salzburg Kunstverein, Austria. She also worked as curator for the Secession Vienna and the Museum of Modern Art Vienna, Austria.
Amanshauser has published widely on modern and contemporary art and she is editor of The Word’s Finest Studio: 60 years of the Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts, published by Jung und Jung Verlag, Salzburg and Vienna, 2013.

Artist 

Poklong Anading

Pokong Anading began as a painter, but has expanded his practice to video, photography, and process-oriented sculpture and installation. In 2006, he received the Ateneo Studio Residency Grant in Australia, and a Cultural Center of the Philippines 13 Artists Award. The Guggenheim acquired Anading’s Counter Acts (2004), a group portrait photograph in which the subjects hold mirrors up to the camera, reflecting a blinding constellation of light toward the viewer. Anading’s works were presented in the two-person exhibition Between Signs at Silverlens Gallery in Makati City (2011). Anading organized and participated in Room 307: Inkling, Gutfeel and Hunch at the National Art Gallery in Manila (2008). He has been included in notable group exhibitions including the Gwangju Biennial, South Korea (2002 and 2012). Anading lives and works in Manila.

Curator-in-Residence 

Rodolfo Andaur

Rodolfo Andaur (b. 1979, Chile) has been coordinator of various contemporary art projects in northern Chile, promoting local artistic practices in relation to Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, and Peru. He has undertaken several international curatorial residencies in Poland, Mexico, Brazil, and Germany. Andaur has also contributed to various magazines and publications such as Artishock, Atlas Magazine, and Rotunda Magazine and is currently part of the academic staff of the Diploma in Critical and Curatorial Studies at Adolfo Ibáñez University, Santiago, Chile.

Artist-in-Residence 

Miguel Andrade Valdez

Miguel Andrade Valdez (b. 1979) lives and works in Peru, Lima. His practice blends building methodologies and the language of sculpture in order to shape a different understanding of architectural construction and urban development. Through his large scale sculptures and installations which take the human body as a standard unit of measurement, he casts built objects as representations of shared social spaces. His works have been included in numerous group shows including Mana Contemporary, Jersey City United States (2015); Museo Mario Testino, Lima, Peru (2014); Museum of Contemporary Art, Lima, Peru (2013), Art Basel Miami Beach, United States (2012).

Artist-in-Residence 

Ang Song Nian

Through photography and installation, Ang Song Nian (b. 1983, Singapore) scrutinises traces of human presence in the landscape. Intrigued by the power of the photographic image to convey complex and layered narratives, he favours a microscopic approach that unleashes the imperceptible and ideological potential embedded in small details. His most recent solo exhibitions are As They Grow Older and Wiser, Objectifs, and Hanging Heavy On My Eyes, DECK, both Singapore (2017). He has participated in group exhibitions at Bangkok University Gallery, Thailand (2016) and Photo España Festival, Spain (2012) amongs others. Ang is currently lecturer in Photography at the School of Art, Design and Media at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

Artist-in-Residence 

Song-Ming Ang

The practice of Song-Ming Ang (b. 1980, Singapore) revolves around music, a subject matter he approaches from the overlapping perspectives of an artist, fan, and amateur musician. Spanning from classical and experimental to indie and mainstream music, he engages with a variety of material and immaterial elements such as music posters and instruments, school songs and mixed-tapes which are reconfigured through simple gestures to push an idea to its logical conclusion. Working across a wide variety of formats, he often develops participatory processes whose outcome is unpredictable and generate knowledge in unexpected ways.

Song-Ming Ang lives and works between Berlin and Singapore. He has had solo exhibitions at Camden Arts Centre, London, United Kingdom (2015) and Spring Workshop, Hong Kong (2012) and has participated in numerous group exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art Singapore (2016); NUS Museum, Singapore (2015); Witte de With, Rotterdam, the Netherlands (2014) and Haus der Kulturen de Welt, Berlin, Germany (2011), amongst many others. He has been an artist-in-residence at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Germany (2011-2012).

Artist 

Animali Domestici

Animali Domestici (Antonio Bernacchi and Alicia Lazzaroni) is a duo and design practice based in Bangkok. They focus on the development of experimental and speculative projects, products and processes, beyond the dichotomies of culture and nature, ‘infra-ordinary’ and ‘ab-normal’, human and non-human.
With admittedly fragmented and heterogeneous sources of inspiration, they are interested in post-anthropocentric spaces, subjects and materialities, in human and animal behavior, vernacular crafts and traditions, popular tastes and everyday life references, rendered ‘lifestyles’ and marketing strategies. Animali Domestici is also intensively involved in teaching and research and have been coordinating the International Program in Design and Architecture (INDA) at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand.

Curator, Staff 

Anna Lovecchio

Dr Anna Lovecchio (Italy/Singapore) is a curator committed to foster the processes of artistic research and create platforms for the production and circulation of knowledge, critical discourse, and interdisciplinary collaborations. Since 2016, she works at the NTU CCA Singapore where she has developed a broad range of programmes, including residencies, exhibitions, publications, and a podcast. Previously, she was Junior Curator at Villa Croce Museum of Contemporary Art in Genoa, Italy where she has worked on exhibitions by Tomás Saraceno, Tony Conrad, Susan Philipsz, Pino Pascali, Julieta Aranda, and Zhang Enli, amongst others. She was Executive Editor of the art journal Around Photography International from 2007 to 2008. She holds a PhD in the history of contemporary art from the University of Bologna, Italy, and an MA in Contemporary Art and Museum Studies from Tufts University, Boston, United States.

Artist 

Ant Farm

Ant Farm was founded in 1968 in San Francisco by architects Chip Lord and Doug Michels as a countercultural collective intersecting between media art and architecture. Their influential work, which integrated art into everyday life with an ironic humour, highlighted environmental degradation, promoted sustainability, and challenged the ideologies and pervasiveness of American mass media, culture, and consumerism. They disbanded in 1978 after a fire destroyed their studio.

Artist-in-Residence 

Antariksa

Antariksa (b. 1975, Indonesia) is a researcher and co-founding member of KUNCI Cultural Studies Center, Yogyakarta, Indonesia. He has conducted research about Indonesian art, culture and history and is author of Tuan Tanah Kawin Muda: Hubungan Seni Rupa-LEKRA 1950–1965(The Linkage Between the Arts and the Institute of People‚ Culture in Indonesia 1950‚1965) (2005). He is currently working on his new book, Art Collectivism in Japanese-Occupied Indonesia.

Artist 

Arahmaiani

Arahmaiani (Indonesia) is one of Indonesia’s most respected and pioneering artists in the field of performance art. From the 1980’s, she has performed in many public spaces — even during the rule of an oppressive military regime. Since then, she has engaged with issues about the environmental, politics, violence, critique of capital, the female body, and in recent years, with her own identity, which although Muslim, lays between Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, and animist beliefs. Her interactive performances have developed into a community-based practice, bringing attention to subjects prevalent in Indonesia and to issues of violence against the environment on the Tibetan Plateau.

Collaborator 

Nanthiyni Aravindan

Nanthiyni Aravindan (Singapore) is studying Visual Communication at Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts. Her passion for illustration and painting has brought her to explore both traditional visual languages and digital techniques. Her artistic production revolves around zoological and mythical creatures. “The New Ordinary” a mix media work she produced in 2020 was selected as a finalist at the Crowbars Award.

Artist-in-Residence 

Izat Arif

In the multidisciplinary practice of Izat Arif (b.1986, Malaysia) videos, drawings, and readymade objects are combined into intricately layered installations. His work often conveys an ironic commentary on everyday life and the art ecosystem of Kuala Lumpur. He has participated in several group exhibitions including A History of Drawing, Camberwell College of Arts, London, United Kingdom (2018); Malaysia Art: A New Perspective, Richard Koh Fine Art, Singapore (2016); Young Malaysian Artist: New Object(ion) II, Galeri Petronas and Young Contemporaries at National Visual Arts Gallery, both Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (2013). Izat Arif is one of the founding members of the collective Malaysian Artist Intention Experiment (MAIX).

Artist 

Siah Armajani

Iranian-born artist Siah Armajani merges architecture and conceptual art in his sculptures, drawings, and public installations. Informed by democratic ideologies and inspired by American vernacular architecture, his works include gathering spaces for communality, emphasizing the “nobility of usefulness.” His highly acclaimed public art and architectural projects have included bridges, gardens, and outdoor structures, that have been commissioned and presented worldwide. A retrospective featuring his artistic career spanning over more than five decades was recently on view at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and inaugurates in March at The MET Breuer, New York.

Artist 

Fareed Armaly

Fareed Armaly is an artist and curator. He was the Artistic Director for Künstlerhaus Stuttgart (1999–2002) and as an artist he has collaborated with several institutions including more recently Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva, and SALT Galata, Istanbul. Armaly considers the open definition of artistic practice as the medium by which to render a contemporary syntax implicit to a politics of representation, culture, and identity. In 2015, Armaly translated spatially the curatorial framework Place. Labour.Capital. through a new interior architecture of the NTU CCA Singapore’s exhibition area.

Curator-in-Residence 

Art Labor

Art Labor is an artist collective. Comprised of artists Phan Thao Nguyen and Truong Cong Tung, and curator Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran, Art Labor works across visual arts and social sphere. In December 2015, Art Labor were Artists-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore where they recreated a Hammock Café serving traditional Vietnamese coffee, similar to itinerant roadside-resting spots for drivers and passengers along provincial highways of the Central Highlands in Vietnam. The name Jrai Dew Hammock Café relates to the philosophy of Jrai people of Vietnam’s Central Highlands, according to which, in the last stage of life cycle, humans evaporate into the environment and transform into “dew,” a state of non-being (ia ngôm in Jrai language).

Institutional Partner 

Asia Art Archive

Asia Art Archive is an independent non-profit organisation co-founded by Claire Hsu and Johnson Chang in 2000 in response to the urgent need to document and make accessible the multiple recent histories of art in the region. A team of over thirty-five individuals led by Hsu are responsible for AAA’s Collection, research activities, programming, and operations. AAA’s Board of Directors, co-chaired by Benjamin Cha and Jane DeBevoise, comprises appointed members drawn from the art and business sectors within Hong Kong and beyond. The Board jointly supports the Executive Director and oversees the strategic direction and financial status of the organisation. AAA is financially supported through diverse channels to include individuals, corporate, foundations, and government. AAA’s Advisory Board comprises thirty-eight noted curators and critics from around the world. Advisors provide guidance in developing the potential and possibility of our collection, and assist in promoting the growing research interest in art from Asia. Asia Art Archive in America and Asia Art Archive in India are set up as independent entities with separate Boards of Directors.

Institutional Partner 

Asian Urban Lab

Asian Urban Lab is a Singapore-registered non-profit founded in 2003 with three primary objectives. First, to promote a greater awareness and understanding of contemporary urban issues in Asia; second, to facilitate multidisciplinary research and discussion on topics related to the trends and directions of modern Asian urban life and architecture; and third, to disseminate the results of this research to as broad an audience as possible.

Artist 

Tekla Aslanishvili

Tekla Aslanishvili (b. 1988, Georgia) is an artist, filmmaker and essayist based between Berlin and Tbilisi. Her works emerge at the intersection of infrastructural design, history and geopolitics. 

Tekla graduated from the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts in 2009 and she holds a MFA from the Berlin University of the Arts – the department of Experimental Film and New Media Art. Aslanishvili’s films have been screened and exhibited internationally at PACT Zollverein, Neue Berliner Kunstverein, Baltic Triennial, Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Kasseler Dokfest, Kunsthalle Münster, EMAF – European Media Art Festival, Videonale 18, Tbilisi Architecture Biennial. She is a 2018–2019 Digital Earth fellow, the nominee for Ars-Viva Art prize 2021 and the recipient of the Han Nefkens Foundation – Fundació Antoni Tàpies Video Art Production Award 2020.

Artist-in-Residence 

Martha Atienza

Working across video, sound, and installation, Martha Atienza (b. 1981, Philippines) explores a wide range of physical, sociological, and emotional connections with water focusing on the environment as well as the communities of her hometown Bantayan Island, situated in the northwestern end of Cebu. These observations have culminated into immersive installations and socially engaged projects that delve into economic, social, and environmental issues tackling the notion of vulnerability while also questioning the role of art as a tool for change. Recent exhibitions include Singapore Biennale (2016); Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland, Australia (2016); Sharjah Biennale, United Arab Emirates (2013). She was most recently the recipient of the 19th Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel Statement 2017.

Artist 

Tarek Atoui

Tarek Atoui studied contemporary and electronic music at the French National Conservatory of Reims. He navigates between the vocabularies and aesthetics of the visual arts, performing arts, and music, redefining contemporary composition and sound production. In 2012, Atoui launched Serpentine Gallery’s Memory Marathon event in London with a five-hour performance that blended influences of traditional Arabic music with contemporary genres including electronic and hip-hop. He was co-artistic director of the Bergen Assembly 2016, a triennial in Norway. Recent projects have taken place at the Tate Modern, London (2016); Fondation Louis Vuitton, Bois de Boulogne (2015); Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm (2013); and Norbergfestival (2013). Selected exhibitions include Art or Sound, Fondazione Prada, Ca’ Corner della Regina, Venice (2014); Within, Sharjah Biennial 11 (2013); Metastable Circuit, la Lutherie and Dimis Reconnected, dOCUMENTA 13, Kassel (2012). His work has been part of biennials including the Marrakech Biennale (2016); 8th Berlin Biennial (2014); 9th Biennale do Mercosul, Porto Alegre (2013); and the 9th and 11th Sharjah Biennial (2009/13).

Artist-in-Residence 

Dana Awartani

The rich visual language of Dana Awartani’s (b. 1987, Saudi Arabia) paintings, sculptures, and textile installations incorporate traditional Islamic art forms into contemporary aesthetics. Engaging with the relationship between geometry and nature, she harnesses the timeless and enduring relevance of forms in order to deconstruct contemporary issues such as gender, faith, loss, and cultural destruction. Past solo exhibitions include The Silence Between Us, Maraya Art Centre, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates (2018) and Detroit Affinities: Dana Awartani, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, United States (2017). She has participated in numerous group shows and biennales such as Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2016, Kochi, India and the 1st Yinchuan Biennale, Museum of Contemporary Art, Yinchuan, China (both 2016), among others.

The artist was scheduled to be in-residence from July – Sept 2020. Due to the COVID-19 virus outbreak and international travel restrictions, the artist was unable to participate in the residency programme physically.

Collaborator 

Kamiliah Bahdar

Kamiliah Bahdar is in charge of public programmes at Independent Archive in 2018.

Artist-in-Residence 

Adrián Balseca

The artistic practice of Adrián Balseca (b. 1989, Ecuador) engages histories of artisanal handicrafts and industrial techniques encompassing different configurations of materials and immaterial processes involved in the production and circulation of manufactured goods. His works range from small interventions to large-scale actions and video documentation. He recently received a solo exhibition at the Precolumbian Art Museum Casa del Alabado, Quito, Ecuador (2017). In 2013, he was awarded the Premio Brasil–Arte Emergente at the Contemporary Art Center of Quito.

Artist-in-Residence 

Yason Banal

Yason Banal is an artist and educator. His work spans from photography to video, installation, text, and performance, deploying varied conceptual strategies to explore links among seemingly divergent systems. Between July and August 2015, Banal was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore where he continued a work-in-progress in- spired as much by José Rizal’s transglobal coordination, Isabelo Delos Reyes’s experimental archive, as it is by contemporary coordinates such as reality TV and lo-fi culture.

Artist-in-Residence 

Tanatchai Bandasak

Tanatchai Bandasak (b. 1984, Thailand) is a visual artist whose practice spans a variety of mediums including video, photography, and installation. Often drawing on his interests in light, living matter, habitat, and geology, his works interrogate the nature of existence and the substance of things to deepen our perception of the world. Recent exhibitions include Appearing Unannounced, Rirkrit Tiravanija’s studio, Tambon Nam-bo-luang, Chiang Mai, Thailand (2018). Tanatchai has also produced several moving-image works which have been screened at international film festivals such the “Spectrum Shorts” section of the 41st International Film Festival Rotterdam, Netherlands (2012) and Rencontres Internationales, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France (2011.)

Artist 

Laura Anderson Barbata

Laura Anderson Barbata, born in Mexico City, is a transdisciplinary artist currently based in Brooklyn and Mexico City. Since 1992, she has worked primarily in the social realm, and has initiated projects in the Venezuelan Amazon, Trinidad and Tobago, Mexico, Norway, and the United States. Barbata is also known for her project Transcommunality (2001–ongoing), working with stilt walkers, artists, and artisans from Mexico, New York, and the Caribbean. This project has been presented at various museums, schools, and other venues in the US, Mexico, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, and Singapore. Her work is in various private and public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; El Museo de Arte Moderno, México D.F.; Landesbank Baden-Württemberg Gallery, Stuttgart, Germany; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, California; Museo Jaureguía, Navarra, Spain, and Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Austria. Her work has been featured in numerous publications, including the New York Times, Sculpture Today, Kunstforum Germany, ARTnews, Art in America, ArtNexus, and 160 Años de Fotografía en México (INBA).

Artist 

Judith Barry

Artist and writer Judith Barry’s work spans several disciplines: architecture, film/video, performance, installation, sculpture, photography and new media. Through this rich variety of media, Barry explores complex relationships between issues of public address, representation, and popular culture.

Barry has exhibited internationally in numerous exhibitions including: the 3rd Berlin Biennale (2004), Sao Paolo Biennale (1994), the Venice Biennales of Art and of Architecture, and the Whitney Biennale (1987). Recent exhibitions include: The Content of Form, Generali Foundation, Vienna (2013); Critical Episodes, MACBA, Barcelona (2013); This will have been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980’s, ICA, Boston (2013); The Deconstructive Impulse, Contemporary Art Museum, Houston (2012); and dOCUMENTA 13, Kassel (2012). She was awarded the Frederick Kiesler Prize for Architecture and the Arts (2000), Best Pavilion at the Cairo Biennale (2001), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2011) among others. Public Fantasy, a collection of Barry’s essays, was published by the ICA in London (1991).

Judith Barry was born in Columbus, Ohio, USA, in 1954. She lives and works in New York City, and is currently Director/Professor of the MFA in Visual Arts at the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University.

Collaborator 

Uriel Barthélémi

Uriel Barthélémi is a drummer, composer and electro-acoustic musician. His language combines percussion, performance, sound & video programming and composition. He infuses each of his projects with this polymorphic and multicultural dimension. His multifaceted identity is found in the musical works he generates, dense and unclassifiable. Following his studies at the conservatoires of Reims, La Courneuve, Montreuil, and Ircam, he embarked upon electro-acoustic compositional work. This has led him to collaborate in numerous areas of the performing arts from 2002 onwards: dance, marionettes, theater, as well as the visual arts.

Curator, Founding Director 

Ute Meta Bauer

Ute Meta Bauer is a Professor at the School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University Singapore (NTU). She is currently the Acting Director and Principal Research Fellow at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (NTU CCA Singapore); and is the Chair of the Masters in Museum Studies and Curatorial Practices (MA MSCP) programme. Having served as the Founding Director of NTU CCA Singapore for over a decade, her work as educator and curator over the past years has focused on Climates. Habitats. Environments. At the Centre, she curated and co-curated The Oceanic (2017/2018), Trees of Life. Knowledge in Material (2018), and The Posthuman City (2020). In 2022, she served as curator for the Singapore Pavilion at the 59th Biennale di Venezia, featuring artist Shubigi Rao. Her recent large scale projects include the 17th Istanbul Biennial (2022), co-curated alongside David Teh and Amar Kanwar, and the artistic direction of the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale 2024. She is a Trustee of the Art Foundation TBA21 and a member of the Governing Council of n.b.k. Berlin. Bauer was recently conferred an Honorary Doctorate of Art and Design by Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Helsinki, Finland.

Artist 

Thomas J. Berghuis

Dr Thomas J. Berghuis is The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Curator of Chinese Art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and a visiting scholar at the Center for China in the World at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia. An eminent scholar and researcher of contemporary Chinese art, contemporary Asian performance art, and contemporary Indonesian art, Dr Berghuis previously served as a lecturer in Asian Art History at the University of Sydney. Dr Berghuis has curated several exhibitions of contemporary Asian art, including most recently the exhibition and commission of Wang Jianwei: Time Temple at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the international group exhibition Suspended Histories at Museum van Loon in Amsterdam (2013), and co-curator for Edge of Elsewhere (2010–2012) at Campbelltown Arts Centre and Gallery 4A in Sydney, featuring contemporary artists from across the Asia-Pacific.

Artist 

Zarina Bhimji

Zarina Bhimji’s work spans a range of media – from installations to photography, from film to sound. Often in her work, Bhimji engages with her family story. Of Indian descent, born in Uganda, Bhimji and her family left the country in the wake of Idi Amin’s expulsion of the South Asians community. Bringing aesthetic to the fore, Bhimji’s approach to colonial history is defined by a strong visual language that resists simplifications and predictable interpretations of the work.

Bhimji’s work has been shown extensively both in the UK and abroad and her solo shows include De Appel Arts Centre (2012-2013), Whitechapel Gallery, London (2012; The New Gallery, Walsall (2012), Kunstmuseum Bern, Bern (2012), Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2009), Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago (2009). Bhimji’s work has also been shown at He Disappeared Into Complete Silence, De Hallen Museum, Haarlem (2011), ARS11 – Africa in Kouvola, Kouvola (2011), Göteburg International Biennal, Göteburg (2011); 29th Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo, Capturing Time, Kadist Art Foundation, Paris (2009), Zones of Contact, Biennale of Sydney (2006). Her first film, Out of Blue was commissioned, produced by and presented in 2002 at documenta 11, Kassel.  Zarina Bhimji was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2007, received a DAAD award in 2002 and was a recipient of the Paul Hamlyn Visual Arts Award in 1999.

Artist 

Carla Bianpoen

Carla Bianpoen is a freelance writer and journalist of contemporary art. She studied in Amsterdam, The Netherlands and Muenster, Germany. During her time in Europe she engaged with fellow students from Indonesia who pursued nationalist ideals. Carla Bianpoen became the World Bank Indonesia office’s first focal point for Women in Development. At her retirement in 1998 she joined women activists and has been a founding member of the National Commission on Violence against Women, after which she went on to focus on contemporary art. She was the senior editor of C-Arts magazine and has been a juror for the Bandung Contemporary Art Awards since 2009. Carla Bianpoen was the artistic director and co-curator of the Indonesian Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. As a writer, she contributes to various Indonesian and international publications and has reviewed, art exhibitions by numerous Indonesian artists in the past two decades, as well as international art events including the Venice Biennale, Prague Biennale, Lyon Biennale, Manifesta and documenta. Carla Bianpoen co-authored the seminal book Indonesian Women Artists: The Curtain Opens, and authored the IndoArtNow commissioned book (unpublished) on emerging Indonesian artists.

Artist 

Ursula Biemann

Ursula Biemann is an artist, writer, and video essayist who investigates global relations under the impact of the accelerated mobility of people, resources, and information. Her works explore space and mobility, and more recently ecology, oil, and water. Her video installations have been exhibited in museums and international art biennials worldwide. She received a doctor honoris causa in Humanities by the Umeå University, Sweden, and the Prix Meret Oppenheim, the national art award of Switzerland. She has a BFA from the School of Visual Arts and attended the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York (1988). Biemann’s research is currently based at the Zurich University for the Arts.

 

Lewis Biggs

Lewis BIGGS (United Kingdom) is an independent curator (Co-Curator, Aichi Triennale 2013; Curator, Folkestone Triennial 2014, 2017, 2020; Curator, Land Art Mongolia 2018; advisory curator Kaunas Biennial 2019). As International Adviser and now Distinguished Professor of Public Art at Shanghai University (since 2011) he is also Chairman of the Institute for Public Art, dedicated to the research, propagation, and advocacy of artist-led urbanism. He was a Director of Tate Liverpool (1990–2000); and General Series Editor for Tate Modern Artists Series, Tate Publishing 2001–14. Lewis was the Artistic Director / CEO of Liverpool Biennial 2000–11. The Biennial exhibitions under his leadership focused on newly-commissioned art, much of it site specific for the urban environment, researched collaboratively and realised by a team of locally based curators.

Commercial Partner 

Bildmuseet

Bildmuseet is a contemporary art museum in Umeå, northern Sweden.

Staff 

Qamarul Asyraf Bin Hosri

Qamarul Asyraf Bin Hosri was Young Professional Trainee, Production at NTU CCA Singapore in 2018.

Curator-in-Residence 

Dr Michael Birchall

Dr Michael Birchall is Curator of Public Practice at Tate Liverpool and Senior Lecturer in Exhibition Studies at Liverpool John Moores University, United Kingdom. His curatorial practice and research concern socially engaged art, performance, and notions of publicness in museums. He has previously held curatorial appointments at The Banff Centre’ Walter Phillips Gallery and The Western Front (both Canada), as well as at the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart (Germany). His writing has appeared in Frieze, ARKEN Bulletin, OnCurating, Modern Painters, C Magazine, Art & the Public Sphere, and various exhibition catalogues. Recently, he co-edited Collective Good/Collaborative Efforts (Stavanger: Rogaland Kunstsenter, 2017) and co-curated O.K. – The Musical(2017), an iterative community theatre musical by Christopher Kline at Tate Liverpool.

Artist-in-Residence 

Rossella Biscotti

The cross-media practice of Rossella Biscotti (b. 1978, Italy/Belgium/Netherlands) cuts across sculpture, performance,sound works, and filmmaking. Stemming from extended research processes, conceptual excavations,personal encounters, interdisciplinary collaborations, and the subtle interrogation of sites and stories,her works encapsulate meticulous stratifications of materials and meanings. She has taken part in majorinternational exhibitions such as Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh (2020); 55th Venice Biennale, Italy (2013); 13th Istanbul Biennale, Turkey(2013); dOCUMENTA 13, Kassel, Germany (2012), and Manifesta 9, Belgium (2012). Recent soloexhibitions were held at Witte de With, Rotterdam, Netherlands (2019); Kunsthaus Baselland, Muttenz,Switzerland (2018), and V‚A‚C Foundation, Moscow, Russia (2016). Biscotti received several awards including ACACIA Prize for Contemporary Art (2017) and Mies van der Rohe Stipendium (2013).

Artist 

Regina Bittner

Regina Bittner (Germany) studied Cultural Theory and Art History at Leipzig University, and recieved her doctorate from the Institute for European Ethnology, Humboldt University of Berlin. As Head of the Academy and Deputy Director of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, she conceptualises and teaches the postgraduate programme for architecture and modern research. Bittner has curated numerous exhibitions on the architectural, urban and cultural history of modernism, her research focus being international architectural and urban research, the modern era and migration, the cultural history of modernism and heritage studies. Recent publications include In Reserve: The Household! Historic Models and Contemporary Positions from the Bauhaus (with Elke Krasny, 2016), and The Bauhaus in Calcutta: An Encounter of the Cosmopolitan Avant-Garde (with Kathrin Rhomberg, 2013). She has also conducted extensive research on Singapore’s public housing commonly referred to as HDBs.

Collaborator 

Dinu Bodiciu

Dinu Bodiciu is a fashion and accessories designer currently teaching Fashion Design in Singapore at LASALLE College of the Arts. His designs are conceptualised as extensions of the human body, tackling aspects situated at the border between dress and skin. His projects include collaborations with Lady Gaga, Hunger Games ep3&4, KCPK, while his designs have been featured in various fashion and design magazines and specialist books published around the world.

Scholar 

Bertolt Brecht

Bertolt Brecht was a German poet and playwright. He lived in exile for much of his life—first in Scandinavia and later in the United States, only to return to Berlin and found his own theater company, the Berliner Ensemble. His plays, the best known of which include The Three-penny Opera (1928) and Mother Courage and Her Children (1941), are the foundations of epic theater. This concept radically departed from theater conventions of the time and pushed forward a political theater that embodies revolutionary aims and contributes to social change. His ideas of a self-conscious and actively engaged spectator—a form of theater that addresses the immediate political and cultural circumstances—had a wide influence upon theater and the arts at large.

Collaborator 

Brooklyn Jumbies Inc.

Brooklyn Jumbies Inc. (United States), founded by Ali Sylvester and Najja Codrington, is an organisation with the purpose of heightening cultural awareness of African and African-Caribbean culture. Performing stilt dancing, one of the numerous cultural elements of the African and Caribbean diaspora, their goal is to help revive knowledge, respect, and pride in these traditions. Since 2007, the Brooklyn Jumbies have worked closely with Laura Anderson Barbata, presenting outreach projects in Mexico and the United States, also collaborating with los Zancudos de Zaachila, traditional stilt dancers from Oaxaca. With Barbata they have performed in various museums. Among their most significant performances are Intervention: Wall Street, in the Financial District of New York (2011); and Intervention: Indigo, Brooklyn, New York, and The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade (2015). Publications include Transcommunality. Interventions And Collaborations With Stilt Dancing Communities (2013).

 

Barney Broomfield

Barney Broomfield (United Kingdom/ United States) is a Sundance award-winning and Oscar-Shortlisted filmmaker and cinematographer. As a graduate of the London School of Economics, Broomfield’s career began with National Geographic in the United Kingdom which funded his first documentary film after university, Welcome to the Real World, a 12,000 mile motorbike journey from Kolkata, India to London, England undergone to raise money for an orphanage in India. Since then Broomfield has travelled extensively around the globe directing and shooting films for the industry’s top broadcasters including HBO, CNN, BBC, National Geographic, Discovery Channel, MTV, Sundance, Channel Four (UK), ITV, SKY, and PBS.

Artist 

Donna Brunero

Dr Donna Brunero is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at the National University of Singapore (NUS). Her research and teaching focuses include the British empire in Asia, colonial port cities of Asia, maritime history, heritage, and the Chinese Maritime Customs Service. Amongst the publications Dr Brunero has authored are Britain’s Imperial Cornerstone in China: The Chinese Maritime Customs Service, 1854-1949 (2006) and “To capture a vanishing era: the development of the Maze Collection of Chinese Junk Models, 1929–1948”, Journal for Maritime Research (April 2015). She was the recipient of Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Teaching Excellence Awards in AY2015-16 and AY2014-15.

Writer 

Giuliana Bruno

Giuliana Bruno is a professor in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. She is internationally known for her research on the intersections of the visual arts, architecture, film, and media. Her seminal body of work Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (2002) is an intellectual journey into cinematic spaces, providing new directions for visual studies. In her latest book, Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (2014), she revisits the concept of materiality in the contemporary world. She has contributed to numerous monographs on contemporary artists, including Isaac Julien’s Riot (2014), The Imaginary Landscapes of Jesper Just (2013), Chantal Akerman’s Too Far, Too Close (2012), and Jane and Louise Wilson: A Free and Anonymous Monument (2004), among others. She was a contributing writer for NTU CCA Singapore publication Theatrical Fields: Critical Strategies in Performance, Film, and Video.

 

Roger M. Buergel

Roger Buergel is an art critic, a curator, and a member of Parasophia: Kyoto International Festival of Contemporary Culture 2015’s Professional Advisory Board. Before serving as a guest curator for the Museum of Contemporary Art Barcelona he taught art history at Luneburg University (1999–2005) and the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe (2007–09). He was appointed the artistic director of Documenta XII (Kassel, 2007) with art historian and curator Ruth Noack. Buergel also served as the artistic director of the 6th Busan Biennale (2012). In 2010, he was appointed the Founding Director of the Johann Jacobs Museum in Zurich, an exhibition space and research institution dedicated to the cultural residue of global trade routes.

Artist-in-Residence 

Lêna Bùi

The practice of Lêna Bùi (b. 1985, Vietnam) is deeply drawn to the intangible aspects of life, such as faith, death, and dreams and the ways in which they influence our behaviours and perceptions. Through the incorporation of anecdotes and personal stories, her works articulate intimate reflections upon the impact of rapid development and the relationship between humans and nature. Bùi’s works have been included in group exhibitions and presentations at Sharjah Art Foundation, United Arab Emirates (2018); Mansfield Freeman Center for East Asian Studies, Wesleyan University, Middle Town, United States (2018); Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany (2017); The Factory Contemporary Arts Centre, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (2016); and Carré d’Art, Nîmes, France (2014) amongst other venues.

Scholar 

Zoe Butt

Zoe Butt is a curator, writer, speaker, and educator. Her curatorial practice centers on building critically thinking and historically conscious artistic communities, fostering dialogue among cultures of the globalizing souths. She is currently Artistic Director of The Factory Contemporary Arts Centre, Ho Chi Minh City; formerly in directorial/curatorial roles with Sàn Art (Ho Chi Minh City), Long March Project (Beijing); Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Gallery of Modern Art (Brisbane). Her work has been published by Sharjah Art Foundation, Hatje Cantz, ArtReview, ArtAsiaPacific, JRP-Ringier, Routledge, and Sternberg Press, amongst others.

Artist-in-Residence 

Buen Calubayan

The practice of Buen Calubayan (b. 1980, Philippines) interweaves politics, religion, history, and identity combining the autobiographical with the art historical in a continuous process of re-contextualization. In his works, the historical influence of Western canons on Filipino art and his own personal struggle to find validation as an artist often merge with broader reflections on the greater state of affairs of his country and the problematic writing of its socio-cultural histories. His most recent solo shows include Biowork at Ateneo Art Gallery, Quezon City, Philippines (2015) and Idiot Knows No Country, La Trobe University Visual Arts Center, Bendigo, Australia (2014). He has presented his paintings, performances, sculptures, and conceptual works in international group exhibitions at the Gwangju Museum of Art, South Korea and at Kunstvlaai: Festival of Independents, Amsterdam, Netherlands, amongst others. He received the 2013 Ateneo Art Awards for the project Spoliarium which reinterpreted an iconic painting by Filipino master Juan Luna and was awarded the 13 Artists Award by the Cultural Centre of the Philippines in 2009.

Artist-in-Residence 

Amy Lien & Enzo Camacho

Amy Lien (b. 1987, United States) and Enzo Camacho (b. 1985, Philippines) perhaps recklessly assume the near total dissolution of creative agency as participants in the financially networked public sphere commonly referred to as “art world”. Yet, this does not prevent them from generating ever more questions via an image-oriented material production, continuously inaugurating a kind of affective and data-frantic cartography of places connected and disconnected to each other, while employing the standard theoretical rubrics of economics‚ and contemporary art. What results is something like mixed media sculpture, or installation art.

The two artists began collaborating in 2009, between New York and Manila. They both received their Bachelor’s degrees from Harvard University (Lien in 2009; Camacho in 2007), and their Master’s degrees from the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg (both in 2014). Most recently, they were Artists-in-Residence at Gluck50 in Milan, where they curated a group exhibition including artists based in New York, Taipei, and Cairo. They have had solo exhibitions at 47 Canal (New York, USA), Mathew Gallery (Berlin, Germany), Republikha Art Gallery (Quezon City, Philippines), and Green Papaya Art Projects (Quezon City, Philippines), as well as participated in recent group exhibitions at the Kunstverein in Dusseldorf and the Künstlerhaus in Bremen.

Artist-in-Residence 

Francisco Camacho Herrera

Francisco Camacho Herrera (b. 1979, Colombia) currently lives and works in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. His projects often experiment with communitarian and participatory approaches to generate social change and trigger the collective imagination of the future of society. Such endeavours include fulltopia.com (2015-ongoing), a web platform that articulates a desire to facilitate the exchange of services and ideas within local communities bypassing monetary economy. His works have been presented in several group exhibitions including the 21st Biennale of Sydney, Australia (2018); The Welfare State, Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp, Netherlands (2015); and The Museum of Rhythm, Museum Stucky, Lodz, Poland (2016). Camacho Herrera was a resident at Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunst in Amsterdam in 2008-9.

Curator-in-Residence 

Diana Campbell Betancourt

Diana Campbell Betancourt (b. 1984, United States) is currently Artistic Director of Samdani Art Foundation and Chief Curator of Dhaka Art Summit, Dhaka, Bangladesh, a major research and exhibition platform for art in South Asia. In addition, Betancourt is Artistic Director of Bellas Artes Projects, Bagac, Philippines. She has collaborated on commissions of Indian scupture with several sculpture parks across the world including, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, United Kingdom; de Cordova, Massachusetts, United States; and Wanas Konst, Malmö, Sweden. Betancourt has also curated numerous solo projects with artists such as Haroon Mirza, Simryn Gill, Tino Sehgal, Lynda Benglis, Shilpa Gupta, Shahzia Sikander, Naeem Mohaiemen, Runa Islam, Shumon Ahmed, Pawel Althamer among others. She chairs the board of the Mumbai Art Room, has been a Research Fellow at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, United Kingdom and the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims, France.

 

Guigone Camus

Dr Guigone Camus (France) holds a PhD in Social Anthropology and Ethnology (EHESS), and since 2002 has lectured at l’Ecole du Louvre in Paris, l’Institut Catholique de Paris (IRCP), and the University of French Polynesia in Tahiti. Camus has worked on the social organisation of Kiribati, which is a small atoll country covering a large part of the Central Pacific. During two missions (2015 and 2017), she observed the I-Kiribati symbolic representations of Nature, their social organisation, and the kin ties between their cosmology and genealogies. In 2014, she published Tabiteuea Kiribati, a book dedicated to Tabiteuea Island (Hazan). As a Scientific Advisor of the Ocean and Climate Platform, she is committed to putting light on issues related to the consequences of global warming on the preservation of biodiversity, and the livelihoods of the human societies living in small island countries, addressing physical and psychological security, food security, and migration. She also works on the pragmatic and emotional perception of climate change and on the political and social parameters influencing the protection of natural resources.

Artist-in-Residence 

Isabel Carvalho

The practice of Isabel Carvalho (b. 1977, Portugal) seeks to establish meaningful relationships between contemporary art, economics, politics, feminism, and sexuality. As part of her experimental practice, some of her projects bring together visual arts and writing in order to explore alternative methods of writing, publishing, and distributing. She is founder and chief editor of LEONORANA, a research magazine dedicated to experimental thinking. Between 2010-2018, she ran Navio Vazio, a project space that provided a three-dimensional extension to her publishing programme. Her works have been exhibited widely across Europe, and she has received solo presentations in Portugal, Germany, and Spain.

The residency of Isabel Carvalho was scheduled for January – March 2021, but the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak rendered international travel impossible.In order to continue to support artistic research and foster collaborations beyond borders, the NTU CCA Residencies Programme initiated project that trailblazes new pathways to collaboration.

 

Antonia Carver

Antonia CARVER (United Arab Emirates) is a member of NTU CCA’s International Advisory Board and is currently the Director of Art Jameel, Dubai, an organisation that fosters and promotes a thriving arts and culture scene and support the development of creative enterprises in the region of Middle East, North Africa, Turkey and beyond. Art Jameel is the founding partner of Edge of Arabia, The Crossway Foundation, Jeddah Art Week, and The Archive. Prior to joining Art Jameel, Antonia was the director of Art Dubai, where she has overseen its development into the leading art fair of the Middle East and South Asia, along with its diverse programmes, artists residencies and commissions as well as other educational initiatives and prizes. Before relocating to the UAE, Antonia was editor at Phaidon Press and had roles at Institute of international Visual Arts and G+B Arts International.

Artist 

Carlos Casas

Carlos Casas is a filmmaker and artist whose practice encompasses film, sound, and the visual arts. His films have been screened and awarded in festivals around the world such as the Venice Film Festival; International Film Festival Rotterdam; Buenos Aires International Film Festival; and Mexico International Film Festival; among others. His work has been exhibited and performed in international art institutions and galleries, including Tate Modern, London; Fondation Cartier, Palais de Tokyo, and Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Hangar Bicocca, Milan. He was an NTU CCA Singapore Artist-in-Residence from December 2017 to February 2018.

Artist-in-Residence 

Carolina Caycedo

Merging studio practice and long-term involvements with local communities, the artistic practiceof Carolina Caycedo (b. 1978, United Kingdom/United States) shows a deep commitment tomovements of resistance, economies of solidarity, and environmental rights. Through her work,she investigates dynamics of assimilation and resistance, representation and control, addressing human and natural environments affected by extractivist modes of development. Recently,she held solo exhibitions at Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, United States (2020) andOrange County Museum of Art, Santa Ana, United States (2019). Her work has been included innumerous international exhibitions and biennials including 32nd São Paulo Biennial, Brazil (2016);8th Berlin Biennial, Germany (2014), and X Havana Biennial, Cuba (2009) among others.

Institutional Partner 

CCA Kitakyushu

The Center for Contemporary Art, CCA Kitakyushu is an institute for research and study, subsidised by the City of Kitakyushu, Japan, established in May 1997.

Institutional Partner 

CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, California

CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts is a nonprofit exhibition venue and research institute dedicated to contemporary art and ideas.

Artist 

Banu Cennetoglu

Banu Cennetoglu is an artist who lives and works in Istanbul. Her work challenges the stereotyped ideas of categorization and information in terms of sharing, access and manipulation, sometimes using photography and the book format as its platform. She initiated the project space BAS, using archives of artists’ publishing. She also co-founded the imprint Bent, a publishing project focusing on the production and distribution of artists’ books and printed matte

Institutional Partner 

Centre Pompidou, Paris, France

 

Alan Chan

Professor Chan is a member of the Social Science Research Council of SIngapore, a member of the Founding Editorial Board, Oxford Bibliographies of Chinese Studies; member of the Board of Directors, Consortium of Humanities Centres and Institutes; Chairman of the Board of Directors, Confucius Institute, NTU; member of the Board of Directors, International Confucian Association; member of the International Advisory Panel, Asia Competiveness Institute, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, NUS; member of the Editorial Board, Journal of Daoist Studies (USA) and Frontiers of Daoist Studies (China); and member of several other Boards. Previously, he served on the Board of Directors, Singapore Examination and Assessment Board (2007–2010).

His recent publications include “From Uncrowned King to the Sage of Profound Greatness: Confucius and the Analects in Early Medieval China” in Companion to Confucius (2017); “Rujia sixiang zhong de xiao de pubianxing he wenhua texing” 儒家思想中的孝的普遍性和文化特性 (Universality and Cultural Specificity of Filial Piety in Confucian Philosophy) (2016); and “The Art of Hearing and the Promise of Harmony in Confucian Self-Cultivation” in New Directions in Chinese Philosophy (2014). He has also developed a Massive Open Online Course, Explorations in Confucian Philosophy.

Professor Chan has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Toronto, University of Washington, University of Yangon, Kyoto University and Chinese University of Hong Kong.

He received his PhD from the University of Toronto, Canada, in Chinese and comparative philosophy and religion.

Staff 

Corine Chan Li Ling

Corine Chan Li Ling Executive Archive, NTU CCA Singapore from May to July 2018. She was Young Professional Trainee, Residencies in 2016.

Artist 

Kent Chan

Kent Chan (b. 1984, Singapore) is an artist, curator, and filmmaker based in The Netherlands. His practice revolves around our encounters with art, fiction and cinema that form a triumvirate of practices porous in form, content and context. He holds particular interest in the tropical imaginary, the past and future relationships between heat and art, and contestations to the legacies of modernity. His works have taken the form of moving-image, text, performances, and exhibitions.

He has held solo and two-person presentations at Gasworks (London, United Kingdom, 2023), Kunstinstituut Melly (Rotterdam, Netherlands, 2021), de Appel (Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2021), Bonnefanten museum (Maastricht, Netherlands, 2020), and National University Singapore Museum (2019). His works and films have been exhibited in institutions and festivals including Liverpool Biennial (United Kingdom, 2023), Seoul Mediacity Biennale (South Korea, 2023), Videobrasil (São Paulo, Brazil, 2023), Tate Modern (London, United Kingdom, 2022), Onassis Stegi (Athens, Greece, 2022), International Film Festival Rotterdam (Netherlands, 2022), Times Museum (Guangdong, China, 2021), BIENALSUR (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2021) and EYE Filmmuseum (Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2016). He is the recipient of the Paulo Cunha e Silva Award and Impart Art Prize (both 2023), and of the Foundwork Artist Prize (2021). His works are collected by institutions such as the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig, Kadist Foundation, Rijkscollectie, and Bonnefanten Museum. He was Artist-in-Residence at MMCA Residency Changdong (Seoul, South Korea, 2025), Art Explora (Paris, France, 2024), Pivô Arte e Pesquisa (São Paulo, Brazil, 2024), Gasworks (London, United Kingdom, 2022), Jan van Eyck Academie (Maastricht, Netherlands, 2019) and NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (2017-18).

Scholar 

Jiat-Hwee Chang

Jiat-Hwee Chang is Associate Professor at the Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore. He is the author of A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture: Colonial Networks, Nature and Technoscience (2016), which was awarded an International Planning History Society Book Prize 2018, and shortlisted for the European Association for Southeast Asian Studies Humanities Book Prize 2017. He is also co-editor of Southeast Asia’s Modern Architecture: Questions in Translation, Epistemology and Power (2019) and (with William S. W. Lim) Non West Modernist Past (2011). Chang was recently a Canadian Centre for Architecture-Mellon Foundation Researcher, 2017–19. In 2019–20, he will be Manton Fellow at the Clark Art Institute and Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society, Germany, researching the sociocultural histories and techno-politics of air conditioning and climate change in urban Asia. He is also co-writing a book on everyday modernism in Singapore with Justin Zhuang and photographer Darren Soh.

Artist-in-Residence 

Chang Wen-Hsuan

The artistic practice of Chang Wen-Hsuan (b. 1991, Taiwan) questions the narrative structure of institutionalised history with re-readings, personal stories, and suggestions of fictional alternatives. Through versatile platforms including installations, videos, and lectures, she often navigates skewed documentations and first-person accounts to trigger reflections on how the understanding of history affects the purport of the present and thrust of the future. Her projects have been shown at Taipei Fine Arts Museum and Taiwan Biennial, Taichung, both Taiwan (2018); Inside-Out Art Museum, Beijing, China (2017); Musrara Mix Festival 17, Jerusalem, Israel (2017); inToAsia: Time-based Art Festival, Queens Museum, New York, United States (2015).

 

Lilian Chee

Lilian Chee is an Associate Professor at the Department of Architecture in the National University of Singapore (NUS). She is a writer, academic, designer, curator, and award-winning educator who has lecturered at the Bartlett, Delft, ETH Zurich, Melbourne, and the Berlage Centre. Her work is situated at the intersections of architectural representation, gender, and affect in a contemporary interdisciplinary context. Her research explores the emergence of architecture through, and from within, everyday encounters and its archives, influenced by film, art and literature. She conceptualised, researched, and collaborated on the award-winning architectural essay film about single women occupants in Singapore’s public housing 03-FLATS (2014), which won the best ASEAN documentary Salaya (2015); shortlisted for the Busan Wide Angle Documentary Prize 2014; and screened at the Singapore Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2016. She is working on a book about public art in Singapore, and co-editing a volume on domesticity in architecture.

Artist-in-Residence 

Kray Chen

Kray Chen is an artist. His practice brings attention to the peculiar characteristics of forms, gestures, and behaviours in society to discuss the value of progress. Between April and August 2016, Chen was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore where he developed a Feng Shui survey of his residency studio and the larger Gillman Barracks precinct, with the aim to enliven and invigorate a site of art that is aiming to establish itself as a vibrant cultural hub.

Curator-in-Residence 

Meiya Cheng

Meiya Cheng (b. 1975, China) is a freelance curator living and working in Taipei. From 2006-2009, she was the curator of MoCA, Taipei. For her talk she will look at two exhibition projects The Great Ephemeral (New Museum, 2015) and Trading Futures, (co-curated with Pauline Yao, Taipei Contemporary Art Centre, 2012) relating them to PLACE.LABOUR.CAPITAL. The Great Ephemeral responds to the speculative nature of the global market, both by exploring its intangible, even emotional, aspects and by offering clear-eyed commentary on its inequalities. Trading Futures was a gathering of conceptual interrogations, gestures and processes that look into the ways in which art and artistic experimentation intersect with hypothetical systems of labour, value, consumption, and desire.

Cheng participated in the founding and operation of Taipei Contemporary Art Center (TCAC) since 2009. With teamwork as the working model, she tries to builds up an alternative model that constantly examines and self/examines institutional the conditions in art production. From 2012-2014, she was the chair of TCAC. Her selected curated exhibition include: Augmenting the World, (The 6th Taipei Digital Art Festival, international section, 2011) and 6th Queens International (co-curated with Hitomi Iwasaki, Queens Museum, NYC, 2013.)

Artist 

Cheong Kah Kit

Cheong Kah Kit is a visual artist based in Singapore. He graduated from Umeå Academy of Fine Art, Sweden in 2008. Kah Kit was affiliated with p-10, a Singapore independent curatorial team (2004-2006). In 2016, he co-founded Peninsular, an artist studio / project space in Singapore. Operating in-between the spaces of production and exhibition, Peninsular seeks intimate dialogue in meaning-making and artistic subjectivity between objects and viewers. He is also currently developing an oral history project with Singapore artists, curators, art historians and administrators. Kah Kit was Manager for Research at NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore between 2016-2018. Prior to that, he was Reference Art Librarian at the Lee Kong Chian Reference Library, National Library Singapore (2009-2015).

Artist-in-Residence 

chi too

Malaysian artist chi too (b. 1981, Malaysia) moves across the mediums of film, music, performance, installations, sculptures, and photography. Shifting between the personal and the political, the public and the private, his performances and artworks touch upon a large spectrum of issues often with humor and a playful attitude. He has participated in several exhibitions in Malaysia, Japan, and Singapore, including Art Next Door, an exhibition about the shared heritage of Singapore and Malaysia held at White Box, Publika, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (2015) and the 2013 Singapore Biennale If the World Changed. In 2011 and 2012, he received the prestigious Asian Public Intellectuals Fellowship (API) from The Nippon Foundation.

 

Jeremy Chia

Jeremy Chia (Singapore) is a Researcher at Asian Urban Lab and AA Asia, Singapore.

 

Jungmin Choi

Jungmin Choi is a campaigner and nonviolence trainer at World Without War, Seoul, an organisation that supports conscientious objectors. She also works at My Sister’s Place, an organisation that assists Korean and migrant women who live and work near US military bases in South Korea.

Jungmin Choi is a campaigner and nonviolence trainer at World Without War, Seoul, an organisation that supports conscientious objectors. She also works at My Sister’s Place, an organisation that assists Korean and migrant women who live and work near US military bases in South Korea.

Curator-in-Residence 

Binna Choi

Binna Choi (b. 1977, South Korea) is Director of Casco – Office for Art, Design and Theory, Netherlands where she employs art and art institutional practice as a way to build a (micro) society in tandem with social movements. At Casco she has conceived and co-developed numerous long-term projects such as Composing the Commons (2013-2015) and Grand Domestic Revolution (2009/2010-2013). Her most recent curatorial projects include the three-day seminar Cultivate or Revolutionize? Life Between Apartment and Farmland (with Nikita Choi) at Times Museum, Guangzhou, China (2014); the summer school and exhibition Group Affinity (with Bart van der Heide, 2011) at Kunstverein Münich, Munich, Germany; the 11th Gwangju Biennale, The Eighth Climate (What Does Art Do?), Gwangju, South Korea (2016). As part of her practice, she also engages with writing, editing, publishing, and contributes to discursive platforms with lectures, discussions, and workshops. Choi has been a faculty member at the Dutch Art Institute/ Masters of Fine Arts Programme in Arnhem, Netherlands.

Artist 

Chok Si Xuan

The artistic practice of Chok Si Xuan (b. 1998, Singapore) is driven by a deep fascination for the complex relations that enmesh technology in the everyday. Exploring ways in which technology, machines, and industrial materials shape contemporary subjectivities and corporealities, her growing body of work features composite sculptures and kinetic installations that coalesce odd circuitries, feedback systems, found electronics, and material components of common technological devices. She is currently pursuing a degree in electronics engineering to gain a deeper understanding of the material nature of electronics and electricity. Her work has been shown in and commissioned by institutions such as ArtScience Museum (2024), Singapore Art Museum and Esplanade (both 2023) as well as independent art spaces in Singapore.

Image: Portrait of Chok Si Xuan. Photo by Kee Ya Ting. Courtesy NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore.

Artist-in-Residence 

Heman Chong

Heman Chong is an artist, curator, and writer. His work interrogates the many functions of the production of narratives in our everyday lives. Between September 2016 and February 2017, Chong was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore where, together with Renée Staal, he launched the long-term project The Library of Unread Books—a reference library made up of donated books that are unread by their previous owners. For the duration of his residency, The Library was open to public every Friday, from 12.00 pm to 12.00 am, in the artist’s studio space.

Artist 

Doryun Chong

Doryun Chong is the inaugural Chief Curator at M+, Hong Kong since September 2013. He oversees all curatorial activities, including exhibitions and symposia, acquisitions for the collection, as well as learning and interpretation programs. Previously Chong was associate curator of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA, where he organised contemporary exhibitions and acquired works for the museum’s collection. At MoMA, he organised Bruce Nauman: Days (2010) and Projects 94: Henrik Olesen (2011), and Tokyo 1955–1970: A New Avant-Garde (2012). Prior to his appointment at MoMA in 2009, Chong was a curator in the Visual Arts department at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. He has also curated or coordinated exhibitions at venues including REDCAT, Los Angeles; the 2006 Busan Biennale, and the Korean Pavilion at the 2001 Venice Biennale. Chong co-edited From Postwar to Postmodern, Art in Japan, 1945–1989: Primary Documents (2013), the first anthology in English of critical documents in the histories of postwar Japanese art, design, and architecture. His writings have appeared in numerous art journals, museum and biennale publications. Doryun Chong is the recipient of the first ICI Gerrit Lansing Independent Vision Award in 2010 and he has served on numerous prize juries, including recently the 2015 Hugo Boss Prize, Absolut Art Award, and Contemporary Chinese Art Award.

Artist-in-Residence 

Chris Chong Chan Fui

Drawing from both social and natural sciences, the research of Chris Chong (b. 1972, Malaysia) is distinctly trans-disciplinary. He works across multiple mediums from moving images, photography and installations to printmaking. His works have been exhibited internationally at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, US; Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France; EYE Film Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands; Austrian Museum of Applied Art, Vienna, Austria; and Singapore Art Museum. His films garnered critical acclaim in various festivals including Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight, BFI London Film Festival, and Wavelengths in Toronto. Most recently, Chong has been an artist-in-residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts, in Paris, France.

Artist-in-Residence 

Weixin Chong

Weixin Chong‚ (b. 1988, Singapore) work is drawn from fascination with the stylisation of natural elements, digital and organic memory systems and the relationship between surface and perceived superficiality. She sees these concerns as material metaphors for human social relationships and the psychology behind the structures and projections of power, value and desire.

Through printed surfaces and objects, she looks at the constant construction of imposed and composed realities,and reproductions that replace and represent. Interactions of the digital and the organic, and the effects and methods of reproducing and manipulating images across materials, are core to her practice.

 

Thanavi Chotpradit

Thanavi Chotpradit is a lecturer in modern and contemporary Thai art history at the Department of Art History, Faculty of Archaeology, Silpakorn University, Bangkok, Thailand, and a member of the editorial collective of Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia. She completed her PhD in art history from Birkbeck, University of London. She has contributed essays for both Thai and international scholarly journals such as Aan, Fah Diew Kan, and Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture and South East Asia Research, art magazines, as well as exhibition catalogues. In 2015–16, she participated in a cross-regional research programme, “Ambitious Alignments: New Histories of Southeast Asian Art.” Her current research on photographs of the 6th October Massacre (1976) is funded by the Thailand Research Fund (TRF) for 2019–21. Chotpradit’s areas of interest include modern and Thai contemporary art in relation to memory studies, war commemoration, Thai politics, and archival practices.

 

Cynthia Chou

Dr Cynthia Chou (Singapore/United States) is C. Maxwell and Elizabeth M. Stanley Family Chair Professor of Asian Studies and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Iowa, United States. She received her PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom in 1994. Dr Chou is internationally known for her pioneering study of the life and lifestyles, as well as identity and change, of the indigenous Malays in Southeast Asia. She was awarded in 2011 the highest Danish academic degree of dr phil by the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, in recognition of her work on the Orang Suku Laut (sea nomads). Her publications include The Orang Suku Laut of Riau, Indonesia: The Inalienable Gift of Territory (2010) and Indonesian Sea Nomads: Money, Magic, and Fear of the Orang Suku Laut of Riau (2003).

Artist-in-Residence 

Ka Fai Choy

Blurring the boundaries between visual arts, dance, design, and technology, Choy Ka Fai’s multidisciplinary practice employs media such as video, interactive installation, sound, as well as choreography to explore the intangible and the material forces that condition the human body, often focusing on the intersection between technology, memory, and movement. Most recently he has developed Soft Machine, a dance research project, presented in several countries around the world, that maps the lexicon of Asian choreography as well as the possible futures of contemporary dance in Asia.

Choy Ka Fai (b. 1979, Singapore) lives and works in Berlin, Germany. He graduated from the Royal College of Art, London, United Kingdom, with a M.A. in Design Interaction. Between 2014 and 2015 he was in residence at Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Germany, and from 2007 to 2009, he was associate artistic director of TheatreWorks, Singapore. In 2010, he was conferred the Young Artist Award by the National Arts Council, Singapore. His projects have been presented in major festival worldwide, including Sadler’s Wells, London, United Kingdom (2016), ImPulsTanz Festival, Vienna, Austria (2015), and Tanz Im August, Berlin, Germany (2013 ,2015).

 

Bjørn Christiansen

Cofounder of SUPERFLEX (Denmark) in 1993, SUPERFLEX challenges the role of the artist in contemporary society and explores the nature of globalisation and systems of power. SUPERFLEX has gained international recognition for projects and solo exhibitions around the world, including Kunsthalle Basel; the Mori Museum, Tokyo; Van AbbeMuseum, Eindhoven; South London Gallery; and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa. The group has participated in international biennials such as the Gwangju Biennale; Istanbul Biennial; São Paulo Biennial; Shanghai Biennial; and in the Utopia Station at the Venice Biennale. SUPERFLEX is represented in several art institutions, such as MoMA, New York; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen; The Hammer, Los Angeles; Kunsthaus Zurich; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; and Colección Jumex, Mexico City.

Scholar 

Kevin Chua

Kevin Chua is an Associate Professor of Art History at Texas Tech University, USA. He specializes in the history of 18th- and 19th-century European and Southeast Asian art, and has published in a wide range of journals, including Art History, Representations, Art Journal, Third Text, Artforum, and nonsite.

 

Emily Chua Hui Ching

Emily Chua is an anthropologist working at the intersections of “the media,” information technology, global capitalism and authoritarian state politics, in China and in Singapore. She did her PhD in Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. She also holds an MA in History from NUS, and a BA in Studio Art and History from Wesleyan University.

 

Calvin Chua

Calvin Chua is an architect, urbanist, and educator. He leads Spatial Anatomy, a firm that designs spaces, objects, and strategies for cities. In parallel, he serves as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Singapore University of Technology and Design, leading seminars and design studios on adaptation and urban regeneration. He is recognised as one of the leading voices on Korean peninsula issues. For the past eight years, Chua has piloted capacity-building programmes and urban advisory work in the DPRK. His works and opinions have been featured in various news media, including Monocle, Reuters, and CNN. Prior to founding his practice, Chua worked for various architecture and urban-planning firms in Europe and Asia. A registered architect in the UK, he graduated from the Architectural Association School of Architecture.

Artist 

George Chua

George Chuais a multidisciplinary artist based in Singapore. Active since the late nineties, he works in the intersection between the body and sound. He has presented works in the form of physical theatre, performance art and sound installations. As an instigator and explorer of sound, he resists development in a singular style or genre. Apart from his solo work and performances, George’s collaborative interests include live sound improvisation, sound design for film and theatre, as well experimental strategies for soundtracks.

Artist-in-Residence 

Chua Chye Teck

The evocative and subtly layered works of Chua Chye Teck (b. 1974, Singapore) result from prolonged visual and experiential quests. His body of work draws attention to the discarded and the overlooked articulating a reflection on the multiple processes of disappearing that result from the impact of progress and development on the natural environment. His works have been exhibited in venues such as at Singapore Art Museum (2021), Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2020), Jendela Esplanade, Singapore (2018, 2015), Institute of Contemporary Arts, Singapore (2017), Chiang Mai University Art Centre, Thailand (2015), and Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Germany (2010).

Artist-in-Residence 

Kin Chui

Originally trained in film, in his artistic practice Kin Chui (b. 1984, Singapore) inflects collaborative projects, performative interventions, and socially-oriented art initiatives with a sustained interest in emancipatory struggles. Recently, he had a solo exhibition, Station 13010, at Grey Projects, Singapore (2020) and was involved in group exhibitions such as In A Hard Place, Apply Soft Pressure (2018) and Unsettling Times (2017), both at Cemeti-Institute for Art and Society, Yogyakarta, Indonesia. He curated the exhibition Fantasy Islands, Objectifs, Singapore (2017). Chui is an active member of soft/WALL/studs, a Singapore-based collaborative project involving several artists, writers, film makers, art workers, and researchers. He periodically aspires to be a cat.

Artist-in-Residence 

Chun Kaifeng

Singapore artist Chun Kaifeng deals with things that linger in the background of the built environment. His practice is premised upon a close observation of those everyday fixtures and ordinary elements that populate the contemporary urban landscape. Absorbed, reconfigured, and abstracted through a rigorous sculptural language, familiar items such as benches, railings, lightbox signs, and trash bins resurface in the gallery space as objects that, in the artist’s own words, possess a mysterious “sense of insularity”.

Chun Kai Feng (b. 1982) is an artist, curator, exhibition designer, and educator. He graduated from Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts and received a Master from the Glasgow School of Art, United Kingdom. His works have been exhibited extensively in Singapore and have been included in group shows at Frac des Pays de la Loire, France and ifa-Galerien, Berlin, Germany (2015). He received the National Arts Council Young Artist Award in 2015 and has been Artist-in-Residence at Ruangrupa Art Lab, Jakarta, Indonesia and Ateliers Internationaux, Frac des Pays de la Loire, France.

Artist-in-Residence 

Tiffany Chung

Tiffany Chung is an artist and co-founder of Sàn Art, an independent art space in Ho Chi Minh City. Her practice examines conflict, migration, and displacement in relation to history and cultural memory through geographical shifts in countries traumatised by war, human destruction, or natural disaster. Chung was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore between July and September 2014, when she explored the notion of “colonialism as civilising mission” in Singapore and in Indochina and continued The Syria Project, a cartographic research of forced migration in the current refugee crisis.

 

Chung Chee Kit

Chung Chee Kit graduated in Naval Architecture from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom. His career with Keppel Corporation, Straits Steamship and IMC Shipping brought him into contact with ship repair, shipbuilding, offshore engineering, ship management and port development, and he has developed a deep love for all things connected with the sea and ships. Currently retired, he now enjoys painting maritime subjects, and is an advocate of a greater appreciation of maritime heritage in Singapore.

 

Roko Josefa Cinavilkeba

Roko Josefa Cinavilakeba (Fiji) was the son of the then Roko Sau, or the paramount chief of Totoya in Lau. Roko Rusiate Sogotubu grew up in Totoya before moving to the city for further studies. After completing his tertiary studies at the Fiji Institute of Technology, now the Fiji National University, he worked as architectural draftsman before joining the Pacific Blue foundation team. Towards the end of the same year, he was formally installed to his traditional role as the paramount chief of Totoya, one of the acknowledged traditional leaders in the Lau Group. He is also an executive member and trustee of the Fiji Locally Managed Marine Area (FLMMA) and the vice chairman of the Lau Provincial Council.

Artist 

Shirley Clarke

Shirley Clarke was an esteemed figure in the American avant-garde cinema of the 1950s and 1960s, and a pioneer of video in the 1970s. She brought a distinctive aesthetic of “choreography of images” to her work as a trained dancer and manipulated image, time, and space by applying choreographic editing and technical effects as a dramatic, expressive language. She co-founded Film-Makers Cooperative and Film-Makers Distribution Center in New York, which offered alternative distribution methods for independent filmmakers. She was also the winner of an Academy Award for her 1964 documentary film Robert Frost: A Lover’s Quarrel With the World.

Artist-in-Residence 

Tyler Coburn

Tyler Coburn is an artist, writer, and professor based in New York. He received a 2024 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, and his writing has appeared in ArtReview, BOMB, C Magazine, Dis, e-flux journal, frieze, LEAP, Metropolis M, Mousse, and Rhizome. Coburn is the author of four books: I’m that angel (self-published, 2012), Robots Building Robots (CCA Glasgow, 2013), Richard Roe (Sternberg, 2019), and Solitary (Sternberg and Art Sonje Center, 2022). He has presented artwork at such venues as Centre Pompidou, Paris; Bergen Kunsthall; Hayward Gallery, London; Para Site, Hong Kong; and Kunstverein, Munich. He was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore in 2017 and his work has been featured in the Centre’s Free Jazz II. Stagings. Soundings. Readings (2018). 

Artist-in-Residence 

Baptist Coelho

Over the past decade, the practice of Baptist Coelho (b. 1977, India) has revolved around the unspoken narratives and intricate trajectories of the Siachen Glacier, a conflict zone between India and Pakistan. His work also often addresses India’s involvement in the two world wars. Through extended archival and ethnographic research, he engages a variety of subjects to probe the physical, psychological, and emotional implications engendered by conflicts, wars, states of conscriptions, and acts of heroism. His works have been exhibited internationally at JSLH Art Gallery, Sonipat, India (2019); Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2018); and Somerset House, London, United Kingdom (2016) among other venues. Coelho was awarded the Sovereign Asian Art Prize in 2016.

Research Fellow 

Franca Cole

Franca Cole is an archaeologist and conservator whose research focuses on the way humans interact with material culture. Her projects include the deliberate fragmentation of handmade ceramics at Niah Caves, Sarawak; trans-Saharan trade of beads and textiles; and sustainable alternatives to air-conditioning for collections storage in extreme climates. Currently she is a Research Fellow on the Climate Transformation Programme and lectures on Material Culture and Collections Care at NTU. Franca was educated at UCL and University of Cambridge. Before her PhD, she was a freelance archaeological conservator, working at sites and museums in Turkey, Libya, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Peru, Chile, India, Norway, Greece, UAE, Qatar and Malaysia. She has held academic posts at UCL Qatar and the University of Leicester, has lead conservation training programmes at UNESCO Bangkok and HCC Singapore, and was State consultant in conservation and archaeology to Sarawak Museum Department 2020-2026. 

Visiting Researcher 

Madeleine Collie

Madeleine Collie is visiting researcher under the Climate Transformation Programme (2024–2027). Collie is a curator, writer, and researcher who creates platforms for the circulation of creative knowledges engaging with the politics and poetics of plants in contemporary art. She initiated the Food Art Research Network in 2020 as a platform for peer learning and slow, curatorial research. She is co-editor of Earth Ethics: Art, Institutions and Regenerative Practices (Monash University Publishing, 2025), lead editor of a forthcoming volume based on the long-term research exchange Follow the Plants (2023–25), and co-editor of Tastes of Justice: The Aesthetics and Politics of Food in Asia and Australia (Routledge, 2026). She was awarded a PhD in Art History, Theory and Curatorial Practice from Monash University in 2025 and holds an MRes in Curatorial/Knowledge from Goldsmiths, University of London.

Speaker 

Joshua Comaroff

Joshua Comaroff is an academic geographer and designer at Lekker Architects. He studied literature and creative writing at Amherst College before joining the Master of Architecture and Master of Landscape Architecture programmes at Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Comaroff’s doctoral research focused upon the subject of haunted landscapes and urban memory in Singapore. In recent years, he has written about architecture, urbanism, and politics, with an Asian focus, and is the co-author (with Ong Ker-Shing) of Horror In Architecture(2013). In addition to practice, Comaroff teaches at Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD).

Artist-in-Residence 

Sean Connelly

Sean Connelly (b.1984, United States) is an artist, urban ecologist, and architect. His research addresses the role of innovative design in recovering ahupua’a, a traditional Hawaiian spatial configuration. Connelly operates both independently and collaboratively out of his studio practice After Oceanic which pursues projects in the realms of architecture, landscape, and infrastructure. He is also the author and producer of Hawai‚Äòi Futures, a virtual intervention and educational tool for island urbanism. His work has been shown across the United States at the Honolulu Biennale (2017); Honolulu Museum of Art (2015) and Santa Fe Art Institute (2016).

Artist-in-Residence 

Danilo Correale

The practice of Danilo Correale critiques contemporary life and investigates the opacity surrounding complex cultural and economic systems. In recent years, his research revolves around the dichotomy between labour and leisure and the relation between sleep and enforced wakefulness under the neoliberal economic regime. His work has been presented in numerous international group exhibitions and his solo shows include They Will Say I Killed Them, Metropolitan Arts Centre, Belfast, United Kingdom (2019); At Work’s End, Art in General, New York, United States (2017); and Tales of Exhaustion, La Loge, Brussels, Belgium (2016). In 2017, he was awarded both the New York Prize for Italian Young Art and an Associate Research Fellowship at Columbia University.

 

Cosmin Costinas

Cosmin Costinas lives and works in Hong Kong as the Executive Director and Curator of Para/Site Art Space. His curated exhibitions at Para/Site include: A Journal of the Plague Year. Fear, ghosts, rebels. SARS, Leslie and the Hong Kong story (with Inti Guerrero, 2013); It May Be That Beauty Has Strengthened Our Resolve (2013); About Films. Deimantas Narkevicius (2012); Taiping Tianguo: A History of Possible Encounters: Ai Weiwei, Frog King Kwok, Tehching Hsieh, and Martin Wong in New York (with Doryun Chong, 2012); rites, thoughts, notes, sparks, swings, strikes. a hong kong spring (with Venus Lau, 2012); Two Thousand Eleven (2011). He was the Curator of BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, Netherlands (2008-2011), co-curator (with Ekaterina Degot and David Riff) of the 1st Ural Industrial Biennial: Shockworkers of the Mobile Image, Ekaterinburg, 2010, and editor of documenta 12 Magazines, Kassel/Vienna (2005–2007). He co-authored the novel Philip (2007) and has contributed his writing to numerous magazines, books, and exhibition catalogs across the world. Cosmin has taught and lectured at different universities and art academies in Europe and Asia.

 

Amanda Crabtree

Amanda CRABTREE (United Kindgom/France) established artconnexion, an independent non- profit cultural production agency based in Lille in 1994 and joined the organisation full-time in 2001. Prior to this, she worked at the British Council, Paris; Le Fresnoy, Studio national des arts contemporains, Tourcoing; Le Magasin contemporary art centre, Grenoble, and the Centre d’art contemporain of Geneva. She teaches at the University of Lille and directs the Master’s programme in Art and Society with a particular focus on the production of contemporary artworks within the public realm. She has just established a short-course University Diploma entitled Reclaiming Art/Reshaping Democracy based on the protocol of New Patrons public art projects.

Curator-in-Residence 

Alfredo Cramerotti

Alfredo Cramerotti is a cultural entrepreneur, writer, curator, and broadcaster. He is currently Director of MOSTYN, Llandudno (Wales, United Kingdom); Head Curator of APT Global-Artist Pension Trust; and Associate Curator of CCANW (Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World). In recent years, he has curated Sean Scully: Standing on the Edge of the World at the Hong Kong Arts Centre (2018), Shezad Dawood: Leviathan, Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice, Italy (2017), three national pavilions at the Venice Biennale (Mauritius in 2015, Wales and Maldives in 2013), and the biennials Sequences VII, Reykjavík Iceland (2015) and Manifesta 8, Murcia, Spain (2010). He serves as Vice-President of AICA (International Association of Art Critics) and as editor of the Critical Photography Book series. His own publications include Forewords: Hyperimages and Hyperimaging (2018), Unmapping the City: Perspectives of Flatness (2010) and Aesthetic Journalism: How to inform without informing (2009). Cramerotti is also a Doctoral Researcher in Communication Design and Photography at the European Centre for Photography, University of South Wales.

Curator-in-Residence 

Joselina Cruz

Joselina Cruz (b. 1970, PhilippineS) is the Director and Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD), De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde, Manila. She studied art history at the University of the Philippines, and received an M.A. in curating contemporary art from the Royal College of Art, London. Cruz has worked as a curator for the Lopez Memorial Museum in Manila (2001-04) and the Singapore Art Museum (2004–07). She was a curator for the 2nd Singapore Biennale in 2008 and one of the networking curators for the 13th Jakarta Biennale in 2009. Cruz was curator-in-charge of the Tàpies retrospective at the Singapore Art Museum (2005), co-curated All the Best: The Deutsche Bank Collection and Zaha Hadid, Singapore Art Museum (2006), and curated You Are Not a Tourist for Curating Lab, Singapore (part of the Singapore Art Show 2007) and Creative Index: An Exhibition in Manila, Philippines (2010) for the 10th Regional Anniversary of the Nippon Foundation’s Asian Public Intellectuals Fellowship program. She also writes essays, reviews, criticism, and art commentary.

Commercial Partner 

Cubes Magazine

 

Daniel Mudie Cunningham

Daniel Mudie CUNNINGHAM (Australia) is Director of Programs at Carriageworks in Sydney, Australia. He has held curatorial roles at Artbank and Hazelhurst Regional Gallery, and academic positions at Western Sydney University, where he completed his doctorate in cultural studies in 2004. At Carriageworks he is currently leading the curatorial delivery of a major public art strategy tied to the redevelopment of South Eveleigh in Sydney. Cunningham is a widely published academic and arts writer and has authored numerous artist monographs and edited publications, including the magazine Sturgeon (2013–16).

Artist-in-Residence 

Anna Daneri

Anna Daneri is co-founder and adjunct curator of Peep-Hole, collaborator with Fondazione Meru (for which she initiated the Meru Art*Science Award), and editor of Peep-Hole Sheet. In 2015 she was the production manager for They Come to Us without a Word by Joan Jonas for the U.S. Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale. She has worked on international exhibitions including Food (Geneva, 2012), The Mediterranean Approach (Venice/Marseille/Sao Paolo, 2011), The Inadequate (project by Dora Garcìa for the 54th Venice Biennale), Collateral (Milan/Sao Paolo, 2008), Joan Jonas – My Theater (Trento, 2007). She collaborated with Art for the World (1996-2013) and with Fondazione Antonio Ratti (1995-2010), and was professor of Contemporary Art Phenomenology at the Accademia Carrara di Belle Arti in Bergamo (2003 – 2007).

 

Hong Phuc Dang

Hong Phuc Dang (Vietnam) is Founder of FOSSASIA, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

Artist-in-Residence 

Fyerool Darma

Fyerool Darma (b. 1987, Singapore) interrogates and complicates the cultural consumption of history and myth in relation to contemporary markers of identity and class. His artefacts are based on an extensive visual vocabulary drawn from popular culture, literature, archives, the internet, and his own life. Recent solo exhibitions include Sunny, your smile ease the pain, Yeo Workshop, Singapore (2019) and the long-term research project After Ballads, NUS Museum, Singapore (2017-18).He has exhibited in group exhibitions such as As the West Slept, Silver Art Projects, New York, United States; 900mdpl: Ghosts of a Thousand Conversations, Kaliurang, Indonesia; Lost and found: imagining new worlds, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Singapore (all 2019), and An Atlas of Mirrors, Singapore Biennale (2016).

Artist 

Ade Darmawan

Ade Darmawan lives and works in Jakarta as an artist, curator, and director of the artist collective ruangrupa. He studied at the Graphic Art Department at the Indonesia Art Institute, and was a resident at the Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam (1998–2000). He works with installation, objects, drawing, digital print, and video. Recently he has had solo exhibitions at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2016) and Portikus, Frankfurt (2015). Darmawan participated in the Gwangju and Singapore Biennales (both 2016), and was a curatorial collaborator in Condition Report (2017); Media Art Kitchen (2013); and Riverscape in-flux (2012). ruangrupa, an artist collective co-founded in 2000 with five other artists in Jakarta, focuses on visual arts and its relation with the social cultural context, particularly in urban environments. The collective has exhibited at the São Paulo Biennale (2014); Asia Pacific Triennial, Brisbane (2012); Istanbul Biennale (2005); and Gwangju Biennale (2002), among others. They were also curators of the 2016 Sonsbeek International. Darmawan was a member of the Jakarta Arts Council (2006–09) and became the Artistic Director of the Jakarta Biennale in 2009. Since 2013, he is executive director of the Jakarta Biennale.

Collaborator 

Sherna Dastur

Sherna Dastur (born 1971, lives in New Delhi, India) is a graphic designer and filmmaker. Her film Manjuben Truck Driver (2002) has been screened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, United States, and the International Documentary Film Festival, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, among several other festivals. Her recent design work includes Project Cinema City (eds. Madhusree Dut ta, Kaushik Bhaumik, and Rohan Shivkumar, Tulika Books, 2013), Trace Retrace: Paintings, Nilima Sheikh (ed. Kumkum Sangari, Tulika Books, 2013), and The Khoj Book, 1997–2007: Contemporary Art Practice in India (ed. Pooja Sood, Harper Collins, 2010). She has also worked on a range of interventions for social campaigns and films on issues of fundamentalism and women’s rights. She has taught the foundation course of colour and form as visiting faculty at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, India, also her alma mater. Dastur has been collaborating on The Sovereign Forest since 2011, experimenting with making paper and the handmade books, and designing the installation as it travels and evolves.

Curator-in-Residence 

Catherine David

Catherine DAVID (France) is the Deputy Director of the Musée National d’Art Moderne at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. From 1982 to 1990, David was curator at the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and from 1990 to 1994 she was curator at the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris. From 1994 to 1997, David served as Artistic Director for documenta X in Kassel (1997). Since 1998, she has been director of the long-term project Contemporary Arab Representations, which began at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona. Between 2002 and 2004, David was director of the Witte de With Center of Contemporary Art in Rotterdam. In 2016, David curated Reframing Modernism at the National Gallery Singapore, which brought together over 200 iconic works from the collections of the National Gallery Singapore and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Artist-in-Residence 

Lucy Davis

Artist and writer Lucy Davis’ (b. 1970, United Kingdom) interdisciplinary practice examines notions of nature in art and visual culture, science and indigenous knowledge, natural histories, materiality and urban memory primarily but not exclusively in Southeast Asia. Most notably, Davis is the founder of The Migrant Ecologies Project – the product of her longstanding interest in the mid-twentieth century Singapore Modern Woodcut movement which later informed a six-year long, material-led cumulative series of investigations under the auspices of The Migrant Ecologies Project. Davis was also the founding editor of the Singapore critical publication series focas: Forum on Contemporary Art & Society from 2000-2007. She was previously Assistant Professor at School of Art, Design and Media (ADM) at Nanyang Technological University.

 

Kat Davis

Kat Davis is the Assitant Director at TBA21-Academy.

Artist 

Jonathas de Andrade

Jonathas de Andrade is one of the most promising Brazilian artists of his generation. Over the last decade, he has developed works in photography, video, and installation that stem from observations of everyday life in Brazil and what he regards as its “urgencies and discomforts.” He considers how the Brazilian national identity and labour conditions have been constructed in the midst of colonialism and slavery, and reinterprets the methodologies of education and social sciences to question underlying assumptions. De Andrade studied communications at Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Brazil, and has had solo exhibitions worldwide.

Artist-in-Residence 

Manon de Boer

Personal narration and/or musical interpretation define both the method and the subject of Manon de Boer’s practice. Working primarily with the moving image, over twenty years she has composed a series of “portrait films” that explore the intimate relationship between language, memory, sound, and time while continuously interrogating truth claims, biographical narratives, and the medium of film itself.

Manon de Boer (b. 1966) is a Dutch artist based in Brussels. She completed her artistic education at the Akademie Van Beeldende Kunsten, Rotterdam, and at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam, Netherlands. Her work has received wide international recognition. Her most recent solo shows include presentations at Secession, Vienna, Austria (2016), Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands (2013), Philadelphia Museum of Art, United States (2012); Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, United States (2011).

Artist 

De Rijke / De Rooij

Jeroen de Rijke and Willem de Rooij were a collaborative artist duo creating video installations, performances, TV programmes and 16mm film shorts. They met while attending the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam and worked together from 1994 until de Rijke’s passing in 2006. They chose film as a medium to engage their audience for a longer period and with greater intensity. An efficient use of the inherent time and light qualities of the film medium in their static camera work gives their subjects an almost meditational quality. Their work has been shown worldwide, most notably at the 2005 Venice Biennale. They were also nominated for the 2005 Hugo Boss Prize.

 

Kenneth Dean

Professor Kenneth Dean is Professor, Head of the Department of Chinese Studies, and Senior Researcher at the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore (NUS). He received his PhD from Stanford University and his current research concerns transnational trust and temple networks linking Singapore Chinese temples to Southeast China and Southeast Asia. Professor Dean contributed to NTU CCA Singapore’s public programming in March 2016 when he conducted an Exhibition (de)Tour as part of Joan Jonas’s exhibition: They Come to Us without a Word.

Artist-in-Residence 

Irina Botea Bucan & Jon Dean

Irina Botea Bucan (b. 1970, Romania) and Jon Dean (b. 1966, United Kingdom) have been working together since 2013. Their artistic collaboration unfolds through filmmaking enquiries premised on the close scrutiny of and active engagement with specific social contexts. Over the years, they developed a methodology based on the symbiotic triangulation of their roles as artists-educators-researchers. Bucan and Dean share an interest in socio-political dynamics, the de-centralisation of discourses, and they are committed to nurturing cultural differentiation outside hegemonic value systems. Their works have been shown internationally at several venues including Centre for Contemporary Art, Torun, Poland (2018); National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest, Romania (2017); The Phillips Museum of Art, Lancaster, United States (2017), and International Film Festival Rotterdam, Netherlands (2015) among others.

Associate Professor 

Matthew Dearth

Matthew Dearth is an Associate Professor of Finance (Practice) and Co-Director of the Centre for Sustainable Finance at the Nanyang Business School, NTU. Before transitioning to academia full time, Dr. Dearth was Managing Director at Silvercrest Asset Management (Singapore).  Earlier, his 30+ years of finance industry experience included leadership roles at Marshall Wace, Goldman Sachs, and Booz Allen & Hamilton. He recently published Sustainable Finance for Returns and Impact (Wiley, 2026) and co-organised the 2025 NTU Decarbonisation Forum on the challenges of decarbonising the building and textiles industries. He received his PhD (General Management) from Singapore Management University, MBA from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and BS (Operations Research) from Princeton University. 

 

Ann Demeester

Ann Demeester is the Director of Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, Netherlands. She was appointed Manager of Art and Urban Development for Amsterdam City Council, co-curated the 10th Baltic Triennial, Vilnius, Lithuania (2009) and was previously the Director of De Appel Arts Centre and W139, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Demeester was part of the editorial team of the literary journals, Yang, A Prior Magazine and F.R. David, and wrote catalogue texts on the work of Luc Tuymans, Michael Borremans, Jennifer Tee, Richard Hawkins, Mika Rottenberg and Bjarne Melgaard, amongst others.

 

Seth Denizen

Seth Denizen is a landscape architect trained in evolutionary ecology and is currently completing a PhD in Geography at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley). His doctoral research is currently investigating the vertical geopolitics of urban soil in Mexico City, where he is working with geologists and systems ecologists to characterise the material complexities and political forces that shape the distribution of geological risk in Distrito Federal’s urban periphery. In 2014 he was the recipient of a SEED-fund grant supporting his research “Mapping the Microbiome of Hong Kong”, which is an ongoing collaboration between the Faculty of Architecture and the Faculty of Science at the University of Hong Kong to investigate the genetic diversity of transportation infrastructure. In 2013, Denizen took 1st prize in an international information design competition: OUT OF BALANCE – CRITIQUE OF THE PRESENT by ARCH+ Journal for Architecture and Urban Design and the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation.

Scholar 

Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida was a French semiotic theorist and philosopher. Celebrated as the founder of deconstructionist thought, Derrida examined and rejected traditional binary forms of analysis, asserting that duality is in fact always hierarchical. He wrote over forty books, which include his seminal Speech and Phenomena and Writing and Difference, both from 1967. Derrida applied his theory of deconstruction to works in the philosophy of art, while also demonstrating how artworks themselves could be deconstructive of historical discourses on art. His writings on visual arts include his explorations of representation in The Truth in Painting (1978) and later in Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins (1993). Throughout his work, Derrida expressed strong interest in the radicality of Artaud’s theater, aligning the practice of deconstruction with Artaud’s projected new theater.

Artist 

DESIGN EARTH

DESIGN EARTH was founded by Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy in 2011. The design research practice deploys the speculative project—drawing and narrative—to make public the climate crisis. Their work has been featured internationally—most recently at Venice Biennale, Bauhaus Museum Dessau, SFMOMA, Milano Triennale—and is in the New York Museum of Modern Art permanent collection. Ghosn and Jazairy are authors of Geographies of Trash (2015); Geostories: Another Architecture for the Environment (3rd ed. 2022), The Planet After Geoengineering (2021) and Climate Inheritance (2023). DESIGN EARTH has been recognized with several awards, including United States Artist Fellowship, Architectural League Prize for Young Architects + Designers, Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture Faculty Design Awards, and Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts Awards. 

Rania Ghosn (Beirut, b. 1977) is Associate Professor and Director of the Master of Science in Architecture Studies (SMArchS) in Urbanism at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. El Hadi Jazairy (Algeria, b. 1970) is Associate Professor of Architecture and Director of Master of Urban Design degree program at the University of Michigan.

Artist 

Isabelle Desjeux

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.

Artist-in-Residence 

Dharma

Dharma (b. 1969, Malaysia/Singapore) is the guitarist from The Observatory and presents his work as a solo improviser and in different configurations with other improvisers. Having toured Europe and Asia, The Resistance is his last solo work released in 2019 as a split cassette with Wukir Suryadi from Senyawa. The approach in his playing incorporates extended techniques with various preparations and effects, resulting in percussive and textural sonics that go beyond what one would expect of the instrument.

Scholar 

Nikita Dhawan

Nikita Dhawan holds the Chair in Political Theory and History of Ideas at the Technical University Dresden. Her research and teaching focuses on global justice, human rights, democracy and decolonization. She received the Käthe Leichter Award in 2017 for outstanding achievements in the pursuit of women’s and gender studies and in support of the women’s movement and the achievement of gender equality. Selected publications include: Impossible Speech: On the Politics of Silence and Violence (2007); Reimagining the State: Theoretical Challenges and Transformative Possibilities (ed., 2019); Rescuing the Enlightenment from the Europeans: Critical Theories of Decolonization (forthcoming, Duke University Press). In 2023, she was awarded the Gerda Henkel Visiting Professorship at Stanford University and the Thomas Mann Fellowship, Los Angeles.

Image courtesy Technical University Dresden. 

Curator-in-Residence 

Corinne Diserens

Corinne Diserens (b. 1960, France) is guest curator for the Taipei Biennial 2016. She currently serves as director of the ERG, higher art and research academy in Brussels, Belgium. Some of her notable previous positions include director and chief curator at the Museion in Bolzano, Italy (2007-2008), Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nantes, France (2003-2006), Les Musées de Marseille in Marseille, France (1996-1999), curator at IVAM in Valencia, Spain (1989-1993), and art director at the 1993 Tyne International Biennial sponsored by the Arts Council of Great Britain.

Artist 

Nina Djekić

Nina Djekić (Ljubljana, 1989), based in Ljubljana and Singapore, graduated with a BA in choreography from School for New Dance Development SNDO and an MFA from Sandberg Instituut, both in Amsterdam.

Her work revolves around choreographic notions in exhibitionary settings. It looks at the psycho-somatic engagements between the artwork and the visitor as well as the affect the uncanny presence of artworks has on the relationship between the visitors themselves. It is important to her practice to think of those encounters as processual and time bound. Her latest work focuses on the sensuality of the gaze and the reconsideration of vision as felt perception.

Scholar 

María do Mar Castro Varela

María do Mar Castro Varela is Professor of Education and Social Work at the Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences in Berlin, with a focus on gender studies. She holds a double degree in Psychology and Education and a PhD in Political Science. She was Thomas Mann House Fellow in Los Angeles (2023), Sir Peter Ustinov Visiting Professor at the Institute of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna (2021/2022), and Senior Fellow at the Institute for the Science of Man (IWM) in Vienna (2016). Her current research focuses on issues of ethics, protest, emancipation, and knowledge production. Selected publications (in German) include: Friendship. Triad of a Political Practice (2023), Post/pandemic Life: A New Theory of Fragility (2021), Untimely Utopias. Migrant Women Between Self-Invention and Learned Hope (2007).

Image courtesy the María do Mar Castro Varela. 

Artist 

Sean Dockray

Sean Dockray (Australia) is an artist, writer, and programmer whose work explores the politics of technology, with a particular emphasis on artificial intelligences and the algorithmic web. He is also the founding director of the Los Angeles non-profit Telic Arts Exchange, and initiator of knowledge-sharing platforms, The Public School and Aaaaarg.

Institutional Partner 

dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany

 

Yvonne P. Doderer

Dr Yvonne P. Doderer is Professor for Gender & Cultural Studies at the University of Applied Sciences in Düsseldorf, and runs the Office for Transdisciplinary Research & Cultural Production. Her work focuses on the linkage of urbanism, gender, and contemporary art. Her most recent publication is Shining Cities. Gender and Other Issues in Urban Development of the Twenty-First Century (2017). Doderer was Visiting Research Fellow at NTU CCA Singapore in 2014, and returned in 2017 as a participant of the Centre’s public summit Cities for People NTU CCA Ideas Fest 2016/17.

Artist 

Christa Donner

Christa Donner (United States) is an artist, writer, and organiser who investigates anatomy and its metaphors. Donner employs a range of artistic media in her creative research, including drawing, audio performance, large-scale installations and small-press publications that create multi-layered, community-centred but intimate projects. Her creative research focuses on the human and non-human body as a site for conflict and adaptation: from the internal activities of the microbiome to the creative potentials of care work and community. She is currently an adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Contemporary Practices at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Artist 

Heri Dono

Heri Dono is one of Indonesia’s most internationally renowned artists. Since graduating in the late 1980s his international profile has increased through a series of exhibitions and residencies around the world. Heri Dono is perhaps best known through his installations which are heavily influenced by, and the result of experimenting with, the most popular Javanese folk theater: wayang. Wayang performances combine a number of artistic and extra-artistic elements––visual arts, singing, music, storytelling, mythological promotion of a philosophy of life, social criticisms, and humour. Dono combines these elements to form multimedia performances, which often use the physical space of the performance as well as interactions with the audience, in the process revitalising the traditional art so profoundly rooted in Indonesia. References to wayang are also integral to Heri Dono’s paintings: from out of wild deformations and free fantasies emerge characters from the traditional wayang stories, which are mixed together with his profound knowledge of children’s cartoons, animation films, and comics. The resulting canvases are populated by astonishing characters and strange juxtapositions, the fantastic and absurd joined by the everyday to create new and vibrant stories in which he inserts his own critical remarks on socio-political issues both in Indonesia and abroad.

Artist 

Stan Douglas

Photographer and filmmaker Stan Douglas has, since the late 1980’s, examined complex intersections of narrative, fact and fiction, while scrutinising the constructs of the media he employs and their influence on our understanding of reality. His interest in the social implementation of Western ideas of progress, particularly utopian philosophies, is located in their often divisive political and economic effects. Douglas’s work is often characterised by extensive research and an interrogation of the structural possibilities of film and video, in concert with intricately developed narratives.

Douglas was recently awarded the Scotiabank Photography Award (2013) and the Infinity Award by the International Center of Photography, New York (2012). His work has been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions at prominent institutions worldwide, including: the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minnesota (2012); MOCA, Los Angeles (2012); the Power Plant, Toronto (2011); the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010); the International Center of Photography, New York (2008), Staatsgalerie and Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart (2007); and documentas 11, 10, 9 (2002, 1997, 1992).

Stan Douglas was born in Vancouver, Canada in 1960, where he lives and work.

Artist 

Ines Doujak

Ines Doujak is an artist, researcher, and writer, who teaches in the areas of visual culture and material aesthetics with a queer-feminist, anti-racist, anti-colonial focus. Doujak received two research grants from the Austrian Science Fund: Loomshuttles, Warpaths (2010–18), a study of textiles to investigate their global history characterised by cultural, class, and gender conflict; and Utopian Pulse: Flares in the Darkroom (2013–15). She studied at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna (1988–93). Selected exhibitions include Actually, the Dead are not Dead, Bergen Assembly (2019); Possibilities for an Non-Alienated Life, Kochi Muziris Biennale, Kerala (2018); A Beast, a God, and a Line, Dhaka Art Summit, Para Site, Hong Kong, TS1 Yangon, and Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2018); Arte para pensar la nueva razón del mundo, Muntref, Buenos Aires (2017); The Conundrum of Imagination, Leopold Museum, Vienna (2017); Not Dressed for Conquering, Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart (2016); The Beast and the Sovereign, MACBA, Barcelona (2015); Ape Culture, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2015); The School of Kyiv, Kyiv Biennial (2015); Universes in Universe, São Paulo Biennial (2014); Garden of Learning, Busan Biennale (2012); The Potosi Principle, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2010); and Documenta 12, Kassel (2007).

Artist 

Iris Dressler

Iris Dressler (Germany) is with Hans D. Christ the director of the Württembergischer Kunstverein (WKV) in Stuttgart since 2005. One of her focuses is on the exploration of collaborative, transcultural and transdisciplinary practices of curating. In 2019 Dressler and Christ were the artistic directors of the Bergen Assmebly, a triennial for contemporary arts in Norway. At the Kunstverein she presented solo exhibitions of artists such as Lorenza Böttner (curated by Paul B. Preciado), Imogen Stidworthy (2018), Alexander Kluge (2020 and 2017), Ines Doujak (2016), Pedro G. Romero (2012), Teresa Burga (2011, curated by Miguel Lopez and Emilio Tarazona), Michaël Borremans (2011), Daniel G. Andújar (2008), Anna Oppermann (2007, curated by Ute Vorkoeper), or Stan Douglas (2007). Recent group exhibitions include Actually, the Dead Are Not Dead (since 2019 in Bergen and Stuttgart with various constellations of co-curators), 50 Years after 50 Year of the Bauhaus (2018), Tito’s Bunker (2017, with Biennial of Contemporary Art Sarajevo, at Tito’s Bunker in Konjic and WKV), The Beast and the Sovereign (2016, with MACBA, Paul B. Preciado and Valentín Roma with at WKV and MACBA) or Acts of Voicing (2012, with a core group of twelve cocurators). Dressler teaches regularly at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Stuttgart and elsewhere. She largely published texts on contemporary art and its political and theoretical contexts. In 1996 she founded with Hans D. Christ the Hartware Medienkunstverein, which they directed till 2004.

Scholar 

Regis Durand

Regis Durand is an art critic and independent curator based in Paris. He has served as the artistic director of the Printemps de Cahors Festival, director of the Centre National de la Photographie, and director of the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris. He was written extensively on contemporary art, with a focus on the practice of photography, and has co-authored monographs on the work of Cindy Sherman, Thomas Demand, and Orlan, among others.

Artist-in-Residence 

Sam Durant

Sam Durant is an artist and Lecturer at the California Institute of the Arts, United States. Often referencing American history, his work explores the varying relationships between culture and politics, engaging subjects as diverse as the civil-rights movement, southern rock music, and modernism. Between July and August 2014, Durant was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore where he researched into the 1955 Bandung conference and its subsequent non-aligned movement.

Research Associate 

Alakesh Dutta

Alakesh Dutta is a research associate and PHD student at the Department of Architecture at the National University of Singapore. He also has over 11 years of industry experience working as an architect in Singapore and India. His projects include the NUS SDE4 Net-Zero Energy Building, Urban Farming projects such as the Vertical Fish Farm in Singapore, Integrated Industrial Master Plans, such as the Jurong Innovation District, and urban design projects, such as the Orchard Road rejuvenation plan.   

Institutional Partner 

Economic Development Board

Collaborator 

Edible Garden City

Edible Garden City (Singapore) is dedicated to the “Grow Your Own Food” movement in land-scarce and import-dependent Singapore, advocating the use of under-utilised urban spaces such as rooftops and sidewalks for growing food. With more than 15 years of farming and construction experience, Edible Garden City designs, builds, and maintains food gardens in tropical urban Singapore, using sustainable growing methods, resource recycling, and waste minimisation.

Institutional Partner 

Embassy of France

Artist 

Rosalia Namsai Engchuan

Rosalia Namsai Engchuan (Germany/Thailand) is a social anthropologist and filmmaker based between Berlin and Southeast Asia. Her PhD research at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany looks at practices of community filmmaking in Indonesia, investigating how cinematic epistemologies produce and socialize knowledges. Her latest video work Complicated Happiness is a speculative research, pivoting around the Thai Park in Berlin, that aims to undo the underlying structures of colonialism, race, gender and class that shape the production of our worlds. Rosalia curates screenings and dialogical encounters with a focus on independent and experimental works from locales of the ‘epistemological’ South, often in collaboration with the Berlin based collective un.thai.tled and she is the 2021 Goethe-Institut fellow at Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin.

 

Vladimir Erofeev

Vladimir Erofeev was a pioneer of expedition cinema in the Soviet Union, advocating for increased attention and investment in edifying non-fiction films made to win the interest of broad audiences. In summer 1927, a trek to the mountainous Pamir region, known as the “Roof of the World,” in present-day Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, was organised by the Sovkino studio in co-operation with the Geological Committee. Erofeev worked with prominent geologist Dmitrii Nalivkin and ethnographer Mikhail Andreyev, who had both extensively researched the area and contributed to the planning for the crew’s journey. The film starts off in Moscow, the symbolic centre of the new empire, leading through Samara and Orenburg, to Tashkent and Osh, and further on to the Pamir Mountains of Central Asia. The film features the expedition’s progress through crossing mountain rivers, traversing snowy passes and descending into valleys in bloom, while at the same time recording the daily practices of the Krygz nomads, the religious customs of a Tajik village community, finally entering Dushanbe, observing the city life in the capital of Soviet Tajikistan. The final result demonstrates a portrait of a rich and vibrant region in which the interaction of various cultures have not yet fully streamlined to the requirements of the uniformed all-Soviet world.

 

Jason Farago

Jason Farago (United States) is an art critic for the New York Times. He reviews exhibitions in New York and abroad, with a focus on global approaches to art history. From 2015 to 2018 he edited Even, an art magazine he co-founded, whose ten issues are collected in the anthology Out of Practice. He has also been a regular contributor to the Guardian, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Artforum, and Frieze. Farago studied art history at Yale University and at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. In 2017 he was awarded the inaugural Rabkin Prize for art criticism.

Artist 

Didier Faustino

Didier Faustino’s work is concerned with the physical Here and Now, with the body at its center. Far from being confined in any of the traditional territories of Art or Architecture, he invites us to operate freely and construct our world starting from the presence of our individual bodies in the world. His subversive stand invites us to reconsider the boundaries of the private and public, of the personal and communal.

 

Paul Feigelfeld

Paul Feigelfeld is the Data and Research Architect at TBA21-Academy.

 

Lukas Feireiss

Lukas Feireiss (Germany) works as curator, writer, art director, and educator in the international mediation of contemporary cultural reflexivity beyond disciplinary boundaries. He attained his graduate education in Comparative Religious Studes, Philosophy and Ethnology. Feireiss’ Berlin-based creative practice Studio Lukas Feireiss aims at the critical cut-up and playful re-evaluation of creative and intellectual production modes and the diverse socio-cultural and medial conditions. He is author and editor of numerous books, and curator of manifold exhibitions. Feireiss has lectured and taught at various universities worldwide, and is Head of the new Masters Programme Radical Cut-Up at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam. With the publisher Gestalte, Feireiss had edited numerous volumes, including Imagine Architecutre: Aristic Visions of the Urban Real (2014), Utopia Forever: VIsions of Architecutre and Urbanism (2011), and Architecture of Change 1 &2: Sustainability and Humanity in the Built Environment (2008 and 2009).

 

Jakob Fenger

Cofounder of SUPERFLEX (Denmark) in 1993, SUPERFLEX challenges the role of the artist in contemporary society and explores the nature of globalisation and systems of power. SUPERFLEX has gained international recognition for projects and solo exhibitions around the world, including Kunsthalle Basel; the Mori Museum, Tokyo; Van AbbeMuseum, Eindhoven; South London Gallery; and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa. The group has participated in international biennials such as the Gwangju Biennale; Istanbul Biennial; São Paulo Biennial; Shanghai Biennial; and in the Utopia Station at the Venice Biennale. SUPERFLEX is represented in several art institutions, such as MoMA, New York; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen; The Hammer, Los Angeles; Kunsthaus Zurich; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; and Colección Jumex, Mexico City.

Scholar 

Josette Féral

Josette Féral is a professor in the Drama Department of the Université du Québec à Montréal, where she has taught since 1981. She was vice president of the International Federation for Theatre Research from 1995 until 1999 and its president from 1999 to 2003. Her publications include Teatro, teoría y práctica: Más allá de las fronteras; Mise en scène et Jeu de l’acteur, volumes I and II, which deal with many European as well as North American stage directors; Rencontres avec Ariane Mnouchkine (1995) and Trajectoires du Soleil (1999) on Mnouchkine’s work; and La culture contre l’art: Essai d’économie politique du théâtre (1990).

Research Fellow 

Jesko Fezer

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

Staff 

Shona Findlay

Shona Mei Findlay (Singapore, 1989) is Curatorial Assistant Residencies of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (NTU CCA Singapore), a contemporary art research centre of Nanyang Technological University (NTU). Since its inauguration in January 2014, the Residencies Programme has brought together artists, curators and writers in a research driven residency with particular emphasis on artists from Singapore and Southeast Asia alongside artists from the rest of the world. She was project assistant for No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia, UBS Guggenheim Global Art Initiative’s MAP exhibition (2014) and co-curated the Artist Resource Platform: Bring it to Life (2015), both at NTU CCA Singapore. Findlay was a participant in the inaugural Workshop for Emerging Professionals of Para Site in Hong Kong (2015) and received her BA in Fine Art and History of Art from Goldsmiths College, London (2007). In the curriculum year 2016-17 she participates in the De Appel Curatorial Programme.

Artist 

Michael M.J. Fischer

Professor Michael M.J. Fischer is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Lecturer in Global Health and Social Medicine at the Harvard Medical School; and a Principal Investigator in the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) International Design Center. He was the inaugural Ngee Ann Kongsi Visiting Professor at Tembusu College, National University of Singapore (NUS). Professor Fischer is the author of “Ethnography for Aging Societies: Dignity, Cultural Genres, and Singapore’s Imagined Futures”, American Ethnologist (April 2015) and articles on Singapore’s life science initiative (Biopolis). He has also authored three books on Iran, and three on social theory including Anthropology as Cultural Critique (with George Marcus, 1996), Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice (2003), and Anthropological Futures (2009). In the arts, he has authored pieces with psychiatrist- print-maker Eric Avery, painter Parviz Yashar, and most recently a catalogue essay with artists Entang Wiharso and Sally Smart.

 

Patrick D. Flores

Patrick D. Flores is a Professor of Art History and Criticism at the Department of Art Studies, University of the Philippines, Quezon City, where he is also the curator of the Jorge B. Vargas Museum. In 2015, he curated the Philippine Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale. Recent publications include “Contemporaneity and Art in Southeast Asia,” a special issue of Third Text (2011), co-edited with Joan Kee, and Past Peripheral: Curation in Southeast Asia (NUS Museum, 2008). He is the Curator of the Taiwan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2022.

Curator-in-Residence 

iLiana Fokianaki

iLiana Fokianaki is a writer and curator based in Athens and Rotterdam. Her research focuses on the notion of state and the power formations that manifest themselves under the influence of geopolitics, identity politics as well as cultural and anthropological histories. Through her exhibition-making practice, she articulates the institutional “performance” of the concept of the state. In 2013, she founded State of Concept Athens, the first non-profit institution with a permanent program and location in Athens. State of Concept promotes Greek and international artists through solo exhibitions and it also invites curators to create exhibitions that comment on the sociopolitical landscape of Greece and beyond. In 2016, together with Antonia Alampi, she founded Future Climates, a platform that aims to propose viable futures for small-scale organizations of contemporary art. Since 2017, she is curator and programmer of Kunsthal Extra City in Antwerp, Belgium. She is a contributing author to several books and has written for art-agenda, Art Papers, e-flux, Frieze, LEAP, Metropolis M, and Ocula. She is currently pursuing a PhD on economy, identity, and politics at Panteion University, Athens, and is a member of IKT International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art.

Curator-in-Residence 

Hendrik Folkerts

Hendrik Folkerts (b. 1984, Netherlands) is one of the curators of documenta 14. He studied Art History at the University of Amsterdam, specializing in contemporary art and theory, feminist practices and contemporary curatorial practices. From 2010 until 2015, he was Curator of Performance, Film & Discursive Programmes at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Folkerts curated the Public Programme of The Temporary Stedelijk at the Stedelijk Museum, a special interim program that was presented from August 2010 until October 2011, as well as Temporary Stedelijk 3: Stedelijk @ (TS3) from October 2011 until September 2012. Prior to his position at the Stedelijk Museum, Folkerts was co-ordinator of the Curatorial Programme at De Appel arts centre in Amsterdam from 2009 until 2011. He frequently publishes in journals and on platforms such as Artforum, The Exhibitionist, Metropolis M and for the Stedelijk Museum (Bureau) Amsterdam. Folkerts is (co)editor of Shadowfiles: Curatorial Education (Amsterdam: de Appel arts centre, 2013, ed. with Ann Demeester) and Facing Forward: Art & Theory from a Future Perspective (Amsterdam: AUP, 2015, ed. with Christoph Lindner and Margriet Schavemaker).

Institutional Partner 

Fond Regional d’art contemporain Bretagne

Collaborator 

Foodscape Collective

Foodscape Collective (Singapore) is a community centred on growing food well, cooking well, eating well and living well. Some are growing food, some choose to cook and eat better meals, others bring food to where it is needed, tackle surplus food or food waste issues, or simply want to tell the stories of our foodscape better. The community at Foodscape Collective envisions to grow and foster compassionate and resilient networks integral to our local food ecosystem, and explore better approaches to food and sustainability. They believe that the future needs better agro-ecological systems; better use, selection, and dissemination of information; and a more inquisitive, adventurous spirit in everyone to ask better questions on our foodscape(s).

 

Andrew Foran

Andrew Foran (Australia/Fiji) is Head of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Pacific Centre for Environ- mental Governance, and is also the IUCN Regional Programme Coordinator (acting) for Oceania. He has worked in the sustainability field for over 15 years. Previously, Foran was the Chief Executive Officer of the Centre for Sustainability Leadership in Australia, and has also worked on sustainable supply chains and green product development and marketing with companies including BP, National Australia Bank, Qantas, Boeing, and Toyota. Before entering the environment sector, he was the founder and general manager of a successful aquaculture business supplying markets in Australia and Asia, and has a Master of Business Administration and a Graduate Diploma in Environmental Management and Planning. Foran currently volunteers as treasurer for the Fiji Surf Association, and as strategic advisor for the Pacific Environment and Climate Exchange.

Curator-in-Residence 

Rosemary Forde

Melbourne-based curator Rosemary Forde (b. 1978, New Zealand) has developed exhibitions and events at a range of institutions and contemporary art spaces in Australia and New Zealand such as National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia and Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts, Auckland, New Zealand. Forde is chair of un Projects, a collective based in Australia that aims to generate independent and critical dialogue around contemporary art, primarily through publishing projects such un Magazine. She co-edited un Anthology 2004-2014: a decade of art and ideas. She is currently a PhD candidate in Curatorial Practice at Monash Art Design & Architecture (MADA), Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. She was previously Director of The Physics Room, Christchurch, New Zealand (2002-2004).

Institutional Partner 

FormContent

FormContent is a curatorial initiative, founded in 2007 with the intent of experimenting with exhibition formats and fostering collaborations that challenge the reciprocity of artistic and curatorial practices. Its current programme It’s moving from I to it has been developed as a nomadic curatorial project under the format of a script.

 

Luke Fowler

Luke Fowler is an artist, filmmaker and musician based in Glasgow. His work explores the limits and conventions of biographical and documentary filmmaking, and has often been compared to the British Free Cinema of the 1950s. Working with archival footage, photography and sound, Fowler’s filmic montages create portraits of intriguing, counter cultural figures, including Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing and English composer Cornelius Cardew.

Filmmaker 

Luke Fowler

Luke Fowler is an artist, filmmaker and musician based in Glasgow. His work explores the limits and conventions of biographical and documentary filmmaking, and has often been compared to the British Free Cinema of the 1950s. Working with archival footage, photography and sound, Fowler’s filmic montages create portraits of intriguing, counter cultural figures, including Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing and English composer Cornelius Cardew.

Artist 

Larys Frogier

Larys Frogier (France/China) is the Director of the Rockbund Art Museum (RAM) in Shanghai since 2012. As a curator, critic and art historian, he is involved in artistic and social challenges in post-global contexts where ongoing social, economic, cultural transformations demand new ways of interrelations, citizenship and reinvented creativity. Since 2013 he is the Chair of the HUGO BOSS ASIA ART jury and he conceived this new award, exhibition and research programme as an evolving platform to question Asia as a construction to investigate rather than a monolithic area or fixed identities. Frogier is also engaged in sound, music, image and text creation under the artist name Ocean. He is the co-founder of Wavz with Alfie Chua.

Scholar 

Cissie Fu

Dr Cissie Fu (AB Harvard; MSt, MSc, DPhil Oxford) is a political theorist. Born in Hong Kong, Cissie taught and performed across Asia, Europe, UK, and the Americas. She joined University of the Arts Singapore in 2022 as Associate Professor and Head of the McNally School of Fine Arts at LASALLE College of the Arts, after having served as Dean of the Faculty of Culture + Community at Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver, Canada. Cissie’s research interests in political aesthetics and decolonial action inform her approach to institution-building as a creative, critical, and communal cultural practice.

Artist-in-Residence 

Hikaru Fujii

The artistic practice of artist and filmmaker Hikaru Fujii (b. 1976, Japan) reflects his strong belief that art results from an intimate relationship between society and history. His work probes modern education and social systems in Japan and Asia often employing strategies of reenactment to address the contemporary relevance of historical events. He recently received a solo exhibition at KADIST, Paris, France (2019). His work has also been exhibited at Aichi Triennale, Japan (2019); Fast Forward Festival 5, Onassis Cultural Centre, Athens, Greece (2018); Centre George Pompidou Metz, France (2017), and Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Japan (2016) among others. He was awarded the Nissan Art Award 2017 Grand Prix.

Scholar 

Chomchon Fusinpaiboon

Chomchon Fusinpaiboon, PhD, is a lecturer at the Faculty of Architecture, Chulalongkorn University, and a practising architect. His research interests cover modern and contemporary architecture in Asia. His doctoral dissertation examines how a modern architectural culture was established in Thailand, and how it transformed traditional ideas of architecture and vice versa. His published and ongoing works include studies on unconventional works of Thai architect Prince Vodhyakara Varavarn, who reinterpreted English arts and crafts philosophy to adapt to modern Thai architecture of both the pre-war and the post-war periods, and the establishment of Thailand’s first architecture school that involved a Belgian architect and Chinese migrants. Currently he is doing design research on the shophouse, a non-pedigree modern architecture that played a major role in the urbanisation of Thailand during the 1960s and 1970s, questioning its legacy and its future in relation to contemporary architectural practice and urban issues.

Artist 

Cyprien Gaillard

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.

Scholar 

Jonathan Galka

Dr Jonathan Galka is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Science, Technology and Society (STS) Research Cluster in the Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore. Dr. Galka holds a PhD and MA in History of Science from Harvard University. During 2024–2025, he was a visiting scholar with NTU CCA for the Climate Crisis and Cultural Loss research project. At ARI, he is working on the histories and futures of deep seawater technologies, especially ocean thermal energy conversion. His dissertation examined the 20th-century identification of deep-sea manganese nodules as scientific, political, and economic resources and how the construction of nodules as a mineral resource frontier imbricated the biological and geological sciences with Cold War and postcolonial ocean law and politics. As a member of the Deep Currents Collective, Dr. Galka contributes to policy and curatorial interventions centering alternative modes of imagining seabed and deep-sea governance.  

Writer-in-Residence 

Orit Gat

Orit Gat (b. 1984, Israel) is a writer whose work focuses on contemporary art, publishing, internet culture, and their different meeting points. Gat is currently the feature editor of Rhizome, managing editor of WdW Review, and contributing editor at The White Review. Gat has taught at CCS Bard and the City College of New York, United States and founded a monthly reading group of art magazines, organised in various cities around the world, including New York, London, and Singapore. In 2015, she won the Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant in the short-form writing category and is currently nominated for the 2017 Absolut Art Writing Award.

Scholar 

Gridthiya Gaweewong

Gridthiya Gaweewong is currently a Curator and Artistic Director of the Jim Thompson Art Center in Bangkok. She is co-founder and director of Project 304, a non-profit art space based in Bangkok, focusing on multidisciplinary and cross-cultural contemporary art projects by local and international artists. Gridthiya has curated numerous exhibitions and films festival including the Bangkok Experimental Film Festival (1997-2007), Under Construction (2002), Politics of Fun (2005), Saigon Open City (2006-7), Short Film Festival from Southeast Asia (2009), Between Utopia and Dystopia (2011) and Primitive (2011).

Research Fellow 

Joshua Gebert

Joshua Gebert serves as Research Fellow at the School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University for the Climate Transformation Programme (2025–Present). Joshua is trained in architectural history and spatial planning in the Netherlands, developing a foundation in the intersections of culture, the built environment, and sustainability. He received his PhD in Southeast Asian Studies from the National University of Singapore in 2024, where he drew on cultural geography and critical heritage studies to examine the politics of heritage in Indonesia. His doctoral research explored how cultural engagements and artistic practices by local communities can contribute to decolonisation.

Curator-in-Residence 

Martin Germann

Martin Germann (b. 1974, Germany) is senior curator at S.M.A.K., the Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art in Ghent, Belgium, since autumn 2012. He has organised solo shows of artists Lee Kit, Michael Buthe, Thomas Ruff, Jordan Wolfson and Rachel Harrison as well as group exhibitions such as Drawing. The Bottom Line, together with Philippe Van Cauteren. Recent curatorial projects at S.M.A.K. include an ongoing series of presentations of works from the collection, as well as a year long exhibition unfolding around a wall piece by Sol LeWitt. He is currently working on a long-term project on the notion of ‘the photographic’ within the contemporary discourse.

Previously, Germann was curator at Kestner Gesellschaft Hanover, Germany and was responsible for the programme “Gagosian Gallery, Berlin” for the 4th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art. He has published numerous exhibition catalogues and monographs and has written for international magazines such as 032cand Frieze. In 2015, he received the AICA award for Belgium’s best exhibition for Lili Dujourie: Folds in time.

 

Christina Leigh Geros

Christina Leigh Geros (United States/Indonesia) is a Design Research Strategist at PetaBencana.id, Jakarta, Indonesia.

Artist 

Jef Geys

Jef Geys was among Europe’s most respected yet under-acknowledged artists. Producing artwork since the 1950s, Geys’ practice probes the construction of social and political engagement, and his work radically embraces art as being intertwined with everyday life. Geys graduated from the Antwerp Arts Academy before settling in Balen in the Kempen region of Belgium, where from 1960 to 1989, he taught art at a state school, focusing on educational experimentation in the arts. Since the late 1960s, Geys has been the editor and publisher of his local newspaper, the Kempens Informatieblad, and subsequently produced them in line with his exhibitions. He is known for his meticulous archive of his work, which in turn becomes generative of other works.

Artist 

Karlos Gil

Karlos Gil is an artist whose multiple art practice thrives on paradox, memory, and navigation between the past and the present to articulate or question the codes that construct meaning. Through a variety of media, he researches the movement of sense regarding the art object and examines its cognitive value as a specific system of knowledge production. Gil studied at Facultad de Bellas Artes UCM and at the School of Visual Arts New York. He has shown his work in CA2M, Matadero and Casa Encendida in Madrid, and at LABoral (Gijón), as well as at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and the Moscow Biennale. In 2014 was recipient of the Fundación Botín Arts grant.

Artist 

Simryn Gill

Simryn Gill grew up in Port Dickson, Malaysia, and has returned to make her work there since 1993. The key photographs in this book, in which the artist becomes an oil palm tree, are a continuation of her work Vegetation (1999– ongoing), where she records herself in various places disguised as local plants: tumbleweed and agave in Texas, grass tree and paperbark tree in rural New South Wales, and an epiphytic fern in a rare derelict site in Singapore.

Institutional Partner 

Gillman Barracks Singapore

Curator-in-Residence 

Natasha Ginwala

Natasha Ginwala is an independent curator, researcher, and writer. She was a member of the artistic team at the 8th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (2014). Her recent work includes Metabolic States: Becoming Image at Artists’ Cinema, Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014, the multi-part curatorial project Landings (with Vivian Ziherl) presented at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, David Roberts Art Foundation, NGBK (as part of the Tagore, Pedagogy and Contemporary Visual Cultures Network), Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and other partner organisations, 2013–ongoing, as well as The Museum of Rhythm at Taipei Biennial 2012 (with Anselm Franke). Ginwala regularly contributes to several publications and periodicals.

 

Anton Ginzburg

Anton Ginzburg is known for his films, sculptures, paintings, and text-based printed work that investigates historical narratives and poetic studies of place, representation, and post-Soviet identity. He earned a BFA from The New School for Social Research and an MFA from Bard College, Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts. His work has been shown at the 54th Venice Biennale; the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston; Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Canada; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; White Columns, New York; Lille 3000, Euralille, France; and the first and second Moscow Biennales. His films have been screened at the Whitechapel Gallery, London; Rotterdam International Film Festival; Dallas Symphony Orchestra; Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas; Les Rencontres Internationales, Paris; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; and New York Film Festival/Projections; among others.

Curator-in-Residence 

Erin Gleeson

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).

Commercial Partner 

Global Specialised Services Pte Ltd

Global Specialised Services Pte Ltd provides fine art and exhibitions transport services.

Research Fellow 

Dr Marc Glöde

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.

Research Fellow 

Tony Godfrey

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

 

Karpo Godina

Karpo Godina is a prominent filmmaker and cinematographer. He is an essential figure and a pioneering member of the Yugoslav Black Wave film movement of the 1960s and 1970s. His film career was launched in the 1960s when he independently produced 8mm experimental shorts and numerous sociocritical films. His film Artificial Paradise was screened at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival.

Institutional Partner 

Goethe-Institut

 

Eileen Goh

Eileen GOH (Singapore) is an Assistant Manager for the Art in Transit programme at the Land Transport Authority (LTA), Singapore. Goh oversees and leads a team in the initiation, development, and implementation of the Art in Transit programme as well as other special art-related projects undertaken by LTA. Goh plays a large part at every stage of the process of conceptualising, developing and delivering the artworks commissioned to be displayed in the Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) stations managed by LTA. This includes working closely with various internal and external stakeholders— including civil contractors—in the fabrication and installation of artwork to presenting the artworks to Ministers and public communities. Goh is a graduate of LASALLE College of the Arts with a BA (Hons) in Arts Management.

Curator, Staff 

Sophie Goltz

Sophie Goltz was Deputy Director, Research & Academic Programmes at NTU CCA Singapore, and Assistant Professor at the NTU School of Art, Design and Media. Goltz was the Artistic Director of Stadtkuratorin Hamburg (City curator) from 2013 to 2016, and has worked as Senior Curator and Head of Communication and Public Programmes at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein between 2008 and 2013, becoming Associate Curator in 2014. Goltz worked as a freelance curator, as well as an art educator for various international exhibitions, including Documenta11 and documenta 12 (2002 and 2007), 3rd berlin biennale for contemporary art (2004), and Project Migration (2004-06).

Artist 

Sheela Gowda

The subject of Sheela Gowda’s Loss is Kashmir, a region bordered by India, Pakistan, China, and Afghanistan. Historically a locus of exchange and syncretism, where Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam flourished in the wake of South Asia’s partition, it is now fraught with violence and uncertainty as border disputes and armed encounters persist. Originally photographed by Kashmir resident Abdul Gani Lone, these six scenes show the path taken to a burial site by the bodies of youths from his village killed in the continuing conflict. Tentatively painted over with watercolour in a subtle accentuation of their subjects’ plight, these prints express the tragic irony of deadly geopolitical struggle unfolding in a place described since the Mughal period as “heaven on earth.”

Artist 

Dan Graham

Dan Graham is an influential pioneer of conceptual art and performance-related video art. His multi-disciplinary practice, spanning across curating, writing, performance, installation, video, photography, and architecture, aligns itself with popular culture more than contemporary art. His work is informed by a social awareness, often working with hybrids that oscillate between quasi-functional spaces and installations to expose processes of perception, of which his freestanding, sculptural structures called Pavilions are an example. NTU CCA Singapore collaborated with Mapletree to permanently install Elliptical Pavilion (2017) at Mapletree Business City II.

 

Tue Greenfort

 

Grieve Perspective

Grieve Perspective is a Singapore-based art collective who use visual and written language to push the boundaries of art and explore taboo themes. The Obits focuses on the obituary as an art form that has somehow never quite taken hold in Singapore. Our newspapers feature death notices daily but nary an obituary the personal but slightly distanced profession of respect, reminiscence and regrets. It is, instead, our custom to frame our dead within boxes of rigidly determined sizes that stand like gravestones at the far end of the newspapers, sandwiched perversely between sports and business news.

Curator-in-Residence 

Krist Gruijthuijsen

Krist Gruijthuijsen (Netherlands/Germany) is Director of KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin and Course Director of the Master of Fine Arts Department at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam. From 2012 to 2016, he was Artistic Director of the Grazer Kunstverein, Graz, Austria. He is one of the co-founding directors of Kunstverein in Amsterdam and has organised numerous projects and exhibitions for institutions such as Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City, United States (2013); Artists Space, New York, United States (2009); Manifesta 7, Trentino – South Tyrol, Italy (2008); Swiss Institute, New York, United States (2007); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands (both 2006) amongst many others.

 

Carles Guerra

Carles Guerra is an artist, art critic and independent curator based in Barcelona. He was the Chief Curator at MACBA (2011-2013) and Director of La Virreina Centre de la Imatge (2009-2011). Guerra is currently an associate professor at the Universitat PompeuFabra. In 2011, he was awarded the Ciutat de Barcelona Prize for his contribution in the field of visual arts. He is currently the member of the editorial board at Cultura/s since 2001 where he authored numerous essays, N for Negri (2000), Allan Sekula speaks with Carles Guerra (2005) and Negatives of Europe. Video Essays and Collective Pedagogies (2008).

Institutional Partner 

Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative

The Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative (MAP) was an unprecedented collaboration between the Guggenheim and UBS that enhanced access to and understanding of global contemporary art.

Artist 

Shilpa Gupta

Shilpa Gupta’s mediums range from manipulated found objects to video, interactive computer-based installation, and performance. Acquired for the Guggenheim’s collection, 1:14.9 (2011–12), features a hand-wound ball of thread accompanied by a small plaque reading “1188.5 MILES OF FENCED BORDER – WEST, NORTH-WEST / DATA UPDATE: DEC 31, 2007,” poetically representing the geopolitical division of India and Pakistan. In 2011, Gupta was the recipient of the Bienal Award, Bienal De Cuenca, Ecuador; in 2004 she was the recipient of the Transmediale Award, Berlin, and the Sanskriti Prathisthan Award, New Delhi. Canada’s South Asian Visual Artists Collective also named her International Artist of the Year. A 10-year survey of her work, Half A Sky, was presented at the OK Center for Contemporary Art, Linz, Austria (2010). Gupta lives and works in Mumbai.

Guest Curator 

Paul C. Ha

Paul Ha is currently the Director of the List Visual Arts Center, the contemporary art museum at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Known for presenting experimental and timely exhibitions, the List also oversees the active MIT’s Percent-for-Art program, which has created one the of the outstanding national collections of public art. The collection includes 50 plus site-specific commissions from artists such as Dan Graham, Cai Guo-Qiang, Anish Kapoor, Sol LeWitt and Sarah Sze. The List also oversees more than 3,500 works in the permanent collection as well as 600 works in an innovative student loan art collection program. In 2014 Ha was chosen to be commissioner of the U.S. Pavilion for the La Biennale di Venezia 56th International Art Exhibition. Ha and co-curator Ute Meta Bauer, presented artist Joan Jonas, a pioneer of performance and time based art.

Artist 

Dr Perrine Hamel

Perrine is an Assistant Professor at the NTU Asian School of the Environment. Her research group examines how natural infrastructure can contribute to creating resilient and inclusive cities in Southeast Asia. To build her research program at NTU, she received the 2020 National Research Foundation Fellowship. Prior to joining NTU, Perrine was a senior scientist at Stanford University with the Natural Capital Project, a global partnership aiming to integrate the benefits provided by nature into major societal decisions. There, she led the Livable Cities program, an initiative aiming to understand and elevate the role of nature in urban environments. Prior to her research on natural capital, Perrine has worked as an environmental engineer in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and conducted her PhD research in the field of integrated urban water management. She holds a PhD from Monash University, Australia, and a Master of Civil and Environmental Engineering from Ecole Centrale Nantes, France.

Collaborator 

Ibrahim Hamid

Ibrahim Hamid is a comic artist who has been collaborating with artist Roslisham Ismail aka Ise since 2018. The works were shown at Campur, Tolak, Kali, Bahagi, Sama Dengan (Add, Subtract, Multiply, Divide, Equals) in 2021, at The Lab in NTU CCA Singapore.

Artist 

Jan Peter Hammer

Jan Peter Hammer is an artist who creates films and performances that connects literature and cinema. He is primarily interested in the narrative structure of a work. His videos, films, and synchronised slideshows allow for a literary reading or a point of view for criticism. He studied painting and sculpture before attending courses at the New School’s Film Theory department and graduating in Fine Arts at the Hunter College. In 2016 he was selected as artistic research fellow at KHiO – Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Norway. His works have been shown in international solo and group exhibitions and screened at several international film festivals.

Artist-in-Residence 

Han Xuemei

Committed to socially engaged practices, multi-disciplinary theatre practitioner Han Xuemei (b. 1987, Singapore) employs art as a tool for bringing communities together and engaging the audience in visceral and personal ways. In her practice, she creates spaces and experiences that incite participants to think outside the box of existing paradigms and articulate forms of hope and resistance. Since 2012, she is Resident Artist at the Singapore-based theatre company Drama Box. Her recent projects include the experiential installation FLOWERS (2019), the community project The Gift (2018), and the participatory experience Missing: The City of Lost Things (2018).

Institutional Partner 

Han Nefkens Foundation

The Han Nefkens Foundation was established in 2009 with the aim of connecting people through art. In 2016, Han Nefkens decided to focus exclusively on supporting emerging and mid-career international video artists through Awards, Production Grants, and Mentorship Grants. The Foundation is not only involved in producing new works with the artists, but also finding international residencies, producing publications, purchasing working tools, finding technical support, and bringing artists into contact with art institutions and peers. With an extensive network in countries such as Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Korea, Ecuador, Peru, Spain, and the Netherlands, the Foundation is able to present artists to a diverse and global audience.

Artist-in-Residence 

Duto Hardono

Duto Hardono (b. 1985, Indonesia) is a conceptual artist and educator based in Bandung, Indonesia. Originally trained in painting, his practice traverses the two-dimensionality of collages and drawings to the dynamic incorporation of readymade materials such as everyday objects, old musical instruments, records and cassette tapes in his installations and performances. Often drawing reference from popular culture, conceptual art and anti-art movements, his works are peppered with touches of dark humour and irony in its aim to examine the relationship and paradoxes between humans and time through sound.

Hardono has participated in numerous international solo and group exhibitions including: Biennale Jogja XII Equator #2: Not A Dead End, Jogja National Museum, Indonesia (2013) and The 9th Shanghai Biennale: Reactivation, Bandung Pavilion for Intercity Pavilion, China (2012). Solo exhibitions include Klab Lucifer, Ark Gallery, Indonesia (2014) and Good Love, Bad Joke, Selasar Sunaryo Art Space, Indonesia (2010). He was nominated for the Asia Awards Young Creator Grand Prix, Tokyo Designers Week (2014).

Scholar 

Stefano Harney

Stefano Harney is Professor of Strategic Management Education at Singapore Management University and co-founder of the collective Ground Provisions. He is a regular speaker on the subject of business ethics, manage- ment, sociology, anthropology, and postcolonial studies. Recent publications include The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013) co-authored with Fred Moten. Harney has contributed to NTU CCA Singapore’s public programming in 2014, presenting the lecture “Post-colonial critique today,” and an Exhibition (de)Tour together with Tonika Sealy Thompson, as part of the exhibition Theatrical Fields.

Collaborator 

Newell Harry

Newell Harry of South African and Mauritian descent, has for over a decade drawn from an intimate web of recurring travels and connections across Oceania and the wider Asia-Pacific, to South Africa’s Western Cape Province, where the artist’s extended family continues to reside. From Pidgin and Creole languages to modes of exchange in the “gift economies” of the South Pacific, Harry’s interests often culminate in culturally “entangled” installations. Selected exhibitions include Tidalectics, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art 21, Vienna (2017); Endless Circulation: Tarrawarra Biennial, curated Victoria Lynn & Helen Hughes, Tarrawarra, Victoria (2016); The 56th Venice Biennale: All the Worlds Futures (2015);Suspended Histories, Museum Van Loon, Amsterdam (2013); Rendez Vous 11 & 12, Institut d’Art Contemporain, Villebanne (2011) and South African National Gallery, Cape Town (2012); Untitled (12th Istanbul Biennial) (2011); The 17th Biennale of Sydney: The Beauty of Distance, Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age (2010); and The Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Before and After Science (2010).

Between February and April 2015, Harry was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore where he looked into the under-presented colonial connections between the Cape Malay of South Africa and the Straits Settlements.

 

Yuko Hasegawa

Yuko Hasegawa is s Chief Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOT), Tokyo and Professor at the Tama Art University in Tokyo, Japan. Since 2008, Yuko has been a member of the Asian Art Council at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, United States. She is also currently Artistic Director of Inujima Art House Project, Okayama, Japan. Past appointments include curator of Encounters for Art Basel in Hong Kong (2012 –2014), Founding Artistic Director, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan; Curator of 11th Sharjah Biennial, United Arab Emirates (2013); co-curator of 29th São Paulo Biennial, Brazil (2010); co-curator of the 4th Shanghai Biennale, China (2002), and Artistic Director of the 7th International Istanbul Biennial, Turkey (2001).

 

Bahbak Hashemi-Nezhad

Bahbak Hashemi-Nezhad is a designer based in London. His studio practice spans from the domestic to the public realm, from neighbourhood plans to products and recipes. He is interested in the changing role of the designer within complex urban conditions and draws from the permissive nature of play and processes of defamiliarisation to develop methodologies that actively engage publics within design processes. He collaborated with various art institutions in London, United Kingdom including The Showroom, The Serpentine Gallery, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Hashemi-Nezhad is currently a lecturer at the Royal College of Art, London, United Kingdom.

Artist-in-Residence 

Taloi Havini

Ranging from photography and sculpture to mixed-media installations, the diverse practice of Taloi Havini(b. 1981, Autonomous Region of Bougainville/Australia) explores sites of political conflicts ensuing from colonial occupations unravelling narratives of nation building within the Pacific. In positing personal responses within contested sites and histories of Oceania, her work recalibrates dominant histories and structures of representation. Havini’s solo exhibitions include Reclamation, Artspace, Sydney, Australia (2020) and Habitat, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2017). Her works have been selected as part of group shows such as Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh (2020); A beast, a god, and a line, Kunsthall Trondheim, Norway (2019); and the 9^th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland, Australia (2018).

Artist-in-Residence 

bani haykal

As artist and musician, bani haykal (Singapore, b. 1985) experiments with language, sound, and fiction. His work revolves around human-machine relationships/intimacies, and cultural identity formations reflecting critically on how language, tools and technologies have shaped and continue to shape our life experiences. From interfaces to interactions, from fictions to frictions, from commuting to communicating, the creative output of his research often involves the creation of DIY tools and it encompasses site-responsive installations, poetry, and performance as well as publications and music releases. 

Artist 

Nicolas Helm-Grovas

Dr Nicolas Helm-Grovas (Spain/United Kingdom) is Lecturer in Film Studies Education at King’s College London. He completed a PhD on the films and writings of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen at Royal Holloway, University of London in 2018. His writing has appeared in Moving Image Review & Art Journal, Radical Philosophy and Oxford Art Journal (forthcoming in the latter) and in edited collections. With Oliver Fuke he is co-curator of a series of interrelated exhibitions on Mulvey and Wollen: ‘Art at the Frontier of Film Theory’ (Peltz Gallery, London, 2019), ‘A is for Avant-Garde, Z is for Zero’ (Cooper Gallery, Dundee, 2020) and ‘Intersections in Theory, Film and Art’ (GAK Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst, Bremen, 2021, forthcoming).

 

Malak Helmy

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.

 

Eugene Heng

Eugene Heng (Singapore), Founder and Chairman, Waterways Watch Society;

 

Amanda Heng

Amanda Heng is an artist. With an interest in the clash of Eastern and Western values, traditions, and gender roles in the context of a multicultural and fast-changing society of Singapore, her work embraces different media including performance. Between April and September 2015, Heng was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore. During her residency, she developed the series Exchange of Everyday Rituals (Forms of Engagement), which included Contact Improvisation with dancer Eng Kai Er and Tea and Sounds with NTU CCA Singapore’s curator Vera Mey, and the studio intervention The Body, Wall Space, and a Smile.

Curator-in-Residence 

Stefanie Hessler

Stefanie Hessler (Germany/Sweden) is the curator of TBA21‚Academy. Recent projects for TBA21‚Academy include Tidalectics at TBA21‚Augarten, Vienna, Austria (2017); The Current Convening #2, co-curated with Ute Meta Bauer and Cesar Garcia in Kochi, India (2016); and the conference Design of the Seabed, co-curated with TBA21‚ Academy director Markus Reymann at the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial, Turkey (2016). Hessler is the co-founder of the art space Andquestionmark in Stockholm, Sweden together with Carsten Höller. Other curatorial projects include Sugar and Speed, Museum of Modern Art in Recife, Brazil (2017); Winter Event ‚ antifreeze, Museum of Contemporary Art in Santiago, Chile and Flora in Bogotá, Colombia (2015/2016); the 8th Momentum Biennial in Moss, Norway (2015); and Outside at Index‚ The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (2014). She regularly writes for publications such as ArtReview and Mousse Magazine and recently co-edited the book Life Itself (2016) for the Moderna Museet.

Artist 

Nikolaus Hirsch

Nikolaus Hirsh is an architect, editor and curator. He was the Director of Städelschule and Portikus in Frankfrut, Germany, and currently teaches at Columbia University in New York, United States. His architectural work includes the award-winning Dresden Synagogue (2001), Hinzert Document Center (2005), Cybermohalla Hub in Delhi (2008-2012), an artist residency building at The Land (with Rirkrit Tiravanija), and Museum of Immortality in Mexico City (2016). Hirsch curated numerious exhibition at the Portikus, the Folly project for the Gwangju Biennale (2014), and Wohnungsfrage (Housing Question) at HKW in Berlin (2015). He is the co-founder and editor of the Critical Spatial Practice series at Sternberg Press and the new e-flux Architecture platform.

Curator-in-Residence 

Maria Hlavajova

Maria Hlavajova (b. 1971, Slovakia) is Artistic Director of BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, Netherlands, an institution that advocates for the critical role of art in society through various programmes of education, exhibitions, and publishing. Hlavajova is also initiator and artistic director of FORMER WEST, an eight-year long transnational research, education, exhibition, and publication project organised and coordinated by BAK. Other curatorial projects include Call the Witness, Roma Pavilion, 54th Venice Biennale, Italy (2011); Citizens and Subjects, part of the Dutch presentation at the 52nd Venice Biennale, Italy (2007); and co-curator of Manifesta 3, Ljubljana, Slovenia (2000). She regularly contributes to numerous critical readers, catalogues, and magazines internationally. In addition, Hlavajova is co-founder of tranzit, a network established in 2002 that supports contemporary art practices and exchanges in Austria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania. She serves on the Advisory Board of Bergen Assembly, Norway.

 

Ho Weng Hin

Ho Weng Hin is partner and conservation specialist consultant of Studio Lapis, an architectural conservation consultancy involved in major local and regional projects. He is also a founding director of the Singapore Chapter of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), an advisory body to UNESCO on heritage conservation, and represents Singapore as expert voting member on its International Scientific Committee on 20th Century Heritage. He serves on government advisory panels on heritage policy and planning. Ho Weng Hin is an adjunct senior lecturer at the Department of Architecture at National University of Singapore, and he obtained his specialist postgraduate degree in conservation from the University of Genoa, Italy. He is the co-author of several books including Our Modern Past: A Visual Survey of Singapore Architecture, 1920s-70s, and former co-editor of The Singapore Architect, the professional journal of the Singapore Institute of Architects.

Artist-in-Residence 

Ho Tzu Nyen

Premised on complex sets of references, the artistic production of Ho Tzu Nyen (b.1976, Singapore) harnesses film, video, performance, and installation. His richly layered and technically challenging works weave together facts and myths to mobilise different understandings of Southeast Asia’s history, politics, and belief systems. Recent solo exhibitions were held at Edith-Russ-Haus For Media Art, Oldenburg, Germany (2019); Kunstverein in Hamburg, Germany (2018); Shanghai Ming Contemporary Art Museum, China (2018); Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong (2017) among others. His works have also been included in major group exhibitions such as: Aichi Triennale, Japan (2019); Sharjah Biennial 14, United Arab Emirates (2019); Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2018); Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh (2018) among many others. He is co-curator of the 7th Asian Art Biennal, Taichung, Taipei (2019). Ho represented Singapore at the 54th Venice Biennale (2011).

Ho was an Artist-in-Residence from October 2019 to April 2020. He also presented video works at NTU CCA Singapore for Ghosts and Spectres — Shadows of History in 2017.

Artist-in-Residence 

Ho Rui An

Ho Rui An (b. 1990, Singapore) is an artist and writer working in the intersections of contemporary art, cinema, performance and theory. His work investigates the emergence, transmission and disappearance of images within contexts of globalism and governance. Working primarily across the mediums of lecture, essay and film, his recent research considers questions surrounding liberal hospitality, participatory democracy and speculative futures.He has presented projects both locally and internationally, gaining attention for his discursively compelling performances that sift through historical archives and contemporary visual culture to probe into the shifting relations between image and power. Ho has presented work at Queensland University of Technology Art Museum, Australia (2016); Hessel Museum of Art and CCS Bard Galleries, United States (2015); LUMA/Westbau, Switzerland (2015); Para Site, Hong Kong (2015); Witte de With, The Netherlands (2014); Kochi-Muziris Biennale, India (2014); and Serpentine Galleries, United Kingdom (2013), among others.

Ho was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore, between September 2016 and January 2017, where he continued his research into the aesthetics of “futurecraft” and “horizon scanning” programmes run by state and private entities in Singapore and beyond. He also contributed to NTU CCA Singapore’s public programming in January 2015 when he conducted an Exhibition (de)Tour as part of Yang Fudong’s exhibition, Incidental Scripts.

Staff 

Ho See Wah

Ho See Wah is Young Professional Trainee at NTU CCA Singapore in 2018.

Staff 

Ho Mun Yee

Ho Mun Yee was Young Professional Trainee, Research at NTU CCA Singapore in 2018.

Artist-in-Residence 

Jacqueline Hoang Nguyen

Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn (b. 1979, Canada) is an artist based in Montreal and Stockholm. In her artistic practice, she mobilizes archival materials and a variety of mediums to investigate issues of historicity, collectivism, utopian politics, and multiculturalism within the framework of feminist theories revealing the political significance of apparently trivial historical anecdotes. She has participated to numerous group shows in North America and Europe. Her most recent solo shows include: Space Fiction & the Archives at MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina, Canada (2017); Black Atlas, Museum of Ethnography, Stockholm, Sweden (2016); For An Epidemic Resistance, MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels), Canada (2014). In 2010, she completed the Whitney Independent Study Program.

Artist 

Heidrun Holzfeind

Heidrun Holzfeind is an artist and filmmaker, explores the interrelations between history and identity, individual histories and political narratives of the present.

Artist-in-Residence 

Chia-Wei Hsu

Chia-Wei Hsu (b. 1983, Taiwan) an artist, filmmaker, and curator based in Taiwan whose work merges the language of contemporary art and film, often unveiling the complex production apparatus – cameras, camera cranes, lighting kits, microphones, etc. – employed in the filmmaking process. In his practice, Hsu unearths histories of the Cold War in Asia buried in precise geographical locations and brings them back to life through narrative and visual sequences that blend myth and reality, historical documentation and fictional developments. Fabricating a mythical narrative where stories, spirits, and machineries unfold on the same level, Hsu maintains a critical attitude toward the structure of film and often seeks to present his projects outside of museums and other contemporary art venues.

Chia-Wei Hsu’s works have been presented in numerous exhibitions and festivals worldwide, including Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2017); Cinema Muzeul Țăranului, Bucharest, Romania (2016); 4th Taiwan International Video Art Exhibition, Hong-Gah Museum, Taipei (2014); 55th International Venice Biennale, Italy (2013); 2012 Taipei Biennial, Taiwan, (2012); Beirut Art Center, Lebanon (2012); Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2011). He was Artist-in-Residence at Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Germany (2014) and at the International Studio and Curatorial Program, New York, United States, (2010). In 2013, he was a finalist for the Hugo Boss Asia Art Award. From 2011 to 2013, he was appointed director of Open Contemporary Art Center in Taipei, Taiwan.

Artist-in-Residence 

Hu Yun

The work of Hu Yun (b. 1986, China) ranges from drawing and watercolours to performance, video, and installation. Delving into personal and historical narratives, Hu revisits historical moments in order to provide alternative readings and reinterpretations. His works have been exhibited at the 11th Gwangju Biennale, The Eight Climate (What Does Art Do?), South Korea, 2016; Power Station of Art, Shanghai, China, 2015; the 7th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale, China, 2012, and National History Museum, London, United Kingdom, 2010. He is also the co-founder of PDF, an independent art e-journal.

Curator-in-Residence 

Anthony Huberman

Anthony Huberman (Switzerland/United States) is the Director and Chief Curator of The Wattis Institute in San Francisco and was the Founding Director of The Artist’s Institute in New York. Previous engagements include Chief Curator of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis and Curator at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris. He has curated solo exhibitions with artists including Henrik Olesen, Sam Lewett, Wang Bing and has developed long-term research projects with artists such as David Hammons and Joan Jonas amongst many others. He was co-curator of the Liverpool Biennale 2014 and has published numerous articles in art periodicals including ArtForum, Frieze, Flash Art, Afterall, and Mousse. He recently published the book Today We Should Be Thinking About (Koenig Books, 2016).

Artist-in-Residence 

Daniel Hui

Addressing contentious historical episodes, the films of Daniel Hui (b.1986, Singapore) straddle between documentary and fiction, blurring the boundaries between institutional accounts, mythical narratives, oral testimonies, and personal memories. His films have been screened at various film festivals and museums including the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, South Korea (2016); Singapore Art Museum (2015); and International Film Festival Rotterdam, Netherlands (2010). His feature-length film Snakeskin (2014) received awards at the 2015 Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, Japan, and at the Torino Film Festival, Italy in 2014. Hui’s latest film, Demons (2018) recently premiered at the Busan International Film Festival, South Korea.

Artist-in-Residence 

Oliver Husain

Artist and filmmaker Oliver Husain (b. Germany, 1969) currently lives and works in Toronto, Canada. In his work, he critically engages theatrical and cinematic notions of spectatorship drifting from performance and conceptual theatre to experimental film, animation, and installation to blur the boundaries between different visual codes. Oscillating between documentary and fictional approaches, Husain orchestrates surreal narratives with a keen sensibility for costume, make-up, and stage set. His most recent solo exhibition took place at Western Front, Vancouver, Canada, in 2016. Husain has participated in numerous international exhibitions and film festivals including: Forum Expanded, Berlinale Film Festival, Berlin, Germany, 2017; Kunstverein Nürnberg, Germany, 2017; Art Museum, University of Toronto, 2016; MAK Museum, Vienna, Austria, 2013; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, United States, 2011, among others. Special screenings of his films took place at Pleasure Dome, Toronto, Canada, 2015, and at Experimenta Film Festival, Bangalore, India, 2011.

Artist-in-Residence 

Saleh Husein

Saleh Husein is an artist and musician. His visual practice is often anchored on archival documents approached with quasiscientific precision to contest the division between memory and experience, reflecting on subjects of archive and memory. Between January and April 2016, Husein was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore, where he continued his research interest in the migration histories of the Arabs in the region, exploring the history of Arabic society in Singapore, and seeking artefacts and archives through citizens’ stories.

Artist 

Pierre Huyghe

Pierre Huyghe attended the École Supérieure d’Arts Graphiques (1981–82) and the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (1982–85). Based in New York, he is the Artistic Director of Okayama Art Summit 2019. In the 1990s, Huyghe emerged as part of a wave of second generation Conceptualists known for their relational aesthetics approach towards art. Throughout his career, he has been involved in multimedia collaborations with other artists. His works, which seek a high degree of control over the viewer’s experience, often present themselves as complex systems characterised by a wide range of life forms, inanimate things, and technologies. His constructed organisms combine not only biological, technological, and fictional elements, they also produce an immersive, constantly changing environment, in which humans, animals, and nonbeings learn, evolve, and grow. In 2001, he received a Special Award from the Jury of the Venice Biennale and in 2002, he was awarded the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s Hugo Boss Prize. His recent projects/exhibitions include UUmwelt at the Serpentine Gallery, London (2018); Skulptur Projekte Münster (2017); The Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2015); a touring solo exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and other museums (2013–14); and Documenta 13 (2012).

Artist 

Yun Hye Hwang

Yun Hye Hwang (South Korea/Singapore) is an accredited landscape architect in Singapore, and Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at the School of Design and Environment, NUS, currently serving as Programme Director of the Bachelor’s programme. She holds two Master’s degrees in landscape architecture, one from Seoul National University in Korea and another from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. Her research, teaching, and professional activities speculate on emerging demands in fast-growing Asian cities by exploring ecological design and management versus manicured greenery and the multifunctional role of everyday landscapes. She focuses on transferring knowledge of urban ecology from academia to practice through active interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaborations.

Artist 

Noor Effendy Ibrahim

Noor Effendy Ibrahim is an interdisciplinary arts practitioner based in Singapore. He received the Japan Chamber of Commerce and Industry Singapore Foundation Culture Award in 2007. Effendy was the Artistic Director of The Substation (2010 – 2015) and Teater Ekamatra (2001 – 2006). Effendy had also served on the Singapore National Arts Council (NAC) Board (2004 – 2006; 7th term) and was selected for the NAC Cultural Fellowship programme in 2014. In 2016, Effendy founded the independent non-profit performance art collective akulah BIMBO SAKTI, or I am the MAGIC BIMBO in Malay.

Effendy was a Senior Academic Staff at Republic Polytechnic from 2007 – 2010 and returned as an Associate Lecturer from 2017 – 2019. He has also taught part-time at LASALLE College of the Art, National Institute of Education – an institute of Nanyang Technological University, Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts and DigiPen Singapore. Effendy has programmed for the Neon Lights international music festival from 2015 – 2016, and the traditional dance festival Padang Tari (Field of Dance) in 2016 presented by the NAC. Effendy has over 20 years of interdisciplinary art-making experience.

Artist 

Sarah Ichioka

Sarah Ichioka (United States/United Kingdom/Singapore) is an urbanist, curator and writer, currently leading Desire Lines, a strategic consultancy for environmental, cultural, and social-impact organisations and initiatives. In previous roles, she has explored the intersections of cities, society, and ecology within leading international institutions of culture, policy, and research. Ichioka’s outlook is glocal, interdisciplinary, and future-facing. She has been recognised as a World Cities Summit Young Leader, one of the Global Public Interest Design 100, a British Council/ Clore Duffield Cultural Leadership International Fellow, and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects.

Artist-in-Residence 

ila

Spanning across performance, photography, and other mediums, ila (b. 1985, Singapore) weaves her own body and emotions into the peripheries of lived experience and unspoken narratives. Constantly in negotiations with different realms of existence and the aftermaths of trauma, she reconfigures and merges speculative fiction with factual histories conceiving them as sites for empathy and connectivity. Her performances (works) have been included in group shows such as Proposals for Novel Ways of Being, National Gallery Singapore and2219: Futures Imagined, ArtScience Museum (both Singapore, 2020); State of Motion: A Fear of Monsters, Asian Film Archive; and Arus Balik, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art (both Singapore, 2019).

Artist 

indieguerillas

indieguerillas, founded in 1999, is a duet of artists from Yogyakarta, Indonesia. They are the couple Santi Ariestyowanti (b. 1977, Semarang) and Dyatmiko “Miko” Bawono (b. 1975, Kudus). The former has a background in visual communication design and the latter in interior design. Both are alumni of the Faculty of Art of the Indonesian Institute of the Arts in Yogyakarta (ISI Yogyakarta). In addition to their being known for their interest in folklore, indieguerillas are also recognised for their proficiency in visual effects and inter-media experimentation in their works.

 

May Adadol Ingawanij

Dr May Adadol Ingawanij (Thailand/United Kingdom) is a moving image theorist, teacher, and curator, and co-director of the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM), University of Westminster, London. She is currently writing a book titled Animistic Cinema: Moving Image Performance and Ritual in Thailand. Her publications include Exhibiting Lav Diaz’s Long Films:Currencies of Circulation and Spectatorship (2017); Nguyen Trinh Thi’s Essay Films (forthcoming); Animism and the Performative Realist Cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul (2013). May’s curatorial projects include Lav Diaz Journeys (London, 2017), and On Attachments and Unknowns (Phnom Penh, 2017).

Artist 

inhabitants

inhabitants (Portugal/United States) is an online channel for exploratory video and documentary reporting. Founded in New York in late 2015 by visual artists Mariana Silva and Pedro Neves Marques, inhabitants produces and streams short-form videos intended for free, online distribution. All episodes are available at www.inhabitants-tv.org, as well as on Vimeo, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram.

Institutional Partner 

Institut Français

Artist-in-Residence 

Roslisham Ismail (aka Ise)

Ise’s work includes installations, publications, animations, collages, participatory events, and the artist space Parking Project (run out of his apartment in Kuala Lumpur). This practice is informed by expressions of popular culture such as comics and graffiti and the manner in which they serve to represent alternative histories of place and culture. Whatever final form it takes, Ise‚ work is always participatory, embedded in conversation, friendship and the experiences of simply living life amongst a multitude of communities internationally. Iseis a graduate of Mara University of Technology in Selangor, Malaysia. Selected exhibitions and Biennials and Residencies include: Singapore Biennale (2011); Asia Triennial Manchester, United Kingdom (2011); Jakarta Biennale with Indonesian collaborative Ruangrupa (2009) Artist-in-Residence at Artspace Visual Arts Centre, Sydney (2006) and the 9th Istanbul Biennial (2005); He is the co-founder of Sentap, a quarterly art publication in Malaysia.

Collaborator 

Ise parkingproject Foundation

Ise parkingproject Foundation is an artist’s space founded by artist Roslisham Ismail aka Ise based in his apartment in Kuala Lumpur.

Staff 

Syaheedah Iskandar

Syaheedah Iskandar works with vernacular ideas of visuality within Southeast Asia, drawing on contemporary discourses on hyper-visuality and its opposite, the unseen. Her projects aim to unpack knowledge(s) that inform and counter hegemonic systems of seeing. Recent curatorial projects include State of Motion 2021: [Alternate/Opt] Realities (2021), An Exercise of Meaning in a Glitch Season (2020) and Nyanyi Sunyi (Songs of Solitude) (2018). Syaheedah was the inaugural Emerging Writers’ Fellow for the academic journal Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia and the recipient of the IMPART Awards 2020 (Singapore) in recognition of her emerging curatorial practice. She holds an MA in History of Art and Archaeology at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. She was previously Curatorial Assistant at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (2014–18).

Filmmaker 

Joris Ivens

Joris Ivens was a documentary filmmaker whose career spanned over 60 years. He filmed more than 50 international documentaries that explored leftist social and political concerns during the 20th century. Named film commissioner in 1944 for the Dutch East Indies, he later resigned in protest over the Dutch’s resistance to decolonisation. Among the notable films he has directed or co-directed, there are A Tale of the Wind (1988), The Spanish Earth (1937), and Far from Vietnam (1967). In 1988, Ivens received the Golden Lion Honorary Award at the Venice Film Festival and in 1989, he was knighted in the Order of the Dutch Lion.

Artist-in-Residence, Artist 

James Jack

James Jack is an artist and Assistant Professor of Visual Art, Yale-NUS College, Singapore. His practice is concerned with rejuvenating fragile connections that exist in the world, making artworks in direct relationship to a place and the people that live there. Between February and April 2015, Jack was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore, where he expanded his artistic research on the project Stories of Khayalan Island (2013–ongoing).

Artist 

Laleen Jayamanne

Laleen Jayamanne is a filmmaker and Professor of Cinema Studies at the Power Department of Fine Arts at the University of Sydney, Australia.

Artist 

Ruby Jayaseelan

Ruby Jayaseelan is an interdisciplinary movement artist, who trained in Bharatanatyam with Cultural Medallion recipient Srimathi Neila Sathyalingam of Apsaras Arts (Singapore) and Kalakshetra Foundation (Chennai, India). These, along with her exposure to Western techniques of the somatic and experimental movement, have informed her movement pedagogy and practices. She is currently an Associate Artist with Teater Ekamatra and has worked with local theatre and dance companies in prominent works like Ghost Writer (The Necessary Stage) and Hungry Stones (Chowk). Her own creations Flowers, Birds and Guns, Sakhi, Purushi have been presented at festivals such as Pinkfest.

Artist-in-Residence 

Prapat Jiwarangsan

The practice of Prapat Jiwarangsan (b. 1979, Thailand) is rooted in a deep fascination with archival materials which the artist peruses and reconfigures in order to question the relationships between nationalism and history, memory and politics in Thailand. In recent years, he has turned his focus tothe experience of migrant workers outside of their home countries. His films and installations havebeen included in international group exhibitions such as, most recently, Singapore Biennale 2019: Every Step in the Right Direction; DIASPORA: Exit, Exile, Exodus of Southeast Asia, MAIIAM ContemporaryArt Museum, Chiang Mai, Thailand (2018), and festivals including the 47th International Film FestivalRotterdam, Netherlands (2018) and the 27th Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival,Chicago, United States (2016).

Curator-in-Residence 

Nathalie Johnston

Active in Myanmar since 2009, NathalieJohnston (United States/Myanmar) is a curator and researcher currently living in Yangon where she has been involved in numerous independent projects and initiatives. In 2016, she founded Myanm/art, an exhibition space, gallery, and reading room dedicated to promoting contemporary art in Myanmar by developing collaborations and showcasing artists‚ works to local and international audiences. In 2013, she co-founded Myanmar Art Resource Center and Archive (MARCA), an archive and resource centre that aims to become the largest bilingual digital resource on the history and current state of the arts in Myanmar.Johnstonis also the director of the art initiative TS1 Yangon and co-founder of Pyinsa Rasa art collective.

Scholar 

Andrew Johnston

Dr Andrew Johnston is a musician, interaction/software designer, and Associate Professor, School of Software, Faculty of Engineering and IT, the University of Technology Sydney. His work focuses on the design of systems that support experimental approaches to live performance. Johnston is also co-director of the Creativity and Cognition Studios, an interdisciplinary research group working at the intersection of creativity and technology.

Artist 

Joan Jonas

Joan Jonas is one of the most significant video and performance artists and important female artists active in the 1960s and 1970s. She pioneered the use of the two genres in visual art and was influential also in other art forms. Incorporating different media, she presents multiple viewpoints and layers of material, texture, and meanings in her work to address current issues. In 1972, she began producing video works that were ground-breaking in emphasising the experience of the medium as a conceptual device and is known for merging various genres in her fragmented video narratives.

Filmmaker 

Isaac Julien

Isaac Julien, CBE RA is a distinguished filmmaker and installation artist, and Professor, UC Santa Cruz. His multiscreen film installations and photographs incorporate different artistic disciplines to create a poetic and unique visual language. Julien’s notable documentary-drama, Looking for Langston (1989), garnered him a cult following. His works have shown in solo shows internationally, and he has participated in various biennales. Most recently, he received the Charles Wollaston Award (2017) for most distinguished work at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, and in 2018 he was made a Royal Academician. Julien was awarded the title Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the Queen’s birthday honours, 2017.

Scholar 

Yoonhee Jung

Yoonhee Jung is an urban geographer with an interdisciplinary background in Architecture, Geography, and Urban Studies. Her research investigates urban and regional sustainability in Asia, with a particular focus on integrating environmental and social dimensions of sustainable development. She explores the politics of nature and sustainability planning in Asian cities and regions, with an emphasis on environmental governance, climate change challenges, and social justice, to shape more equitable and resilient futures.

Filmmaker 

Mikhail Kalatozov

Mikhail Kalatozov was a prominent film director who largely contributed to both Georgian and Russian cinema. He studied economics before starting his extensive filmmaking career in 1923. He had his solo directorial debut in 1930 with the documentary Salt for Svanetia and directed several propaganda films during World War II. He also worked as a cultural attaché at the Soviet Embassy in the United States, and was later appointed Deputy Film Minister of the Soviet Union. He is best known for his World War II drama, The Cranes Are Flying (1958), which won the Palm d’Or at the 1958 Cannes Film Festival.

Associate Professor 

Kristy H.A. Kang

Kristy H.A. Kang is a practice-based researcher whose work navigates the triangulation of place, geographies, and cultural memory. She is Associate Professor of Urban Media Art and Design in the GAME School and the ASU Media and Immersive eXperience (MIX) Center, Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts. Prior to joining ASU, she was Assistant Professor at the School of Art, Design and Media at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and received her doctorate in media arts and practice at the School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California. Her research interests combine urban and ethnic studies, mapping, and emerging media arts to visualise cultural histories of cities and communities. Her works have been presented at the Gwangju Design Biennale, South Korea; the Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore; the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; the Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe; and the Jewish Museum, Berlin, among others and received the Jury Award for New Forms at the Sundance Online Festival.

Artist-in-Residence 

Geraldine Kang

Visual artist Geraldine Kang (b. 1988, Singapore) uses photography as a means of introspection and as a tool to negotiate identities within physical and psychological spaces. Combining photography with objects she creates installations that address a range of topics from family, community, and mental illness to site-explorations of the undercurrents and ambivalences of familiar places. Kang holds a Bachelor of Fine Art in Photography and Digital Imaging from Nanyang Technological University and has exhibited her work both locally and internationally with solo exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore and NTU CCA Singapore. She participated to group shows at the ifa Gallery in Berlin and Stuttgart, and ONESITE Art Festival in Taiwan. She was awarded the 2011 Kwek Leng Joo Prize of Excellence in Still Photography and participated to photography platforms such as Kuala Lumpur International Photo Awards, Photographer’s Forum, Px3 and the Asian Women Photographers’ Showcase. She is also the editor of Left to Right, an anthology of image-making in Singapore.

Artist 

Amar Kanwar

Amar Kanwar is an artist and filmmaker. Kanwar has distinguished himself through films and multimedia works, which explore the politics of power, violence, and justice. His multilayered installations originate in narratives often drawn from zones of conflict and are characterised by a unique poetic approach to the social and political. Kanwar’s long-term research project, The Sovereign Forest (2012–ongoing) was presented at NTU CCA Singapore in 2016.

Artist-in-Residence 

Valentina Karga

The artistic practice of Valentina Karga (b. 1986, Greece) spans the fields of architecture, socially engaged art, and performance. Interested in creating alternatives to existing societal and pedagogical structures, Kargadesigns conceptual infrastructures that encourage engagement and participation to facilitate practices of commoning and sustainability. Her works have been presented at Athens Biennale, Greece (2013); transmediale, Berlin, Germany (2016); and the inaugural Thailand Biennale (2018-19). She is a founding member of Collective Disaster, an interdisciplinary, transnational, and nomadic community that works in the intersections of art, architecture, and the social realm and is currently Professor for introduction to artistic work in Design at HFBK Hamburg, Germany.

Curator-in-Residence 

Anne Szefer Karlsen

Anne Szefer Karlsen (b. 1976, Norway) is a curator, writer and editor interested in artistic and curatorial collaborations as well as developing the language that surrounds art productions of today ‚ linguistically, ideologically, spatially and structurally. She is currently Associate Professor for MA Curatorial Practice at Bergen Academy of Art and Design, Norway.

Previously, Szefer Karlsen was Director of Hordaland Art Centre in Bergen, Norway (2008-2014); curator of Art Belongs to Those Who See it, the Norwegian Sculpture Biennial (2015); and co-curator of Just what is it that makes today so familiar, so uneasy, Lofoten International Art Festival, Norway (2013). She was also Associate Curator for Research and Encounters for Inventer le monde: l’artiste citoyen, Biennale Bénin (2012). Her writings have appeared in journals such as Afterall, Bildedkunst and kunstkritikk.no. She is currently series editor for Dublett (2012 – 2016), a book series featuring artists‚ works through anthologies and artists‚ books.

Collaborator 

Misso Russell Keith

Misso Russell Keith (Singapore) is Head Chef of Open Farm Community, where he works closely with urban farmers and talented chefs to create locally sourced, seasonal, and innovative dishes. He has more than a decade of experience working in Singapore’s top luxury hotels and most celebrated restaurants, including three Michelin-starred Joël Robuchon Restaurant, Pollen, and Tippling Club.

Dan Susman is a writer, director and editor. Dan Susman with producer Jess Gormley at the Lovie Awards.

Scholar 

Yin Ker

Yin Ker is Assistant Professor at the School of Humanities and School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She owes her training in art history to the Sorbonne University. Her work focuses on Myanmar’s pioneer modern painter, Bagyi Aung Soe (1923–1990). Her research interests include “art” and “art history” as variable constructs, “art” and matrices of power and authority, and the intersections of ancient and modern methods of knowledge and image-making.

Artist-in-Residence 

Bui Cong Khanh

The artist practice of Bui Cong Khanh (b. 1972, Vietnam) often addresses social and political implications embedded in the notion of cultural heritage. He first gained international recognition in the 1990s through performances that questioned restrictions of individual expression in his own country at a time of political turmoil. Initially focused on oil painting, his practice has come to encompass mediums such as sculpture, installation, video, and drawing often combining traditional fine arts and a conceptual approach.

Recent solo projects include exhibitions at Sàn Art and The Factory Contemporary Arts Centre, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (2016). His works have been presented at the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane, Australia (2009); Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, Thailand (2013 and 2015), and Arter, Istanbul, Turkey (2014). He currently lives and works between Ho Chi Minh City and Hoi An, Vietnam.

Artist 

Hyunjin Kim

Hyunjin Kim (South Korea) is a curator, writer, and researcher, currently teaching at R.A.T. School, Seoul. She is an advisor to Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong. Her recent curatorial and interdisciplinary practices explore disparate points of regional modernity, in various forms and productions. She was Director at Arko Art Center, Seoul (2014–15), and a co-curator of 7th Gwangju Biennale (2008). She curated numerous exhibitions and projects including Tradition (Un)Realized, Arko Art Center, Seoul, South Korea (2014); Perspective Strikes Back, L’appartement22, Rabat, Morocco (2010); Plug-In #3-Undeclared Crowd, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands (2006), and published extensively on contemporary artists including Park Chan-kyong.

 

Eunsong Kim

Eunsong Kim is Assistant Professor in the Department of English, and an affiliate faculty of the department of Cultures, Societies and Global Studies at Northeastern University, Boston.

 

Christoph Knoth

Christoph Knoth is a graphic designer, teacher, web developer and researcher who focuses on digital typography and the Internet as a platform for experimenting with visual language. In 2012 he was a design researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, Netherlands, with the project Computed Type which explores the historic and future possibilities of parametric typeface generation. Since 2011 he works together with Konrad Renner and he is currently a guest researcher at the Bauhaus University Weimar, Germany. He collaborated with various artists and art institutions and worked on the websites of Casco — Office for Art, Design and Theory Utrecht, Netherlands, Schauspiel Stuttgart, Germany, and the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2015 amongst others.

Artist-in-Residence 

Takuji Kogo

Takuji Kogo (b. 1965, Japan) lives and works in Fukuoka. He is the director of the Kitakyushu Biennial and founder of *CANDY FACTORY PROJECTS. Working mainly in digital and web-based media, he has produced a large body of works both as a solo artist and in various collaborative configurations. Together with American artist John Miller, he founded a virtual band whose videos have been shown in venues such as Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin, Germany (2015) and New Museum, New York, United States (2013). *CANDY FACTORY PROJECTS has been presented at The Private Museum, Singapore (2017); Kalmar Konstmuseum, Sweden (2015); Küstlerhaus Stuttgart, Germany (2010), among other venues.

Artist-in-Residence 

Koh Nguang How

Koh Nguang How is an artist and independent researcher on Singaporean contemporary art. Between July 2014 and January 2015, Koh was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore. As part of his residency, he presented to the public his long-term artistic endeavour, Singapore Art Archive Project (SAAP). For more than 30 years, Koh has been documenting the local art scene, gathering an impressive collection of printed matters ranging from exhibition flyers, catalogues, newspapers, as well as photographs and audio recordings produced by the artist himself.

Collaborator 

Joyce Bee Tuan Koh

Joyce Bee Tuan Koh (Singapore) composes concert music and creates sound installations and multi-media works. Versatile and collaborative, Joyce has a wealth of experience working with musicians, choreographers, theatre-makers, artists, writers, philosophers, filmmakers, and architects. Originating from her interests in architecture and interdisciplinarity, her work explores notions of sonic canvas, space, and theatre of music. As described by the International Piano Quarterly, her sound world “engages the intellect and requires a different approach”. Her works have been presented at international festivals notably, International Computer Music Conferences, International Symposium on Electronic Arts, World Stage Design, Biennale Musiques France, Sir Henry Wood Promenade UK, Melbourne Arts Festival, Sydney InsideOut Festival, Singapore Arts Festival, Singapore Dan:s Festival, and Soundislands Festival.

 

Kok Heng Leun

KOK Heng Leun is a prominent figure in the Singapore arts scene, having built his artistic career as a theatre director, playwright, dramaturg and educator. Koh is known for his ability to engage the community on various issues through the arts, championing civil discourse across different segments of society. Having begun his work in the theatre almost 30 years ago, some notable directorial works include Manifesto (2016), Drift (2007), Trick or Threat (2007), and Happy (2005). His explorations with multi-disciplinary engaged arts has produced works like It Won’t Be Too Long (2015), which touched on the dynamics of space in Singapore, Both Sides, Now (2013, 2014), a project that seeks to normalise end-of-life conversations, and Project Mending Sky (2008, 2009, 2012), a series on environmental issues. Koh’s contributions to the arts have landed him the National Arts Council Singapore Young Artist Award in 2000 and the National Arts Council Cultural Fellowship in 2014. Koh is currently the Arts Nominated Member of Parliament.

Commercial Partner 

König Books

König Books is an imprint of Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König (VWKG), a publishing house which was founded in 1968 in Köln/New York by Walther and Kasper König.

 

Cresantia (Frances) Koya

Dr Cresantia Frances Koya Vaka‘uta (Fiji) is the Director of the Oceania Centre for Arts, Culture and Pacific Studies & Pacific Heritage Hub, UNESCO Faculty of Arts, Law and Education at The University of the South Pacific, Fiji. She was previously a senior lecturer in Education at The University of the South Pacific. Her doctoral thesis explored Pacific understandings of ESD through an examination of Samoan and Tongan Heritage Arts. Koya Vaka’uta’s research interests include Pacific island education, Pacific Island Arts, art as a social learning tool, Protest Poetry, Pacific Research and Evaluation, Pacific indigenous research methodologies, and Education for Sustainability in the islands. A poet and artist, she is interested in the potential role that the arts can play in formal and non-formal education with reference to issues of resilience, sustainability, and crisis in the Pacific islands.

Artist-in-Residence 

Susanne Kriemann

Susanne Kriemann (b. 1972, Germany) is an artist and Professor for Artistic Photography at the University of Design in Karlsruhe, Germany. Kriemann‚ research-based work investigates the medium of photography in the context of social history and archival practice. Recent solo exhibitions include Canopy, canopy at The Wattis Institute, San Francisco, United States (2018) and dyeing until the water runs clean, at the Kunstforum Baloise, Basel, Switzerland (2017). Her works have also been included in numerous international group shows such the 11th Shanghai Biennale, China (2016)and the 5th Berlin Biennale, Germany (2008).

Collaborator 

Ramesh Krishnan

Ramesh Krishnan (Singapore) is a sound designer, music creative and DJ. Ramesh’s inception as a sound designer started in 2004 when he collaborated on Marseilles-based artist Mathieu Briand’s Derrière Le Monde Flottant at the Musée d’art Contemporain in Lyon. He ventured into exploring stimulation, play and perception with electronic music and technology. In 2009, he took on Quest for Immortality and Singapore 1960, exhibitions held at National Museum of Singapore in which he created original compositions by re-arranging historical recordings into experimental soundscapes. Krishnan received the President’s Design Award 2010 for Quest for Immortality.

 

Wilfried Kuehn

Wilfried Kuehn is the co-founder of the architectural office Kuehn Malvezzi established in 2001 together with Simona Malvezzi and Johannes Kuehn. Past projects include the architectural design for Documenta11, the Flick Collection in the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Germany, the Julia Stoschek Collection in Düsseldorf, Germany, which was nominated for the international Mies van der Rohe award. The firm has designed the reconfiguration of a number of contemporary and historical art collections, and dealt with sensitive preservation issues for listed buildings such as the Belvedere Museum, Vienna, Austria. Their projects have been shown in international solo and group exhibitions, including the 10th, 13th and 14th Architecture Biennial in Venice and Manifesta 7 in Trento, Italy. Kuehn Malvezzi participated in the 1st Chicago Architecture Biennial in 2015.

Collaborator 

Sudarshan Chandra Kumar

Sudarshan Chandra Kumar has performed for the Asian Meeting Festival (Singapore); CHOPPA Music Fest (Singapore); Playfreely (Singapore); KLEX Festival (Malaysia); and Switch On Festival (Malaysia). He participates regularly in Serious Play Improv Lab (SPIL), a monthly experimental music series in Kuala Lumpur. Together with Yong Yandsen and Tey Beng Tze, he established LaoBan Records in 2017, which released its first album clinamina for His Hubris, a duo by Sudarshan and Yong.

Artist-in-Residence 

Jompet Kuswidananto

Jompet Kuswidananto is an artist. His works examine issues of colonialism, politics, power and mass mobilisation, and the notion of the state of transition in the context of post-reformation Indonesia. Between December 2015 and February 2016, Kuswidananto was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore. During the Residencies: OPEN, he presented Noda (2016), a site-specific intervention in his studio, a physical translation of “historical leaks” in Indonesia’s recent history that are breaking public silence and becoming visible.

Artist 

Kian Woon Kwok

Professor Kwok Kian-Woon is a sociology faculty and currently Associate Provost (Student Life) at Nanyang Technological University. His research interests include the study of social memory, mental health, civil society, and heritage and the arts. As a sociologist and a citizen, he has been actively involved in public life. He has served on many key committees of the Heritage Board, on the boards of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Arts and the Intercultural Theatre Institute, and as external advisor to the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts. He was President (1997-2001) of the Singapore Heritage Society, which has worked with many Singaporeans to shape the national agenda on heritage conservation.

Artist 

Zak Kyes

Zak Kyes is a graphic designer, and runs his own design office Zak Group in London. Kyes is also co-founder of the Bedford Press, an imprint of AA Publications, which pursues new forms and content in publishing. His work includes not only design, but also organizing art projects, often with his collaborators including artists, architects, curators and writers.

Artist-in-Residence 

Phyoe Kyi

Phyoe Kyi (b. 1977, Myanmar) is a painter, graphic designer, and a self-taught installation and performance artist based in Taunggyi, Shan State, Myanmar. Working with a variety of mediums, his conceptual and experience-based practice triggers conversations on existing social systems and the complexities of human nature, often giving voice to oppressed and forgotten people. His works has been exhibited widely across Myanmar and has been included in numerous international shows such 3rd Fukuoka Asian Art Triennial, Japan (2005) and 11th Asian Art Biennale, Bangladesh (2004). His most recent solo show, The White Clothes took place at Myanm/art Gallery, Yangon, Myanmar (2016). He curated the 1st Mingun Biennale, Mingun, Myanmar (2015).

 

Éric La Casa

Éric La Casa has worked in the field of sound creation since the early 1990s through recording, record production, installation, radio, and various types of written publications. Through his aesthetic of capturing sound, his work fits equally into the fields of sound art and music, offering an interesting critical approach to the practice of sound landscape, and questioning our listening methods and schemes. He has recently examined the sound dimension of public spaces and the places in which we spend our private and domestic lives in the context of the project entitled Habiter, and the relation between waiting and listening in L’attente. La Casa collaborated with Tarek Atoui on recording the harbour of Abu Dhabi in 2017 and of Singapore in 2018 for the I/E project.

Collaborator 

Lulu Lutfi Labibi

Lulu Lutfi Labibi studied textile craft in Indonesian Institute of the Arts in Yogyakarta (ISI Yogyakarta). In 2012, LULU LUTFI LABIBI was launched: a ready-to-wear fashion label that promotes the use of Indonesian traditional textiles such as lurik, tenun, and batik in a more up-to-date look. The technique of drapery became its own identity by forming the fabric directly onto the mannequin or living model, without creating many patterns. Apart from presenting his works at various local and international festivals, Lulu Lutfi Labibi collaborated with artists indieguerillas to present Petruk Jadi Supermodel at Artjog 2015, and with art collective Piramida Gerilya to present Warung Murakabi at Artjog 2019.

Artist-in-Residence 

Sonya Lacey

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).

Artist 

Michelle Lai

Michelle Lai (Singapore) is an urban farmer and forager, who spends her time tinkering with food experiments at Native, a cocktail bar in Singapore. Interested in issues related to the local agricultural and food system, she explores community-driven innovation and community engagement practices, forming symbiotic relationships through everyday participation, research, and dialogue. Lai is also part of TANAH, an interdisciplinary collective that playfully questions urban living via site-specific interventions within and around the city.

Lawyer 

Hervé Raimana Lallemant-Moe

Dr Hervé Raimana Lallemant-Moe (French Polynesia) is a member of the Governance and Insular Development Research Team (GDI – University of French Polynesia) and the Center of International Law (CDI – University of Lyon III). His research interests include environmental law, international law, and oversea communities’ legal issues, particularly for French Polynesia, and his specialty is climate change legal issues. Lallemant-Moe is teaching law at the University of French Polynesia, where he is an alumnus. He also graduated from the University of Western Brittany (France) and the University of South Pacific (Fiji). Lallemant-Moe is the assistant of Maina Sage, Member of the French National Assembly (French Parliament). He previously worked several years for the Polynesian Government and was a member of the High Council of French Polynesia, a group of legal experts who served as advisors to the President of the country.

 

Ulrich Lang

Ulrich Lang is Senior Conservator, MMK Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt Global Specialised Services Pte Ltd.

 

Fritz Lang

Fritz Lang was an influential filmmaker, producer and actor. He moved to the United States at the age of 46 and is best known as an émigrés from the German school of Expressionism. He had directed 23 features in his 20-year American career and is considered to have set the precedence for the evolution of American genre cinema; more specifically to film noir. His work consists of a variety of genres revolving around fate and justice.

Artist-in-Residence 

Zac Langdon-Pole

Zac Langdon-Pole’s work is underpinned by questions of belonging, translation, and identification. He has worked in a variety of media, including sculpture, performance, photography, film, textiles, poetry, installation, and using the work of other artists, to explore processes of montage, transposition, travelling, reinterpretation, collaboration, and appropriation. He is the latest recipient of the BMW Art Journey Prize (2018), was awarded the Ars Viva Prize for Visual Arts in Germany (2017), and received the Charlotte Prinz Stipendium in Darmstadt (2016). Langdon-Pole completed a BFA (Hons) at Elam School of Fine Arts, Auckland (2010) and at the Städelschule, Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Frankfurt (2016). Recent exhibitions include scions, Kunsthalle Darmstadt (2018); Ars Viva, S.M.A.K., Ghent (2018), and Kunstverein Munich (2017–18); Discoveries, Art Basel Hong Kong 2018 (presented by Michael Lett Gallery); emic etic, Between Bridges, Berlin (2018); Trappings, Station Gallery, Melbourne (2017); La Biennale de Montréal (2016–17); and Oratory Index, Michael Lett Gallery, Auckland (2016). Between March and April 2016, Langdon-Pole was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore, where he developed further his work My body … (Brendan Pole) (2015), a text based upon the memory of a poem that was only ever conveyed orally to the artist’s mother by her brother shortly before he died of AIDS complications.

Artist 

Darcy Lange

Darcy Lange was a New Zealand artist born in Urenui. During the 1970s, Lange developed a socially engaged video practice with remarkable studies of people at work that draw from documentary traditions as well as conceptual and structuralist video making. With his seminal style of real-time, unedited, without commentary, lengthy observations of workers that came to characterise his Work Studies series (1972 – 77), Lange aimed to “convey the image of work as work, as an occupation, as an activity, as creativity and as a time consumer”.

Artist-in-Residence 

Việt Lê

Việt Lê (b. 1976, Vietnam/United States) is an artist, writer, curator, and academic based in California, United States. Recent projects twist the formats of pop music videos and place trauma, representation, sexuality, and spiritualties within the framework of visual studies, ethnography, queer theory, and diasporic histories. Lê has recently presented his work at Pitzer College Art Galleries, Claremont, United States (2018) and Bangkok Art and Cultural Center, Thailand (2013) and in the solo exhibition lovebang! at Kellogg University Art Gallery, Los Angeles, United States (2016). He is a co-founder of The Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN).

Artist-in-Residence 

Soyo Lee

Working at the intersection between media arts and biology, Soyo Lee (b.1976, South Korea) mobilises archival materials and museological codes of display to critically examine conventions of collecting, manipulating, and displaying life-forms. In 2017, she initiated Lifeforms in Culture, an independent publishing platform dedicated to artistic and cultural inquiries about biological organisms. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at venues such as Seoul Museum of Art (2018); Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, South Korea (2015, 2016) and Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia (2016). The installation Wet Specimen Conservation (2014) is on permanent display at the Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, United States. She holds a PhD from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, United States.

Artist-in-Residence 

Michael Lee

Michael Lee (b. 1972, Singapore) is an artist, curator, and publisher based in Singapore. Researching urban memory with a marked interest in loss, its contexts, and implications, Lee’s observations often merge personal and national narratives and are variously translated into objects, diagrams, situations, curations, and texts. He has presented his work in solo exhibitions at Yavuz Fine Art, Singapore, 2014; Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Germany, 2013; Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong, 2010. His work has also been included in international group exhibitions such as Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale, China, 2014, and Asia Triennial Manchester, United Kingdom, 2011, among others. Lee is the founding director of Studio Bibliothèque, a platform which facilitates experiments in art making, curating, and publishing. He was a co-curator of An Atlas of Mirrors, Singapore Biennale, 2016. His editorial projects include the series Corridors: Notes on the Contemporary (Singapore: Studio Bibliothèque, 2013) and Who Cares: 16 Essays on Curating in Asia, co-edited with Alvaro Rodriguez Fominaya, (Hong Kong: Para/Site Art Space, 2010.)

He was awarded the APBF Signature Art Prize People’s Choice Award in 2011 and the National Arts Council’s Young Artist Award (Visual Arts) in 2005.

 

Lee Weng Choy

Lee Weng Choy is president of the Singapore Section of the International Association of Art Critics, and a part-time consultant with A+ Works of Art in Kuala Lumpur. Previously, Lee was Artistic Co-Director of The Substation, Singapore; he has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and the Sotheby’s Institute of Art—Singapore. His essays have appeared in journals such as Afterall, and anthologies such as Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art: An Anthology (Cornell SEAP, 2012), Over Here: International Perspectives on Art and Culture (MIT Press, 2004), and Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985 (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). He writes the “Ask a Critic” column for Plural Art Mag.

Artist 

Lee Wen

Lee Wenwas awarded the Cultural Medallion of Singapore in 2009. He entered the art scene comparatively late in the ‘80s, but quickly gained attention. His early practice was associated with The Artists Village in Singapore and later forged a more individuated artistic career. Lee Wen has been exploring different strategies of time-based and performance art since 1989. He helped initiate both R.I.T.E.S. (Rooted In The Ephemeral Speak) (2009-) and Future of Imagination (2003-), an international performance art event. Since 2012, he has taken an active interest in the memory of Singapore’s performance art history through the initiation of the Independent Archive. Recent group exhibitions include SUNSHOWER: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia 1980s to Now, The National Arts Centre and Mori Art Museum, Japan (2017), Secret Archipelago, Palais de Tokyo, France (2015) and a solo show at the Singapore Art Museum (2012). Lee Wen was an NTU CCA Singapore Artist-in-Residence from August 2014 to February 2015.

Artist 

Okkyung Lee

Okkyung Lee is a sound artist. After studying music in Korea, she moved to the USA and currently lives in New York while still working intensively around the world. Lee plays cello, and explores unprecedented ways of playing through her improvisation and composition. She employs sound and music from various genres such as traditional Korean music, jazz and noise to open up a new sphere of sound. Lee often collaborates not only with other musicians but also with visual artists.

Artist 

Jae Rhim Lee

Jae Rhim Lee is a visual artist, designer, researcher as well as the founder and director of the Infinity Burial Project. From developing city-wide soil remediation plans for the City of New Orleans to teaching art and design at MIT and building recycling systems, furniture and wearables, Jae Rhim’s work spans multiple disciplines, including art and design, city planning, psychology, and science. JR has lectured about and exhibited her work internationally and is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, including the Creative Capital Foundation, MIT, the MAK Center for Art +Architecture, and the Universitate der Kunste Berlin. She is a TED Fellow and Lecturer and Fellow at the ‘d.School’ (Hasso Plattner Institute of Design) at Stanford University.

Scholar 

Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez

Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez is an Associate Professor of the University of the Philippines Diliman Department of Art Studies. Currently working within UP’s Doctorate in Social Development program in line with long-term research on site-specific community art initiatives across the Philippines, she continues to work across the fields of criticism and art history. She presently serves as editorial collective member of the journal Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia.

Artist-in-Residence 

Diana Lelonek

Working with photography, installations, and found objects, the interdisciplinary practice of Diana Lelonek (b. 1988, Poland) interrogates the notion of nature in the anthropocene. Through the collection of newly formed waste-derived organisms across dump sites and landfills, she explores the impact of overproduction of waste on existing ecosystems. Her recent solo exhibitions include Diana Lelonek: Buona Fortuna, Fondazione Pastificio Cerere, Rome, Italy (2020); Raport, BWA Galeria Meijska Bydgoszcz, Poland and Center for Living Things, Buerobasel, Basel, Switzerland (both 2019). She has exhibited in international shows such as Nature nature, Kunstraum Niederoesterreich, Vienna, Austria andThe Art of Being Good, Tallinna Kunstihoone, Estonia (both 2019); and Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art, Latvia (2018), among others.

Artist 

Vincent Leong

Vincent Leong’s practice often concentrates on the production of nation and culture across media including photography and video. Acquired by the Guggenheim in 2012, Leong’s pair of portrait photographs, Keeping Up with the Abdullahs (2012), assembles family members from two minority ethnicities in Malaysia—Chinese and Indian—addressing the subject of assimilation in a multiethnic country. Leong’s work has been presented in solo exhibitions at Valentine Willie Fine Art, Kuala Lumpur (2007 and 2012), and Sculpture Square, Singapore (2007). The artist has also been featured in the following notable group exhibitions: Some Rooms, Osage Gallery, Hong Kong (2009); Our Own Orbit, Tembi Contemporary, Jogya, Indonesia (2009); and Tanah Ayer: Malaysian Stories from the Land, Selasar Sunaryo Art Space, Bandung, Indonesia (2011). Leong lives and works in Kuala Lumpur.

Staff 

Samantha Leong

Samantha Leong is Executive, Conference, Workshops & Archive at NTU CCA Singapore from 2016-2018.

Artist-in-Residence 

Alexandra Murray-Leslie

Alexandra Murray-Leslie (b 1970, Australia) is a researcher and pop-artformer working in the field of wearable musical instrument design for performance, PhD candidate, Creativity and Cognition Studios, The University of Technology, Sydney and founder and member of Chicks on Speed. Her current practice-based research project focuses on the development of interactive footwear designs for live-art with possible health applications.TheBipedShoes are a joint research project between The University of Technology, Sydney, SymbioticA, University of Western Australia, Department of Kinesiology, College of Health & Human Development, The Pennsylvania State University and shoe-designer Max Kibardin. Alex has published her research widely, including Journal for critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty, New Interfaces for Musical Expression Conference proceedings, Carol Rama, MACBA, 2015 and International Symposium for Wearable Computers 2014.

Artist-in-Residence 

Li Ran

Li Ran is a performance and video artist. His practice tests the line between fact and fiction, questioning assumptions of cultural cliché and challenging the idea of the self. Between September and November 2015, Li was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore where he started the work It is not Complicated, A Guide Book (2016). As part of the work, Li juxtaposed recordings of Singapore’s popular attractions, Gardens by the Bay and Marina Bay Sands, with quotes from the Chinese version of the Centre Pompidou museum guide, whose account of modern art resonates with Singapore’s contemporary landscape.

Artist 

Liang Shaoji

Liang Shaoji’s practice intersects science and nature, biology and bio-ecology, weaving and sculpture, and installation and performance. He has been working with silkworms for almost three decades, using the life process of these insects as a medium. Liang graduated from the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now renamed China Academy of Fine Arts, Hangzhou) in 1965 and studied at the university’s Varbanov Institute of Tapestry. Now working in Tiantai, Zhejiang Province, his works are filled with a sense of meditation, philosophy, and poetry, while illustrating the inherent beauty of silk. Selected exhibitions include Cloud Above Cloud, Museum of China Academy of Art, Hangzhou (2016); What About the Art?, Contemporary Art from China, Al Riwaq, Doha (2016); Liang Shaoji: Back to Origin, ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai (2014); Art of Change, Hayward Gallery, London (2012); Liang Shaoji, Prince Claus Fund, Amsterdam (2009); among others. He was awarded the Prince Claus Award in 2009 and the Chinese Contemporary Art Award (CCAA) in 2002. In September 2018, Liang will have a solo exhibition at M Woods, Beijing.

 

Richard Lim

Richard LIM (Singapore) is an art management professional, currently caring for CapitaLand’s corporate art collection in four broad ways: acquisition, display, promotion, and maintenance. As a champion of art and education, Lim regularly runs art-related activities for the enrichment of family, friends, and colleagues. He is also passionate about supporting emerging regional artists, with a special focus on Singaporean, Indonesian, and Thai art. Lim was invited to be a guest speaker at Art World Forum 2016, and has authored several articles related to corporate art acquisition processes in both English and Mandarin. In Lim’s personal artistic practice, he creates installations, paintings, and various craft-linked media, which often speak as social commentary on contemporary life.

 

Qinyi Lim

Samson Young, Para Site, Hong Kong (2016); A Luxury We Cannot Afford, Para Site, Hong Kong (2015); Why Stay If You Can Go?, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2012); Three Artists Walk Into A Bar…, de Appel, Amsterdam (2012); and Telah Terbit: Out Now,, Singapore Art Museum (2006).

Xyza Cruz Bacani, Arrow Factory, Beijing (2016); Orchestrations

Qinyi Lim (Singapore) is an independent curator and writer. She previously held curatorial positions at Para Site, Hong Kong: National University of Singapore Museum, and the Singapore Art Museum. Lim completed the de Appel Curatorial Programme in 2012. Her past projects include The Outlier

Artist-in-Residence 

Lim Sokchanlina

Working with photography, video, installation, and performance the multidisciplinary practice of Lim Sokchanlina (b. 1987, Cambodia) scrutinizes the developments in the social, political, cultural, economic, and environmental landscape of Cambodia brought about by a rampant process of modernisation. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Sunshower: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia 1980s to Now, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan (2017); Urban Aspiration, The Physics Room Contemporary Art Space, Auckland, New Zealand (2016); and Urban Street Nightclub, SA SA BASSAC, Phnom Penh, Cambodia (2013).

Lim is committed to a number of community-based projects that foster research, education, and collaborative methodologies in Phnom Penh. In 2007, he co-founded the collective Stiev Selapak which, in 2010, evolved into the artist-run space Sa Sa Art Projects. He also collaborated to establish Analogue Prints Laboratory, the first public-access darkroom in the capital of Cambodia.

Artist-in-Residence 

Charles Lim

Charles Lim (b. 1973, Singapore) sees Singapore like no other artist. As a former professional sailor, his senses are keenly attuned to environments we rarely see and to forces most of us do not even notice. His early collaborative project, tsunamii.net, which participated in dOCUMENTA 11 (2002) traced the hidden submarine infrastructure that underpins our global computer networks. After sailing for Singapore in the 1996 Olympics, Lim studied Fine Art at Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design, London, graduating in 2001. His SEA STATE series is an ongoing body of work that has been exhibited at the Dojima River Biennale, Osaka, Japan (2013); Lyon Biennial Rendez-Vous 13 at the Institut d’art contemporain Villeurbanne, France (2013); the Singapore Biennale (2011); Manifesta 7, Trentino-South Tyrol, Italy (2008); Shanghai Biennale (2008). Lim’s moving image works have been screened in international film festivals at Rotterdam, Tribeca and Edinburgh. His multi-award-winning short film, All The Lines Flow Out, premiered at the 68th Venice Film Festival, winning a Special Mention, the first award ever won there by a Singaporean production.

Staff, Curator 

Tian Lim

Tian Lim is Manager, Exhibitions at NTU CCA Singapore from 2020-2021. She graduated from NTU CCA Singapore and NTU ADM’s MA programme in Museum Studies and Curatorial Practices in 2019, and was part of the curatorial team for <!DOCTYPE work> held at The Lab in NTU CCA Singapore in 2020.

Collaborator 

Lim Kim Chua

Lim Kim Chua is a senior member of Nature Society of Singapore (NSS). He assisted The Migrant Ecologies Project by Lucy Davis.

Collaborator 

Lim Kim Seng

Lim Kim Seng is a senior member of Nature Society of Singapore (NSS). He assisted The Migrant Ecologies Project by Lucy Davis in the identification of 105 bird species around Tanglin Halt.

 

Hongjohn Lin

Hongjohn LIN (Taiwan/Singapore) is an artist, writer and curator. Lin has a PhD in Arts and Humanities from the New York University. He has participated in exhibitions including Taipei Biennial (2004), Manchester Asian Triennial 2008, Rotterdam Film Festival 2008, and Taipei Biennial (2012), China Asia Biennial (2014), and Guangzhou Triennial (2015). Lin was curator of the Taiwan Pavilion Atopia, Venice Biennial (2007), co-curator of Taipei Biennial (with Tirdad Zolghadr, 2010). Currently he is serving as Professor at the Taipei National University of the Arts. His writings can be found in international magazines, journals, and publications. He wrote the Introductions for Chinese edition of Art Power (Boris Groys) and Artificial Hells (Claire Bishop and his publications in Chinese include Poetics of Curating (2018).

Curator-in-Residence 

Aimee Lin

Aimee Lin, (b. 1979, China) editor of ArtReview Asia gave a talk at the ‘Singapore Art Book Fair 2014’. She met with local artists to understand the art scene in Singapore with research facilitated by NTU CCA Singapore Curator, Residencies.

Curator-in-Residence 

Maria Lind

Maria Lind (b. 1966, Sweden) is Director of the Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm and Artistic Director of the Gwangju Biennale 2016. Lind is also an independent curator and writer interested in exploring the formats and methodologies connected with the contemporary art institution. Previous positions include, director of the graduate program, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (2008-2010). Curatorial projects include co-curator of Manifesta 2, Europe’s biennale of contemporary art and was responsible for Moderna Museet Projekt; What if: Art on the Verge of Architecture and Design and guest-curated the group exhibition Abstract Possible: The Tamayo Take at Museo Tamayo in Mexico City. She has contributed widely to newspapers and magazines and to numerous catalogues and other publications. She is the 2009 recipient of the Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement. In the fall of 2010 Selected Maria Lind Writing was published by Sternberg Press.

Artist 

PerMagnus Lindborg

Dr PerMagnus Lindborg is a composer, sound artist, and researcher. He has authored more than 100 media artworks and compositions presented worldwide, notably at Xuhui Art Museum, Shanghai (2017); Tonspur, Vienna (2016); National Gallery Singapore (2015); Onassis Centre, Athens (2014); World Stage Design, Cardiff (2013); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2008); and Centre Pompidou, Paris (2003). Lindborg studied piano and composition at the Norwegian Music Academy in Oslo, music computing at IRCAM in Paris, contemporary musicology at Université de Paris Sorbonne, and holds a PhD in sound perception and design in multimodal environments from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm (2015). Since 2005, Lindborg has taught at institutions in France and Singapore. He has published 33 peer-reviewed articles and papers in PLoS One, Leonardo, Applied Acoustics, and Applied Sciences, and book chapters for IRCAM-Delatour and Springer-LNCS, as well as numerous conference proceedings. He created the biannual Soundislands Festival (2013, 2015, and 2017).

Artist 

Armin Linke

Armin Linke is a photographer and filmmaker who combines a range of contemporary image-processing technologies in order to blur the borders between fiction and reality. He was Research Affiliate at MIT Visual Arts Program Cambridge, guest professor at the IUAV Arts and Design University in Venice, and professor for photography at the University for Arts and Design Karlsruhe. Linke analyses the formation, the gestaltung of our natural, technological, and urban environment, perceived as a diverse space of continuous interaction. His photographs and films function as tools to become aware of the different design strategies. Concerned with different possibilities of dealing with image archives and their respective manifestations, Linke works with his own archive, as well as with other media archives, challenging conventional practices, whereby the questions of how photography and film are installed and displayed become increasingly important. In a collective approach with artists, designers, architects, historians, and curators, narratives are procured on the level of multiple discourses.

Artist 

Tayeba Begum Lipi

Tayeba Begum Lipi makes paintings, prints, installations, and videos. Lipi cofounded the Britto Arts Trust, Bangladesh’s first artist-run alternative arts platform, which has extended its reach beyond Bangladesh through exhibitions, residencies, talks, collaborations, and exchanges. Her 2012 work Love Bed, acquired for the Guggenheim’s collection, addresses themes of female identity, and references the double bind of political and gender-specific violence. Lipi was awarded the Grand Prize at the Asian Art Biennial, Dhaka, in 2004, and was the commissioner for the Bangladesh Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale (2011). She has had solo exhibitions at Alliance Française (1998 and 2004) and Bengal Gallery (2007) in Dhaka. Notable group exhibitions include the Venice Biennale (2011) and Colombo Art Biennial (2012). Lipi lives and works in Dhaka.

Institutional Partner 

Liquid Architecture

Liquid Architecture is an Australian organisation for artists working with sound. LA investigates the sounds themselves, but also the ideas communicated about, and the meaning of, sound and listening.

Artist-in-Residence 

Andrea Lissoni

Dr Andrea Lissoni is Senior Curator, International Art (Film) at Tate Modern, London (United Kingdom). At Tate Modern, he launched an annual Cinema Programme conceived as an exhibition unfolding throughout the year. He also curated the major survey exhibition Joan Jonas(2018), the Turbine Hall commission by Philippe Parreno (2016), and the live programme for the opening of the new building (2016). In 2018, he co-curated The Sound of Screens Imploding, Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement, Geneva (Switzerland)/Turin (Italy). In 2012, he co-founded Vdrome, an online cinema for artists and filmmakers. Previously, he was curator at HangarBicocca, Milan (2009-13) and co-director of the international festival Netmage, Bologna (both Italy). In April 2020, Lissoni will take up the position of artistic director at Haus der Kunst in Munich (Germany).

Collaborator 

Liu Wen Chao

Liu Wen Chao is born in 1992, China. Wen Chao graduated from Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in 2014. Moving from China to Singapore has been an experience of discovery and wandering to him. Wen Chao is interested in exploring the fundamental question of what art is by experimenting with different methods of interpretation, such as performance art, painting and video. Liu was assistant to the late Lee Wen and helped with the Independent Archive (IA).

Artist-in-Residence 

Liu Yu

Merging fictional stories and historical accounts, the practice of Liu Yu (b. 1985, Taiwan) cuts across video, installation, and text. Her work is concerned with re-contextualizing stories of marginalised communities as a commentary on the intricacies of domineering power structures. Using field work and site-specific methodologies, she reconstructs alternative narratives strung together by fragmented representations of space, history, image, and narration. Recent solo exhibitions include The history of the concave and the convex, Hong-gah Museum, Taipei, Taiwan (2018) and Several Ways to Believe, Taiwan Academy, Los Angeles, United States (2016). She has recently participated in group exhibitions such the Asian Art Biennial, Taichung, Taiwan (2019).

Research Assistant 

Liz Liu Yihui

Liz Liu Yihui is a research assistant supporting the Developing and Evaluating Digital Tools for Participatory Climate Change Mitigation (2025–2026). Liu holds a BSc in Ecological Sciences from the University of Göttingen. She has pursued a master’s degree at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) Singapore, using dye-making as a research method to investigate the materiality of a traditional textile dye in Southeast Asia. She is a co-founder at Wild Dot, a botanical ink-making studio working with locally abundant plants.

Artist 

Maria Loboda

Maria Loboda is a Berlin-based artist who creates enigmatic spaces that dive deep into rich historical narratives and the current state of affairs. She has exhibited at dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel; Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; Kunstverein Braunschweig; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; among others. She will have solo exhibitions at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, in November 2018, and at Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City, in 2019.

Institutional Partner 

Anne Lochoff

Anne Lochoff is the Programme Director of the Singapore Agri-Food Innovation Lab (SAIL), a national platform managed by NTU that seeds partnerships between SAIL’s corporate partners, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), start-ups, research institutes and institutes of higher learning (IHLs) to drive agri-food innovations. She was previously the senior advisor partnerships at the United Nations Development Programme Global Centre for Technology, Innovation and Sustainable Development in Singapore. Her background spans government, academia, NGOs, and private-sector businesses.  

Curator-in-Residence 

Barbara London

Between 1973 and 2013, Barbara London (United States) was curator at MoMA where she founded the video exhibition and collection programmes. She is also a pioneer of the integration of the Internet into curatorial practice. Among the exhibitions she organised are one-person shows with early mavericks such as Nam June Paik, Steina Vasulka, Joan Jonas, Shigeko Kubota, Bill Viola, VALIE EXPORT, Laurie Anderson, and Zhang Peili. Her thematic projects have included Looking at Music, parts 1-3 (2008–2011) and Soundings: A Contemporary Score (2013). Her writings have appeared in a range of catalogues and journals, including ArtForum, Yishu, Leonardo, ArtAsiaPacific, Art in America, Modern Painter, and Image Forum. Currently, she is completing a book with Phaidon and is teaching at Yale University School of Art, New Haven, United States.

Artist-in-Residence, Artist 

Loo Zihan

Loo Zihan is an artist. His work emphasises the malleability of memory through various representational strategies, from performance re-enactments to essay films. Between June and September 2016, Loo was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore where he continued his research into The Ray Langenbach Archive of Performance Art (which documents over 20 years of performance art in Southeast Asia), and developed I am LGB (a participatory performance commissioned by the Singapore International Festival of Arts) that highlights the fragile relation between education and control.

Artist-in-Residence 

Ben Loong

Working at the intersection of painting and sculpture, Ben Loong (b. 1988, Singapore) explores themes and questions of utility within traditional craftsmanship. Through the manipulation of industrial and mass-produced materials and the observation of textures and patterns in the everyday, his practice attempts to challenge the value systems embedded in our material culture. Ben has regularly presented in Singapore, in both solo and group exhibitions. His solo exhibitions include Squaring the Circle, Mizuma Gallery, Singapore (2021); MONO, S.E.A. Focus, Singapore (2020); and Aggregate, I_S_L_A_N_D_S, Singapore (2018). His group exhibitions include Ancient Future Myths, AC43 Gallery, Singapore (2021); FrictionaL and Lingering Manifestations, Pearl Lam Galleries, Singapore and River Stories, LASALLE’s Institute of Contemporary Art Singapore (both 2018); Untapped Emerging, Visual Arts Development Association, Chan + Hori Contemporary, Singapore (2017); Ends, Hart Lane Studios and Joyless Unity, Mori + Stein, both London, United Kingdom (2014 and 2013). He received the Highly Commended mention in the Established Artist Category at the UOB Painting of the Year Competition in 2018.

Artist-in-Residence 

Claudia Losi

The artistic practice of Claudia Losi (b.1971, Italy) explores social interactions, the entanglements of human sensibilities, and the complexities of natural phenomena through scientific, ethnographic, and anthropological research methodologies. Spanning participatory projects and performances as well as drawings, photography, and sculpture, her work has recently been presented in the solo exhibition How do I imagine being there?, Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy (2016) and in numerous international group shows including the Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Art, China (2016); MAGASIN, Grenoble, France (2010); Sharjah Biennale 8, United Arab Emirates (2007).

Artist 

Philippa Lovatt

Dr Philippa Lovatt (Scotland) is a Lecturer in Film Studies at University of St Andrews. Her research focusses on artists’ moving image, sound, eco-cinema, and independent film and video cultures in Southeast Asia. She is currently writing a monograph on the politics of sound and listening in artists’ film and is also working on an oral history project with Jasmine Nadua Trice: “Parallel Practices: Oral Histories of Southeast Asian Film and Video Cultures.” She has edited two dossiers for Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (“Theorizing Region: Film and Video Cultures in Southeast Asia” co-edited with Trice) and Screen (“Tracing the Anthropocene in Southeast Asian Cinemas” with Graiwoot Chulphongsathorn) both forthcoming in 2021. She has previously published her research in Screen; Sound, Music and the Moving Image; The New Soundtrack, SoundEffects, and Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia.

 

Geert Lovink

Geert Lovink is a media theorist, internet critic and author of Zero Comments (2007) and Networks Without a Cause (2012). Since 2004 he has been a researcher in the School for Communication and Media Design at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA) where he is the Founding Director of the Institute of Network Cultures. From 2004–2013 he taught in the New Media Master’s Programme at Mediastudies, University of Amsterdam, which has organised conferences and research networks around topics such as the politics and aesthetics of online video, urban screens, Wikipedia, the culture of search, internet revenue models, digital publishing strategies and alternatives in social media. He is a Media Theory Professor at the European Graduate School (Saas-Fee) and Associated Member of the Centre for Digital Cultures at the Leuphana University (Lueneburg/D).

 

Low Eng Teong

Low Eng Teong (Singapore) is an Assistant Chief Executive, Sector Development, National Arts Council Singapore.

Artist-in-Residence 

John Low

John Low (b.1958, Singapore) is an artist and independent researcher. In the last decade, his practice has shifted its focus from the representation of urban and rural landscape to the tensions between the local and the global. He is especially interested in understanding how cross-cultural and transnational discourses influence the production of art practices and critical writing in Singapore and Southeast Asia. His work has been featured in the 3rd Singapore Biennale (2011). He was a contributor to the publication Histories, Practices, Interventions: A Reader in Singapore Contemporary Art (2016).

Collaborator 

Felicia Low

Dr Felicia Low (Singapore) is a graduate of Goldsmiths College and has been a practising visual artist since 1999. Her projects have mostly been site-specific, performative and community-specific as she works collaboratively with different sectors of society. A Lee Kong Chien scholar of the National University of Singapore, Low obtained a PhD in Cultural Studies in Asia in 2015. Her research focused on the politics of participatory visual art practices with subaltern communities in Singapore.

Low is also the Founding Director of a not-for-profit organisation, Community Cultural Development (Singapore), which aims to provide a critical discursive platform for artistic practices that engage with communities in the region. Low is also an associate lecturer with the Singapore University of Social Sciences (BA in Art Education & Psychology/Arts Management) and teaches Anthropology at the School of the Arts, Singapore.

Artist-in-Residence 

Luca Lum

Interested in ideas of language, (anti)literature, vulnerability, vampirism, intimacy, double-agency, mourning, metaphor, genre, and the phenomenology of the event, Luca Lum (b. 1991, Singapore) works at the intersection of art, performance, poetry, and fiction. She is a co-founder of the artist-run space soft/WALL/studs and co-editor of CONCRETE ISLAND Reader. Her projects have been presented at Cemeti Institute of Art and Society, Yogyakarta, Indonesia (with soft/WALL/studs, 2018); Yeo Workshop, Ikkan Art Gallery, NUS Museum, Singapore (2016); LUMA Westbau, Zurich, Switzerland (2015).

Artist 

Lucy + Jorge Orta

Lucy + Jorge Orta are a French husband-wife art duo made up of Lucy Orta (b. United Kingdom, 1966) and Jorge Orta (b. Argentina, 1953). Their collaborative visual arts practice employs a diversity of media including drawing, sculpture and performance to realize major bodies of work that address key social and ecological challenges of our time. Amongst their most emblematic bodies of work are: Refuge Wear and Body Architecture, portable minimum habitats bridging architecture and dress; Nexus Architecture investigates alternative models of the social link; The Gift, the biomedical ethics of organ donation and the heart as a metaphor for life; HortiRecycling and 70 x 7 The Meal question the local and global food chain and rituals of community feasting; OrtaWater and Clouds reflect on water scarcity and the problems arising from its pollution and corporate control; Antarctica considers the effects of climate change on migration; and Amazonia explores interwoven ecosystems and their value to our natural environment.

Lucy + Jorge Orta’s artwork has been the focus of important survey exhibitions, including: the Argentine representation at the 46th Venice Biennale International Art Exhibition, Italy (1995); The Curve, Barbican Art Gallery, London, UK and Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Venice Biennale, Italy (2005); Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Holland (2006); Biennial of the End of the World, Ushuaia and the Antarctic Peninsula (2007); Hangar Bicocca spazio d’arte, Milan, Italy (2008); Natural History Museum, London, UK (2010); MAXXI National Museum of XXI Century Arts, Rome, Italy and Shanghai Biennale, China (2012); Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK (2013); Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, USA and Parc de la Villette, Paris, France (2014); London Museum Ontario, Canada (2015); Attenborough Arts Centre, Leicester and City Gallery and Museum, Peterborough, UK (2016); Humber Street Gallery, Hull, UK (2017); Ikon Gallery Birmingham, UK (2018).

Senior Lecturer 

Shawn Lum

Shawn Lum is a Senior Lecturer at NTU’s Asian School of the Environment (ASE) and a CTP Co-PI in Cluster 2: Climate and Biodiversity. A tropical rainforest ecologist trained at Harvard and UC Berkeley, he has spent much of his career studying the resilience and long-term viability of fragmented and disturbed forest remnants, and has played a central role in the conservation of Singapore’s forests. He previously served as President of Nature Society Singapore and was recently appointed the 18th S R Nathan Fellow for the Study of Singapore, researching why biodiversity matters even in an urban city like Singapore.  

Artist 

Tran Luong

Tran Luong’s practice spans painting, installation, and performance art. The artist came to international prominence as part of a group of artists called the Gang of Five, and was responsible for leading the development of contemporary art in Vietnam in the late 1980s and early ’90s. Acquired for the Guggenheim’s collection, Tran’s video installation Lập Lòe (2012) features the red scarf—an item of historical and political significance associated with communism—waving, floating, and being snapped against the artist’s body. Tran is a member of the curatorial team for the 2013 Singapore Biennial, and has participated in notable group exhibitions including Negotiating Home, History and Nation: Two Decades of Contemporary Art in Southeast Asia 1991–2011, Singapore Art Museum (2011). Tran lives and works in Hanoi.

Scholar 

Jean-Francois Lyotard

Jean-Francois Lyotard was a French philosopher. His influential book The Postmodern Condition (1979) would come to define postmodernism. He introduced the concept of “master narrative” as a critique of hegemonic forms of knowledge that attempt to construct and make sense of history. His writings span philosophy, politics, and aesthetics, all unified by a persistent view that reality consists of singular events that cannot be accurately represented. Lyotard made a substantial contribution in theatrical theory where he opposed the analytic rigidity of semiotics. Lyotard’s vision of a “theater of energies,” rather than of signs, was particularly relevant in the theoretical grounding of the concept of performance.

 

Magdalena Magiera

Magdalena Magiera is Curator, Outreach & Education at NTU CCA Singapore. She was an independent curator, Managing Editor of frieze d/e, and currently Editor of mono.kultur, a quarterly interview magazine. She co-curated Based in Berlin (2011) as well as exhibitions for The Building and SPLACE in Berlin. Magiera was Project Manager of The Maybe Education and Other Programs at dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel (2012), and UNITEDNATIONSPLAZA, Berlin (2006–08). Prior to joining NTU CCA Singapore, she worked for e-flux exhibitions and public programmes in New York City.

Artist-in-Residence 

Zul Mahmod

Zulkifle Mahmod is a sound-media artist. Formally trained in sculpture, Zulkifle has expanded his practice to include sculpted sound and live sound performances. Zulkifle’s practice investigates the audible attributes of physical space to explore the emotional responses of its inhabitants. Zul is one of the participants for the 52nd Venice Biennale in Italy for the Singapore Pavillion in 2007 along with three other artists. Zul‚ practice signals an encompassing and expanded visual arts sensory experience.

Between February and June 2016, Zulkifle was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore, where he explored the aural relationship between ready-made sound sculptures, and the architecture of space, and examined the sonic characteristics, forms, and textures of everyday objects.

 

Nashin Mahtani

Nashin Mahtani is the director of PetaBencana.id, a non-profit organisation developing methods and integrated software infrastructures for community-led disaster co-management. She leads a multi-disciplinary design research team in developing real-time visualisations of disaster events to support democratised practices of mutual aid for climate adaptation. Mahtani also creates new representational forms and data visualisation strategies to explain humanitarian information and communication technologies and systems. With a background in architecture, her research and design work investigates the relational complexities of urban infrastructure, computation, and neuroscience.

Artist-in-Residence 

Ato Malinda

Ato Malinda (b. 1981, Kenya) lives and works in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

She has a Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) from Transart Institute, New York. Her diverse practice consists of performance, drawing, painting, installation, video, and ceramic object-making, through which she investigates the hybrid nature of African identity, contesting notions of authenticity and issues of colonialism, trade, race, gender and sexuality.

Malinda was recently the winner of the first Annual African Art Award from the Smithsonian Institution (2016) and was one of the awardees of the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2015). She has exhibited extensively participating in exhibitions at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen, Denmark (2015) and the Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main, Germany (2014) among others.

Artist 

Nicholas Mangan

Nicholas Mangan is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in Melbourne. He is senior lecturer at Monash University. Through a practice bridging drawing, sculpture, film, and installation, Mangan creates politically astute and disconcerting assemblages that address some of the most galvanising issues of our time; the ongoing impacts of colonialism, humanity’s fraught relationship with the natural environment, and the complex and evolving dynamics of the global political economy. His recent solo exhibitions include Limits to Growth, Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA), Melbourne, the Institute of Modern Art (IMA), Brisbane, Kunst-Werke Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin, Dowse Art Museum, Wellington (2016); Ancient Lights, Chisenhale Gallery, London, (2015); Some Kinds of Duration, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, (2012). His work has been included in major international exhibitions including Biennale of Sydney (2018); Let’s Talk About the Weather: Art and Ecology in A Time of Crisis, Guangdong Times Museum, Guangzhou (2018); 74 million million million tons, Sculpture Center, New York (2018); The National 2017: new Australian art, AGNSW, Sydney (2017); 4.543 BILLION. The Matter of matter, CAPC, Bordeaux, (2017); New Museum Triennial: Surround Audience, New York (2015); 9th Bienal do Mercosul, Porto Alegre (2013); and the 13th Istanbul Biennial (2013).

Artist 

Daniel Mann

Dr Daniel Mann (Israel/United Kingdom) is a London-based writer and filmmaker. Mann’s writing has been published with journals such as Screen, Media Culture & Society and World Records. His forthcoming book, titled “Occupying Habits: Media and Warfare in Israel-Palestine”, will be out next year with Bloomsbury Press. His films have been exhibited at The Berlinale, The Rotterdam Film Festival, Cinéma du Réel, Hong Kong Film Festival and the ICA in London. Mann earned his PhD from the Media Department and the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths. Currently, he is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Film Studies Department at King’s College London.

Collaborator 

Mapletree Investments Pte Ltd

Mapletree Investments Pte Ltd (Mapletree) focuses on delivering value to its stakeholders through its business model that maximises capital efficiency. In executing a business
strategy that combines the roles of real estate development, investment, capital and property management, Mapletree has generated consistently good returns to its stakeholders, and established a track record for building award-winning development projects across various real estate classes.

As at 31 March 2020, Mapletree owns and manages S$60.5 billion of office, retail, logistics, industrial, data centre, residential, and lodging properties. The Group manages four Singapore- listed real estate investment trusts (REITs) and six private equity real estate funds, which hold a diverse portfolio of assets in Asia Pacific, the United Kingdom (UK), and the United States (US). The Group also has an extensive network of offices in Singapore, Australia, China, Hong Kong SAR, India, Japan, Malaysia, Poland, South Korea, the Netherlands, the UK, the US, and Vietnam.

Mapletree’s portfolio includes award-winning properties in Singapore such as VivoCity, Mapletree Business City, and STT Tai Seng 1, as well as mixed-use developments in the region such as Nanhai Business City in China.

Mapletree has always placed great emphasis on implementing sustainability initiatives as part
of our property development and management. Mapletree also adopts sustainable designs for its developments to reduce negative environmental impact and to ensure the health and safety of its buildings’ occupants. Sustainable design principles that Mapletree has employed include optimising site potential, minimising non-renewable energy consumption, use of environmentally friendly products, and continually optimising operational and maintenance practices.

For more information, please visit www.mapletree.com.sg

Guest Curator 

Shireen Marican

Cultural manager, curator, and researcher motivated to advance the engagement of arts and culture with critical global issues; working independently with arts organisations and other creatives to design programmes centred around social issues and strategies that engage with art, culture and heritage.

Collaborator 

Victoria Marshall

Victoria Marshall is the founder of Till Design (tilldesign.com). She is currently a President’s Fellow at the National University of Singapore, where she is pursuing a PhD in Geography. Marshall is also an Urban-Rural Systems researcher at the ETH Future Cities Laboratory in Singapore.

Artist 

Brian Massumi

Brian O’Reilly works within the fields of electroacoustic composition, sound installations, moving images, and noise music. He is also a contrabassist focusing on uncovering the inaudible textures and hidden acoustic micro-sounds of his instrument through the integration of electronic treatments and extended playing techniques. He performs with moving images and modular analog synthesizer under Black Zenith and contrabass as well as electronics with the group Game of Patience. O’Reilly is Lecturer at the School of Contemporary Music, Lasalle College of the Arts, Singapore.

Research Fellow 

Piers Masterson

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.

Artist 

Gordon Matta-Clark

Gordon Matta-Clark originally trained as an architect, was one of the most influential post-war artists. He is best known for subverting architecture and urban landscape with geometric interventions of “building cuts,” converting them into gravity-defying and disorientating walk-through sculptures. His work is seen not only as a rejection of the architectural profession but also as new modes of contemporary artistic expression. “Anarchitecture,” which became the name of an artist group of which he was a member, and the title of a 1974 exhibition from the group’s discussion around the dematerialisation of the art object and activation of space and place, was attributed to him.

Artist-in-Residence 

Alex Mawimbi

Alex Mawimbi is a visual artist. Her multimedia practice investigates the hybrid nature of African identity, contesting notions of authenticity as well as gender and female sexuality. Since 2012, she has been working on a series of drawings of half-human, half-animal creatures caught up in intimate situations and pensive poses. Mawimbi was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore between August and October 2016. During her residency, she produced a new series of self-portraits, Out of Africa, Out of Reach, and several portraits of one of Singapore’s most famous drag queens. *formerly Ato Malinda

Artist-in-Residence 

Matthew Mazzotta

Matthew Mazzota is a conceptual artist whose work lies at the intersection of art, activism, architecture, design, and urban planning. His interactive public projects explore the relationship between people and their environments, as well as between each other. Between November 2014 and January 2015, Mazzotta was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore where he recreated his community-specific public art project Outdoor Living Rooms at a hawker centre in Singapore. In 2017, Mazzotta was one of the speakers in the Centre’s public summit Cities for People NTU CCA Ideas Fest 2016/17. He received an undergraduate degree from the School of the Art Insitute of Chicago, and a Master of Science in Visual Studies from the Massachusetts Institue of Technology, Cambridge, United States.

 

Massamba Mbaye

Massamba MBAYE (Senegal) is an art critic, exhibition curator, and communication theories historian. Mbaye is a lecturer at Dakar Cheikh Anta Diop University and at the Virtual University of Senegal (UVS). Mbaye is a member of the Dakar Biennale of Contemporary African Art, Dak’Art Steering Committee and the Communication Officer of the Biennale. A member of the International Association of Art Critics (IAAC), he is the Executive Director of a media and communications group. Furthermore, Mbaye is a member of the editorial board of Afrik’Arts, an international visual arts magazine published by Dak’Art. He is an associate curator at Raw Material Company (RAW) and he is the lead curator of Kemboury Gallery. He has been regularly writing about aesthetics for the last 20 years. In 2019 Mbaye was a juror for the International Award for Public Art.

Curator-in-Residence 

Tara McDowell

Tara McDowell (United States) is Associate Professor and Director of Curatorial Practice at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. She is Editor-at-Large of The Exhibitionist, a journal on curatorial practice and exhibition making now published and distributed by the MIT press for which she served as Founding Senior Editor. She has held curatorial appointments at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, where she mounted over two dozen group and solo exhibitions. In addition to her contemporary curatorial work, McDowell has organized group shows on Minimalism, Fluxus, assemblage, and avant-garde cinema, and worked on retrospectives of Philip Guston, Gerhard Richter, and Richard Tuttle. She publishes and lectures frequently, and writes criticism for art-agenda and artforum.com. McDowell holds a Ph.D. in the History of Art from the University of California, Berkeley.

Co-Deputy Director 

Md Saidul Islam

Md Saidul Islam (Singapore) is Associate Professor of Sociology and Postgraduate Coordinator at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. A former Visiting Scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), his research sits at the intersection of environmental sociology, international development, and the socio-political dynamics of neoliberal modernity. His work focuses on climate justice, food systems, and sustainability, particularly in the Global South, and contributing to debates on biocultural worlding, relationality, and human–nature entanglements. 

Dr. Islam’s (PhD, York, Canada) publications include Climate Change and Food Security in Asia Pacific: Response and Resilience (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), and his forthcoming book, The Anatomy of Revolt: The July Revolution and the Struggle for Democracy in Bangladesh, will be published by Oxford University Press. 

Prior to NTU, he taught at York University in Canada and the College of William and Mary in the United States. In the CBCW, he will advance interdisciplinary dialogues on biocultural relations, knowledge co-production, and planetary futures.

Staff 

Pooja Paras Mehta

Pooja Paras Mehta is Young Professional Trainee at NTU CCA Singapore in 2017.

Scholar 

Dr Aron Meltzner

Dr Aron Meltzner is a geologist by training. He is an Assistant Professor at the Asian School of the Environment and a Principal Investigator at the Earth Observatory of Singapore, at Nanyang Technological University Singapore. Dr Meltzner’s research interests lie in active tectonics, past sea level and vertical land motion, at timescales from centuries to millennia. Broadly, his work addresses fundamental questions of earthquake hazard, earthquake recurrence and repeatability, fault segmentation, fault interactions, and past sea-level change. Many of his studies involve the use of coral microatolls to infer past changes in relative sea level, which we can use in turn to infer changes in sea-surface and land height, as well as tectonic deformation. He has ongoing research using coral microatolls in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines.

Artist 

Margarida Mendes

Margarida Mendes is a writer, curator, and educator. In 2009 she founded the project space The Barber Shop in Lisbon, where she hosts a programme of seminars and residencies dedicated to artistic and philosophical research. Exploring the overlap between cybernetics, philosophy, sciences, and experimental film, her personal research investigates the dynamic transformations of materialism and their impact on societal structures and cultural production. She is interested in exploring alternative modes of education and political resilience through her collaborative practice, programming and activism. Margarida Mendes has curated projects in various institutions, among them Flat Time House, London; KIM? Contemporary Art Centre, Liga; Berardo Museum, Lisbon; Spike Island Centre of Contemporary Art & Design, Bristol; 98 Weeks, Beirut; and Serralves Museum, Porto.

Margarida holds an MA in Aural and Visual Culture from Goldsmiths College of London, and in 2013 she was part of the Synapse Curatorial Research Group included in the Anthropocene Project at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, with writing in the volume Textures of the Anthropocene: Grain Vapor Ray, published by MIT Press (2004). From 2017 on she will be based in Madrid where she will co-run Escuelita, an informal school at Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo.

 

Marie Menken

Marie Menken was an underground experimental filmmaker known as “the mother of the avant-garde,” having influenced and worked with internationally renowned artists such as Andy Warhol. She progressed from painting to filmmaking in 1945, when she made her first avant-garde film using a handheld Bolex camera. Since then, she was celebrated for her intuitive, free-form cinematic style and for taking filmmaking to a new direction with the way she created poetic patterns of light, colour, and texture. Her films are fragmentary encounters with friends, landscapes, and her urban surroundings.

Curator, Staff 

Vera Mey

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.

Artist 

Eva Meyer

Eva Meyer is a writer and filmmaker based in Berlin. She is the author of various works of cinematic thinking including What Does the Veil Know? (ed. in collaboration with Vivian Liska, 2009), Frei und indirekt (2010), Zählen und Erzählen. Für eine Semiotik des Weiblichen (1983, reprint 2013). She has taught at various universities and art schools in Europe and the United States, and currently is a faculty member at the Zurich University of the Arts. Since 1997 she has collaborated with the filmmaker Eran Schaerf, focusing on documentary fiction.

Artist-in-Residence 

Alice Miceli

The work of Alice Miceli (b. 1980, Brazil) addresses issues of time, memory, and violence through formal experimentations, archival research, and investigative travels. She charts the visual, physical, and cultural manifestations of human-induced trauma inflicted on social and natural landscapes to rethink conventional strategies of representation and question the notion of visibility. In Chernobyl Project (2007-2011), she documented the exclusion zone around the site of Chernobyl’s nuclear disaster, an environment deeply affected by invisible radiations, using specially developed photographic processes. Her current research, titled In Depth (landmines) (2014-ongoing), focuses on photographic representation of landscapes contaminated with unexploded landmines and on the physical position of the photographer’s body within these fields. Quietly embedded in the ground, landmines stand as deadly remainders of conflict playing an invisible yet all-determining role. As part of this research, Miceli has travelled to Battambang Province, Cambodia; Medellin, Colombia; and Obudova, in the Šamac municipality, Bosnia & Herzegovina.

Alice Miceli lives and works between Rio de Janeiro and New York. Her exhibition record includes the 5th Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, Russia (2016); 17th Japan Media Arts Festival, Tokyo, Japan (2014); São Paolo Biennale, Brazil (2010); Dense Local, TRANSITIO_MX, Mexico City, Mexico (2009). Miceli was also recipient of the 2014 PIPA Prize, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In 2016, she was a fellow at the Jan Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, the Netherlands.

Collaborator 

Galina Mihaleva

Galina Mihaleva (Bulgaria/Singapore) is Associate Professor at the School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University, where she teaches Technology, Art and Fashion. Her research investigates the physical and psychological relationship we have with garments or what she calls “wearable technology.” Mihaleva taught at Arizona State University for more than 15 years in costume design, where she often worked with renowned choreographers worldwide. She is the founder of Galina Couture in Scottsdale, Arizona where her team develops exclusive and unique collections making use of new materials. Mihaleva received the Rumi award in the US and won first place at Tiffany’s Paris Fashion Week, 2016.

Institutional Partner 

Ministry for Culture, Community and Youth (MCCY)

Associate Professor 

Laura Miotto

Laura Miotto is Associate Professor at the School of Art, Design and Media (ADM) at Nanyang Technological University, and co-chair of the MA programme in Museum Studies and Curatorial Practices at ADM. She is also Design Director of GSM Project in Singapore, an international firm specialised in exhibition design originating from Montréal, Canada. With 20 years of experience in the design field, both as a creative director and an architectural designer, Miotto has worked on exhibitions focusing on heritage interpretation and sensorial design strategies in the context of museums, thematic galleries, and public spaces

Institutional Partner 

MIT List Visual Arts Center

They Come to Us without a Word was organised for the U.S. Pavilion of the 56th Venice Biennale by the MIT List Visual Arts Center and co-curated by Paul C. Ha, Director of the MIT List Visual Arts Center and Ute Meta Bauer, Founding Director of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore.

Curator-in-Residence 

Akiko Miyake

Akiko Fukai (September 10, 1943) is a Japanese curator of fashion and textile arts. She received a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in fashion history from National University of Ochanomizu and studied at Paris-Sorbonne University. Currently, Fukai is the Director and Chief Curator of the Kyoto Costume Institute.

Institutional Partner 

MMK Museum for Modern Art, Frankfurt

Artist 

Naeem Mohaiemen

Naeem Mohaiemen was born in London and grew up in Dhaka. In his works, he uses film, installation, and essays to research socialist utopias and incomplete decolonisation. Despite underscoring the left’s historic errors, a hope for a future global left is always a basis for the work. Mohaiemen is author of Midnight’s Third Child (Nokta, 2020) and Prisoners of Shothik Itihash (Kunsthalle Basel, 2014); co-editor (with Eszter Szakacs) of Solidarity Must be Defended (Tranzit, 2020); and co-editor (with Lorenzo Fusi) of System Error: War is a Force that Gives us Meaning (Sylvana, 2007). Solo exhibitions include Tripoli Banchal, Bengal Foundation, Dhaka (2020); There is no Last Man, Museum of Modern Art (PS1), New York (2017); and My Mobile Weighs a Ton, Gallery Chitrak, Dhaka (2008). Group exhibitions include Chobi Mela (2019, 2017, 2009); Lahore Biennial (2018); documenta 14 (2017); Venice Biennale (2015); and Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2014). Mohaiemen has worked in activist collectives in New York (Gulf Labor Coalition, Visible Collective, 3rd i South Asian Film, South Asia Solidarity Network) and Dhaka (Drishtipat, Alal O Dulal). He was nominated for the 2018 Turner Prize, London, and is a 2020-21 postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University, New York.

Research Fellow 

Regina (Maria) Möller

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.

Artist 

Mariano G. Montelibano III

Mariano G. Montelibano III is a Visayan media artist who focuses his works on the psychology of current social, political, economic, and religious structures. In recent years, his works have been included in the exhibitions Art Paris Art Fair, Grand Palais, The Philippine Contemporary: To Scale the Past and the Possible, Metropolitan Museum of Manila, the Philippines (2013); END FRAME VIDEO ART PROJECT 3, Gallery Nova, the Philippines (2011); KM1: What Remains What Disappears, Fort Santiago, Manila, the Philippines (2012); Echoes of Alliances, Alliance Francaise Foundation, Paris (2013); Move On Asia, Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruche, Germany (2012); VIVA EXCON, Art Center, Cebu, the Philippines (2010); Beyond Protest: Philippine Social Realism, Ateneo Rockwell Campus, the Philippines (2012); and Modes of Impact, Ateneo Art Gallery, the Philippines (2012), among others. Aside from being a video and sound installation artist, Mariano G. Montelibano III is a film and stage director, cultural worker, editor, technical specialist, and teaches in the University of St. La Salle in Bacolod City, the Philippines.

Collaborator 

Bharathi Moorthiappan

Bharathi Moorthiappan (Singapore) has a Masters Degree in Tamil and interested about teaching, learning, writing and speaking in the Tamil language. Bharathi pursues her passion through her Tamil education company where she encourages reading among her students. Bharathi is also an avid reader of books translated from other languages as a way to experience various cultures and travel the world.

Speaker 

Kyle Morgan

Kyle Morgan is a Nanyang Assistant Professor and National Research Foundation Fellow at the Asian School of Environment and a Principal Investigator at the Earth Observatory of Singapore. He leads the Coral Reef Geomorphology group at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) Singapore, which aims to better understand how reef structures and their ecologies provide coastal resilience in Southeast Asia.

Kyle is an inter-disciplinary researcher with degrees in marine biology and coastal geomorphology, and a PhD in marine science. Following his PhD, he was a Research Fellow in the UK investigating the coral ecology and geological evolution of the Great Barrier Reef. In 2017, Kyle moved to NTU to examine the effects of sedimentation on Singapore’s coral reefs, before being awarded the AXA Research Fund and NTU Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowships in 2019 to study the impact of human activities on coral reefs in Southeast Asia. Kyle spends his days either diving in Singapore’s waters to monitor ocean conditions and how coral reefs grow, in the lab at NTU where he conducts a range of experiments, or engaging with students, other researchers, and the public.

Artist-in-Residence 

Russell Morton

The filmic and performative practice of Russell Morton (b. 1982, Singapore) explores folkloric myths, esoteric rituals, and the conventions of cinema itself. His film Saudade (2020) was commissioned for State of Motion: Rushes of Time, Asian Film Archives, Singapore, and presented at the 31^st Singapore International Film Festival (2020); The Forest of Copper Columns (2015) won the Cinematic Achievement Award at the 57^th Thessaloniki Film Festival, Greece (2016) and was selected for several festivals including the Short Shorts Film Festival, Tokyo, Japan (2017); the Thai Short Film and Video Festival, Bangkok, Thailand and Jogja-NETPAC Asian Film Festival, Indonesia (both 2016).

Artist-in-Residence 

Zarina Muhammad

Zarina Muhammad (b. 1982, Singapore) is an artist, educator, and researcher whose practice critically re-examines oral histories, ethnographic literature, and historiographic narratives of Southeast Asia. Working at the intersections of performance, text, installation, ritual, sound, moving image, and participatory practice, her work explores the enmeshed contexts of ecocultural cosmologies, identities and interactions, mythmaking, haunted historiographies, and geo-spirited landscapes. Her long-term interdisciplinary project investigates Southeast Asia’s evolving relationship with spectrality, ritual magic, polysensoriality, and the immaterial, examining these themes against the backdrop of global modernity, the social production of rationality, and transcultural exchanges of knowledge. Her work has been widely presented at international biennales and institutions, including FotoFest Biennial, Houston, USA (2024), the 2nd Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale, Saudi Arabia (2024), the 7th Singapore Biennale (2022), and the 3rd Lahore Biennale, Pakistan (2024). She recently had a solo presentation, curated by Shubigi Rao, at the Singapore Pavilion at the 15th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2024). Zarina is the recipient of the 2022 IMPART Art Prize.

 

Ranu Mukherjee

Ranu Mukherjee (United States) is an artist and Associate Professor in Fine Art and Film at California College of the Arts, San Francisco.

Scholar 

Timothy Murray

Timothy Murray is director of the Society for the Humanities, curator of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, professor of Comparative Literature and English at Cornell University, and codirector of the Cornell/East China Normal University Center for Comparative Culture. His publication Mimesis, Masochism & Mime: The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought (1997) brought together essays by leading French thinkers, highlighting the political importance of theatricality and its contribution to continental theory. His interest in the theatrical and cinematic has been explored in other publications including Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds (2008); Drama Trauma: Specters of Race and Sexuality in Performance, Video, Art (1997); and Like a Film: Ideological Fantasy on Screen, Camera, and Canvas (1993).

Collaborator 

Museum for the Displaced

Institutional Partner 

Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD) Manila

Institutional Partner 

Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York

Speaker 

Shabbir Hussain Mustafa

Shabbir Hussain Mustafa is Curator at the National Gallery Singapore, where he researches art from Singapore and Southeast Asia, and leads the curatorial team overseeing the Singapore Gallery, a permanent exhibition space that surveys art in Singapore from the 19th century to the present. He was formerly a curator at the National University of Singapore Museum (NUS Museum), where his curatorial practice centered on the deployment of archival materials to engage different modes of thinking and writing, whilst opening the archive to the varied struggles of perception and reading. Amongst Shabbir Hussain Mustafa’s numerous exhibition projects, he was the curator of Camping and Tramping through The Colonial Archive: The Museum in Malaya (2011), and an initiator of a new project space at NUS Museum titled Prep Room – Things That May or May Not Happen (2011). Most recently, he curated In Search of Raffles’ Light: an art project with Charles Lim (2013). He has written extensively about curatorial methodologies and practices in Singapore, and is a member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA).

Artist 

Manish Nai

Manish Nai concentrates on the material qualities of the various substances he utilises in his work. His interest is in the discovery of abstract forms through the physical manipulation of matter, and the new life assumed by cast-offs when transformed from objects of use to objects of art. Using the colour indigo (indigo dye), itself loaded with a multitude of representations and associations, this opens up the visual form to subjectivities in the interpretation of the medium throughout time. Nai’s work was included in A beast, a god, and a line, curated by Cosmin Costinas, which debuted during the Dhaka Art Summit 2018 and subsequently travelled to Para Site, Hong Kong (2018). In 2017, the Fondation Fernet Branca in St. Louis, France, presented a comprehensive exhibition of the artist’s paintings, murals, sculptures, and photographs. The exhibition will travel to the Het Noordbrabants Museum in The Netherlands. Other group exhibitions include Asymmetrical Objects, Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai (2018); the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2014); and the Shanghai Biennale (2012). He has newly completed an 18-metre-long sculpture as a permanent installation in Mumbai’s Bandra-Kurla Complex. His works are on view at the Sculpture Park at Madhavendra Palace, Rajasthan, India (2017–18), and at the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago as part of its permanent collection.

Research Fellow 

Mark Nash

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

Institutional Partner 

National Arts Council

Institutional Partner 

National Gallery Singapore

Research Fellow 

Dr Roger Nelson

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. 

Artist 

Louise Neo

Louise Neo is a botanical researcher and the co-author of Wayside Flowers of Singapore, a full-colour guidebook that showcases the diversity of wildflowers in Singapore and interesting facts about each species. Neo is a contributor to Urban Forest (uforest.org), a non-profit online platform that aims to provide an accessible and convenient identification guide to the diversity of plants in Singapore and the region.

Speaker 

Alecia Neo

Alecia Neo develops long-term projects that involve collaborative partnerships with individuals and communities. Her socially engaged practice unfolds primarily through photography, video, and participatory workshops that address modes of mobility, reciprocity, caregiving, and well-being to explores issues of identity and the search for self. Her recent projects include a collaboration with the community engagement platform Both Sides, Now, Singapore (2019-2017); Touch Collection, Singapore Art Museum, and Personally Speaking, Objectifs (both Singapore, 2018-ongoing). She is the co-founder of Brack, a platform for socially engaged art. Neo was the recipient of the Young Artist Award in 2016. Between October 2019 to April 2020, she was an Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore.

Artist-in-Residence 

Arjuna Neuman

Arjuna Neuman (b.1984, United Kingdom) was born on an airplane, that’s why he has two passports. He shows his work internationally with recent exhibitions and screenings at: Sunshinism, State of the Art, Berlin, Germany (2014); Les Recontres Internationales, Haus Der Kunst der Welt, Berlin, Germany (2014); The Museum of Immortality, Ashkal Alwan, Beirut, Lebanon (2014); Exposure, Beirut Art Centre (2014); Les Rencontres Internationales, Le Gaite Lyric, Paris, France (2014); Transpositions, Verge Gallery Sydney University, Australia (2014); Young Artist Moscow Biennale, Moscow Museum (2014); ABC : MTL, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, Canada (2012); In Our Sights, Machine Projects, Los Angeles , United States (2012) amongst others. As a writer he has published articles in Relief Press, Into the Pines Press, The Journal for New Writing, VIA Press, Concord Press, Art Voices and e-flux.

Between January and April 2015, Neuman was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore, where he researched on Singapore as a “City in a Garden” through the concept of “borrowed scenery.” In addition, Neuman produced Multicultural Dread, a collaborative event addressing the topic of identity in Singapore that included a conversation co-organised by Brack and a text intervention by one of its members, Nazry Bahrawi.

 

Larry Ng

Larry Ng is the Group Director of Architecture & Urban Design Excellence, URA.

Collaborator 

Darren Ng

For the past two decades, Darren has sound designed and composed music for over 250 arts productions, and has received multiple Straits Times Life! Theatre Awards for Best Sound. Being the Associate Sound Artist and Music Composer for The Finger Players since 2004, Darren is also one of the co-founders of design collective – INDEX. He was conferred the Singapore National Arts Council’s Young Artist Award (music; multi-disciplinary practice) in 2012.

Staff 

Sara Ng

Sara Ng was Young Professional Trainee, Residencies at NTU CCA Singapore in 2018-2019.

Research Associate 

Mei Jia Ng

Ng Mei Jia is currently Research Associate at the School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University, managing the research projects Climate Transformation Programme (2024–2030), Developing and Evaluating Digital Tools for Participatory Climate Change Mitigation (2025–2026) and a research assistant on 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). She was previously a Project Officer (Intangible Cultural Heritage) at the National Heritage Board, Singapore. Mei Jia holds an MA in Southeast Asian Studies from the National University of Singapore.

Artist-in-Residence 

Ng Hui Hsien

Ng Hui Hsien (b. 1982, Singapore) works as an artist, educator, and curator. Through her artworks, she seeks to evoke stillness and wonder, especially towards our inner landscapes and the more-than-human world. Her work is informed by phenomenology, one that sees our bodies as sites of knowledge and one curious about our relations with the living earth. Ng has received solo exhibitions at Objectifs Centre of Photography and Film, Singapore (2023), Grey Projects, Singapore (2020-2021), Comma Space, Singapore (2020), and Reykjavík Museum of Photography, Iceland (2018-2019). Her work has been internationally exhibited at institutions and festivals such as Shanghai Art Book Fair, China (2019), Martin Parr Foundation, Bristol, UK (2018), the PhotoBangkok Festival, Thailand (2018), Obscura Festival of Photography, Penang, Malaysia (2018), Dali International Photography Festival, China (2018), and Athens Photo Festival, Greece (2018) among others. She holds a Master of Arts in Photography from University of the West of England and a Master of Social Sciences from National University of Singapore.

Artist-in-Residence 

Ngoc Nau

The multimedia practice of Ngoc Nau encompasses photography, holograms, and Augmented Reality (AR) and she is currently working with 3D software and other open source technologies to create new possibilities for video installation. In Nau’s work, different materials and techniques attempt to capture the subtle ways in which new media shape and dictate our views of reality. Blending traditional culture and spiritual beliefs with modern technologies and lifestyles, her work often responds to Vietnam’s accelerated urban development. She has participated in several exhibitions across Asia, including the Thailand Biennale, Korat (2021) and the Singapore Biennale (2019) among others. She also participated in documenta 15, Kassel, Germany (2022) with Sa Sa Art Projects.

Artist 

Nguyen Trinh Thi

Nguyen Trinh Thi is a Hanoi-based filmmaker and moving image artist. Her diverse practice—traversing boundaries between film and video art, installation and performance—consistently engages with memory and history, and reflects on the roles and positions of art and artists in society and the environment. Nguyen studied journalism, photography, international relations, and ethnographic film in the United States. Her films and video art works have been shown at festivals and art exhibitions including Asia Pacific Triennale of Contemporary Art (APT9) in Brisbane (2018); Sydney Biennale 2018; Jeu de Paume, Paris; CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux; the Lyon Biennale 2015; Asian Art Biennial 2015, Taiwan; Fukuoka Asian Art Triennial 2014; Singapore Biennale 2013; Jakarta Biennale 2013; Oberhausen International Film Festival; and the Rotterdam International Film Festival. Nguyen is founder and director of Hanoi DOCLAB, an independent centre for documentary film and the moving image art since 2009. She previously showed at NTU CCA Singapore in the exhibition Ghosts and Spectres – Shadows of History (2017).

 

Kim Nguyen

Kim Nguyen (United States) is Curator and Head of Programmes at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts.

Artist 

Tuan Andrew Nguyen

Tuan Andrew Nguyen (Vietnam) graduated in Fine Arts from the University of California, Irvine (1999) and received his MFA from The California Institute of the Arts (2004). His work investigates the body as site and as moment of resistance in public space, exploring the impact of mass media. Nguyen has exhibited at international exhibitions and film festivals, having works in the collection of the Queensland Art Gallery; Carre d’Art; the Museum of Modern Art; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. He is co-founder and board member of Sàn Art, an artist- initiated exhibition and educational space in Ho Chi Minh City. In 2006, he founded the art collective The Propeller Group, which has participated in numerous exhibitions including the New Museum Triennial (2012); Los Angeles Biennial (2012), New Orleans Triennial (2014), and the Venice Biennale (2015).

Artist-in-Residence 

UuDam Tran Nguyen

UuDam Tran Nguyen is an artist and co-founder of the experimental art magazine XEM. His practice explores the role and impact of human progress on rural and urban spaces. Between November and December 2016, Nguyen was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore. During his residency, Nguyen continued working on his long-term project Time Boomerang (2013– ongoing), which explores the lasting influence of colonialism. Articulated in eight phases, the project has a global scope with the artist attempting to reach and leave traces across all the continents.

Artist 

Phill Niblock

Phill Niblock is a New York-based minimalist composer and multi-media musician, and director of Experimental Intermedia, a foundation born in the flames of 1968’s barricade-hopping. He has been a maverick presence on the fringes of the avant-garde ever since.

Artist 

Carsten Nicolai

Carsten Nicolai is a cross-disciplinary artist whose work intersects art, music, and science. He introduced the dimensions of time and temporality and concepts of ephemerality in his work as well as experiments with sound and light frequencies in the mid-1990s. He is interested in the subject of human consciousness and how the complex phenomena of micro and macrosystems, and abstract concepts of physics, influence someone’s behaviour. For his musical outputs, he uses the pseudonym Alva Noto.

 

Rasmus Nielson

Dr. Nielsen received his Ph.D. from UC-Berkeley in 1998, did postdoctoral research at Harvard University and worked as an assistant professor at Cornell University from 2000-2004. From 2004 he has been a Professor of Biology at the University of Copenhagen and he joined the faculty at the departments of Integrative Biology and Statistics at Berkeley in Jan. 2008.

One of the central problems he has been interested in is the molecular basis of evolutionary adaptation. What happens at the molecular levels as one species is transformed into another over evolutionary time? To address this question he has developed a number of computational methods and applied them to large scale genomic data, such as genomic comparisons of humans and chimpanzees.

He has also worked on understanding human genetic variation. He uses both classical statistical methods and evolutionary inferences to identify genetic variants that affect phenotypic variability in humans, including genetic adaptations to diet and local environmental factors. He has studied the genetic basis of human adaption to high altitude, changes in diet, and cold climates. He has also worked extensively on analyses of ancient DNA derived from fossils to understand human origins and diversification.

Artist 

Boris Nieslony

Boris Nieslony has worked intensively as a performance artist, curator, archivist, and independent scholar, staging various installations, interventions, and artist projects since the 1970s. He is the Co-founder of Black Market International, a performance group that meets regularly in various configurations to realise group performance projects. And also the instigator of the ASA Foundation, a platform for a self-organising rhizomatic network of performance artists and theorists. Nieslony is recognised as one of the most prolific and significant contributors to performance art. He creates unpredictable and unrepeatable improvisational performance works that manifest “an encounter and its effects.”

Curator-in-Residence 

Ruth Noack

Ruth Noack (b. 1964, Germany) trained as a visual artist and art historian, held numerous lectureships, and works as curator, critic and author. She was curator of documenta 12. Recent shows include Notes on Crisis, Currency and Consumption and Vienna and Ines Doujak‚ first solo show in London. Noack headed the Curating Contemporary Art programme at the RCA, London, United Kingdom (2012-2013). She was Šaloun Professor atAcademy of Fine Art (AVU), Prague and led the Gwangju Biennale International Curator Course (2014). Currently, she is curator-tutor of a Dutch Art Institute’s Roaming Academy trajectory. She has published widely, including a book on Sanja Ivekovic’s Triangle for Afterall.

Collaborator 

Mohamed Noor

Mohamed Noor (Singapore) grew up in a musical family, and began his music career playing percussion at the age of 5 for a performance at The Victoria Theater. A multi-instrumentalist, Noor grew up playing the tabla, drums, mandolin, keyboards, clarinet, Indian karnatic flute and saxophone, to name a few. Noor currently plays more than 25 percussion instruments from around the world and has performed in many music festivals including the ASEAN Jazz Festival (Malaysia), Heineken Jazz Festival (Singapore), Big Bang Percussion Festival (London), Singapore Arts Festival, Penang Jazz, Jarusum International Jazz Festival, Nanning International Folk Song Festival, and the Tokyo International Performing Arts festival.

Artist-in-Residence 

Jamie North

Jamie North (b. 1971, Australia) is an artist based in Sydney. His practice explores the concurrence and conflict between architectural structures and the biological world. Initially working with photography, North’s interest in the ability of plants to recover, regenerate, and reclaim an environment after human intervention has shifted towards the creation of living sculptural installations. His work has been presented at the 20th Biennale of Sydney, Australia, 2016; Tophane-i Amire Cultural and Arts Center, Istanbul, Turkey, 2015; Monash University, Melbourne, 2015, amongst other venues.

Artist-in-Residence 

Elia Nurvista

As a co-founder of the food study group Bakudapan, Elia Nurvista (b. 1983, Indonesia) employs an interdisciplinary approach towards the discourse around food. Through a wide range of mediums, from video installations to workshops, her works invite reflective participation to think beyond food as an alimentary sustenance. Selected group shows include Dhaka Art Summit 2020, Bangladesh and , Framer Framed, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (both 2020); Karachi Biennale, Pakistan and Singapore Biennale with Bakudapan (both 2019). Her recent solo presentation titled Früchtlinge took place at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Germany (2019).

Institutional Partner 

NUS Museum

Artist 

Phi Phi Oanh

Phi Phi Oanh’s work is informed by her inquiry into lacquer as a material combined with her studies of the Vietnamese lacquer painting (sơn mài) tradition. Drawing from the hybrid nature of her personal history, Oanh constructs pictorial and evocative installations that reconfigure culturally-specific signs and symbols, creating familiar yet distinctive experiential spaces. In 2004 she was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study traditional Tranh Sơn Mài (Vietnamese lacquer painting) in Hanoi, which has since become a key medium in her practice. She has had solo exhibitions at L’Espace, Alliance Française in Hanoi; Artcore in Los Angeles; Art League in Houston; as well as El Palacio Nacional de la Cultura in Managua. In 2016, she was commissioned to create Pro Se, a work for the National Gallery Singapore and also showed her monumental Specula in the Singapore Biennale (2013).

 

Alan Oei

Alan OEI currently serves as the Artistic Director at The Substation. Founded in 1990, The Substation is Singapore’s first independent contemporary arts centre. Under Oei’s stewardship, The Substation has initiated programmes engaging in discourse on public space such as Discipline the City (2017) and A Public Square (2019). Oei is also co-founder and executive director of OH! Open House and was the former Artistic Director for Sculpture Square from 2012 to 2014. He holds a bachelor’s degree in art history from Columbia University and a diploma in fine arts from LASALLE College of the Arts.

Curator, Staff 

Karin Oen

Karin G. Oen is Deputy Director, Curatorial Programmes, at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore. She received her PhD in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Art and Architecture from MIT. A global modernist, she has recently focused on curatorial projects that explore transmediatic, transcultural, and transhistorical discourse. Oen is the curator of the forthcoming exhibition, teamLab: Continuity, at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, where she was a curator from 2015-2019.

Scholar 

Brigitte Oetker

Brigitte Oetker was a Professor for Creative Processes at KMM, Institut für Kultur- und Medienmanagement, Hamburg, Germany, from 2008 to 2016. She has been the editor of Jahresring—Annual of Fine Arts since 1989. Since 1988 she has been a member of the board of Villa Romana Residency in Florence, which gives grants to young artists, and assumed the mantle of chairwoman from 2019. She also serves on the board of the Friends of the German Pavilion of the Biennale di Venezia. She is a member of the International Council of MoMA, New York and of the International Council of Centre Pompidou, Paris.

 

OFFCUFF

An artist collective and band from Singapore consisting of Bani Haykal, Mohamad Riduan, Shahila Baharom and Wu Jun Han.

Artist 

Kazuo Okanoya

Kazuo Okanoya is a professor at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Tokyo, and Research Director of the ERATO Okanoya Emotional Information Project. Through the study of the psycho-biological properties of emotional information in animals that rely heavily on vocal communication, such as birds and rodents, as well as pre-linguistic, language-acquiring infants, children, and adults, he seeks to understand the mechanisms of the human brain and language.

Co-Deputy Director 

Lisa Onaga

Lisa Onaga (Germany) is a Senior Research Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG), investigating the production, ownership, and authorship of knowledge in agricultural, laboratory, health, and industrial settings.

Her book Cocoon Cultures: The Entanglement of Biology and Silk in Japan (Duke University Press, forthcoming), examines how environmental and genetic control of an insect for industrial silk manufacture underpins the history of the life sciences in Japan. Onaga’s publications include “Making Animal Materials in Time” in Historical Studies of the Natural Sciences (2023); “Insect Histories” Focus in Isis (2024); and most recently, the Osiris volume “Animal Mobilities” (2025).

At the MPIWG, she has led the “Proteins and Fibers: Scaffolding History with Molecular Signatures” Working Group, exploring multidisciplinary methods to study biological materials. Additionally, Onaga leads the “Reclaiming ‘Turtles All The Way Down’” Working Group, which studies human-animal relations in Indo-Pacific systems to engage in biocultural histories. This project builds upon her research while she was an assistant professor in the History Programme of Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (2012–2017), and will contribute to the CBCW (2026–2031).

Guest Curator 

Khim Ong

Khim Ong is Head & Curator, Biennale and Residencies at Singapore Art Museum. Previously, she was Deputy Director, Curatorial Programmes at NTU CCA Singapore (2016–19) where she co-curated solo exhibitions of internationally acclaimed artists Tarek Atoui, Amar Kanwar, and Yang Fudong, and research exhibitions Trees of Life — Knowledge in Material (2018), Ghosts and Spectres — Shadows of History (2017), and Incomplete Urbanism: Attempts of Critical Spatial Practice (2016). She is co-editor of the publication The Impossibility of Mapping (Urban Asia) (NTU CCA Singapore and World Scientific Publishing 2020). Previously, Ong held curatorial positions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, LASALLE and Osage Gallery, Hong Kong. Ong was curator of the Southeast Asia Platform at Art Stage Singapore in 2015 and was part of the curatorial team of Escape Routes, Bangkok Art Biennale 2020.

Artist 

Aihwa Ong

Professor Aihwa Ong is Professor of Socio-Cultural Anthropology and Southeast Asian Studies, Robert H. Lowie Distinguished Chair in Anthropology and Chair of Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley). Her research interests include governance and citizenship, Asian cities, cosmopolitan science and contemporary Asian art. Professor Ong has authored the publications Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia (1987); Flexible Citizenship: the Cultural Logics of Transnationality (1999); Buddha is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America (2003) and Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (2006). Among the publications she co-edited are Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics and Ethics as Anthropological Problems (2005); Privatizing China, Socialism from Afar (2008); Asian Biotech: Ethics and Communities of Fate (2010) and Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments with the Art of Being Global (2011). Professor Ong has given numerous lectures internationally and she has been invited to the World Economic Forum. Her forthcoming book draws on research in Biopolis, Singapore: Fungible Life: Experiment in the Asian City of Life (Duke University Press, 2016).

Artist-in-Residence 

Cheryl Ong

Cheryl Ong (Singapore) is a percussionist active in performance and education and a regular member of the avant-rock group The Observatory. In recent years she has been exploring improvisational and experimental practices for her music, while hunting down new ideas and sounds. Her recent performances include All Ears Festival (2020, Norway) and AngelicA Festival (2019, Bologna) in a duo with Vivian Wang. Ong participated as a musician for the dance performance by Pichet Klunchun x Wu-kang Chen at Behalf (2019, UCC, Singapore). Her solo composition Hejira was used in Yeo Siew Hua’s award winning film, A Land Imagined.

Artist 

Jimmy Ong

Jimmy Ong (Singapore/Indonesia) is an artist who currently works from his studios in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Jimmy Ong’s practice involves highly personal inquiries into bodily forms and queer(ed) identities, expanding into broader entanglements with regional myths, archetypes, traditions, and historical narratives.

Artist 

ong kian peng

Working across a broad range of mediums, including film, sound, VR, and electronics, ong kian peng (Singapore, 1981) situates his practice at the intersection of art, technology and ecology. His work explores ecological thinking through immersive multi-media environments and installations that address environmental crises, climate change, and the expanding field of human-technology interactions. Delving into the complex relationship between culture, nature, and technology, he creates visionary scenarios and raises existential questions about our role in shaping the future of a vulnerable planet. His work has been featured in international exhibitions and festivals such as, most recently, Ars Electronica (Linz, Austria, 2024) and Singapore Biennale (2022). In 2017, he co-founded Supernormal.space, an independent art space focusing on emerging and experimental art practices. He was awarded the President’s Young Talents award in 2015.  He is currently a PhD candidate at the NTU School of Art, Design and Media and a recipient of the NTU Research Scholarship.

 

Sanne Oorthuizen

Sanne Oorthuizen is a curator, editor, translator, feminist, daughter, educator and partner. She is Co-Chief Curator at Cemeti — Institute for Art and Society, Yogyakarta, Indonesia where she is currently working with Alec Steadman on Maintenance Works, a year-long project in which they envision alternative futures for Cemeti. Previously she was Curator at Casco-Office for Art, Design and Theory in Utrecht, Netherlands (2012—2016), curatorial team member for the SONSBEEK Triennial, Arnhem, Netherlands (2015—2016, with ruangrupa).

 

Bige Örer

Bige Örer is the Director of the Istanbul Biennial. She has worked on the coordination of cultural and artistic projects for the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts since 2003. Örer also works as an independent expert in the European Union’s department, which evaluates cultural funds. She has acted as a consultant and a jury member for several cultural and artistic projects, is a member of the project Capacity Building for Cultural Policy in Turkey and a member of the team writing the alternative Cultural Policy Compendium of Turkey. Bige currently teaches at Istanbul Bilgi University.

Curator-in-Residence 

Márton Orosz

Márton Orosz (b. 1979, Hungary) is Curator of the Collection of Photography and Media Arts at the Museum of Fine Arts and the Acting Director of the Vasarely Museum both in in Budapest, Hungary. He has recently curated Hungarian Artists and the Computer (2016), Time Landscape. Alan Sonfist and the Birth of Land Art (2014), and Film Experiments Brought to Light (2014).

He earned his PhD in Art History at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. He has been Terra Fellow at Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington D.C., United States, and György Kepes Fellow for Advanced Studies and Transdisciplinary Research at MIT, Cambridge, United States. His publications range across the history of photography, film, and collecting. His essay on Gyorgy Kepes’ Polaroid experiments appeared in AR – Artistic Research (Walther König, 2013). His study on the 1930s European abstract animated film industry was published in Regarding the Popular. Modernism, the Avant-Garde and High and Low Culture (De Gruyter, 2011).

 

Lucy Orta

Lucy Orta (B. Sutton Coldfield, UK, 1966) and Jorge Orta (B. Rosario, Argentina, 1953) founded Studio Orta in 1991. Lucy and Jorge’s collaborative practice focuses on the social and ecological factors of environmental sustainability. They present their work using a diverse range of media that includes drawing, sculpture, installation, couture, painting, silkscreen, photography, video and light, as well staged interventions and performances. Among their most iconic series are: refuge wear and body architecture portable minimum habitats bridging architecture and dress; hortire cycling the food chain in global and local contexts; 70 x 7 the meal the ritual of dining and its role in community networking; nexus architecture alternative modes of establishing the social link; the gift a metaphor for the heart and the biomedical ethics of organ donation; ortawater and clouds water scarcity and the problems arising from pollution and corporate control; Antarctica international human rights and freer international migration; and Amazonia – the value of the natural environment to our daily lives and to our survival. In recognition of their contribution to sustainability, the artists received the Green Leaf award in 2007 for artistic excellence with an environmental message. This was presented by the United Nations environment programme in partnership with the natural world museum at the Nobel peace center in Oslo, Norway. In 2013 the artists’ monumental meteoros clouds was selected for the inaugural terrace wires public art commission for St Pancras international in London.

Artist-in-Residence 

Nolan Oswald Dennis

The interdisciplinary practice of Nolan Oswald Dennis (b. 1988, Zambia/South Africa) looks at histories and futures of solidarity in the global south as strategic responses to capital and colonial power, and as trajectories of collective world-making. Engaging with “a black consciousness of space”, his practiceunsettles dominant ways of knowing. His work has been shown internationally at Young Congo Biennial, Kinshasa, Congo (2019); Goethe Institute, Beijing, China (2018); Kalmar Konstmuseum, Sweden (2017), amongst others. In 2016, he was awarded the FNB Art Prize. He is a Research Associate in the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre, University of Johannesburg, and a 2020/21 Digital Earth Fellow.

Artist 

Mary Otis Stevens

Mary Otis Stevens (b.1928) is a pioneering American architect. Her architectural designs, along with the founding of i Press (1968-1978), an important publisher of books on architecture, urbanism, and social space, were linked to her ability to radically re-envision space and relationships. In the context of the Cold War and American political activism in the 1960s, her work, which were often in collaboration with her partner, fellow architect and i Press co-founder Thomas McNulty, revealed her foundational training in philosophy and her commitment to de-centralising hierarchies.

Artist 

Ulrike Ottinger

Ulrike Ottinger (b. 1942) grew up in Constance, Germany, where she opened her own studio at an early age. From 1962 until 1968, she lived and worked as an artist in Paris, where she exhibited at the Salon de la Jeune Peinture and elsewhere. She studied etching techniques at the studio of Johnny Friedlaender and attended lectures at the Sorbonne on art history, religious studies, and ethnology with Claude Lévi-Strauss, Louis Althusser, and Pierre Bourdieu. In 1966, she wrote her first screenplay, entitled The Mongolian Double Drawer.

After returning to West Germany, she founded the filmclub visuell in Constance in 1969, as well as the galeriepress gallery and press, presenting Wolf Vostell and David Hockney, among others. With Tabea Blumenschein, she realised her first film in 1972–73, Laocoon & Sons, which had its premiere at Arsenal Berlin. She moved to Berlin in 1973 where she filmed the happening documentation Berlinfever – Wolf Vostell. After The Enchantment of the Blue Sailors (1975) with Valeska Gert, came the female pirate film Madame X (1977), a coproduction with the ZDF television network. The film was a sensation and prompted substantial controversy.

Ottinger’s “Berlin trilogy” began with Ticket of No Return (1979), followed by Freak Orlando (1981) and Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press (1984). Collaborating on the films were Delphine Seyrig, Magdalena Montezuma, Veruschka von Lehndorff, Eddie Constantine, and Kurt Raab, as well as the composer Peer Raben. In the short film Usinimage (1987), she revisited imagery derived from industrial wastelands and alienated urban landscapes.

Scientist 

Ow Yan Xiang

Dr Ow is a seagrass scientist who has been working on this charismatic ecosystem since 2012. She started as a marine plant physiologist when she did her PhD with James Cook University, Australia, where she fell for the beauty of seagrass meadows while studying how they respond to climate change-related stresses. In 2016, she came home to join the National University of Singapore as a post-doctoral research fellow, with the aim to understand seagrass beds in the local urban marine environment. Over the years, her pursuit of conserving and restoring seagrasses has allowed her to interact with various communities and stakeholders. This has made her appreciate that communication and engagement is probably the bigger part of a scientist’s role.

Artist 

Hyungmin Pai

Hyungmin Pai (South Korea) is a historian, critic, and curator. Currently a Professor at the Univeristy of Seoul, he recieved his PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, and is a two-time Fulbright Scholar. Pai is author of The Portfolio and the Diagram (2002), Sensuous Plan: The Architecture of Seung H-Sang (2007), and The Key Concepts of Korean Architecture (2013). He was twice curator for the Korean Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2008, 2014), and in 2014 was awarded the Golden Lion for best national participation. Pai was Head Curator of the 4th Gwangju Design Biennale (2010-11), guest curator for numerous international exhibitions and is presently Director of the inaugural Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism.

Collaborator 

Sivakumar Palakrishnan

Sivakumar Palakrishnan (Singapore) is an actor who has worked in television, film and theatre. Some of his theatrical credits include The Kalinga Trilogy (Miror Theatre) and We Are Like This Only! (HuM Theatre). He has received nominations at the Pradhana Vizha, Vasantham Channel’s Television awards, and won for his performance in Veethi Varai. Siva is recognized for his role in K Rajagopal’s A Yellow Bird, which premiered at the International Critics’ Week at the Cannes Film Festival in 2016. Currently, he is a cast member in Channel 5’s television drama series, Tanglin.

Scholar 

Nikos Papastergiadis

Nikos Papastergiadis is the Director of the Research Unit in Public Cultures, and a Professor in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. Furthermore, he is a co- founder (with Scott McQuire) of the Spatial Aesthetics research cluster. He is the Project Leader of the Australian Research Council Linkage Project, “Large Screens and the Transnational Public Sphere,” and Chief Investigator on the ARC Discovery Project “Public Screens and the Transformation of Public Space.” Prior to joining the School of Culture and Communication, he was Deputy Director of the Australia Centre at the University of Melbourne, Head of the Centre for Ideas at the Victorian College of Arts, and lecturer in Sociology and recipient of the Simon Fellowship at the University of Manchester. Throughout his career, Papastergiadis has provided strategic consultancies for government agencies on issues of cultural identity and has worked in collaborative projects with international renowned artists and theorists.

 

Park Chan-kyong

Park Chan-kyong is a media artist, film director and writer. He graduated from Seoul National University with a BFA in Painting in 1988, and the California Institute of the Arts with a MFA in Photography in 1995. Park served as the Artistic Director of the SeMA Biennale Mediacity Seoul in 2014. His major works include Manshin: Ten Thousand Spirits (2013), Night Fishing (2011, co-directed by Park Chan-wook), Sindoan (2008), Power Passage (2004) and Sets (2000). Park’s work has been exhibited internationally in numerous solo and group exhibitions including Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2017), Taipei Biennial (2016), Anyang Public Art Project (2016), Iniva, London (2015), Art Sonje Center, Seoul (2013), and Atelier Hermès, Seoul (2012, 2008). Park was awarded the Hermès Korea Art Award in 2004, and the Golden Bear for best short film at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2011 for Night Fishing. His works are included in the collection of major art institutions, such as the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea; KADIST, Paris and San Francisco; Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes; Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul; Seoul Museum of Art; Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Ansan; and Art Sonje Center, Seoul.

Associate Professor 

Edward Park

Edward Park is an Associate Professor in Physical Geography at NIE and ASE. He serves as Principal Investigator at the Earth Observatory of Singapore (EOS) where he is developing a river research program entitled ‘Tropical Rivers in the Anthropocene’. He also serves as a PI for Research Cluster 1: Climate Processes and Extremes, on the Climate Transformation Programme led by EOS, NTU. His research investigates the tropical rivers processes along the Mekong Delta and how they interact with human activities, such as sand mining, as well as natural disasters. Edward’s work is strongly based on geospatial technologies, hydrological modeling, in addition to traditional field surveys. He received his PhD from the University of Texas, Austin and BA from the Ohio State University.    

Collaborator 

James Parker

James Parker (Australia) is an academic and curator based at Institute for International Law and Humanities at Melbourne Law School. His research focuses on the relations between law, sound and listening.

Artist 

passthejpeg

passthejpeg is an artist collective based in Singapore.

Artist-in-Residence 

Gary-Ross Pastrana

Gary-Ross Pastrana is an artist and curator. His artistic practice combines concepts with objects and his poetic and subtle works often focus on the afterlife of things and the new meanings it generates. Between July and October 2015, Pastrana was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore. His residency coincided with Singapore’s 50th-year celebrations as a nation state, which prompted the artist to document a series of coincidental encounters in the city with this anniversary number.

 

Jasmeen Patheja

Jasmeen PATHEJA (India) lives and works in Bangalore. She is founder andfacilitator of Blank Noise, a community of Action Sheroes, Heroes, Theyroes, citizens and persons, taking agency to end sexual and gender based violence. Patheja initiated Blank Noise in 2003, in response to the normalisation and the silence surrounding street harassment. Over the last 16 years, Patheja has designed a wide range of interventions to trigger discourse and shift public consciousness. Her work rests on the power of collaborations and community. Patheja is a TED speaker and Ashoka Fellow. In 2015, she received the International Award for Public Art, for the project Talk to Me (Blank Noise). She is currently shortlisted for the Visible Award and was shortlisted for the Vera List Center for Arts and Politics. She works as artist in residence at Srishti Institute of Art Design and Technology.

Artist-in-Residence 

Narawan Pathomvat

Narawan Pathomvat (b. 1980, Thailand)is the founder and director of contemporary art library and non-profit platform, The Reading Room, Bangkok. She is also lecturer at the Department of Art History, Faculty of Archaeology at Silpakorn University, Bangkok. She received her MPS (Arts and Cultural Management) from Pratt Institute, New York and previously worked for Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York, and Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong. Pathomvat is also an independent curator, writer, and translator.

Collaborator 

Sudhir Pattnaik

Sudhir Pattnaik (born 1962, lives in Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India) is an independent media activist who has been intensely engaged in social issues for the last 25 years. He is associated with print and electronic news magazines as a part of non-profit collective Samadrusti, and is the editor of fortnightly Oriya news magazine The Samadrusti. He is also a lyricist, playwright, and theatre director. His views are non-ideological and secular. He “firmly believes that it is only love and peace preached, practiced, and propagated by the bold and the brave minority that may bring lasting change in society.” Pattnaik has collaborated on The Sovereign Forest since 2011, and has hosted its installation in the Samadrusti campus in Odisha since 2012.

Artist 

David Peace

David Peace is a writer who lives in Tokyo. Peace is known as a chronicler of the 20th century; the Red Riding Quartet dealing with the Yorkshire Ripper, GB84 on the 1984-85 miners’ strike, The Damned Utd and Red or Dead on football, and the Tokyo Trilogy (he is now writing the last novel) on the American occupation period of post-war Japan. He develops his novels from the historical facts of war, politics, crime and sport to construct an image of societies of extremes.

Curator-in-Residence 

Robin Peckham

Robin Peckham‚ (b.1984, China) is the editor of LEAP magazine. His residency coincided with Art Stage 2015.

Collaborator 

Manuel Pelmus

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.

 

Pen Sereypagna

Pen Sereypagna is the director of the Vann Molyvann Project and a freelance architect and urban researcher based in Phnom Penh City. He has been awarded scholarships and fellowships including the Chevening Scholarship (2017–18), US/ICOMOS and East West Center (2015–16), Sa Sa Art Projects (2014–15), Asian Cultural Council (2012–13), and the School of Constructed Environments PARSONS as a visiting scholar (2012). Sereypagna’s work on Genealogy of Urban Form Phnom Penh, Genealogy of Bassac, and Phnom Penh Visions has been the subject of several exhibitions and presentations in Cambodia and selected venues in Asia, Australia, and the US. His publications on urban transformation with a focus on Phnom Penh, Cambodia, include: Cité de l’Architecture & du Patrimoine (forthcoming 2019), National University of Singapore’s Urban Asias (2018), Chulalongkorn University’s Nakhara journal (2015), and Parsons Journal (2014).

 

Maureen Penjueli

Maureen Penjueli (Fiji) is the Coordinator of the Pacific Network on Globalisation (PANG) based in Suva, Fiji. She has a vast experience working with a number of key regional organisations in the Pacific, including Greenpeace and the Foundation of the Peoples of the South Pacific International (FSPI). PANG is the region’s alternative voice in defending and promoting Pacific people’s right to economic self-determination, mobilising and advocating based on substantive research and analysis to challenge neoliberal development agendas in the region.

Collaborator 

Sidd Perez

Siddharta Perez is an Assistant Curator at the NUS Museum, focused on developing exhibitions and programmes around the museum’s South & Southeast Asian Collection. Previously based in Manila, she is the co-founder of Planting Rice, an independent curatorial and resource platform, and worked as the curatorial associate for The Drawing Room’s Manila and Singapore galleries (2012-2015). Her other previous projects include LOSTprojects (2009-2012) – an independent space for Australia and Philippine artist exchange, the coordination of the Roberto Chabet retrospective (2011) and as an exhibition manager/curator for the Valentine Willie Fine Art galleries (2008-2011).

Curator-in-Residence 

Emily Pethick

Since 2008, Emily Pethick (b. 1975, United Kingdom) has been Director of The Showroom, London, United Kingdom, a contemporary art space committed to collaborative and process-driven approaches to cultural production within its locality and beyond. She was previously Director of Casco, Office for Art, Design and Theory, in Utrecht, the Netherlands (2005-2008) and curator at Cubitt, London, United Kingdom (2003-2004). Pethick is currently teaching the course Curating Positions at the Dutch Art Institute, Arnhem, the Netherlands. She is also working on a research project for a new institution in Amsterdam led by Stedelijk Museum and Ammodo, both in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Pethick has contributed to numerous catalogues and magazines, including Artforum, Frieze, Afterall, and The Exhibitionist, and edited numerous publications including Wendelien van Oldenborgh’s monograph Amateur (2016), and Cluster: Dialectionary (with Binna Choi, Maria Lind and Natasa Petresin-Bachelez, 2014). Pethick is also a jury member for the 2017 Turner Prize.

Curator-in-Residence 

Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez

Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez is an independent curator, editor, and writer based in Paris whose research interest spans situated curatorial practices, empathy, transnational feminism, slow institutions, degrowth, and performative practices in the former Eastern Europe.She is the curator of the Contour Biennale 9 (Mechelen, Belgium, 2019). She is developing, with Giovanna Zapperi, the first comprehensive exhibition of the videos of French actress and feminist activist Delphine Seyrig (1932-1990). She co-founded, with Elisabeth Lebovici and Patricia Falguières,Something You Should Know, a seminar series held at the School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) and she is a member of the research group Travelling Féministe at the Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir, both in Paris.

Her previous exhibitions include: Let’s Talk about the Weather. Art and Ecology in a Time of Crisis (curated with Nora Razian), Sursock Museum (Beirut, Lebanon, 2016); Becoming Earthlings. Blackmarket for Useful Knowledge and Non-Knowledge #18 (curated with Alexander Klose, Council, and Mobile Academy), Musée de l’Homme (Paris, France, 2015); Tales of Empathy, Jeu de Paume (Paris, France, 2014), and Resilience, Triennial of Contemporary Art, Museum of Contemporary Art (Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2013) amongst others. Petrešin-Bachelez was chief editor of L’Internationale Online (2014-2017) and of the Manifesta Journal (2012-2014); co-director of Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers (2010-2012), and co-founder of Cluster, an European network of small-scale art institutions. She has contributed texts to numerous publications and magazines such e-flux journal, Bidoun, Sarai Reader, Springerin, Parkett Magazine.

 

Lorenzo Petrillo

Lorenzo PETRILLO (Italy/Singapore) is a designer and community driver. He began his career in Italy, designing for esterni, an association that develops cultural projects for public spaces (among them, the Public Design Festival). Petrillo then moved to Asia in 2007, first to Shanghai and then three years later to Singapore. His experience over the last eight years has been predominantly in the brand experience space, as a lead designer for MNCs such as Bata and Samsung. His travels around the globe inspired him to start his own business, LOPELAB, a design consultant agency that redesigns public spaces through marrying urban structures and social ideas for a more enjoyable and sustainable city. Since then, Petrillo and his team at Lopelab have organised eight Urban Ventures events that have seen over 50,000 visitors.

 

Conrad H. Philipp

Conrad H. Philipp (Germany/Singapore), Future Cities Laboratory, Singapore-ETH Centre

Artist-in-Residence 

Pratchaya Phinthong

Pratchaya Phinthong creates situations as an invitation made to the visitor to share an experience with him. His projects (without any specific or pre-defined form) suggest a crack in which the spectators are invited to fill the gaps. He builds a set, a fiction, or a process where he can test our perceptions. He proposes to his audience a story with multiple paths. A trip down memory lane combined with subjective perceptions. His projects are often constructed in a dialogue between the artist and the others, making the artist‚ movement glide towards the social field. Beyond any artistic or formal experience, the artist is looking to find his place and his identity playing on the economic representations and cultural existences. The ‚Äògallery‚ space becomes a free area.Therefore, Phinthong works in a dynamic area in between different realities underlining the space and distance that separates them: two geographical points, two societies, two economic systems.

Phinthong was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore between October and December 2014. As part of his residency, Phinthong explored the idea of airspace as monitored and ambiguous, researching into the histories and negotiations of airspace between Singapore and its neighbours, with particular attention given to Thailand.

Artist-in-Residence 

Souliya Phoumivong

The artistic practice of Souliya Phoumivong (b. 1983, Laos) radically shifted from painting to photography, video art, and stop motion animation as a result of a residency at Youkobo Art Space, Tokyo, in 2010 during which the artist experimented with new media art and created his first Claymation work. In 2012, Phoumivong established Clay House Studio which focuses on video and stop-motion works, and is the first of its kind in Laos. The studio is responsible for an array of projects, including the production of the first clay animation TV show in Laos which has reached its 4th season. Phoumivong is currently a lecturer at the Department of Communication Design at the National Institute of Fine Art in Vientiane and Junior Curator for‚”Condition Report” in 2017, a collaborative project by Japan Foundation Asia Centre, featuring emerging curators from Japan and Southeast Asia. His work has been included in exhibitions such as Missing Links, The Jim Thompson Art Center, Bangkok, Thailand (2015) and Cross+Scape, ASEAN-Korea Contemporary Media Art Exhibition, Kumho Museum of Art, Seoul, South Korea (2011).

Artist 

Sopheap Pich

Sopheap Pich left Cambodia with his family as a refugee at the end of the Khmer Rouge’s reign, settling in the United States in 1984. Memories of his childhood and a desire to reconnect with his home country drew the artist back to Cambodia in 2002. He began working with local materials—bamboo, rattan, burlap from rice bags, beeswax, and earth pigments gathered from around Cambodia—to make sculptures inspired by bodily organs, vegetal forms, and abstract geometric structures. The strength, durability, lightness, and incredible malleability of rattan allow Pich to create organic forms that have become a signature of his practice. Pich holds a BFA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (1995), and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1999). In 2013, Pich presented a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, entitled Cambodian Rattan: The Sculptures of Sopheap Pich. Selected group exhibitions include the 57th Venice Biennale (2017); the Moscow Biennale (2013); Documenta 13, Kassel (2012); the Singapore Biennial (2011), among others. His work was presented at NTU CCA Singapore as part of Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative’s No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia (2014), curated by Dr June Yap.

Artist 

Alexandra Pirici

Alexandra Pirici is an artist with a background in choreography that works undisciplined across different mediums, both in galleries and in public space. Her work has been exhibited within the decennial art exhibition Skulptur Projekte Munster 2017; the Romanian Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale; Tate Modern, London; New Museum, New York; 9th Berlin Biennale; Manifesta 10; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the Museum Ludwig Cologne; among others.

Guest Curator 

Philippe Pirotte

Philippe Pirotte is Rector of Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste – Städelschule, and Director of Portikus, Frankfurt, and Visiting Professor (2018/19) of MA Museum Studies and Curatorial Practices, School of Art, Design and Media, NTU.

Artist-in-Residence 

Falke Pisano

The artistic practice of Falke Pisano (b. 1978, Netherlands) scrutinizes the ways in which systems of thought are structured, formalized, and ultimately naturalized. Her series of works stem from long-term research cycles that delve deep into specific subject matters and undermine conventional frameworks of knowledge by triggering a continuous exchange between language, ideas, materials, and forms. Her work has been widely exhibited internationally. Recent solo shows were held at Centro de Creación Contemporànea de Andalucía, Cordoba, Spain (2016), REDCAT, Los Angeles, United States (2015); Praxes Center for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany (2014); The Showroom, London, United Kingdom (2013). She was a recipient of the Prix de Rome in 2013.

Curator-in-Residence 

Bojana Piškur

Bojana Piškur (Slovenia) is a writer and curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana. Her research focuses on political issues and the way in which they relate to, or are manifested in, the field of art looking specifically at the regions of former Yugoslavia and Latin America. She has contributed to numerous publications and lectured extensively on topics such as post avant-gardes in former Yugoslavia, radical education, cultural politics in self-management, and the Non-Aligned Movement.

Collaborator 

Planting Rice

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.

Collaborator 

Melanie Pocock

Melanie Pocock is Assistant Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, LASALLE College of the Arts and Editor-at-large of Kaleidoscope Asia. A graduate of the Royal College of Art’s MA in Curating Contemporary Art, she previously held curatorial positions at Art Scene China and Modern Art Oxford, where she worked on solo exhibitions by Shezad Dawood and Stephen Willats. Pocock’s projects and writing explore shifting modalities in contemporary media and the influence of intercultural exchange on artistic practices. Exhibitions she has curated include Jack Tan: How to do things with rules (2015), Countershadows (tactics in evasion) (2014) and Michael Lee: A machine for (living) dying in (2014). In 2014, Pocock edited and co-authored Sulaiman, the first monograph on the work of Malaysian artist Shooshie Sulaiman.

 

Valérie Portefaix

Valérie Portefaix (France/Hong Kong) is Director of MAP Office, a multidisciplinary platform based in Hong Kong since 1996, co-founded with Laurent Gutierrez. The relation between bodies and territories is at the centre of its research-based artistic production. With 20 years of multifaceted navigations, publications, and exhibitions, MAP Office’s practice has evolved across multiple fields and disciplines, having recently developed a specific focus on islands and other liquid territories as a subject and object of study. Through these investigations, and after more than a decade of exploring the effects of globalisation and urbanisation in Hong Kong and China, MAP Office is investigating a new geography of archipelagos that characterise the transient and globalised environment of the Anthropocene age. MAP Office’s last cross-disciplinary research Our Ocean Guide was published in 2017 by Lightbox.

Institutional Partner 

Post-Museum

 

Marjetica Potrč

Marjetica Potrč is an artist and architect. Her work includes drawing, architectural case studies, and public art projects. Since 2011, she leads a class of participatory practice, Design for the Living World, at the University of Fine Arts (HFBK) in Hamburg, Germany. In Potrč’s view, the sustainable solutions that are implemented and disseminated by communities serve to empower these communities and help create a democracy built from below. Potrč has received numerous awards, including the Hugo Boss Prize (2000) and the Vera List Center for Arts and Politics Fellowship (2007) at The New School in New York, United States.

Scholar 

Elizabeth A. Povinelli

Dr Elizabeth A. Povinelli is an anthropologist, writer, and filmmaker. In her writing and film work, she developed a critical theory of late liberalism that supports an anthropology of the otherwise. She was previously the editor of Public Culture and has published widely, including Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (2016), Economies of Abandonment (2011), and The Empire of Love (2006). She is a founding member of the Karrabing Film Collective. Povinelli is the Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University, New York.

Artist 

Progressive Disintegrations

Progressive Disintegrations is a collaborative group that began out of the need to create a format and a space for creative exchange between the artistic practices of Chua Chye Teck, Marc Gloede, Hilmi Johandi and Wei Leng Tay. The project aimed to open up the normally individual artistic and curatorial pursuits of each participant, creating situations that allow them to explore and expand the notions that underlie their respective practices.

Collaborator 

Laure Prouvost

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.

 

Milenko Prvački

Milenko PRVAČKI (Singapore) was born in 1951 in (former) Yugoslavia. He graduated with a Master of Fine Arts (Painting) from the Institutul de Arte Plastice “Nicolae Grigorescu” in Bucharest, Romania. Prvački is one of Singapore’s foremost artists and art educators, teaching at LASALLE College of the Arts since 1994. He was Dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts for 10 years, and is currently Senior Fellow, Office of the President at the College. He is also Founder of ART WALK Little India and Tropical Lab. Prvački participated in major exhibitions, most notably the Biennale of Sydney (2006). His work is in various private and public collections, such as the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australia; Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, Serbia; Singapore Art Museum, National Gallery Singapore; amongst others. He was awarded the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 2011, and Singapore’s Cultural Medallion for Visual Arts in 2012.

Artist-in-Residence 

Ana Prvacki

Ana Prvacki’s (b. 1976, Serbia) work has been included in many international exhibitions including dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel (2012); Sydney Biennial (2007); Singapore Biennial (2006); Turin Triennale (2005). She has developed projects for venues and institutions such as Greeting Committee, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, United States (2011); Mardi, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2010); Music Derived Pain Killer, Castello di Rivoli, Italy (2009); T1 Pantagruel Syndrome, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin, Italy (2005); Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art, Smart Museum of Art, Chicago, United States (2012); Speculative Futures, Bloomberg HQ, New York, United States (2011); 25 Years Later…, Art in General, New York, United States (2007); Time Becomes Form, Artists Space, New York, United States (2008); Neutralize Negative Feelings, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City, United States (2013); Performing Practice, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, United States (2012).

 

Pwint

Dr. Pwint is Professor and Deputy Head of the Department of Architecture at Yangon Technical University (YTU), Myanmar. She received her PhD in Architecture from Yangon Technical University in 2006. Sheworks in the areas of heritage conservation management, architecture education, sustainable architecture, and vernacular architecture. She is a local expert for the development of building control guidelines for the Pyu Ancient Cities, a UNSECO World Heritage Site. Apart from YTU, Pwint has worked with the Myanmar Ministry of Science and Technology. She is a member of the Bagan Master Plan Team, Myanmar ICOMOS, a former executive member of the Association of Myanmar Architects (2015–2018),and was a member of the Three Pyu Ancient Cities Property Management Plan Team (2012–2014).

Collaborator 

Bruce Quek

Bruce Quek is a young artist who works with whatever seems appropriate at the time, often producing things that don’t seem to mean anything. This tendency might be traced to his training in sculpture at LASALLE, which often saw him scrounging for serendipitous pieces of scrap metal. His projects tend to take the distribution and dissemination of information as starting points for various conceptual investigations, critiques of artistic infrastructure, and other wanderings. He takes an interest in many things, but maintains an unhealthy fascination with emergent behaviour, pathological transference, and puns. All of his endeavours are frequently threatened by the seductive allure of reading random things online, out of a vague belief in the value of consuming as much information as possible. In addition to practicing as an artist, he is involved with the art world on a number of other levels, from writing criticism and assisting the Independent Archive, to plain old gallery sitting. His recent and upcoming projects have included participating in the traveling show Time of others, as well as an upcoming group exhibition, PPC | 珍珠坊: A Public Living Room. In 2016’s first edition of the Monday Moot, he’ll be speaking about his recent work and practice in the various roles he plays, including in-depth discussion of his recent and upcoming works. Bruce was manager to the Independent Archive (IA), founded by the late Lee Wen in 2012.

 

Genevieve Quick

Genevieve Quick (United States) is an artist and arts writer in San Francisco.

 

Bhenji Ra

Bhenji Ra is an interdisciplinary artist who reframes performance through a combination of dance, choreography, video, and installation. Her work is often concerned with the dissection of cultural theory and identity. She uses spectacle and her own personal histories to explore themes of race, sexuality, and gender, giving voice to hidden and marginalised communities, and suggesting alternative modules of community. He is part of Sydney-based collective Club Ate.

Artist 

Serina Abdul Rahman

Dr Serina Abdul Rahman (Singapore/Malaysia) is a conservation scientist and environmental anthropologist. Her research interests lie in human, floral, and faunal marine communities, as well as their interaction and preservation. She specialises in sustainable development and education; community empowerment; environmental issues; and innovations; including development for urban and rural poor. In 2004, she moved to Malaysia to dedicate her time to marine environmental organisations and island/coastal communities. In 2009, she co-founded Kelab Alami, a community organisation in a fishing village in Johor to empower the community through environmental education for habitat conservation. Since 2015, the programme evolved to focus on community capacity-building.

Guest Curator 

Ella Raidel

Ella Raidel, Ph.D., is a filmmaker, artist and researcher. Since April 2019 she is Assistant Professor at NTU Singapore at ADM School of Art, Design and Media and WKWSCI School of Communication and Information.

Curator-in-Residence 

Filipa Ramos

Filipa Ramos (Portugal/United Kingdom) is a writer and editor, currently Editor-in-Chief of art-agenda, commissioning and publishing experimental and rigorous writing on art. She is a lecturer in art and moving image at the Experimental Film MA Programme of Kingston University, and at the MRes Art: Moving Image of Central Saint Martins/ University of the Arts, both in London, and works with the Master Programme of the Institut Kunst, Basel. She is co-founder and co-curator of Vdrome, and was previously Associate Editor of Manifesta Journal; contributed to documenta 13 (2012) and 14 (2017). Interested in the way art, and particularly time-based work, provides a site of encounter for humans and nonhumans, Ramos has written, lectured, and curated exhibitions and film programmes on the topic, having edited Animals (Whitechapel Gallery/ MIT Press, 2016). Ramos was a Writer-in- Residence at NTU CCA Singapore in 2016. She has been a guest curator at several institutions and her writing has been published in several magazines and catalogues.

Artist-in-Residence, Artist 

Shubigi Rao

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.

Artist 

Lisa Rave

Lisa Rave is an artist, filmmaker, and photographer. In her work, she often explores issues surrounding postcolonialism, and history’s repeating patterns in the complex interplay of culture, economy, and ecology, as well as natural phenomena. Rave studied experimental film at the University of the Arts Berlin and photography at Bard College, New York. She was a fellow artist at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart in 2014. Some of her recent exhibitions and screenings include Lofoten International Art Festival (2017); Arsenal Kino Berlin (2017); Glasmoog Cologne (2017); Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary–Augarten (2017); Württembergischer Kunstverein (2016); 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial (2016); FLORA ars+natura, Bogota (2015), Meulensteen Gallery, New York (2014); Kunstverein Wiesbaden (2013); Chisenhale Gallery, London (2012); Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (2011); and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2011).

Artist 

Lucy Raven

Lucy Raven received a BFA in studio art and a BA in art history from the University of Arizona, Tucson, and an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, New York. Primarily grounded in animation and the moving image, Raven’s multidisciplinary practice also incorporates still photography, installation, sound, and performative lecture. Throughout her oeuvre, Raven explores how images can convey networks of labour. The artist has received numerous awards, including the San Francisco Bay Area component of the Artadia Award (2013), and residencies at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2011–12) and Oakland Museum of California (2012). Her work has been exhibited in numerous international solo presentations, including Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2014); Portikus, Frankfurt (2014); Hammer Museum (2012–13); and Nevada Museum of Art, Reno (2010). She participated in group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum, New York (2013); Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Oregon (2013); MoMA PS1, New York (2013 and 2010); and Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (2010), among others. Her work was included in the 2012 Whitney Biennial, and can be found in permanent collections such as Tate Modern, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, and the Guggenheim.

Artist 

Navin Rawanchaikul

Navin Rawanchaikul works in various media including sculpture, painting, performance, photography, and film. Rawanchaikul’s Places of Rebirth (2009) was inspired by the artist’s first visit to Pakistan, the birthplace of his ancestors. Purchased for the Guggenheim’s collection, the painting narrates his family’s migration to Thailand in pursuit of new opportunity during the aftermath of 1947’s partition of South Asia. In 2010, Rawanchaikul was awarded the national Silapathorn citation from the Thai Ministry of Culture in the field of visual arts. His work has been featured in solo exhibitions at MoMA P.S.1 in collaboration with Public Art Fund, New York (2001); Tang Contemporary Art, Hong Kong (2008); and Valentine Willie Fine Art, Singapore (2011). He represented Thailand at the 54th Venice Biennale (2011) and has participated in numerous group exhibitions around the world. Rawanchaikul lives and works in Chiang Mai and Fukuoka, Japan.

Professor 

Simon Redfern

Simon Redfern is a Professor at the Asian School of Environment and President’s Chair in Earth Sciences at NTU, where he previously served as Dean of the College of Science. He serves as Principal Investigator on Research Cluster 3: Climate Mitigation, under the Climate Transformation Programme. A mineralogist and crystallographer, his research explores the atomic-scale structures of Earth materials and their physical and chemical properties—from oceanic minerals to the planet’s deep interior. His work spans from understanding how crystal structures respond to extreme conditions, to investigating subduction zones as potential geological carbon sinks, contributing to our understanding of Earth’s carbon cycle and climate regulation over deep time. 

Collaborator 

Kelly Reedy

Kelly Reedy has worked in Singapore for over 18 years as an artist and educator. She holds a BFA in Fine Art (University of Wisconsin, 1985), MA in Education (Hunter College, 1991), MA in Art Therapy (LASALLE College of the Arts, 2017). She has exhibited her artworks internationally in Paris, Chicago, and Berlin, as well as locally at Jendela Visual Arts Space, Esplanade, Singapore Tyler Print Institute, and Alliance Fran.aise. Reedy has developed educational resources for the National Gallery Singapore and trained teachers at the National Institute of Education, specialising in visual arts education in museums and galleries.

Artist-in-Residence 

Bridget Reweti

Bridget Reweti (b. 1985, Aotearoa New Zealand) is an artist hailing from the Ngāti Ranginui and Ngāi Te Rangi groups in Tauranga Moana. Her artistic practice unfolds through lens-based works that engage with indigenous perspectives and posit landscape as a site of resistance against essentialist notions of ethnicities. She is a founding member of Kava Club, a collective of Māori and Pacific practitioners based in Wellington, and part of Mata Aho Collective, a group of four Māori women whose large scale fiber-based works have been featured in exhibitions such as Honolulu Biennial, Hawai’i, United States (2019), Signature Art Prize, Singapore Art Museum (2018), and documenta14, Kassel, Germany, (2017). She recently received solo shows at TSB Bank Wallace Arts Centre, Auckland (2019) and New Zealand Portrait Gallery, Wellington (2018).

Collaborator 

Markus Reymann

Markus Reymann is the Director of TBA21–Academy. He joined TBA21 in 2011 and subsequently cofounded TBA21–Academy with TBA21 Foundation Chairwoman and Founder Francesca von Habsburg. As a central programming unit of TBA21, the Academy provides a moving platform of cultural production and interdisciplinary exchange. Since 2011, Reymann initiated and conducted numerous expeditions, each trip designed as a collaboration with invited artists, scientists, and thinkers eager to embark on oceanic explorations. The Academy commissions ambitious projects inspired by these unusual encounters.

Research Assistant 

Angela Ricasio Hoten

Angela Ricasio Hoten is a research assistant at the School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University supporting the research projects Climate Transformation Programme (2024–2030), Developing and Evaluating Digital Tools for Participatory Climate Change Mitigation (2025–2026) and previously the Environmentally-Engaged Artistic Practices in South, Southeast Asia and the Pacific (2023–2024). Angela holds a BA (Hons) in Environmental Studies and minor in Anthropology from Yale-NUS College, Singapore. She was also the undergraduate research assistant for ‘Lala Land: Singapore’s Seafood Heritage’ edited by Anthony Medrano, published by Epigram Books.

Institutional Partner 

Rockbund Museum, Shanghai

The Rockbund Art Museum is a contemporary art museum which plays one of the finest roles in the creative art scene worldwide.

Artist 

Norberto Roldan

Norberto Roldan’s work offers a commentary on the social, political, and cultural conditions of the Philippines via assemblages of object, text, and image. Roldan’s F-16 (2012), acquired for the Guggenheim’s collection, draws a relationship between the colonization of the Philippines and events on today’s global stage. In 1986, he founded Black Artists in Asia, a Philippines-based group focused on socially and politically progressive practice. He is also the cofounder of the Manila gallery Green Papaya Art Projects. Roldan has had solo exhibitions at Now Gallery, Manila (2011 and 2012); and Vulcan Artbox, Waterford, Ireland (2012). He was also a finalist for the Philip Morris Philippines Art Award, Manila, in 1996, 1997, and 1999. In 1998, he was selected as Juror’s Choice for the same award, as well for the Art Association of the Philippines Annual Art Competition. Roldan lives and works in Manila.

Artist 

Nigel Rolfe

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.

Institutional Partner 

Rossi & Rossi

Founded in 1985 in London by Anna Maria Rossi, who was later joined by her son, Fabio, Rossi & Rossi is today amongst the leading representatives of contemporary artists from the Asia-Pacific region. The gallery operates from its headquarters in Hong Kong’s South Island Cultural District, as well as a nearby showroom, and offices in St. James’s, London. A pioneer in the development of contemporary Asian art, Rossi & Rossi attracts major museums and private collectors worldwide.

In 2017, Fabio Rossi embarked on a series of exhibitions in Asia dedicated to bringing greater attention to modern and contemporary European artists. The following year, Rossi & Rossi staged the first exhibition in Asia on the work of the late Italian avant-garde artist Aldo Mondino, in addition to a successful commercial presentation of works by Italian painter and printmaker Giorgio Morandi.

Rossi & Rossi is a member of the Society of London Art Dealers (SLAD), Asian Art in London (AAL), the Hong Kong Art Gallery Association (HKAGA) and the South Island Cultural District (SICD). The gallery also participates in pre-eminent regional and international art fairs, including Art Basel Hong Kong, West Bund Shanghai and TEFAF Maastricht.

 

Jean Rouch

Jean Rouch is a ethnographer-turned-filmmaker, was the father of modern cinéma vérité together with his collaborator, Edgar Morin. Their work has had great influence on French New Wave filmmakers.

Artist 

Constanze Ruhm

Constanze Ruhm is an artist, filmmaker and author whose artistic practice focuses on the relation of cinema, new media and theatrical forms, and investigates questions of female identity and representation.

Ruhm’s works have been shown at international exhibitions, as well as at film festivals, including: Internationale Filmfestspiele / Forum Expanded | Living Archive, Kunstwerke, Berlin, Germany (2013); Internationale Filmfestspiele, Berlin, Germany (2010 and 2011); The 5th International Video Art Biennial, Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, Israel (2012); Tel Aviv Film Festival (2010); The University Art Gallery / Room Gallery, University of California, Irvine (2010); Extracity, Antwerp (2008); Museo de la Reina Sofia, Madrid (2008); Generali Foundation, Vienna (2006), and 3rd Berlin Bienniale (2004). In 1995 Ruhm represented Austria at the Venice Biennale along with Peter Sandbichler. Ruhm also curates exhibitions, realises publications, and both organises and contributes to international symposia. Constanze Ruhm was born in Vienna, Austria in 1965. She lives and works in Vienna and Berlin. Since 2006, she is Professor for Art and Media at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna.

Artist 

Jose Tence Ruiz

Jose Tence Ruiz is a multi-media artist and an independent writer, consultant, and curator for institutions in the Philippines such as the Cultural Center of the Philippines, The National Commission for Culture and the Arts, The Pasig City Arts Museum, Neo-Angono Collective and The Ateneo Art Gallery. He is an alumnus of the prestigious Ateneo de Manila and University of Santo Tomas, Manila.For over 30 years, Ruiz has been involved in various multimedia and visual practices such as paintings, sculpture, design, installation, and performance, as well as media presentations, book illustration, publication design, or set. He is also well known for his political cartoons that he submitted for the editorial pages of major newspapers across the Philippines and Singapore (The Manila Times, The Manila Chronicle, and Singapore Straits Times, among others). In its formal aspects, Ruiz’s practice draws from different sources: Social Realism, botanical and industrial debris from both rural and urban environments of the Philippines as well as the chaos theory and the aesthetics of fractals––symmetrical geometric compositions, described by the study of mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot. Strangely poetic in its form, his work is strongly embedded in the political and social landscape of the Philippines.

Curator 

Anca Rujoiu

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.

Artist-in-Residence, Artist 

Arin Rungjang

The artistic practice of Arin Rungjang (b. 1974, Thailand) is deeply intertwined with Southeast Asian histories, symbols, memories and addresses the ways in which social and economic transformations affect individuals‚ lives. Exploring power relations embedded in traditional practices and daily objects, he creates works that stand on the threshold between the public and the private and recast collective histories through personal narratives. Regarded as a pioneer of installation art in Thailand, his work spans across different media and often engage collaborative practice. Arin Rungjang has recently received a solo exhibition at the Jim Thompson Art Center in Bangkok, Thailand (2015). He has participated to the 18th Biennale of Sydney, Sydney, Australia (2012), the Bandung Pavilion at the Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai, China (2012) and the Asia Triennial, Manchester, United Kingdom (2011). He represented Thailand at the 55th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (2015).

Between October and November 2016, Rungjang was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore, where he focused on unofficial stories that circulate by word of mouth while connecting them to the politics of governance and notions of historical truth. During his residency, Rungjang conducted an interview with Johnston, who offered a poignant account of the difficulties of growing up as an albino man in Singapore. Based on an agreement with him, the artist decided to limit the work to a fully washed-out still from the recording, a symbolic indication of how such narratives circulate at the margins of visibility.

Scholar 

T. K. Sabapathy

T. K. Sabapathy is an art historian and curator. Sabapathy has published extensively on the art histories of Southeast Asia. His publications include: Vision and Idea: Re-Looking Modern Malaysian Art (1994), Modernity and Beyond: Themes in Southeast Asian Art (1996), Road to Nowhere: The Quick Rise and the Long Fall of Art History in Singapore (2010), and recently Intersecting Histories: Contemporary Turns in Southeast Asian Art (2014), the catalogue for the eponymous exhibition he curated at NTU ADM Gallery. He is Adjunct Associate Professor at NUS since 1981; and he has lectured at NTU since 2006. Sabapathy was the first Research Fellow at NTU CCA Singapore.

Artist-in-Residence 

Taiki Sakpisit

Taiki Sakpisit (b.1975, Japan) is a Thai artist and filmmaker based in Bangkok. He applies his cinematic skills to create haunting evocations of memory through the repetition and imperceptible manipulation of images that interweave found footage and archival material. Featuring rich soundscapes produced in collaboration with a sound designer, his films produce heightened and uneasy modes of spectatorship that often relate to the tumultuous socio-political climate in Thailand. Taiki’s most recent solo exhibition Until the Morning Comes took place at S.A.C. Subhashok The Arts Centre, Bangkok, Thailand (2018) and his work has been presented at numerous exhibitions, screenings, and film festivals.

Staff 

Ana Sophie Salazar

Ana Sophie Salazar (1990) was Assistant Curator for Exhibitions at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore. She graduated with an MA in Curatorial Practice from the School of Visual Arts, New York, and a BA in Piano from the Music School of Lisbon. She investigates the crossing of disciplines and nomadic, poly-lingual, transcultural subjectivities.

Artist-in-Residence 

Irwan Ahmett and Tita Salina

Working together since 2010, Irwan Ahmett and Tita Salina are an artist duo from Jakarta, Indonesia. Their tactical interventionist approach is developed in response to their experience of living in Jakarta, a megacity of 15 million people fraught with political power struggles. In their practice, they frequently translate social issues into events that unfold spontaneously in the public sphere as a form of “urban play,” generating critical alternatives to complicated issues. Their work has been exhibited at ST PAUL St Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand (2016); Biennale Jogja, Yogyakarta, Indonesia (2015); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands (2014); and Singapore Biennale (2013).

 

Grace Samboh

Grace Samboh lives and works between Yogyakarta, Jakarta and Medan, doing curatorial work as well as groundwork research. In 2011, she co-founded Hyphen —, a research initiative that aims to publish reference books on recent art practices. She is program manager for the Equator Symposium (2012–2022, Yogyakarta Biennale Foundation) and programme director of RUBANAH Underground Hub, a gallery-based initiative in Jakarta, established in 2018.Grace Samboh has been involved in a variety of exhibition projects as curator, advisor or contributor, including Unorganised Response (AutoItalia, London, 2019), Contemporary Worlds: Indonesia (National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2019), Choreographed Knowledges (Institute for Art and Society, Yogyakarta, 2019).

Artist 

Sufian Samsiyar

Sufian Samsiyar is an artist. Their work was featured in exhibitions at the National Gallery Singapore and the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore.

Artist 

Tomás Saraceno

Formally trained as an architect, Tomás Saraceno draws on art, architecture, natural sciences, astrophysics, and engineering in his practice. His floating sculptures, community projects, and interactive installations propose and explore new, sustainable ways of inhabiting and sensing the environment. Over the past decade, he has initiated collaborations with renowned scientific institutions, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Max Planck Society, Nanyang Technological University of Singapore, and institutions of the Exhibition Road Cultural Group. For many years, Saraceno has studied the methods by which various species of spiders construct their webs and has incorporated this knowledge about their functionality and aesthetics into his own artistic practice. He was the first person to scan, reconstruct, and reimagine spiders’ weaved spatial habitats, and possesses the only three-dimensional spider’s web collection in existence. In January 2020, as part of the global art initiative “CONNECT, BTS”, Saraceno launched his project “Fly with Aerocene Pacha”, featuring the first-ever fuel-free hot-air balloon, above the Salinas Grandes salt flats in Jujuy, Argentina, achieving the world’s first manned solar-powered free flight and setting six world records. His major commissions include Tomás Saraceno on the Roof: Cloud City (2012) at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the permanent installation In Orbit (2013) at Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf. Saraceno was also a participating artist in the 53rd and 58th Venice Biennales. His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin; among others.

Artist-in-Residence 

Svay Sareth

Svay Sareth (b. 1972, Cambodia) was born during a period of political turmoil and violence that would last until he was 18 years old. Svay began making art as a young teenager in the Site 2 refugee camp, near the Thai-Cambodian border. He describes life as a refugee as “void nationality…a time and place you imagine escaping from.” Drawing and painting became a daily activity for Svay ‚ a process of bearing witness to the psychological and physical violence that was an everyday experience, as well as a way to symbolically escape and dream of change. After the wars ended, Svay went on to co-found Phare Ponlue Selepak, a non-governmental organisation and art school in Battambang that continues to thrive today. In 2002, the artist continued his studies in France, earning the Diplôme National Supérieur d’Études des Arts Plastiques / MFA in 2009, after which he returned to Siem Reap to live and work.

Artist 

Reetu Sattar

Reetu Sattar (Bangladesh) works in Dhaka and Berlin. Her interdisciplinary practice encompasses live performance, documentation and objects as archival memories in an effort to re-examine history and human perception. Her search of a new language as response to the empathetic mind reaches her to working inside seemingly impossible spaces, allowing for contents to be emergent rather than determined as the body negotiates repetition, disruption, meaning and memory. She has presented her work at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Liverpool Biennial, and Dhaka Art Summit, among many other venues. Her performances have been staged internationally at venues in London, Birmingham, Bangkok and Goa.

Artist 

Eran Schaerf

Eran Schaerf’s multidisciplinary work focuses on the architecture of narration. He has exhibited in group-exhibitions such as Venice Bienniale (2011), Fake or Feint (2008), Territories (2003), Manifesta (1998), Listener’s Voice, Brussels (2001), DOCUMENTA IX (1992). Among his publications are: fm-scenario – where palms stand – mask –delay, London (2012), Blue Key, Cologne (2002), Listener’s Voice, Brussels (2001), Re-enactment, New- York (1996).

Co-Director 

Dagmar Schäfer

Dagmar Schäfer (Germany) is Director of the Department Artifacts, Action, Knowledge at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, as well as Honorary Professor at Freie Universität Berlin, Technische Universität Berlin, and Northwest University, Xi’an. Before taking up her current positions, she was Chair of China Studies and History of Technology at the University of Manchester (2011–2015). 

A sinologist and historian of technology and science, she has published widely on the premodern history of China (Song-Ming), materiality, and the processes and structures that lead to varying knowledge systems. In 2020, Schäfer was awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize by the DFG (German Research Foundation) for her development of new approaches to cultural studies and the resulting comparative perspectives on a comprehensive global history. 

Her monograph, The Crafting of 10,000 Things: Knowledge and Technology in Seventeenth-Century China (University of Chicago Press, 2011), received the Pfizer Awards and Joseph Levenson Book prize. Recent publications include Ownership of Knowledge: Beyond Intellectual Property (MIT Press, 2023), coedited with Annapurna Mamidipudi and Marius Buning and the working group volume Plurilingualism in Traditional Eurasian Scholarship: Thinking in Many Tongues (Brill, 2023), coedited with Glenn W. Most and Mårten Söderblom Saarela. A forthcoming monograph co-authored with Giorgio Riello focusing on an asynchronous comparison of silk in Renaissance Italy and Yuan China is expected to appear this year with Princeton University Press. 

 

Leon van Schaik

Leon van Schaik AO is Professor of Architecture and Innovation Chair in Design Practice Research at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT). From his base in Melbourne, he has promoted local and international architectural culture through an influential practice-based research programme and the commissioning of innovative architecture. His Architecture and Design PhD programme at RMIT has become an important template for institutions worldwide. In 2005, at the 75th anniversary awards of the Australian Institute of Architects, Professor Van Schaik was awarded the inaugural Neville Quarry Architectural Education Prize. In 2006, he was made an Officer (AO) in the General Division of the Order of Australia for his services to architecture and education. Some of his recent publications include Practical Poetics in Architecture (Chichester: Wiley, 2015) and Ideograms (Melbourne: Lyon Foundation and Lyon Housemuseum, 2013).

 

Silke Schmickl

Silke Schmickl (Germany/Hong Kong) was previously curator at the National Gallery Singapore, the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, a researcher at the German Art History Center in Paris and the co-founding director of Lowave, a Paris/Singapore based curatorial platform and publishing house for artists’ moving images. She has initiated and directed numerous art and film projects dedicated to emerging art scenes in the Middle East, Africa, India, Turkey and Singapore. Recent exhibitions at the National Gallery include include Minimalism: Light. Space. Object, Rirkrit Tiravanija: untitled 2018 (the infinite dimensions of smallness) and Haegue Yang: Forum for Drone Speech – Singapore Simulations.

Professor, Director 

Thomas Schroepfer

Thomas Schroepfer is Full Professor and Founding Programme Director of Architecture and Sustainable Design (ASD) at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD). He is the Director of the Singapore-ETH Centre Future Cities Laboratory (FCL), based at Singapore’s Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise (CREATE), where he leads pioneering research at the intersection of architecture, urban design, and technology. He is also the Director of SUTD’s Advanced Architecture Laboratory and a Senior Fellow at the Collegium Helveticum, the Institute for Advanced Studies of ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich), where he contributes to interdisciplinary research on the future of cities. Schroepfer has held visiting professorships at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich), Loughborough University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), and the National University of Singapore (NUS), shaping global conversations on sustainable urban development and design innovation.

Curator-in-Residence 

Marco Scotini

Marco Scotini (Italy) is a curator, writer, and art critic based in Milan. He is currently Artistic Director of the FM Centre for Contemporary Art, Milan. Since 2004, he has been Head of the Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies Department at NABA, Milan and, since 2014, he has been Head of Exhibitions Program at Parco Arte Vivente (PAV), Turin. During his career, Scotini has curated more than 200 solo exhibitions of artists and has collaborated with art institutions such as Documenta (2017); MSU, Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb (2015); SALT, Istanbul (2014); Castello di Rivoli (2013); Raven Row, London (2013); Bildmuseet Umeå (2012); Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2011); Manifesta (2009); and Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2007), amongst many others. He curated the Albanian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2015 and co-curated the 1st edition of the Anren Biennale, China, in 2017. He is Artistic Director of the 2nd Yinchuan Biennale that will open in June 2018. Image credit: Copyright Mousse Agency, 2018.

 

Ridley Scott

Sir Ridley Scott is a visionary director, acclaimed producer and one of the greatest British filmmakers. His work, known for an atmospheric and highly concentrated visual style, continues to push boundaries in style and genre. He was awarded the BAFTA Fellowship in 2018 and an honorary doctorate by the Royal College of Art in 2015. In 2003, Scott was knighted at the Queen’s New Year Honours in the United Kingdom for having made substantial contribution to the British film industry.

Artist-in-Residence, Artist 

anGie seah

anGie seah’s multidisciplinary practice traverses the mediums of drawing, sculpture, performance art, installation, sound and video. Seah allows spontaneity and intuition to navigate a range of shifting emotional resonances and psychological states. Experimenting with articulations of spoken language, she searches for authentic expression and primal beauty. For more than a decade, she has been working with diverse communities on participatory projects. Since 1997 anGie has exhibited widely including at ZKM Centre for New Media, Germany; Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan; and the Palais de Tokyo, France; as well as at NTU CCA Singapore and the Singapore Biennale.

Artist 

Maggie Segale

Maggie Segale is a dancer, artist, and teacher with a focus on performing and interdisciplinary, collaborative work. She graduated from the Juilliard School, where she received multiple awards and fellowships including the 2014 Entrepreneurship Fellowship for her writing on self-image and dance. Segale works with Helen Simoneau Danse, Bryan Arias, and artist Cally Spooner, having collaborated with A24 Films, Center for Innovation in the Arts, Roya Carreras in the upcoming Pussy Riot music video, composer Zubin Hensler, and Matilda Sakamoto. Segale choreographed the opera Role of Reason at the Interarts Festival 2018, and was an Artist-in-Residence at the New Jersey Dance Theatre Ensemble (2016).

Artist 

Allan Sekula

Allan Sekula was born in Pennsylvania in 1951 and he lived and taught at California Institute of the Arts before passing away on 2013. By employing photography and written words, his works often focused on the shipping industry and ocean travel, contributing on questions of social reality and globalization. His works were included in the dOCUMENTA (11) and (12), Kassel, Germany (2002, 2007), Centre Pompidou (2006, 1996), Sao Paulo Biennial (2010), Whitney Museum (1976, 1993, 2002, 2006, 2014), Foto Institute Rotterdam (1997, 2001), Whitney Biennale (2014), (2010), Istanbul Biennale (2007), Busan Biennale (2006) and many others. He also received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts National Endowment for the Arts, the Getty Research Institute, and many other prestigious institutions.

Collaborator 

Ashwinii Selvarai

Ashwinii Selvaraj (Singapore) is an undergraduate studying Political Science in the National University of Singapore. Her keen interest to write in the Tamil language have produced works that have been published in short story collections such as Akkarai Pachai (Greener Pastures). In addition to being a writer, she translates English articles for the Serangoon Times, a Tamil literary magazine published in Singapore. She has also won multiple awards and prizes including the Prime Minister’s Book Prize Award (2015) and National Poetry Festival competition (2015), as well first prize for the ASEAN-India Pravasi Bharathiya Divas Conference Tamil poetry competition (2018).

 

Ousmane Sembène

Ousmane Sembène was a preeminent Senegalese film director and writer. His writings observed the political scene in Senegal where he wrote several volumes on the developing national consciousness. In the early 1960s, he turned to film and went to study in Moscow. He is often called the “Father of African Cinema,” a title befitting the first African to make a film distributed outside of Africa. His works examine the multiplicities of a continent emerging from the colonial era, at grips with the tensions of independence and modernity, historicising Africa’s political and social transformation throughout the 20th century.

Scholar 

Seng Yu Jin

Seng Yu Jin is an art historian and Senior Curator at The National Gallery Singapore. He completed his PhD at the University of Melbourne. He lectures at the National University of Singapore’s Minor in Art History, and LASALLE College of the Arts’ MA in Asian Art Histories programme. Seng’s research interests include the modern and contemporary histories of Southeast Asia, focusing on exhibition histories, collectivism, and forms of socially engaged artistic practices in the region.

Artist 

Shireen Seno

Shireen Seno studied architecture and cinema at the University of Toronto before relocating to Manila. Her work addresses memory, history and image-making, often in relation to the idea of home.

Guest Curator 

Vladimir Seput

Vladimir Seput is a curator and researcher based in London. He studied film in Zagreb and did postgraduate research in film/video studies at University Paris 8 (2013-14), where he wrote about Mediterranean iconography in film and moving image, and researched the cinematic aspects of the sea as a place where politics, history, and mythology intersect. He holds a Masters in Film Curation from Birkbeck, University of London (2017). For the last 10 years, he has published on film and moving image art, and translated and edited books on philosophy, literary criticism, and contemporary art for various publications in Croatia and the United Kingdom.

Artist 

Richard Serra

Richard Serra is one of the most preeminent and visionary artists of his generation. In the 1960s, he and other Minimalist artists employed non-traditional, industrial materials to emphasise the materiality of their work. He subsequently expanded his spatial and temporal approach to sculptures to large-scale, site-specific work, of which his arcs, spirals, and ellipses are most renowned. These monumental works engage their viewers as they are experienced in situ. In 1968, he produced his first short film and experimented with video in the 1970s. Serra has held numerous museum shows and participated in important international exhibitions around the world.

Artist 

Tejal Shah

Tejal Shah is an artist whose practice incorporates video, photography, performance, drawing, sound, and educational workshops. Their work unselfconsciously manifests “the inappropriate/d other” within a feminist and queer framework, and often challenges normative social hegemonies. They are interested in the intersections of art, ecology, and non-duality and their relationship to consciousness. Shah obtained a BA in Photography from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne, and is currently pursuing an MA in Nalanda Buddhist philosophy.

Collaborator 

Marie Shannon

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.

Artist-in-Residence 

Jeremy Sharma

Jeremy Sharma is a visual artist and Lecturer for Fine Arts at LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore. His practice addresses our present relationship to modernity and interconnectivity in an increasingly fragmented and artificial reality. Sharma was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore between May and July 2015. During his residency, Sharma focused on the idea of “vertical progression,” observing the logic of production, from the act of making to the moment of display. This research consolidated into the video work Vertical Progression (2016) that spans across two years, revealing the network of collaborators, scientists, fabricators, movers, and collectors involved in the process.

Staff 

Kimberly Shen

Curator-in-Residence 

Mary Sherman

Mary Sherman (b. 1957, United States) is an artist and the director of the artists-run TransCultural Exchange, which she founded in Chicago in 1989. (She also teaches at Boston College and Northeastern University and, in 2010, served as the interim Associate Director of MIT’s Program in Art, Culture and Technology). Additionally, for two decades, while pursuing her career as an artist, she worked as an art critic for such publications as The Chicago Sun-Times, The Boston Globe and ARTnews. She has received numerous grants and awards, including two Fulbright Senior Specialist Grants and been an Artist-in-Residence at such institutions as MIT and the Taipei Artist Village. Her own works, which push the definition of painting into the realm of space and sound, have been shown at numerous institutions, including Taipei’s Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Beijing’s Central Conservatory, Vienna’s WUK Kunsthalle, Trondheim’s Academy of Fine Arts at the University of Science and Technology, Seoul’s Kwanghoon Gallery and New York’s Trans Hudson Gallery.

Artist-in-Residence 

SHIMURAbros

SHIMURAbros are a brother/sister artist duo composed of Yuka (b. 1976, Japan) and Kentaro Shimura (b. 1979, Japan). Since 2014, they have been working as researchers at the Studio Olafur Eliasson in Berlin, Germany. Film is a catalyst for their works wherein the equilibrium between light and matter and the material representation of film become a focal point. Between November and December 2016, SHIMURAbros were Artists-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore. During the residency, the duo continued their investigations on the archaeology of film and its structural components, focusing on light as the power source in the cinematic process and the essential condition for seeing.

Artist 

Yinka Shonibare CBE RA

Yinka Shonibare CBE RA, an artist of African descent, was born in London and grew up in Nigeria, returning to London only in his late teens. His work explores issues of colonialism and postcolonialism within the contemporary context of globalisation, as well as race and class. Mixing Western art history and literature, he questions the construct of collective contemporary identity and its meaning within cultural and national definitions. Shonibare has participated in major international art exhibitions, including the 52nd and 57th Venice Biennale and Documenta11. His works are in prominent collections, including the Tate Collection, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; National Gallery of Modern Art, Rome; and VandenBroek Foundation, the Netherlands. In 2004, Shonibare was nominated for the Turner Prize, the most prestigious annual art prize in United Kingdom, and was awarded the decoration of Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE). Fifteen years later, in January 2019, Shonibare was awarded Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE). That same year, he held a solo exhibition at the Norval Foundation in Cape Town, Trade Winds: Yinka Shonibare CBE, which featured works connected by their use of Dutch wax fabric and a major installation that celebrates the contributions of immigrant and non-immigrant Africans, The African Library.

 

Justin Shoulder

Justin Shoulder works in performance, sculpture, and video. His main body of work, Fantastic Creatures, comprises invented beings and alter-personas based on interpretations of mythology, folktale, and fantasy. These creatures are embodied through movement and elaborate, hand-crafted costumes and prostheses, forging connections between queer, migrant, spiritual, and intercultural experiences. He is part of Sydney-based collective Club Ate.

 

Sharon Siddique

Sharon Siddique is Director, Asian Urban Lab, Singapore; Visiting Professiorial Fellow, Lee Kuan Yew Centre for Innovative Cities, Singapore University of Technology and Design; and Adjunct Professor, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore.

 

Mariana Silva

Mariana Silva has exhibited and screened her work at Anthology Film Archives, New York (2018); Gwangju Biennale (2016); Moscow Biennale (2016); and EDP Foundation, Lisbon (2015); among others. Solo shows include For more Information, fluent, Santander (2018); Camera Traps, Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon (2018); Audience Response Systems, Parkour, Lisbon (2014); P/p, Mews Project Space, London (2013); Environments, e-flux exhibition space, New York (2013); and The Organization of Forms, Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon (2011). She was a resident at Gasworks (2016), Zentrum Paul Klee Sommerakademie, Bern (2010), and at ISCP, New York (2009–10). Together with artist Pedro Neves Marques, she runs Inhabitants, an online channel for exploratory video and documentary reporting (inhabitants-tv.org).

Staff 

Joey Sim

Joey Sim was Young Professional Trainee, Residencies at NTU CCA Singapore in 2018.

Artist-in-Residence 

Sim Chi Yin

Photographer and artist Sim Chi Yin (b. 1978, Singapore/United Kingdom) combines rigorous research with intimate storytelling to explore issues relating to history, memory, conflict, and migration. Recent solo exhibitions include One Day We‚ll Understand, Landskrona Foto Festival, Sweden (2020), One Day We‚ll Understand, Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong (2019) andMost People Were Silent, Institute of Contemporary Arts,LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore (2018). Her work has also been included in group shows such asMost People Were Silent, Aesthetica Art Prize, York Art Gallery, United Kingdom (2019);UnAuthorised Medium, Framer Framed, Amsterdam, The Netherlands;Relics, Jendela (Visual Arts Space) Gallery, Esplanade, Singapore (both 2018); and the 15^thIstanbul Biennial, Turkey (2017). Sim was commissioned as the Nobel Peace Prize photographer in 2017, nominated for the Vera List Center‚ Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice 2020 and shortlisted as a finalist for theTim Hetherington TrustVisionary Award 2020.

Artist-in-Residence 

Marianna Simnett

Marianna Simnett (b.1986, United Kingdom) lives and works in London. Her interdisciplinary practice includes video, installation, performance, sculpture and watercolour. Simnett uses vivid and visceral means to explore the body as a site of transformation. Working with animals, children, organs, and often performing herself, she imagines radical new worlds filled with untamed thoughts, strange tales, and desires. Simnett has shown in major museums internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include LAB RATS, Kunsthalle Zürich, Switzerland (2019), My Broken Animal, Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, Netherlands (2019), CREATURE, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia (2019), Blood In My Milk, New Museum, New York, United States (2018) among others. She is a joint winner of the Paul Hamlyn Award 2020, received the Jerwood / FVU Award in 2015, and was shortlisted for the Jarman Award in 2017.

The artist was scheduled to be in-residence from July ‚ Sept 2020. Due to the COVID-19 virus outbreak and international travel restrictions, the artist was unable to participate in the residency programme physically.

 

Constance Singam

Constance Singam (Singapore) is an author and civil society activist.

Institutional Partner 

Singapore Art Week

Institutional Partner 

Singapore Tourism Board

Artist 

Peter Sipeli

Peter Daniel Sipeli is passionate about storytelling because he believes that stories humanise people by showing that we all face the same choices, struggles, and triumphs. A well-known spoken word artist, he was instrumental in the revitalisation of the Fiji SLAM in Suva. He founded the Poetryshop Fiji to fill a development gap for new and emerging local writers, as well as the only online Pacific islands arts magazine ARTalk. Having worked for 10 years with NGOs as a human rights and LGBTQ activist, he has also worked in the Fiji Arts Council and in the Dean’s Office at the Fiji School of Medicine. Additionally, he managed the popularised ROC Sunday street market.

Artist 

Peter Sipeli

Peter Daniel Sipeli is passionate about storytelling because he believes that stories humanise people by showing that we all face the same choices, struggles, and triumphs. A well-known spoken word artist, he was instrumental in the revitalisation of the Fiji SLAM in Suva. He founded the Poetryshop Fiji to fill a development gap for new and emerging local writers, as well as the only online Pacific islands arts magazine ARTalk. Having worked for 10 years with NGOs as a human rights and LGBTQ activist, he has also worked in the Fiji Arts Council and in the Dean’s Office at the Fiji School of Medicine. Additionally, he managed the popularised ROC Sunday street market.

Artist-in-Residence 

siren eun young jung

Over the last eight years, siren eun young jung (b. 1974, Korea) has been investigating and challenging cultural expectations and genre constructs in Korean society through the lens of Yeosung Gukgeuk, a traditional type of Korean theatre combining singing and dancing that reached its peak of popularity in the 1950s and 1960s, falling out of favour thereafter. While Yeosung Gukgeuk maintains the conventional roles of melodrama, it exclusively features women actors who perform all characters in an intense process of genre-shifting. Working across a wide range of mediums such as films, photographs, performances, and installations, the artist has produced several works, endowed with a lush visual imagery, that deeply engage the aging community of Yeosung Gukgeuk practitioners addressing issues of resistance, affect, and performativity.

siren eun young jung holds a M.F.A. in Painting from Ewha Womans University, Korea and an M.A. in Feminist Theory and Practice in the Visual Arts from the University of Leeds, United Kingdom. In 2015 she earned a doctoral degree in Fine Art from Ewha Womans University with a dissertation titled, “The Politics of Gender and the Aesthetics of Dissensus.” Her works have been included in numerous group exhibitions such as: Taipei Biennial 2016 Taiwan (2016); Discordant Harmony, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan (2015); 8th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, QAGOMA, Australia (2015); The Future is Now, MAXXI, Italy (2014); Something in space escapes our attempts at surveying, Württembergischer Kunstverein, Germany (2014). In 2013, she was awarded the Hermès Foundation Missulsang Prize.

Artist-in-Residence 

Škart

Škart is an experimental art/design collective founded by Djordje Balmazović and Dragan Protić in 1990 at the Faculty of Architecture in Belgrade. In Serbian, the word Škart means “trash/reject”, an allusion to the collective’s approach to creative endeavours. Using vernacular languages and low-tech media, Škart’s practice infiltrates the most unconventional settings and often engenders unorthodox, community-based collaborations. Revolving around poetry and the “architecture of the human relationships,” their projects have been developed in several institutions and independent spaces across Europe. Most recently, their work has been presented in exhibitions at Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2016; Galerija Nova, Zagreb, Croatia, 2015; Museum of Yugoslav History, Belgrade, Serbia, 2015; the Serbian Pavilion, Venice Biennial of Architecture, Italy, 2010.

Curator-in-Residence 

Dirk Snauwaert

Dirk Snauwaert is Artist Director of WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels, and was involved in its creation since July 2004. At WIELS, Snauwaert has curated exhibitions of Tauba Auerbach (2013) and Mike Kelley (2008). Prior, Snauwaert was Co-Director of the Institut d’art contemporain Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alps where he was in charge of the exhibition programme and the development of the FRAC Rhône-Alpes collection. He was Director of the Kunstverein Munich from 1996 to 2001, where he curated solo shows by Rita McBride (1999), William Kentridge (1998), David Lamelas (1997), and Fareed Armaly (1997). He was also the curator of Jef Geys at the Pavilion of Belgium, 53rd Venice Biennale International Art Exhibition. Snauwaert was an NTU CCA Singapore Curator-in-Residence in 2015.

Staff 

Soh Kay Min

Soh Kay Min is currently Research Associate at the School of Art, Design, and Media, Nanyang Technological University, overseeing the research projects 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 part of the research team at NTU CCA Singapore (2018–2021), and worked on projects that focused on the development of trans-institutional research collaborations and facilitation of transdisciplinary artistic research. Kay Min holds a BSc (Hons) in Anthropology from University College London, and MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths College, both University of London.

Artist-in-Residence 

Matthias Sohr

Premised upon the methodologies of ethnographic fieldwork, Matthias Sohr’s (b. 1980, Germany) artistic practice results in sculptures and installations that draw from technology and social sciences to reflect a wide range of research interests, from medical anthropology to “Bureaucracy Studies”. He is currently pursuing a PhD in the History of Medicine, University of Lausanne, Switzerland.

Matthias Sohr obtained a Master of Visual Arts from the University of Art and Design Lausanne, Switzerland in 2013. He has been a visiting lecturer at the University of Arts and Industrial Design Linz, Austria (2011-2012); Berlin University of the Arts, Institute of Spatial Experiments, Germany (2010). His work has been exhibited at Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT), Japan (2011) and Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany (2014), among others.

Artist-in-Residence 

Kartik Sood

Drawing inspiration from music, design, literature as well as his own life experiences, the multidisciplinary practice of Kartik Sood(b. 1986, India) revolves around the delicate balance of coexistence, investigating the tension that arises between the handmade and the mechanical, materials and concepts. Sood’s artworks examines these tensions through the manipulation of a variety of mediums such as gouache paintings, moving images, and installations with archival photos and found objects that unfold ambiguous narratives.

Kartik Sood lives and works between Baroda and Delhi, India. His works have been widely exhibited in India and, most recently, he participated in the Yinchuan Biennale, China (2016). In 2014, he undertook a residency at Gasworks, London, United Kingdom.

Curator-in-Residence 

Simon Soon

Simon Soon is a Senior Lecturer in the Visual Art Department, Culture Centre, University of Malaya, Malaysia. His research focuses on 20th-century art in Southeast Asia. He is a member of the editorial collective of Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art and a team member of the Malaysia Design Archive. He was an Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore in May 2015.

Commercial Partner 

SPACElogic

SPACElogic is a Singapore-based company that offers interior design services.

Research Fellow 

Yvonne Spielmann

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.

Artist 

Cally Spooner

Cally Spooner is an artist based in Athens. Her installations unfold in evolutionary phases, in conjunction with the delivery of a project or an exhibition. Recent solo shows include Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève; Whitechapel Gallery, London; The New Museum, New York; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Her book Scripts was published by Slimvolume in 2016 and her novel Collapsing In Parts by Mousse in 2012.

 

Renée Staal

Renée Staal is the chief librarian of The Library of Unread Books, a project managed in collaboration with artist Heman Chong.

Institutional Partner 

Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste – Städelschule, Frankfurt

 

Alec Steadman

Alec Steadman is a curator and researcher. He is currently Co-Chief Curator at Cemeti — Institute for Art and Society, Yogyakarta. Previously he occupied various roles including: Curator, Arts Catalyst, London, United Kingdom (2015—2016); Exhibition Studies Research Fellow, Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong (2015); Artistic Director, Contemporary Image Collective, Cairo, Egypt (2013—2014); Curator in Residence, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy (2013), and Head of Exhibitions, Zoo Art Enterprises, London, United Kingdom (2005—2010).

Collaborator 

Joel Stern

Joel Stern (Australia) is a curator, researcher, and artist living and working on Wurundjeri land in Melbourne, Australia. Since 2013, Stern has been Artistic Director at Liquid Archi­tec­ture, a leading organ­i­sa­tion that creates spaces for sonic expe­ri­ence and crit­i­cal listening at the inter­sec­tion of con­tem­po­rary art and exper­i­men­tal music.

Artist 

Hallam Stevens

Hallam Stevens (Australia/Singapore) is Associate Professor of History in the School of Humanities at Nanyang Technological University and the Associate Director of the NTU Institute of Science and Technology For Humanity. He is the author of Life out of Sequence: a data-driven history of bioinformatics (Chicago, 2013), Biotechnology & Society: an introduction (Chicago, 2016), and the co-editor of Postgenomics: Perspectives on Life After the Genome (Duke, 2015). At NTU he teaches courses on the history of the life sciences and the history of information technology.

Artist 

Hito Steyerl

Hito Steyerl is a German filmmaker, artist and writer whose work explores the complexities of the digital world, art, capitalism, and the implications of Artificial Intelligence for society. Steyerl studied cinematography and documentary filmmaking at the Academy of Visual Arts in Tokyo, the University of Television and Film in Munich, and holds a Ph.D in philosophy from the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. The most formative parts of her education, however, include working as a stunt-girl and bouncer.
Hito Steyerl is interested in the proliferation and circulation of images in our globalized world. She often works with the format of the video essay, combining a heterogeneous range of material, including interviews, found footage, fictional dramatizations, pop-music sound tracks, and first-person voiceovers. Her work focuses on the intersection of media technology, political violence, and desire by using humor, charm, and reduced gravity as political means of expression. Her sources range from appropriated low-fi clips and sounds to mostly misquoted philosophical fittings. These elements are condensed in rambling essayistic speculation in both text and imagery. Through her oversensitivity to analogies, Steyerl both collects and creates stories describing realities that are stranger than fiction and reflected upon in galloping thought experiments. Her work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions including documenta 12, Taipei Biennial 2010, and 7th Shanghai Biennial. Her written essays have proliferated more on- than offline in journals such as e-flux and eipcp. She has published filmic and written essays centred around questions of globalization, urbanism, racism and nationalism. She is also involved in the movement of feminist migrants and women of colour in Germany.
Steyerl teaches New Media Art at University of the Arts in Berlin. As well as being a visiting professor for Cultural and Gender Studies, at University of Arts, Berlin, she has lectured at Goldsmith’s College, London and at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, among other institutions. A collection of her essays was published in The Wretched of the Screen (2012).

Artist 

Hito Steyerl

Hito Steyerl is a German filmmaker, artist and writer whose work explores the complexities of the digital world, art, capitalism, and the implications of Artificial Intelligence for society. Steyerl studied cinematography and documentary filmmaking at the Academy of Visual Arts in Tokyo, the University of Television and Film in Munich, and holds a Ph.D in philosophy from the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. The most formative parts of her education, however, include working as a stunt-girl and bouncer.

Hito Steyerl is interested in the proliferation and circulation of images in our globalized world. She often works with the format of the video essay, combining a heterogeneous range of material, including interviews, found footage, fictional dramatizations, pop-music sound tracks, and first-person voiceovers. Her work focuses on the intersection of media technology, political violence, and desire by using humor, charm, and reduced gravity as political means of expression. Her sources range from appropriated low-fi clips and sounds to mostly misquoted philosophical fittings. These elements are condensed in rambling essayistic speculation in both text and imagery. Through her oversensitivity to analogies, Steyerl both collects and creates stories describing realities that are stranger than fiction and reflected upon in galloping thought experiments. Her work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions including documenta 12, Taipei Biennial 2010, and 7th Shanghai Biennial. Her written essays have proliferated more on- than offline in journals such as e-flux and eipcp. She has published filmic and written essays centred around questions of globalization, urbanism, racism and nationalism. She is also involved in the movement of feminist migrants and women of colour in Germany.

Steyerl teaches New Media Art at University of the Arts in Berlin. As well as being a visiting professor for Cultural and Gender Studies, at University of Arts, Berlin, she has lectured at Goldsmith’s College, London and at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, among other institutions. A collection of her essays was published in The Wretched of the Screen (2012).

Artist-in-Residence 

Richard Streitmatter-Tran

Richard Streitmatter-Tran (b. 1972, Vietnam) lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City. Since 2013, his practice has shifted from performance and new media to sculpture, painting, and drawings. This “return to craft” is fueled by a preoccupation with material knowledge over concept and is framed by a deep-rooted interest into modes of learning that used to be passed down through generations and are now being erased by the diffusion of new technologies.

His solo and collaborative works have been exhibited internationally including Hong Kong Arts Centre (2017), Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2015), Singapore Art Museum (2016, 2012, 2009), Asia Triennial, Manchester, United Kingdom (2011), Singapore Biennale (2008, 2006), among many others. Streitmatter-Tran has also been involved in numerous writing, education, and curatorial projects. In 2010, he established DIA/PROJECTS, an experimental art space in Ho Chi Minh City. He also co-curated with Russell Storer the exhibition The Mekong at The Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia (2009) that was part of the 6th Asia Pacific Triennial.

Artist-in-Residence 

Shahmen Suku

Shahmen Suku (b.1987, Singapore) is a performance artist who works between Sydney and Canberra, Australia. Drawing from his personal experience of growing up in a matriarchal Tamil household in Singapore, Shahmen’s body of work explore multifaceted perspectives on migration, displacement, race, culture, colonisation, and gender identity. The personal, poignant, and irreverent narratives generated around these themes are conveyed through performances, installations, and video works and they are often voiced by his alter ego, Radha. His recent projects include 5,6.7.8, Penrith Regional Gallery, Australia (2022); Oil Room, Club 4A, 4A Centre for Contemporary Arts, Sydney, Australia (2022); Queer Ecologies – Rivus, Biennale of Sydney, Sydney, Australia (2022); Skin Deep, Queer Contemporary, National Art School, Sydney, Australia (2021). From 2019 to 2022, he was part of Australian ABC TV’s live music television programme The Set. In 2022, Shahmen received the Incubator – NSW Theatre (Emerging) Fellowship with Griffin Theatre Company.

Artist-in-Residence 

Shooshie Sulaiman

Often drawing on her experience, emotions and memories, Shooshie Sulaiman makes works and situations that create highly nuanced and personal interactions with their subjects and audiences. After receiving her BA in Fine Art from the MARA University of Technology (UiTM), Malaysia, in 1996, she received the National Art Gallery of Malaysia‚ prestigious Young Contemporaries Award, and has participated in numerous exhibitions and residencies in Malaysia and internationally.

In her paintings, drawings, books, and collages, Sulaiman infuses the social and artistic histories of Malaysia with her own responses and experiences. Between June and August 2015, she was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore. Her research on rubber plantation histories between Singapore and Malaya took the shape of a series of portraits executed within and outside her studio, making use of organic material such as soil and wood.

Artist 

Arin Dwihartanto Sunaryo

Arin Dwihartano Sunaryo is dedicated to painting, pushing its boundaries with innovative techniques, and distilling his passion for comic books, science fi ction, and Japanese manga into abstract compositions. His paintings capture shifts between solid and liquid, static and animated, synthetic and natural, and are rooted in the embrace of chance. Acquired for the Guggenheim’s collection, Sunaryo’s Volcanic Ash Series #4 (2012) was made using a combination of resin and, as pigment, volcanic ash from the 2010 eruption of Gunung Merapi, the most active volcano in Indonesia. Sunaryo has participated in numerous group exhibitions including the Asian International Art Exhibition, Ayala Museum, Manila (2005); and Marcel Duchamp in Southeast Asia, Equator Art Projects, Gillman Barracks, Singapore (2012). Sunaryo lives and works in Bandung.

Artist-in-Residence 

Min Thein Sung

In his artistic practice, Min Thein Sung (b. 1978, Myanmar) engages with daily life in Myanmar addressing the complex history of a country that was long isolated from the world. Often playful and poetic, his works conjure up patterns of creativity and modes of imagination that circulate under restrictive political regimes.

His work has been exhibited internationally at the 8th Asia Pacific Triennial, Brisbane, Australia, 2015; the 5th Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale, Japan, 2014; H Project Space, Bangkok, Thailand, 2011; Kunstverein Bad Aibling, Germany, 2010.

Artist-in-Residence 

Saroot Supasuthivech

Drawing from oral histories and unwritten memories, the works of Saroot Supasuthivech unearth the multiplicity of narratives embedded in specific locations. His installations often combine moving image and sound to conjure the affective aura of a site and bring forth its intangible socio-historical stratifications. Using photogrammetry techniques, he turns 2D images into 3D models as a way of to blur the lines between the real and the mythical. His latest video installation, River Kwai: This Memorial Service Was Held in the Memory of the Deceased (2022), was featured in the Discoveries Section at Art Basel Hong Kong 2022.

Facilitator 

Superlative Futures

Superlative Futures is a transdisciplinary design and research agency in Singapore co-founded by Wong Zi Hao and Liu Dian Cong. Their research practice centres on creative modes of representation to advocate new ways of seeing landscapes, speculative social imaginaries and futuring urban practices to relate differently with more-than-human worlds. They see their design output as a practice of care. They have exhibited at NUS Museum and were supported by Singapore Art Museum’s inaugural Design Research Fellowship (2024-2025). Wong received his PhD in Architecture at the National University of Singapore in 2023, having completed a design-led research on intertidal practices of care. Alongside his research practice, Wong teaches at the Department of Architecture, National University Singapore (NUS) and at Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, University of Arts Singapore. Liu currently practices as an architectural designer. He completed a Master of Architecture at NUS in 2024 working on sedimentation and alternative conceptions of “ground”.

Artist 

Melati Suryodarmo

Melati Suryodarmo graduated in Performance Art from the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig, Germany, under the tutelage of Marina Abramović and Anzu Furukawa. Her practice, informed by butoh, dance, and history, is the result of ongoing research in body movement and its relationship to the self and the world.These are enshrined in photography, translated into choreographed dances, enacted in video, or executed in live performances. A belief in change or growth through bodily action belies her early induction in meditation, which she continues to practice. Suryodarmo has presented her work worldwide, including Fukuoka Art Museum; National Museum of Contemporary Art Korea, Gwacheon; Kiasma, Helsinki; National Art Centre Tokyo; National Portrait Gallery, Canberra; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Para Site, Hong Kong; Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; Seoul Museum of Art; and Singapore Art Museum. Her work was included in the 5th Guangzhou Triennale (2015); Incheon Women Artists’ Biennale (2009); Manchester International Festival (2009); and Manifesta 7, Bolzano (2008). Since 2007, Suryodarmo organises the annual Performance Art Laboratory and Undisclosed Territory, a performance art festival in Solo, Indonesia, having also founded the art space Studio Plesungan in 2012. She was Artistic Director for Jiwa, the 17th Jakarta Biennale (2017).

 

Dan Susman

Dan Susman is a writer, director and editor. Dan Susman with producer Jess Gormley at the Lovie Awards.

Research Fellow 

Apolonija Šušteršič

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

Artist-in-Residence 

Anocha Suwichakornpong

Anocha Suwichakornpong is an independent film director, screenwriter, and producer. Suwichakornpong’s filmic research is on Thai history within Southeast Asia, in particular the Thai politics and student movements of the 1970s. Between September and November 2014, Suwichakornpong was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore where she worked on Nightfall (2016), a short video essay exploring the relationship between Thailand and Singapore, harking back to 1871 when King Rama V—the first monarch in Thai history to visit a foreign country, Singapore, donated as a token of appreciation a bronze statue of an elephant; and a multiplatform project on the Golden Mile Complex, the most popular gathering place of the Thai community in Singapore.

Curator-in-Residence 

Syafiatudina

Syafiatudina‚ (b. 1988, Indonesia) curatorial practices lies inthe interplay between theory and practice, thinking and doing. Her ideasstemfrom the belief that artistic practices are part of knowledge inquiriesthat contribute to social and political change. She is currently working as researcher and curator at KUNCI Cultural Studies Center in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.

Scholar 

Katharina Sykora

Katharina Sykora is a curator and professor of Art History at Braunschweig University of the Arts and author of Die Tode der Fotografie (vol. I, 2009; vol. II, 2015). She was the Max Kade Visiting Professor at Bloomington University, Indiana, research fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, and an Opus Magnum Research Fellow, a joint venture between the VolkswagenStiftung, Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, Bucerius Stiftung, and Deutscher Wissenschaftsverband. Since 2013 she has been the head of the Photographic Dispositif PhD program funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.

Artist 

Denim Szram

Denim Szram (Poland/Switzerland) a sound and media artist, whose artistic work oscillates between music production, performance, multimedia installations and immersive sound compositions. As an electronic musician he creates compositions for spaces, dance and theatre. An expert in the field of 3D audio and uses this for his acoustic scenography, he expands sound with other media and creates audio visual systems and musical interfaces to explore expression with new technology. His work has been shown internationally and institutions like ZKM Karlsruhe, House of electronic arts in Basel, and the Audio Art Festival Krakow.

Scholar 

Benoit Taisne

Benoit Taisne is an Associate Professor at the Asian School of Environment and Principal Investigator at the Earth Observatory of Singapore, NTU. His current research focuses on the early anticipation of the style and size of volcanic eruptions and utilising infrasound for volcano monitoring. He received his BSc and MSc degrees in Geosciences from the Ecole Normal Superieure de Paris, France and obtained his PhD at the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, France. 

Artist 

Imran bin Tajudeen

Dr Imran bin Tajudeen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture at the National University of Singapore (NUS). His research interests include place histories and the processes, underlying motivations and assumptions through which notions of heritage have been constituted, and how they are narrated in contemporary reconstructions and representations. Dr Imran has been engaged in a number of urban history and heritage documentation projects, among which the most recent is as the main consultant for the recovery and documentation of the historic graves at Jalan Kubor, Kampung Gelam with Nusantara Consultancy. His doctoral dissertation (NUS, 2009) on the architecture and urban histories of Southeast Asian cities won the ICAS Book Prize for Best PhD (Social Sciences) in April 2011. Dr Imran was postdoctoral fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)’s Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture and the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) in Leiden, the Netherlands.

Artist 

Kimi Takesue

Kimi Takesue is an award-winning filmmaker and recipient of the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Fellowships in Film.

Curator-in-Residence 

Sally Tallant

Sally Tallant (b. 1967, United Kingdom) is the Director of Liverpool Biennial ‚ The UK Biennial of International Contemporary Art. From 2001 ‚ 2011 she was Head of Programmes at the Serpentine Gallery, London where she was responsible for the development and delivery of an integrated programme of Exhibitions, Architecture, Education and Public Programmes. She has curated exhibitions in a wide range of contexts including the Hayward Gallery, Serpentine Gallery, Hospitals, Schools as well as public commissions. She has developed commissioning programmes for artists in a range of contexts and developed long-term projects including The Edgware Road Project, Skills Exchange and Disassembly. She has also curated performances, sound events, film programmes and conferences. She is a regular contributor to conferences nationally and internationally. She is a Trustee of Metal, and Advisory Board Member of Open Arts Archive (Open University), a Board Member of the International Biennial Association and a member of the London Regional Council for the Arts Council of England.

Artist-in-Residence 

Yuichiro Tamura

The videos, installations, and performances of Yuichiro Tamura (b. 1977, Japan) articulate multi-layered narratives which delve into the memory and history of localities and weave together unconnected events. By merging fact and fiction, his works investigate the contemporary significance of past events. Recent group shows includeReadings from Below, Times Art Center Berlin, Germany; Yokohama Triennale 2020, Japan andParticipation Mystique, Ming Contemporary Art Museum, Shanghai, China (all 2020), and 7^th Asian Art Biennial, Taichung, Taiwan (2019), amongst others. He was a finalist for the Asia Pacific Breweries Foundation Signature Art Prize in 2018 and the Nissan Art Award in 2017.

Artist-in-Residence 

Tan Kai Syng

Tan Kai Syng (Singapore) is an artist and researcher based in London, United Kingdom. She uses art as a process of interrogation and intervention to energise existing discourses and instigate conversations across disciplinary, cultural, and geopolitical boundaries. Her work is in the collection of several museums and has been exhibited at South London Gallery and Southbank Centre, London (both 2018); Guangzhou Triennale, China (2008); Biennale of Sydney, Australia (2006); Singapore Art Museum (2008, 2003). In 2007, she received the National Arts Council Young Artist Award. She holds a PhD from the Slade School of Fine Art and is currently a Visiting Researcher at the Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre at King‚ College (both London.)

 

Paul Tan

Paul Tan is Deputy Chief Executive Officer of the National Arts Council (NAC) Singapore. Previously, Tan was Director of Sector Development (Literary Arts) at NAC and helmed the Singapore Writers Festival. He has also published four volumes of poetry. Tan is the Co-Chair of NTU CCA Singapore’s Governing Council.

Artist-in-Residence 

Guo-Liang Tan

Guo-Liang Tan is an artist working primarily with painting and text. Tan’s practice explores the tension between the phenomenological and the psychological in the process of painting and writing. His artist publication, Aversions (2009), brought together reflections from Singaporean artists on writing, drawing, and conceptualism. Between December 2015 and April 2016, Tan was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore, where he continued his research on abstraction and the notion of touch as an indexical and invocative gesture.

 

Eugene Tan

Dr Eugene Tan is Director of National Gallery Singapore. He was co-curator of the inaugural Singapore Biennale in 2006 and curator for the Singapore Pavilion at the 2005 Venice Art Biennale. His previous appointments include Programme Director (Special Projects) of Singapore Economic Development Board, Director of Exhibitions at the Osage Gallery (Hong Kong, Singapore, Beijing, Shanghai), Director for Contemporary Art at Sotheby’s Institute of Art – Singapore, and Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore.

He oversaw the development of Gillman Barracks as Programme Director (Special Projects) at the Singapore Economic Development Board and curated the exhibition Engaging Perspectives: New Art from Singapore (2013) that preceded the official opening of NTU CCA Singapore. Tan is also a member of NTU CCA Singapore’s Governing Council.

 

Dan Feng Tan

Tan Dan Feng (Singapore) is the Director of Asian Urban Lab, Singapore.

 

Alvin Tan

Alvin Tan (Singapore) is the Founder and Artistic Director, The Necessary Stage, Singapore.

Artist-in-Residence 

Dennis Tan

Dennis Tan went to an arts college in Singapore and graduated with a diploma in Painting. Tan subsequently took on an MA in Architecture, however this course of study was peppered with interruptions and took over a decade to obtain his degree. During his studies, he took on the role of a nomad and a bricoleur, of thinking while making. Tan cites the turning point of his practice when he first encountered Alan Kaprow’s, The blurring of Art and Life and sees this and Tom Marioni’s, The Act of Drinking Beer With Friends Is the Highest Form of Art as a pivotal influence on his practice. Tan’s practice suspends conceptualism, tinkers with found objects and the environment as a gestural structure upon which the loop closes with the behaviour of its recipients. To date, this inclination sets the tone of his evolving practice.

Between February to June 2016, Tan was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore. During his residency, he continued his research on the fast-disappearing knowledge of marine craft in the region, working with oral histories in the Riau Archipelago to reconstruct a traditional Kolek sailboat.

Artist 

Fiona Tan

Fiona Tan’s work range from photographs to drawings, from digital installations to theatrically scaled projections. Tan’s evocative works are powerful investigations of identity and belonging in a world shaped by global culture. Much of her work expresses a long-standing interest in the documentary image, both personal and public, and the role of memory, time and place in the construction of identity. The artist’s explorations on issues of post-colonialism and displacement originate in her own biography straddling East and West. Born in Indonesia, to a Chinese-Indonesian father and an Australian mother, she was raised in Australia and moved to the Netherlands in her late teens where she studied at Rijksakademie, Amsterdam. Still, her work often suggests that displacement is part of everyone’s life and everyone’s identity is in a constant flux.

Tan’s work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions. She participated in various biennales including São Paulo Biennial, São Paulo (2010), Göteborg Biennial, Göteborg (2009), New Orleans Biennial, New Orleans (2008), Biennale of Sydney, Sydney (2006), Berlin Biennale (2001) and she also took part in documenta 11, Kassel (2002). In 2009, she represented The Netherlands at the Venice Biennale’s for the Dutch Pavilion. Tan’s recent solo exhibitions include: Inventory, Maxxi, Rome (2013), Disorient, Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow (2012), Point of Departure, Andalusian Centre of Contemporary Art, Sevilla (2012), Rise and Fall, a touring solo exhibition at Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau; The Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver (2010 – 2011).

Artist 

Moses Tan

Moses Tan (b. 1986, Singapore) is a Singapore-based artist whose work explores histories that intersect with queer theory and politics while looking at melancholia and shame as points of departure. Working with drawing, video and installation, his interest lies in the use of subtlety and codes in the articulation of narratives. He graduated from LASALLE College of the Arts with a BA(Hons) in Fine Arts and a BA(Hons) in Chemistry and Biological Chemistry from Nanyang Technological University.

He was awarded the Noise Singapore Award for Art and Design in 2014, Winston Oh Travel Research Grant in 2016, and the LASALLE Award for Academic Excellence in 2016. He has shown in Grey Projects (SG), Hidden Space (HK), Indiana University (US), Sabanci University (TR), Kunst Im Dialog (DE), and at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (SYD) and also completed a residency in Santa Fe Art Institute (US).

Guest Curator 

Leon Tan

Leon Tan graduated from NTU CCA Singapore and NTU ADM’s MA programme in Museum Studies and Curatorial Practices in 2019. He co-conceived the project <!DOCTYPE work> with fellow graduates Shireen Marican, and Tian Li, which was presented at The Lab in NTU CCA Singapore in 2020.

Curator-in-Residence 

Pelin Tan

Pelin Tan (b. 1974,Turkey) is a sociologist and art historian based in Mardin, Turkey. Assoc.Prof. at Architecture Faculty, Mardin Artuklu University and contributor of The Silent University (educational platform for/by refugees/migrants). Currently visiting Assoc.Prof. at School of Design, Hong Kong PolyU (2016). Fellow of ACT Program, School of Architecture and Urban Planning, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Tan is a member of Art1kisler video collective. She is the Turkey curator of Actopolis project (Goethe Inst. Athens, 2015 ‚ 2017). Lead author of Towards New Urban Society– IPSP (Edts.Saskia Sassen&Edgar Pieterse, 2015 ‚ 2017). Tan participated in Lisbon Architecture Triennial (2013), Montreal Biennial (2014), Istanbul Biennial (2007, 2015), Oslo Architecture Triennial (2016), Cyprus Pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennial (2016). Residencies: CCA Kitakyushu (2015), IASPIS (2008), GeoAir (2011).

Artist-in-Residence 

Tan Pin Pin

Tan Pin Pin is a Singapore filmmaker who questions gaps in history, memory, and processes of documentation. Self-reflective in their addressing of the complexities of the filmic medium, her films include: Moving House (2001), Singapore GaGa (2005), Invisible City (2007), To Singapore with Love (2013), and In Time To Come (2017). They have been shown at numerous international film festivals around the world and have won multiple awards. She had retrospectives at RIDM Montreal, DOK Leipzig. She was the executive producer of award-winning Unteachable (2019). She is a co-founding member of filmcommunitysg, a community of independent filmmakers and was a board member of the Singapore International Film Festival, The Substation and the National Archives of Singapore. She was awarded the S. Rajaratnam scholarship to study for an MFA at Northwestern University, USA. She was awarded the S. Rajaratnam scholarship to study for an MFA at Northwestern University, USA, and was called to the Singapore Bar upon completion of her law degree from Oxford University.

During her residency at NTU CCA Singapore between May and September 2016, Tan was working on her five-year project In Time to Come (2017), a contemplative film on daily rituals in Singapore, from school ceremonies to opening protocol in a bookstore, in which constant repetition provides a sense of frozen time in a city that always looks forward.

Artist-in-Residence 

Xu Tan

Xu Tan is an artist. His ongoing project Searching for Keywords analyses video interviews of different communities to identify keywords based on meanings that reveal the values and motivations of contemporary Chinese society. Between June and August 2016, Xu was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore where he expanded his work on the project Keywords Lab: Socio-botany (first initiated in 2012), conducting interviews with various local practitioners engaged in the practice of urban farming in Singapore.

Artist-in-Residence 

Erika Tan

Erika Tan (b. 1967, Singapore) is an artist and Lecturer at Central Saint Martins, London. Her research-led practice develops from an interest in received narratives, contested heritage, subjugated voices, and the transnational movement of ideas, people, and objects. Between July and August 2015, Tan was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore where she continued her research into the minor historical figure of the Malay weaver Halimah and the conditions surrounding the 1924 British Empire Exhibiton, an inquiry that has since developed into the video installations APA JIKA, The Mis-Placed Comma and The ‘Forgotten’ Weaver (both in 2017).

Artist-in-Residence 

Zai Tang

Zai Tang (b. 1984, United Kingdom) is an artist, composer, and sound designer based in Singapore. Employing a wide range of analogue and digital technologies, his practice experiments with different ways to translate the audible in visual phenomena. Recent exhibitions and collaborations include 2nd Yinchuan Biennale, China (2018); Resident Frequencies, National Gallery Singapore (2017); Railtrack Songmaps, Gillman Barracks, Singapore (2016); SOUND: Latitudes & Attitudes, Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore (2014). Tang participated as a guest musician to Tarek Atoui‚ exhibition The Ground: From the Land to the Sea, NTU CCA Singapore (2018).

Artist 

Billy Tang

Billy Tang (China/United Kingdom) is Senior Curator, Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai.

Artist 

Tang Da Wu

Through performance, installation, painting, sculpture, and drawing, Tang Da Wu explores social and environmental themes including deforestation, animal endangerment, and urban transformation. Acquired for the Guggenheim’s collection, his three-part sculpture Our Children (2012) references a story from Teochew opera in which a young boy experiences illumination at the sight of a baby goat suckling at its mother. Tang is credited as the founder of the Artists Village, a collective that has become synonymous with experimental art in Singapore. In 1999, he was awarded the 10th Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize in Arts and Culture. He has had solo exhibitions at Valentine Willie Fine Art, Kuala Lumpur (2006); and Goodman Arts Centre, Singapore (2011), and was featured in the Singapore Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2007. Tang lives and works in Singapore.

Artist-in-Residence 

Marvin Tang

Marvin Tang (b. 1989, Singapore) harnesses photography, moving image, and object-based installations to visualise social phenomena that simmer under, beyond, and in spite of government infrastructures and systems of control. His works often undermine the conventional representations of nature and question the linearity of historical narratives. Recent solo exhibitions include Print Room: In Every Change of Season, DECK, Singapore (2019) and The Mountain Survey, Alliance Française de Singapour (2018). His work has been presented internationally at the Thessaloniki PhotoBiennale, Greece; GETXOPHOTO International Image Festival, Spain; and Nooderlicht International Photofestival, Groningen, Netherlands (all 2018).

Artist 

Zai Tang

Zai Tang is an artist, composer and sound designer based in Singapore. Drawing influence from acoustic ecology, philosophy and electronic & experimental music, his practice is built upon a belief that listening is an invaluable means of attuning to and forming deeper relationships with the worlds we inhabit.

Recent presentations include Duets at Auditoria, SAW (2026); No.60 at APARN, Chulalongkorn University (2025) with Pichet Klunchun Dance Company; Wild Soma at Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale (2024); Sonic Medi(t)ations at National Gallery Singapore (2023); Escape Velocity V (Solo Version) at Seoul Mediacity Pre-Biennale (2022); Redder at Thailand Biennale, Korat (2021).

Architect 

Leong Tatt Man

Leong Tatt Man is an architect and Director of Projects at Tierra Design Studio Pte Ltd; a design studio focused on principles of landscape urbanism and ecologically sustainable practice. His current projects include the Singapore Agriport proposal, which includes the conceptualisation of food forest integration, including restorative aquaculture and multi trophic aquaculture farming, into Singapore’s landscapes. His previous projects include the 4th Desalination Plant which is PUB Gold Certified. The project also won the International Water Association Grand Innovation in 2022. He previously worked at OD 205 Planning Studio and Architects 61 and obtained his Master of Architecture (NUS) in 2001. 

 

Joey Tau

Joey Tau (Papua New Guinea/Fiji) is the Media and Extractives Campaigner with the Pacific Network on Globalisation (PANG) based in Suva, Fiji. Tau has a background in media, having worked in mainstream media in Papua New Guinea and the Pacific. PANG is the region’s alternative voice in defending and promoting Pacific people’s right to economic self-determination, mobilising and advocating based on substantive research and analysis to challenge neoliberal development agendas in the region.

Scholar 

Michael Taussig

Michael T. Taussig is an Australian anthropologist and professor at Columbia University. He has visited Colombia annually since 1969. In 2012 and 2015 he made three short visits to the extensive swamps of northern Colombia in the Bolívar department, for a total of seven weeks. Two of these visits were with the Colombian law professor, Juan Felipe García, working pro bono with the peasant-colonists of the village of Buenos Aires in Colombia, consisting of 144 houses on the island of Papayal. Since 2007 the village has been under siege by oil palm plantation owners trying to rid the peasants of the land, using armed force as well as the courts. Further west in Chocó in the mid-1990s, entire communities have been subject to aerial bombing combined with paramilitary ground assault for the same purpose.

Artist-in-Residence 

Wei Leng Tay

Informed by close interactions with people, the artistic projects of Wei Leng Tay (b. 1978, Singapore) address the significance of personal relationships, family histories, societal structures, national narratives, and patterns of migration questioning ingrained modes of perception and representation. Often using a mediated documentary approach to image-making, Tay‚ intimate works explore intergenerational dialogues as well as the affective and political impact of displacement upon one‚ cultural identity. Crossings, her most recent solo exhibition articulated in four parts, took place at NUS Museum, Singapore (2018-19). She has participated in numerous international group exhibitions.

Scholar 

Nora A. Taylor

Nora A. Taylor is the Alsdorf Professor of South and Southeast Asia Art and Chair of the Department of Art History, Theory and Criticism at the School of Art Institute of Chicago, United States. She is the author of Painters in Hanoi: An Ethnography of Vietnamese Art (University of Hawaii Press, 2004, and NUS Press, 2009) and co-editor of Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art: An Anthology (Cornell SEAP, 2012).

 

David Teh

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.

 

Paul Teng

Paul Teng (Singapore) is Principal Officer at the National Institute of Education, and Adjunct Senior Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of Internaitional Studies, Nanyang Technology University. His experience on agrifood security issues is from the WorldFish Center, the International Rice Research Institute, and Monsanto Company. Professor Teng is a Fellow of the American Phytopathological Society and The World Academy of Sciences, and he has won prestigious awards such as the Eriksson Prize (Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences), and an Honorary Doctorate in Science for his work on food security. He chairs several international and national scientific groups and has published 9 books and over 250 technical papers.

Artist 

Teo Siyang

Teo Siyang is a full-time data analyst with a biology degree and the founder of Urban Forest (uforest.org), which aims to provide information about the diversity of plants in Singapore. The platform was built on the belief that the first step in conservation is enabling people to identify the nature around them so they can foster a deeper connection with it.

 

Fabrizio Terranova

Fabrizio Terranova is a filmmaker, activist, dramaturge, and lecturer at the École de Recherche Graphique (ERG) in Brussels, where he launched and co-runs the Master’s programme in Narrations and Experimentation/ Speculative Narration. His films include Josée Andrei, An Insane Portrait (2010), an experimental documentary that was later published into a book by Les Editions du Souffle. He is also a founding member of DingDingDong, an institute to jointly improve knowledge about Huntington’s disease.

Artist-in-Residence 

Thảo Nguyên Phan

Thao-Phan Nguyen focuses on historical events, traditional narratives through a combination of painting, video, performance, and installation. She has the ability to condense the manifold references to history, literature, philosophy, and theory that always frames her research into poetic works that open up new spaces for reflection. In 2016, she is the protégé of American artist Joan Jonas within the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, a programme which pairs gifted young artists with internationally recognised masters, sponsoring them to spend a year in a one-to-one mentoring relationship. Her recent exhibitions include Poetic Amnesia (2017), the Factory Contemporary Art Centre, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and Nha San Collective, Hanoi, Vietnam; Concept Context Contestation, Art and the Collective in South East Asia, Goethe Institut, Hanoi, Vietnam (2016); Haunted Thresholds: Spirituality in Contemporary Southeast Asia, Kunstverein Göttingen, Germany, (2014). and Tâm Tã, Hanoi Fine Arts Museum, Vietnam (2014). In 2018, she was the Grand Prize winner of the APB Foundation Signature Art Prize, organised by Singapore Art Museum. Nguyen founded the collective Art Labor together with artist Truong Cong Tung and curator Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran Phan in 2012.

Collaborator 

The Analog Girl

The Analog Girl started out as a lo-fi bedroom project using portable synthesisers and cassette tape recorders, having evolved into a universe of dreamlike technicolour pop. She creates and performs using a myriad of illuminating electronic instruments including the Tenori-On, Monome, and Percussa AudioCubes. She has been named by TIME magazine as one of 5 Music Acts To Watch in 2008.

Commercial Partner 

The AUDE Space

Artist-in-Residence 

The Observatory

The Observatory is a band whose music and cultural ethos responds and speaks back to the contemporary afflictions in Singapore and the global milieu. Its current constellation comprises multi-instrumentalists Cheryl Ong, Dharma and Yuen Chee Wai who tread on improvisation, intermedia, experimentation and noise-adjacent territories. In confronting new forms of disorders, The Observatory restlessly turns upon itself to agitate, to comfort and to resist. Drawing on old and new lexicons, The Observatory seeks to bridge artists and expressions. Two decades on, the band’s polymath practice encompasses music and performance; in-person festivals and online radio shows; touring gigs and interdisciplinary exhibitions.

Artist 

The Otolith Group

The Otolith Group is an award-winning artist-led collective founded by Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun in 2002. Their moving image, audio works, performances, and installations are characterised by an engagement with the legacies and potentialities of diasporic futurisms that explore modes of temporal anomalies, anthropic inversions, and synthetic alienation. Their work is driven by extensive research into the histories of science fiction and the legacies of transnationalism. Recent solo exhibitions include Xenogenesis, Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven (2019); Reconstruction of Story 2, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (2018); In the Year of the Quiet Sun, CASCO, Utrecht (2014); Novaya Zemlya, Museu Serralves, Porto (2014); and Medium Earth, REDCAT, Los Angeles (2013). They have participated in exhibitions at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2019); Carnegie International, 57th Edition (2018); Kochi-Muziris Biennale, (2018); Rubin Museum of Art, New York (2018); Villa Empain – Fondation Boghossian, Brussels (2017); Sharjah Biennial 13, (2017); Gwangju Biennale (2016); and Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2015).

Commercial Partner 

The Press Room

The Press Room is a Singaporean visual communication agency that specialises in content creation and content interpretation.

Artist 

Janelle Thompson

Dr Janelle Thompson (United States/Singapore) is an environmental microbiologist whose research and teaching drive towards careful stewardship of energy and water. Her ongoing work harnesses bacteria as indicators of water quality and for bioproduction of renewable fuels. She holds graduate degrees from Stanford University and MIT and is newly appointed as an Associate Professor at the Asian School of the Environment, NTU, and Principal Investigator (PI) at the Singapore Centre for Environmental Life Sciences Engineering. In previous roles she taught Environmental Engineering at MIT and was Associate Director and PI at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology.

 

Ashley Thompson

Ashley THOMPSON (United Kingdom) is Hiram W. Woodward Chair in Southeast Asian Art at SOAS University of London, where she leads the Research and Publications division of the Southeast Asian Art Academic Programme. She is a specialist of Cambodian cultural history, with a focus on classical and pre-modern arts and literatures, in the larger South and Southeast Asian context, with a view to theorising politico-cultural formations. Formative experiences include working under Vann Molyvann for the creation of a Cambodian national management structure for Angkor, and with the Théâtre du Soleil and Phare Ponleu Selpak on the direction of a Cambodian production of Cixous’ Terrible but Unfinished Story of Norodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia. Recent publications include Hiding the female sex: a sustained cultural dialogue between India and Southeast Asia and Emergenc(i)es: History and the Auto-Ethnographic Impulse in Contemporary Cambodian Art (both 2017).

Artist-in-Residence 

Luke Willis Thompson

Luke Willis Thompson’s (b. 1988, New Zealand) objects are typically both curios drawn from historical blind-spots and markers of, or stand-ins for, very particular personal lived experience. Thompson’s recent projects have focused on politics around the circulation and repatriation of artefacts, and the class-bound art world’s mode of distribution.

Thompson holds an MFA (2010) and a BFA (2009) from the ELAM School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland. Selected exhibitions include: Surround Audience, the New Museum Triennial (2015); Foreign Exchange (or the stories you wouldn’t tell a stranger), Weltkulturen Museum, Frankfurt, Germany (2014); The 5th Auckland Triennial, Auckland Art Gallery, New Zealand (2013). Thompson won the acclaimed Auckland Art Gallery’s Walters Prize in 2014.

Artist 

Jesper List Thomsen

Jesper List Thomsen is an artist and writer. Recent exhibitions and performances include Hollis and Money, ICA, London and Künstlerhaus, Stuttgart; Speak Through You, Hot Wheels Projects, Athens; A Social Body Event, Serpentine Gallery, London; Micro-Composition, Rozenstraat, Amsterdam; The body, the body, the tongue, Reading International; Hand and Mind, Grand Union, Birmingham; The boys the girls and the political, Lisson Gallery, London; and One Hour Exhibition, South London Gallery, London. A book-length collection of his texts will be published in Autumn 2018 by Juan de la Cosa (John of the Thing). He is also a part of the artist collective Am Nuden Da.

Institutional Partner 

Thyssen Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA 21), Vienna

Artist-in-Residence 

Sung Tieu

The artistic practice of Sung Tieu (b. 1987, Vietnam/Germany/United Kingdom) spans a variety of mediums includingsound installation, video, sculpture, photography, performance, and public interventions. In her work,she contends with notions of history and analyses transnational movements of people and capitals. Forthcoming solo exhibitions will be held at Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany and NottinghamContemporary, United Kingdom (both 2020). Other forthcoming projects will be featured at TateModern and David Roberts Art Foundation (both London, United Kingdom, 2019), and the PragueBiennale (2020). She has had solo exhibitions at FRAGILE, Berlin, Germany (2019); Royal Academyof Arts, London, United Kingdom (2018); and Nha San Collective, Hanoi, Vietnam (2017).

 

Philip Tinari

Philip TINARI has served as Director of UCCA, Beijing, the institution at the heart of Beijing’s 798 Art District, since late 2011. His programme has brought to China international figures including Robert Rauschenberg, Elmgreen & Dragset, Haegue Yang, William Kentridge, Taryn Simon, and Tino Sehgal, and has tracked China’s evolving art scene through retrospectives and surveys of artists including Zhao Bandi, Zeng Fanzhi, Liu Wei, Xu Zhen, Wang Keping, Wang Xingwei, Kan Xuan. In 2009, he launched LEAP, an internationally distributed, bilingual art magazine published by the Modern Media Group. He is a contributing editor of Artforum, and was founding editor of the magazine’s online Chinese edition. He holds degrees from Duke University and Harvard University, and is currently a PhD candidate in art history at the University of Oxford.

 

John Tirman

John Tirman is the Executive Director and a Principal Research Scientist at MIT’s Center for International Studies. Tirman is author, or coauthor and editor, of 14 books including, most recently, Dream Chasers: Immigration and the American Backlash (2015) and The Deaths of Others: The Fate of Civilians in America’s Wars (2011). Earlier published work includes The Fallacy of Star Wars (1984), the first important critique of strategic defense, and Spoils of War: The Human Cost of America’s Arms Trade (1997). In addition, he has published more than 100 articles in periodicals such as the The Nation, Boston Globe, New York Times, Washington Post, Esquire, Wall Street Journal, and Boston Review. Past apppointments include Programme Director, Social Science Research Council, New York. He is also a trustee of the Institute for War & Peace Reporting, which has offices worldwide.

 

Charmaine Toh

Charmaine Toh is currently Curator at National Gallery Singapore where she researches on contemporary art and photography from Southeast Asia. Recent exhibitions includ Danh Vo, Earth Work 1979 (2016) and Siapa Namu Kamu?: Art in Singapore since the 19th century (2015–). Previously, she was the Programme Director at Objectifs Centre for Photography and Film. Toh was one of the curators for the Singapore Biennale 2013 an the i Light Festival 2012, and founder of The Art Incubator, a residency programme that ran from 2009 to 2014.

Staff 

Priscilla Toh

Priscilla Toh was Young Professional Trainee, Communications at NTU CCA Singapore in 2018.

Research Fellow, Artist 

Sissel Tolaas

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.

 

Diego Tonus

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).

Artist-in-Residence 

John Torres

John Torres (b.1975, the Philippines) is an independent film director, producer, and writer widely acclaimed for his highly personal and poetic style. Weaving together archival clips, found footage, and visually powerful imagery, his films unfold narrative structures, often with strong autobiographical references, that defy conventional tropes and genres. Torres has received solo retrospectives at The Reading Room, Bangkok, Thailand (2015); Vienna International Film Festival (2013), and the 12th Seoul International New Media Festival, South Korea (2012). His most recent feature film People Power Bombshell: The Diary of Vietnam Rose, premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Netherlands, in 2016 and received Special Mention at the 6th Curitiba International Film Festival,Rotterdam, Netherlands, in 2016 and received Special Mention at the 6th Curitiba International Film Festival, Brazil in 2017.

 

Cecilia Tortajada

Cecilia Tortajada (Mexico and Spain/Singapore), Senior Research Fellow, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore (NUS). The main focus of her work at present is on the future of the world’s water, especially in terms of water, food, energy and environmental securities through coordinated policies. Tortajada has been an advisor to major international institutions including the United Nations Development Programme, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Canada International Development Research Centre, World Bank, and Asian Development Bank. She is a member of the OECD Initiative in Water Governance, and she was previously President of the International Water Resources Association and also the Third World Centre for Water Management in Mexico

Artist-in-Residence 

Iris Touliatou

The artistic practice of Iris Touliatou (b. 1981, Greece) composes and decomposes concepts, narratives, objects, and bodies through subtle alchemical operations that probe the enigmatic nature of existence. By experimenting with an ever-growing array of materials and techniques, she seeks moments of slippages, instances of misalignments, chance meetings, and unexpected findings that are out of the experimenter’s control. Amongst her solo exhibitions are at Radio Athènes, Athens, Greece (upcoming, June 2019), Woman spinning at Palermo, Stuttgart, Germany (2019) and Some Seine, HYLE, Athens, Greece (2017). She has participated in international group exhibitions such as May the bridges I burn light the way, 5x5x5: Selected Projects, Manifesta 12, Palermo, Italy (2018) and Expanded Ecologies, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, Greece (2009).

Artist 

Trinh T. Minh-ha

Trinh T. Minh-ha is Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies and of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, and an award-winning artist and filmmaker. She grew up in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War and pursued her education at the National Conservatory of Music and Theater in Ho Chi Minh City. In 1970, she migrated to the United States where she continued her studies in music composition, ethnomusicology, and French literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She embarked on a career as an educator and has taught in diverse disciplines which brought her to the National Conservatory of Music in Dakar, Senegal, where she shot her first film, Reassemblage. Trinh’s cinematic oeuvre has been featured in numerous exhibitions and film festivals. She has participated in biennales across the globe including Documenta11, Kassel (2002), and most recently at Manifesta 13, Marseille (2020). A prolific writer, she has authored nine books. She is the author of several books including Lovecidal: Walking with the Disappeared (2016), D-Passage: The Digital Way (2013), and Elsewhere, Within Here: Immigration, Refugeeism and the Boundary Event (2011). Her film Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989) was presented as an installation within NTU CCA Singapore’s inaugural exhibition Paradise Lost (2014).

 

Hồng-Ân Trương

Hồng-Ân Trương (United States) is an artist and Associate Professor of Art, and Director of Graduate Studies in the MFA Programme at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Artist-in-Residence 

Mona Vătămanu & Florin Tudor

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.

Artist-in-Residence 

Florin Tudor

Mona Vătămanu and Florin Tudor are artists who have worked together since 2000. Their artistic practice involves bringing history into the present tense. Between July and September 2014, Vătămanu and Tudor were Artists-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore where they focused on the prevalent presence of migrant labour in Singapore. During their residency, the artists also produced Le Monde et les Choses, a map based on statistical studies by the Central Intelligence Agency that shows the dominant industries in each world country. The map exposes the contradictions of global neoliberalism, revealing the large domination over industries by a small number of countries.

 

Katherine Ann Leilani Tuider

Katherine Tuider, Executive Director and Co- founder of Honolulu Biennial Foundation, will speak about building a biennial from the ground up in what has been described as the most isolated, populated landmass in the world, Hawai‘i. Despite the perceived challenges associated with building an international, city-wide exhibition with no start-up capital in a seemingly isolated place, the contributions and involvement of the local community in Hawai‘i made the Honolulu Biennial a success. Prioritising the needs and desires of the local community was an integral part of the planning process in order to create a biennial that was locally relevant, while also being reflective of what makes Hawai‘i so unique for those who were visiting. A biennial that honours and involves its community is not only more sustainable, but also more interesting for those who visit because the biennial serves as a portal for understanding the history and culture of that place. As urban spaces rapidly grow and change, Tuider will explain why a “community-first” approach is essential in order to create successful public art exhibitions that are reflective of the past, while also relevant in the future.

Collaborator, Speaker 

Tun Win Aung

Tun Win Aung (b. 1975, Myanmar) employs a wide range of mediums including photography, video, and installation. His practice focuses on local histories and environments and he often collaborates with artist Wah Nu on large-scale art projects and activities. Their works as a duo have been exhibited in institutional venues such as the Guggenheim Museum, New York, United States (2013); 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan (2011); and biennials including Singapore Biennale (2016); 4th Guangzhou Triennial, China (2011); and the 6th Asia Pacific Triennial, Brisbane, Australia (2009).

Research Fellow 

Dr Etienne Turpin

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.

Institutional Partner 

U.S. Embassy

Artist 

Mierle Laderman Ukeles

Mierle Laderman Ukeles is an influential pioneer of maintenance art. Her work also revolves around feminist art. She is best known for her Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! Proposal for an Exhibition “CARE” (1969), a proposal for an exhibition to display maintenance work as contemporary art. Since 1977, she has been an unsalaried artist-in-residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation where she creates art that deals with urban waste flows, recycling, ecology, urban sustainability, and our power to transform degraded land and water into healthy inhabitable public places.

Institutional Partner 

University of the Arts London

University of the Arts London is a collegiate university in London, England, specialising in arts, design, fashion and the performing arts.

Institutional Partner 

Urban Redevelopment Authority

Artist-in-Residence 

Monica Ursina Jäger

Working with drawing, sculpture, installation, and cognitive mapping, the practice of Monica Ursina Jäger (b. 1974, Switzerland/United Kingdom) unfolds through a multidisciplinary reflection on concepts of space, landscape, and architecture that scrutinizes the relationship between the natural and the constructed environment.

Her work has been presented at the Biennale Kulturort Weiertal, Winterthur, Switzerland (2017); Haus Konstructiv, Zurich, Switzerland (2017); Kunstverein Wagenhallen, Stuttgart, Germany (2016) amongst other venues. She was the recipient of the Swiss Art Award 2007 and is currently a research associate and lecturer at the Institute of Natural Resource Sciences IUNR, University of Applied Sciences Zurich ZHAW, Switzerland.

Collaborator 

Harini V

Harini V (Singapore) is a bilingual poet and a member of the Tamil Language Council. Her Tamil poems have been featured in the recent SG50 Singapore women poetry anthology titled Nithimisai Nagarum Koorangazhkal, as well as in Love at the Gallery 2017 — a book of poems inspired by art from the National Gallery Singapore. Outside of her writing activities, she has also organised open mic nights and literary panels over the past few years.

Curator-in-Residence 

Brigitte van der Sande

Brigitte van der Sande (b. 1957, Netherlands) is an art historian, curator, and writer based in Amsterdam. She is the artistic director of Other Futures, a multidisciplinary platform that frames science fiction as an empowerment tool to envision the future and build a new and better world. In the early 1990s, van der Sande began a long-term research about the representation of war in art which developed through lectures, workshops, the exhibition Soft Target. War as a Daily, First-Hand Reality held at BAK, basis actuele kunst, Utrecht (2005), and War Zone Amsterdam, a series of presentations which took place at Mediamatic in Amsterdam (2009), accompanied by a reader published on open! Platform for Art, Culture, and the Public Domain. Between 2013 and 2014, she curated See You in The Hague (2013-2014) at Stroom Den Haag, The Hague and she co-curated, with Babs Bakels, The Last Image, an exhibition series about the relationship between death, the camera, and the spectator at The Nederlands Uitvaart Museum Tot Zover (Dutch Funeral Museum So Far), Amsterdam.

 

Hilde Van Gelder

Dr Hilde Van Gelder is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at KU Leuven. Her research focuses on how the photographic and moving image contribute to shaping insights of the global political and socio-economic sphere. Van Gelder contributed to NTU CCA Singapore’s public programming in 2015, conducting a workshop and participating in an international symposium held in conjunction with the NTU CCA Singapore exhibition Allan Sekula: Fish Story, to be continued (2015).

Artist 

Stan VanDerBeek

Stan VanDerBeek was an American experimental filmmaker at the forefront of technology. He began making films in 1955 and working with computers in 1965, when he produced multimedia pieces and computer animation in collaboration with Bell Labs. In the 1970s, he constructed “Movie-Drome,” an immersive audio-visual laboratory for a new kind of cinema-stage. His multimedia experiments in “expanded cinema” included movie murals, projection systems, planetarium events, and explored early computer graphics and image processing systems, merging art with technology and dance with films. He was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT (1969–72 and 1976–77).

Scholar 

Helena Varkkey

Dr Helena Varkkey is Senior Lecturer at the Department of International and Strategic Studies, University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. She specialises in environmental politics of the Southeast Asian region, specifically transboundary haze pollution and its links to the palm oil industry. The findings of her PhD research have been published as a book under the Routledge Malaysian Studies Series, entitled The Haze Problem in Southeast Asia: Palm Oil and Patronage (2016). In 2016, Varkkey contributed to NTU CCA Singapore’s public programming by conducting an Exhibition (de)Tour as part of Amar Kanwar’s exhibition, The Sovereign Forest (2016).

Artist-in-Residence 

Mona Vătămanu

Mona Vătămanu and Florin Tudor are artists who have worked together since 2000. Their artistic practice involves bringing history into the present tense. Between July and September 2014, Vătămanu and Tudor were Artists-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore where they focused on the prevalent presence of migrant labour in Singapore. During their residency, the artists also produced Le Monde et les Choses, a map based on statistical studies by the Central Intelligence Agency that shows the dominant industries in each world country. The map exposes the contradictions of global neoliberalism, revealing the large domination over industries by a small number of countries.

Artist 

Clare Veal

Dr Clare Veal (United Kingdom/Singapore) is a lecturer in the MA Asian Art Histories programme at LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore. She undertakes research on Southeast Asian photography, art, and visual culture, with a particular focus on Thailand. She received her PhD from the Department of Art History and Film Studies at the University of Sydney for her thesis entitled Thainess Framed: Photography and Thai Identity, 1946-2010. Veal was the sub-editor for Asian Art for the Routledge Encyclopaedia of Modernism(2016) and has contributed papers to a number of publications, including Journal of Aesthetics and Culture and Trans-Asia Photography Review.

Research Fellow 

Mercedes Vicente

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.

Artist 

Video Earth Tokyo

Video Earth Tokyo is a community-oriented video art collective serving as a network for people making video in Japan. It was founded in 1971 by Ko Nakajima, a pioneer of video art and computer animation. He recorded local communities, social activities, interventions, and performance experiments using a portable video recorder—a communication tool employed by the collective to promote communal awareness. The collective broadcast their documentaries and experimental works on cable television and participated in international exhibitions as well as computer graphics conferences.

Research Fellow 

Jegan Vincent de Paul

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. 

Scholar 

Hari Vishnu

Hari is a Senior Research Fellow at NUS working on underwater acoustic signal processing and machine learning. These are used in a range of applications ranging from bio-acoustics based biodiversity characterization and defense-related scenarios in shallow tropical waters, to polar glaciers where melt-induced cryo-acoustic noise dominates the soundscape. From 2019, he is focusing on the acoustics of melting ice, and undertook field campaigns to Svalbard in the Arctic, and to the Antarctic to study this problem. He also studies distributed acoustic sensing, and acoustics based marine-mammal and reef health monitoring. He obtained his PhD from NTU in 2014 and was a Visiting researcher at Scripps Institution of Oceanography during 2019-2021.

Collaborator 

Chương-Đài Võ

Chương-Đài Võ is a Researcher at Asia Art Archive, where she is supervising the acquisition of three archival collections: Lee Wen, Green Papaya Art Projects, and Manila Artist-Run Spaces. Her research and curatorial work focuses on collective platforms, ephemeral practices, social movements, and marginalised genealogies.

 

Bastian von Lehsten

Bastian von Lehsten is the co-founder of Novamondo Design together with Christian Schlimok. The design agency works in the fields of brand strategy, corporate design, and digital communications for several international art organizations including the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, United States , the Staatsoper and the Leibniz Association in Berlin, Germany. He is teaching branding and corporate design at the Design Academy Berlin, Germany. His work has received numerous rewards, including the Red Dot Award and the iF Design Award. Since 2015, Novamondo collaborates closely with NTU CCA Singapore on communication collaterals for exhibitions, research, and residencies.

Scholar 

John Wagner

John Wagner’s architectural practice is defined by engagement with diverse community members, artists, activists, leadership, and financial stakeholders. His design practice creates spaces of interaction unique to the communities they serve. His collaboration with Matthew Mazzotta applies architectural practice to artistic creation addressing issues rooted in the convergence of public space, art, justice, and the built environment. Wagner, NCARB, is a licensed architect, received a B.Arch from Virginia Tech, a Masters in Architecture from Harvard Graduate School of Design, and is currently an Irving Innovation Fellow at Harvard University.

Collaborator 

Wah Nu

Wah Nu is a contemporary artist from Myanmar.

 

Lucy Walker

Lucy Walker is an esteemed Emmy-winning film director who uses dramatic filmmaking techniques to make documentary films. Renowned for her ability to connect with audiences through creating riveting character-driven nonfiction, she follows memorable characters on transformative journeys that grant unique access inside closed worlds. Walker obtained her MFA from the Graduate Film Programme at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts on a Fulbright Scholarship after graduating at the top of her class with a BA Hons and MA Oxon in Literature at Oxford University. She has twice been nominated for an Academy Award and her films have been nominated for seven Emmys, having won over one hundred film awards.

 

Wang Dawei

WANG Dawei (China) is PhD supervisor, Executive Dean of Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts, Editor- in-Chief of Public Art Magazine, Vice Director of the Graphic Design Art Committee of the Chinese Artists Association, a member of the Design Discipline Review Group of the State Council Academic Degrees Office, Vice Chairman of the Shanghai Federation of Cultural and Art Circles, and Chairman of the Shanghai Creative Designers Association. His “Public Art Teaching and Research Practice” won the first prize of Shanghai Teaching Achievement in 2009 and himself was awarded the title of “Shanghai Leading Figure.”

Artist-in-Residence, Artist 

Bo Wang

Bo Wang is an artist, filmmaker, and faculty member at Visual and Critical Studies, School of Visual Arts, New York. Wang’s work depicts provocative portraits of China, presenting contradictions in its cultural identity, changing urban spaces, and power structures. Wang was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore, between August and September 2016, where he studied the role of sand in Singapore, tracing its physical circulation as a fundamental element for the state’s development but also its symbolic role in the cultural sphere.

Collaborator 

Vivian Wang

Vivian Wang diverged from her formal training as a classical pianist when she started the avant-rock outfit The Observatory in 2001. A former TV producer-presenter as well as a film music supervisor, Wang focuses solely on music, performance, and interdisciplinary work since 2008. She performs on synth, keyboard, voice, and percussion, and tags Alice Coltrane, Robert Wyatt, Mark Hollis, Bill Evans, and Annapurna Devi as her all-time favourite musical heroes.

Artist 

Wang Ruobing

Wang Ruobing is an artist, curator and educator at LASALLE, University of the Arts Singapore. Committed to exploring new ways of seeing and methods of knowledge production, Dr Wang’s artistic practice stretches from drawing to photography, sculpture, kinetic art, and installation. Her body of work explores our position with our environment, with works such as “Tide” (2023) addressing the issue of travelling trash and its impacts on marine ecosystems. As an academic, her research concentrates on identity, hybridity and transcultural discourses, particularly on contemporary art in China and Southeast Asia. She received her PhD from the University of Oxford, United Kingdom, and previously a curator at the National Gallery Singapore. 

 

Farah Wardani

Farah Wardani is currently Assistant Director of the Resource Centre at the National Gallery Singapore. She was previously Director of the Indonesian Visual Art Archive (IVAA), Yogyakarta, Indonesia, a centre for digital archive and documentation of Indonesian art, as well as a platform for research. Wardani has also been active as a teacher, writer, and curator. Her curatorial work encompasses collaborations with art spaces such as Cemeti Art House, Yogyakarta and ruangrupa, Jakarta, Indonesia. She also served as artistic director of Biennale Jogja XII Equator #2, Indonesia (2013).

Scholar 

Marina Warner

Marina Warner has written several studies in cultural history, as well as novels and short stories. Much of her work explores symbols and figures in myth and fairy tales, from Catholic cults to the Arabian Nights. Her books include Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (1976), Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (1985), and Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights (2011). Warner has also curated exhibitions and contributed to a range of contemporary art matters, exploring new ways of seeing and connections with our cultural heritage. She is professor of English and Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, University of London. She was awarded the Holberg Prize in 2015 and made a Dame the same year.

Artist-in-Residence 

Munem Wasif

Munem Wasif (b. 1983, Bangladesh) explores complex socio-political issues through photography and video. His artistic practice is marked by close engagement and intimate commitment, both physical and psychological, to his subjects of interest and it usually unfolds through long-term research processes. While interested in the archival and social value of documentary photography, his worksoften confound the boundaries between fact and fiction. An award-winning photographer, he hasparticipated in international exhibitions such as Sharjah Biennial 14, United Arab Emirates (2019);the 9th Asia Pacific Triennale of Contemporary Art, Brisbane, Australia (2018-19); An Atlas of Mirrors, Singapore Biennale (2016), amongst numerous others.

Institutional Partner 

Wattis Institute, California

Artist-in-Residence 

Tamara Weber

Tamara Weber is an artist. She explores formal questions (light, space, figuration, portraiture, temporality) and the possibilities of multidisciplinary collaboration. Between October and December 2016, Weber was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore. As part of her residency, she produced the unbound book Close Readings that features a series of photographic reinterpretations of the iconic hotel PARKROYAL on Pickering in Singapore, designed by WOHA, an impressive building that merges the rigorousness of abstraction and unruliness of tropical greenery.

 

Koon Wee

Wee H Koon is Assistant Professor at the HKU Department of Architecture, and founding director of the Cities in Asia Summer Program. He served as the Academic Director of the HKU Shanghai Study Center between 2008-2011. He received a number of international accolades for the design of industrial buildings and campuses, such as Blueprint, Green Dot, LEAF, and the Chicago Athenaeum Awards. Koon was selected to be the co-director for the 2017 Architecture Festival “Archifest” by the Singapore Institute of Architects. He is a founding member of the Docomomo Hong Kong Chapter, and advisory board member of Asian Urban Lab. He supports governments and NGOs in advisory roles, including the Singapore Centrefor Liveable Cities’ Leaders in Urban Governance Programme, Design Singapore Council, Hong Kong Buildings Department, Haiti International University Centre, Orphans International, AA Asia, and Modern Asian Architecture Network.

Artist-in-Residence 

Jason Wee

Jason Wee is an artist and writer. Most recently, he was a 2025-26 IASPIS Artist-in-Residence and he is currently an Asymmetry Foundation Scholar at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author of five poetry collections, including Dance, Time (Dakota Books, 2025). His work will be on view at Passion is Volcanic, an upcoming exhibition at National Gallery Singapore (24 April – 30 August 2026). He was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore in 2016-2017.

Wee is the founder and director of Grey Projects, an artists’ space, library, and residency programme that focuses on emerging artists, experimental curatorial practices, new forms of writing, and design propositions. He is editor of the poetry journal Softblow. His work has been included in group shows at the Chelsea Art Museum, New York, United States; Casino Luxembourg, Luxembourg; Singapore Art Museum, Singapore. He has been Artist-in-Residence at Artspace, Sydney, Australia; Tokyo Wonder Site, Tokyo, Japan; Gyeonggi Creation Center, Ansan-si, South Korea. He received the 2008 Young Artist Award for visual arts in Singapore and has been Studio Fellow in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.

 

H. Koon Wee

H. Koon Wee is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Architecture and Faculty Member of the Hong Kong University Advanced Cultural Leadership Program. He served as the former Academic Director of the HKU Shanghai Study Center and Adjunct Professor of the New York University Shanghai Program. He taught previously as a visiting critic and teaching fellow at Pratt Institute and Yale University. At HKU, Koon teaches classes in urbanism, memory and identity, globalisation, and architectural design. As a registered architect and founding principal of art and architecture practice SKEW Collaborative, Koon gained a number of awards and recognitions from the Asia Pacific Design Center, Condé Nast, Architectural Record Magazine (China), ID Magazine, Modern Media Group, Design Singapore Council, National Arts Council, and Lee Foundation. Koon supports government and non-profit bodies in a number of advisory roles, including the Leaders in Urban Governance Program at the Singapore Centre for Liveable Cities, the Haiti International University Center, Orphans International, AA Asia, Asian Urban Lab, and Design Singapore Council.

Artist 

C.J. Wee Wan-ling

Professor C.J. Wee Wan-ling is a Professor of English at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. He was a Fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS), Singapore and has held visiting fellowships at – among other institutions – the Society for the Humanities, Cornell University, United States and the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and the Humanities, Cambridge University, United Kingdom. Professor Wee is the author of Culture, Empire, and the Question of Being Modern (2003) and The Asian Modern: Culture, Capitalist Development, Singapore (2007). He is also a co-editor of the anthology Contesting Performance: Global Sites of Research (2010). Professor Wee is a member of the editorial board of the journal Modern Asian Studies.

 

Beng Geok Wee

Dr Wee Beng Geok is a consultant of the Nanyang Business School,Nanyang Technological University (NTU) where she was Associate Professor from 1999 to 2014. In 2000, she set up the Asian Business Case Centre at the Nanyang Business School, and was its Director until 2014. Dr Wee has written and published many business case studies and several casebooks, including a series of case studies on the maritime industries in Singapore. Her career in Singapore’s corporate sector spanned two decades of which more than half were in the maritime sector. Dr Wee’s current research interests include the history of maritime businesses and industries in Singapore.

Artist 

Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Apichatpong Weerasethakul is an artist and filmmaker. Recognised as one of the most original voices in contemporary cinema, his feature films, short films and installations have won him widespread international recognition and numerous awards, including the Cannes Palme d’Or in 2010 with Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives; the Cannes Competition Jury Prize in 2004 with Tropical Malady; and the Cannes Un Certain Regard Award in 2002 with Blissfully Yours. His latest feature Cemetery of Splendour was released to critical acclaim at the 68th Cannes Film Festival in 2015. Apichatpong began making films and video shorts in 1994 and completed his first feature, Mysterious Object at Noon in 2000. He has also mounted exhibitions and installations in many countries since 1998. Lyrical and often mysterious, his film works are non-linear, dealing with memory in subtle ways, invoking personal politics and social issues. Working independently of the Thai commercial film industry, Apichatpong devotes himself to promoting experimental and independent filmmaking through his company Kick the Machine Films, founded in 1999, which also produces all his films. Major installations have been presented at dOCUMENTA(13) (2012) and in solo exhibitions in Oslo, London, Mexico City, Kyoto, and New York.

Artist-in-Residence 

Otty Widasari

Otty Widasari is an artist and co-founder of Forum Lenteng, a community-development project that uses video, photography, and texts as tools to unveil sociocultural problems. Since 2002, she has produced documentary films for non-profit organisations. Widasari was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore, between October and November 2015, where she continued to work on the video work Fiksi (Fiction) that includes footage of the diorama section at the National Monument, Jakarta, drawing attention to state-driven efforts to establish historical truths in the collective memory of a nation.

Artist-in-Residence 

Boedi Widjaja

Driven by first-hand experiences of migration and diaspora, the practice of Boedi Widjaja (b. 1975, Indonesia/Singapore) articulates subtle reflections on migration, memory, and spatial relations across a variety of mediums with an emphasis on process and bodily engagement. Recent solo presentations include Boedi Widjaja: Declaration of, Helwaser Gallery, New York, United States (2019) and Boedi Widjaja: Rivers and Lakes Tanah dan air ShanghART, Singapore (2018). His works have been included in international group exhibitions such as Singapore Biennale (2019); Media Art Globale, Jakarta, Indonesia (both 2019), and The 9 Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland, Australia (2018) amongst others.

Institutional Partner 

WIELS Contemporary Art Centre

WIELS is the main centre for contemporary art in Europe’s capital city. An international laboratory for innovation and creative practices that aims to enrich the debate, open up new perspectives and stimulate the senses, enhancing cultural mobility and interactions with creators and authors from other cultures and geographies. As a space dedicated to the transmission of knowledge, support and professionalisation of emerging and less-visible artists since its inception in 2007, WIELS occupies a central position in the art scene from Brussels and Europe and puts its know-how at the service of artistic invention and innovation. For the second decade, after having established global connectivity, WIELS engages in new efforts to connect artists and intellectuals from east and South-east Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Curator-in-Residence 

Mechtild Widrich

Mechtild Widrich (Austria) is Assistant Professor of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), United States. Her work focuses on performance art, aesthetic theory, and global art geographies. Her book Performative Monuments: The Rematerialisation of Public Art was published with Manchester University Press, 2014. She has written for Grey Room, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Art Journal, The Drama Review (TDR), Performance Art Journal (PAJ), and Texte zur Kunst. She has edited books on Ugliness (London, 2013), Participation in Art and Architecture (London, 2015), and Presence (Berlin 2016), among others.

Artist-in-Residence 

Susie Wong

Susie Wong (b. 1956, Singapore) began her artistic practice in the late 1980s as a painter and art writer, later developing curatorial projects focused on collaboration and women‚ issues. In recent years, her work has engaged with memory and loss, documentation and nostalgia through a variety of mediums such as painting, drawing, and time-based installation.She participated to group exhibitions at The Substation, Singapore (2016, 2010, 2008), The Esplanade, Singapore (2015, 2013); andInstitute of Contemporary Arts, Singapore (2012).

 

Ming Wong

Ming Wong builds layers of cinematic language, social structure, identity, and introspection through re-telling world cinema and popular culture in videos, installations, and performances. He often “mis-casts” himself in multiple roles in a foreign language, interconnecting concepts of gender, representation, culture, and identity. Wong represented Singapore at the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009). He has had solo exhibitions at leading institutions worldwide and has participated in international biennials, including Performa, New York; Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane; and Sydney Biennale, among others.

Collaborator 

Mark Wong

Mark Wong has been active in experimental music, sonic arts and independent music practice in the last decade, playing multiple roles as organiser, programmer, artist, curator, writer, and label producer. His sound compositions, site-specific works, sound walks, sound objects, and multi-channel installations have been exhibited at Singapore Art Museum, 8Q@SAM, Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, Jendela (Visual Arts Space), and Yavuz Gallery. In 2010, Wong conceived Ujikaji as a music label and event organiser with a focus on experimental music in Singapore and Southeast Asia.

 

Chen-Hsi Wong

Wong Chen-Hsi (Singapore) is a filmaker and educator. Her debut feature film, Innocents (2012), won Best Director -New Talents Award at the Shanghai International Film Festival. Wong’s short films include Who Loves the Sun (2006), which premiered at Clermont-Ferrand, and the documentary short Conversations on Sago Lane (2010). She is an alumna of the Berlin Talents, the Torino Film Lab, and a Film Independent Los Angeles fellow. Wong’s films are often about displacement and the nature of our environment. She is an Assistant Professor in Film at the School of Art, Design and Media Nanyang Technological University.

Staff 

Olivia Wong

Olivia Wong was Young Professional Trainee, Exhibition at NTU CCA Singapore in 2018.

Artist-in-Residence 

Wu Mali

Wu Mali (b. 1957, Taipei) is an artist and Associate Professor at the Graduate Institute of Interdisciplinary Art, National Kaohsiung Normal University, Taiwan. A highly influential practitioner and theorist of socially engaged art, she has developed numerous projects over a thirty-year long career. Her most recent solo show, Wu Mali. Working in Public 2006-2011, took place in Taipei in 2011. Her work has been included in biennials such as the 9th Shanghai Biennial, China (2012); 3rd Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale, Japan (2005); 46. Venice Biennial, Italy (1995). She received Taiwan‚ National Award for Arts in 2016, the Taishin Arts Award in 2013, and was appointed co-curator of the upcoming 11th Taipei Biennale, 2018.

Collaborator 

Wu Junhan

Wu Jun Han is a visual art practitioner and experimental musician who lives and works from Singapore. His current practice primarily consists of fields such as VJ-ing, installation, audio/visual improvisation and various others. Recent credits include being part of “Fantasy Islands”, a group show at Objectifs gallery.

Collaborator 

Ari Wulu

Ari Wulu is a solo electronic music performer also known as midiJUNKIE or WVLV. He has been actively creating arrangements and performing since 1998, and his works have been presented at various events and festivals in Indonesia. Apart from his audio works, he is also the Program Director of SoundBoutique (2005–present), and Yogyakarta Gamelan Festival (2009–present), and was a member of the board of directors of Yogyakarta Art Festival (2013–18). Together with his collective, Jogjakarta Video Mapping Project (also known as JVMP, 2013–present), Ari Wulu organises SUMONAR, an annual video projection and interactive art festival in Yogyakarta (since 2018).

Institutional Partner 

Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart

The Württembergischer Kunstverein, founded in 1827 and situated in the heart of Stuttgart at Schlossplatz, is one of Germany’s largest art associations—boasting nearly 2,500 members, over 1,700 square meters of exhibition and event space, workshops, and a studio house.

Artist 

Vivian Xu

Vivian Xu’s practice focuses on the exploration and intersection of electronic and bio media. While creating new forms of machine logic, life, and sensory systems, Xu explores the possibilities of designing a series of hybrid bio-machines that are capable of generating self-organised silk structures that combine the silkworms’ natural production process with automated computational systems of production. She is the co-founder of Dogma Labs, a cross-disciplinary laboratory based in Shanghai, dedicated to integrating design, research, education, and production with the areas of computation, biology, and digital fabrication. Xu holds an MFA in Design and Technology from Parsons the New School for Design, New York (2013) and is currently a Global Pre-Doctoral Fellow at New York University Shanghai. Xu has exhibited and lectured at various institutions around the world, including the National Art Museum of China, Beijing; Central Academy of China, Beijing; Chronus Art Center, Shanghai; Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai; Art Laboratory Berlin; SymbioticA, the University of Western Australia; and China Academy of Art, Hangzhou.

Artist-in-Residence 

Yan Jun

Yan Jun is a musician, born in Lanzhou in 1973 and based in Beijing. His activities involve improvised music, field recordings and site-specific sound works/events. His feedback improvisation set always follows the unstable relationship between microphones, speakers, the space and his own body movement. He often plays with the environment and found objects at audiences‚ homes, along or with other artists, through the Living Room Tour project.

He is member of FEN, Tea Rockers Quintet and Impro Committee. He has performed in more than 20 countries in North America, Australia, Europe and Asia. As a poet and artist he has attended Rotterdam International Poetry Festival, Berlin International Poetry Festival and Shanghai Biennale.

Artist-in-Residence 

Haegue Yang

Haegue Yang (b. 1971, Korea) currently lives and works in Berlin and Seoul. Her works are known for their eloquent and seductive sculptural language of visual abstraction out of her research on historical figures and events. Bringing together a variety of working methods, ranging from complex spatial installations with industrially produced items, such as Venetian blinds, to hand-made sculptures using rather low-tech craft such as paper folding, known as origami, knitting, macramé and other types of weavings. Recently, bells have been entered as sonic and performative elements, which illuminate one of her interests in the notion of movements, in physical, social and metaphorical sense. Also to mention as new material encounter is synthetic straw, an intriguing elements gesturing towards the notion of folk which is both an anthropological reference well as democratic base. Yang’s oeuvre has reached a level of rich complexity and across her work is a focus on sculpture and a rigorous negotiation with materiality through processes of creation and the final form itself, yet the invisible part of investigation on history has been additionally inherent, which has been widely discussed as a method of unique abstraction.

Haegue Yang has exhibited in major international exhibitions including the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009) as South Korean representative, dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel, Germany (2012); Mediacity Seoul, Korea (2014); and Taipei Biennale, Taiwan (2014). Her recent solo exhibitions include Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China (2015); Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea (2015); Museum of Contemporary Art, Strasbourg (2013); Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen, Norway (2013), Haus der Kunst München, Munich, Germany (2012); and major institutions including the New Museum in New York, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria, Modern Art Oxford in UK, Aspen Art Museum in US, Arnolfini and Tate Modern Tanks in UK among others have hosted her solo shows.

Artist 

Andrew S Yang

Andrew S Yang (United States) works across the visual arts, sciences, and history to explore emerging ecologies of the Anthropocene. Yang’s work has been exhibited from Oklahoma to Yokohama, including the 14th Istanbul Biennial (2015), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2016), the Spencer Museum of Art (2019), and the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History (2020). His writing and research can be found in Art Journal, Leonardo, Biological Theory, and Antennae. He is an Associate Professor in the Liberal Arts Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a research associate at the Field Museum of Natural History.

Artist 

Yang Fudong

Yang Fudong was born in 1971 in Beijing and now lives and works in Shanghai. Working primarily in photography and film, Yang’s works are filled with psychological and existential questions. Yang’s work has been shown at many international exhibitions including: Documenta XI, Germany, 2002; the Shanghai Biennale, China, 2002; the Carnegie International, United States, 2005; the Asia Pacific Triennial, Australia, 2006; and the Venice Biennale, 2007.

Guest Curator 

June Yap

Dr June Yap is a curator, art historian, and Director of Curatorial, Programmes and Publications at the Singapore Art Museum. She is the author of Retrospective: A Historiographical Aesthetic in Contemporary Singapore and Malaysia (2016) and curator of the Singapore Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale (2011). In April 2012, Yap was selected as Guggenheim UBS MAP Curator, South and Southeast Asia. This led to the exhibition No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia that was also presented at NTU CCA Singapore between May and July 2014.

Collaborator 

Selene Yap

Selene Yap is a Programme Manager for Visual Arts at The Substation. From 2014 to 2015, she was a member of Curating Lab, a curatorial mentorship programme by National University of Singapore (NUS) Museum. Yap’s previous projects include Objects in the Mirror Are Closer than They Appear (2015), a site-specific exploration on the experience of space and material in Singapore’s Dakota Crescent estate. Her interest in discursive engagements on the politics of urban space and culture is a development from her studies in NUS where she read Sociology and Southeast Asian Studies. Image credit: Susie Wong, image of selected pages from (her) Book of Solitude (2014).

Artist 

Denise Yap

Denise yap (b.1998) is a re-packager, an inbetween of pre-writer and post-reader; They draws from different sources of information to build a world that is plausible. Their artworks explore the potentiality of sincere investments such as alternative kinships and entanglements (and all the embarrassments!) of the human condition.

Their recent group exhibitions include Immaterial Bodies at Objectifs, at NTU CCA Singapore, and The Open Workshop at Supernormal as part of Singapore Art Week.

Artist-in-Residence 

Yee I-Lann

Yee I-Lann is an artist. Her practice speculates on issues of culture, power, and the role of historical memory in our social experience by way of allusion to historical, popular, and everyday references, often through the medium of photography. Recent exhibitions include Away from the Long Night, MSAC, Taipei (2014); The Roving Eye: Contemporary Art from South East Asia, ARTER, Istanbul (2014); Welcome to the Jungle: Contemporary Art in Southeast Asia, Yokohama Museum of Art (2013); Suspended Histories, Museum Van Loon, Amsterdam (2013); Art of Memory: Contemporary Textile Expressions, Jim Thompson Art Center, Bangkok, Thailand (2013). She was a member of the curatorial team for the 2013 Singapore Biennale. Yee also works in the film industry in Malaysia. 

Between April and July 2015, Yee was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore where she continued her research on folkloric ghost stories of female spirits, specifically the figure of the Pontianak, depictions of which are found throughout Southeast Asia.

Artist-in-Residence 

Yeo Siew Hua

Yeo Siew Hua’s (b. 1985, Singapore) practice spans film directing and screenwriting. His last feature film, A Land Imagined (2018) was awarded the Golden Leopard at the 71st Locarno Film Festival, Switzerland (2019) and selected as Singapore’s entry to the 92nd Academy Awards’ Best International Feature Film category, United States (2020). 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.

Artist 

Lam Keong Yeoh

Yeoh Lam Keong is currently a private economic consultant, an Adjunct Professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy and a Vice-President of the Economic Society of Singapore. He worked at the GIC for 26 years, where he was Director of Economics and Strategy as well as Chief Economist and oversaw global macro-economic analysis and investment strategy. As a prominent economist, Yeoh has authored many academic publications and is heavily involved in public policy research.

Artist-in-Residence 

Trevor Yeung

The practice of Trevor Yeung (b. 1988, China/Hong Kong) consistently excavates the inner logics of closed systems and the way in which such systems contain and create emotional and behavioural conditions. In his mixed-media works, carefully staged objects, animals, and plants function asaesthetic pretexts which delicately and ironically address notions of artificiality and the processes ofhuman relations. His works have been exhibited internationally at Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai,China (2019); Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, Lithuania (2019); 4th Dhaka Art Summit 2018,Bangladesh (2018); Para Site, Hong Kong (2017), and Asia Culture Center, Gwangju, South Korea(2017), among other venues.

Institutional Partner 

Yorkshire Sculpture Park, United Kingdom

Curator-in-Residence 

Miya Yoshida

A researcher and curator based in Berlin, Miya Yoshida develops different formats of projects based on her artistic research. She obtained her Master in Art History at Goldsmith College, University of London, and her PhD, Philosophy in Arts at Malmö Art Academy, Lund University. She has collaborated with art academies and universities in Germany, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia. Her recent curatorial projects include Amateurism (Heidelberger Kunstverein, 2012), Art and Measurement (Kunstraum, Lüneburg/ Archive Kabinett, Berlin, 2012-13, 2018) and the annual exhibition project,Sharing as Caring (Heidelberger Kunstverein, 2012–16, 2018–ongoing). With the support of Stiftung Kunstfonds. and Stiftung für modern und zeitgenössische Kunst, she published Art and Measurement, Towards (Im)Measurability of Art and Life (Archive Books, Berlin, 2017).

 

Liam Young

Liam Young is a speculative architect and director who operates in the spaces between design, fiction, and futures. He is the founder of a think tank Tomorrows Thoughts Today, a group whose work explores the possibilities of fantastic, speculative, and imaginary urbanisms. Young also co-runs the Unknown Fields Division, a nomadic research studio that travels on location shoots and expeditions to the “ends of the Earth” to document emerging trends and uncover the weak signals of possible futures. He has taught internationally including the Architectural Association and Princeton University, and now runs an MA in Fiction and Entertainment at Southern California Institute of Architecture.

Artist-in-Residence 

Yuen Chee Wai

Musician, artist, designer, and curator Yuen Chee Wai (b. 1975, Singapore) is known for his commitment to improvised music and experimental projects that explore memory and loss, indeterminacy and invisibility. Ranging from the obsolescent and the newfangled, his eclectic toolbox comprises noise, field recordings, found sounds as well as guitars and various electronic instruments which reverberate with critical perspectives inspired by philosophy, literature, film, and politics. Together with FEN (Far East Network), an improvised music quartet he co-formed in 2008, Yuen is active in triggering multifaceted collaborations across Asia. Since 2014, he is Project Director of Asian Music Network for which he co-curates Asian Meeting Festival. Yuen is also a member of the experimental band The Observatory with whom he plays guitar, efx and objects, and organises a range of projects such Playfreely and BlackKaji.

 

Zai Kuning

Zai Kuning is one of the pioneering experimental artists in Singapore who has redefined what it means to engage in multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary art forms. Zai’s artistic work in the last two decades has shifted between sculpture, drawing, installation, performance, movement, music and sound. In 2000, he began researching the lives of the Orang Laut, the sea gypsies of the Riau Archipelago in Indonesia, near Singapore. His research culminated in an internationally acclaimed documentary film RIAU (2003). He recently returned to further explore this theme, and he is currently working on a new documentary film project focused on the Mak Yong Mantang, an important form of Malay performing arts as it pre-dates Islam influence in the 14th century. Mak Yong has been declared by UNESCO as a “Masterpiece Of The Oral And Intangible Heritage Of Humanity”, one with roots in animist and Hindu-Buddhist beliefs and mythology. His project on the Mak Yong is supported by the National Arts Council Singapore.

Artist-in-Residence 

Green Zeng

The works of filmmaker and artist Green Zeng (b. 1972, Singapore) scrutinise how history is written, interpreted, and disseminated. Focusing on issues such as student activism and the connection between archives, the state, and the individual, he reactivates fragments of the past and questions the artist‚ role in ‚ truth-telling. His films have been presented in international festivals including the 30th Venice International Film Critics‚ Week, Italy (2015) and Cannes Film Festival, France (2006) and his works have been included in group exhibitions at LASALLE‚ Institute of Contemporary Arts, Singapore (2018, 2017); and Para Site, Hong Kong (2015) amongst other venues. His most recent solo presentation is Returning Revisiting and Reconstructing, Foundation Cinema Oasis, Bangkok, Thailand (2019).

Staff 

Zhang Jing Chao

Zhang Jing Chao was Young Professional Trainee, Outreach & Education at NTU CCA Singapore in 2018.

Artist-in-Residence 

Robert Zhao Renhui

Robert Zhao Renhui (b. 1982, Singapore) is a multi-disciplinary artist and the founder of the Institute of Critical Zoologists. Persistently twisting reality and fiction, his artistic practice addresses the human relationship with nature challenging accepted parameters of objectivity and scientific modes of classifications. Over the years, Zhao has appropriated codes and convention of documentary photography and museum display to compose compelling narratives that subtly destabilize our notion of truth.

Zhao received his Bachelor‚ and Master‚ degree in Photography from Camberwell College of Arts and London College of Communication respectively. His work has been exhibited in international group show such as Jiwa: Jakarta Biennale, Indonesia, 2017; 7th Moscow Biennale, Russia, 2017; 20th Sydney Biennale, Australia 2016; Les Recontres d‚Arles, France, 2015. Amongst his more recent solo exhibitions in Singapore are The Nature Museum, commissioned by Singapore International Festival of Art (SIFA) and The Bizarre Honour, realized for OH! Open House, both in 2017. Zhao has undertaken residencies at the Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, France, and Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco, United States, and the Fukuoka Art Museum, Japan. He was awarded Young Artist Award by National Arts Council in 2010 and is currently a finalist of Hugo Boss Asia Art Award.

 

Želimir Žilnik

Želimir Žilnik is best known as one of the major figures of the Yugoslav Black Wave film movement of the 1960s and 1970s. He is noted for his socially engaging style of filmmaking and focus on contemporary issues— social, political and economic assessments of everyday life. His feature film Early Works (Rani Radovi) won him a Golden Berlin Bear Award at the 19th Berlin International Film Festival. Not only has his work been included in programmes of art galleries and museums worldwide, he is also a mentor and executive producer in many international workshops for students in South-Eastern Europe. He is also a visiting lecturer at film schools.

Artist-in-Residence 

Zulkhairi Zulkiflee

With a body of work spanning across film, installation, and photography, the artistic practice of Zulkhairi Zulkiflee (b. 1991, Singapore) is committed to exploring Malay identity and its social ontology. His lens-based artworks investigate themes of Malayness in relation to local and global contexts, social agency, knowledge production, and notions of taste. Zulkhairi recently concluded his first solo exhibition, Proximities at Objectifs – Centre for Photography and Film, Singapore (2022). His work has also been presented in group exhibitions such as  Kenduri Seni Nusantara, Patani, Thailand, Singapore Shorts ‘22, Asian Film Archive, Singapore, Mini Film Festival, S-Express Singapore, Kuching, Malaysia, and The Singapore Pavilion, Expo 2020, Dubai, United Arab Emirates (all 2022); The Body as a Dream, Art Agenda SEA, Singapore (2021) and How to Desire Differently, Lim Hak Tai Gallery, Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Singapore (2020) among others. Zulkhairi is also an educator, independent curator, and founder of Sikap, a project group that engages with the creative value of ‘let do’ in the form of organizational experiments. He was the Curatorial Winner of the IMPART Awards in 2020.