Ute Meta Bauer is the Founding Director of NTU CCA Singapore, and Professor, School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University. For more than three decades, Bauer is a curator/co-curator of exhibitions and presentations, connecting contemporary art, film, video, and sound through transdisciplinary formats including Documenta11, the 3rd berlin biennale for contemporary art, and the US Pavilion for the 56th Venice Biennale, featuring eminent artist Joan Jonas. Recent co-edited books include The Impossibility of Mapping (Urban Asia) (NTU CCA Singapore/World Scientific Publishing, 2020) and Place.Labour.Capital. (NTU CCA Singapore/Mousse Publishing, 2018).

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.

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.