Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) is delighted to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (NTU CCA Singapore), a national research centre with a threefold mandate: exhibitions, residencies, research and academic education. The Centre would like to thank all its contributors and supporters, from artists to staff, advisory boards to audiences, who have shaped it into an institution that stands for creativity and critical thinking in the contemporary art landscape of Singapore and beyond.
To commemorate these ten years of nurturing artistic innovation, interdisciplinary experimentation, and meaningful connections, NTU CCA Singapore is proud to showcase a series of newly-commissioned collaborative performances by Artist-in-Residence alumni and previous contributors working in the realms of sound, performance, and new technologies, curated by Dr. Anna Lovecchio (Italy/Singapore), Assistant Director, Programmes, and Magdalena Magiera (Germany/Singapore), Curator Residencies and Programmes. The selected artists and collectives consistently push boundaries, challenge norms, and create thought-provoking experiences in their respective practices, in synergy with NTU CCA Singapore’s decade-long commitment to supporting experimental forms of artistic expression. This generative series of commissioned performances casts the Centre’s Residencies Studios as an open stage for creative alliances and convergent trajectories, setting in motion entanglements between different practices.
The Centre’s residency programme has worked with and nurtured more than 210 Artists-, Curators-, and Researchers-in-Residence, among them 60 Singaporean artists and counting. Many of the projects developed by the artists during their residencies went on to be presented at international exhibitions, biennials, and festivals. Its public resource platform, programmes and conferences continue to engage with artists, curators, and critical thinkers across disciplines. The Centre was joined by 56 Young Professional Trainees over periods of six to eight months, contributing to capacity building in the arts sector. In 2018, NTU CCA Singapore and NTU ADM jointly inaugurated the Master of Arts programme in Museum Studies and Curatorial Practices, the first of its kind in the region.
SCHEDULE
Saturday, 16 September 2023, 3.30pm
Time is still and we are in revolution
Yan Jun (China) and Yuen Chee Wai (Singapore)
Isn’t there a paradox in any revolution in that they circle back as they move forward? A revolving disc spins the two performers, together with their respective environments and audiences, at the same speed across vast geopolitical distances: an apartment in Bejing (Yan Jun) and former military barracks converted into artist studios in Singapore (Yuen Chee Wai). Set in a mysterious code, Time is still and we are in revolution is an experiment in remote communication made of sonic and physical improvisations, cyclical contacts and recurring departures.
Time is still and we are in revolution results from an experimental working methodology developed by Yan Jun and Yuen Chee Wai. The first outcome of this ongoing collaboration, The Riddle of the Machine, was presented at the Trans-Southeast Asia Triennial Research Exhibition Series Review, Guangzhou, China, earlier in 2023.
More information here.
Friday, 29 September 2023, 6.00–10.00pm
6.00pm
Inauguration Speech by Guest-of-Honour Low Eng Teong, Chief Executive Officer, NAC
Welcome Remarks by Prof Ute Meta Bauer, Founding Director, NTU CCA Singapore
Zachary Chan and Zarina Muhammad (both Singapore)
Ace of Cups invites us into the presence of elusive and unseen bodies, beings, organisms, and ungovernable worlds inhabiting the sites we move through, occupy and inhabit. Drawing from and unfolding from fragments from each of Zarina and Zachary’s respective practices and recent curiosities, the musical offering and performance acknowledges and gives thanks to the other-than-human complexity of a place that has hosted, sheltered, held, and been a vessel for so many of us for so many years.
More information here.
Intervention (Singapore)
VV presents a nevv spin-off iddea Invention! Is more exxperimental. Is don’t carre. Is party. Is art hihi. For thiss one sinnce seventh-month just ovver, they vvill do their queer vversion of the woah-oh-oh getai. Exxpect DJ sets and kkaraoke!
More information here.
Saturday, 30 September 2023, 3.30–5.30pm
Tini Aliman and Fyerool Darma (both Singapore)
da ko da ko is an audio-visual performance, a listening, and a dialogue between Tini Aliman, Fyerool Darma, and their natural and computer-generated collaborators. An accumulation, arrangement, and employment of de-patterning that embeds the learnings from ecologies of time, the performance deploys images from the artists’ personal folders, open-source archives, and embedded experiences to prompts of collective discordances. Stock footages and hand-drawn visuals are arranged, remixed, and disrupted against sampled sounds, interspersed between the image sequences in negotiation with the litany of questions above.
More information here
ila and anGie Seah (both Singapore)
Thinking about care as a form of labour that is often unnoticed and not adequately remunerated, in this collaborative performance anGie and ila explore a spectrum of physical gestures culled out from both institutional frameworks of care-giving, such as hospitals and clinics, and the more intimate setting of the domestic environment. Through a choreography of bodily movements and sounds that are partly intentional, partly improvised, partly interactive, the two performers reimagine the embodied experience of care-giving bringing forth its physical and emotional gravity as well as its unrelenting quest for comfort, lightness, and relief.
More information here.