Developed as an online educational tool for researchers, practitioners, policymakers, educators, students, and wider publics, the repository gathers and connects different forms of knowledge relating to mangroves and coral reefs. It aims to initiate and support transdisciplinary dialogue, exchange, and education on the importance of coastal ecosystems, the pressures they face, and the practices through which they are cared for and restored.

Bringing together scientific research, community-based knowledge, and environmentally engaged artistic and cultural practices, the repository places these different ways of knowing in conversation without presenting one as more authoritative than another. Scientific resources, oral histories, field documentation, video interviews, artistic projects, and best-practice examples of mangrove restoration and coral transplantation make up the content of the repository and are connected with each other through shared places and ecological concerns. In doing so, the repository makes existing coastal stewardship more visible while keeping knowledge attributed to the people and communities through whom it is generated.

The repository is supported by the Ministry of Education, Singapore, under its Academic Research Fund Tier 3 Award (MOE-MOET32022-0006), through Nanyang Technological University’s Climate Transformation Programme, and Academic Research Fund Tier 1 Grant (RG129/24). It is led by Principal Investigator Professor Ute Meta Bauer, with Research Fellow Joshua Gebert, Research Associate Mei Jia Ng (until February 2026), Research Assistant Angela Hoten and visiting fellow Madeleine Collie (13 October – 12 December 2025) under the MoE Academic Research Fund Tier 3 Grant, and with Research Assistant Liz Liu Yihui, under the Academic Research Fund Tier 1 Grant (RG129/24).

Browse the database HERE

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.

Food security has been a perennial concern in Singapore, which sees the nation-state importing more than 90% of its food and allocating only 1% of its land to agriculture. These challenges are intensified by disruptions to global supply chains due to climate-induced extreme weather. In response, Singapore Food Agency has implemented strategies to address national food security concerns, including the promotion of local urban agriculture. Edible Garden City, an urban farming social enterprise, has been a lead to expanding the country’s urban agricultural landscape. Having established over 280 edible gardens, EGC is committed to regenerative agriculture and soil-based food systems as foundational to cultivating food sovereignty and fostering community agrarian literacy. 
 
Join us on Saturday, 2 May at Edible Garden City’s site in Queenstown to learn about the importance of local soil-based food systems with a lecture by EGC Co-Founder Bjorn Low, followed by a hands-on soil composting workshop with members of the EGC Queenstown community. 

Saturday Workshop 

2 May 2026
10:00 – 11:30am 
Edible Garden City
60 Jalan Penjara, S149375 

Register here
Participant Fee $21.80 (incl of GST)

Coastal ecosystems and communities across islands such as Bintan and Singapore face existential threats of climate change-induced sea level rise and ocean warming. Industrial development adds to these pressures that expose coastal communities to significant risks to resources and livelihood, and the loss of maritime and cultural knowledge. Introducing an on-going digital humanities project, the Repository on Coastal Ecosystems: Bridging Artistic, Scientific and Community-led practices in the Riau Archipelago, was developed under the Climate Transformation Programme. Drawing from the long-term engagement in Bintan, the project explores how such digital tools support the documentation of mangrove restoration and coral transplantation, and the circulation of coastal knowledge for a wider range of stakeholders. Referencing various onsite collaborations with community practitioners, researchers, and institutions in both Singapore and Indonesia, Professor Ute Meta Bauer (Germany/Singapore) and Research Fellow Joshua Gebert (Netherlands/Singapore), Climate Transformation Programme reflect on such platforms. Respondent Dr Ow Yan Xiang (Singapore), St John’s Island National Marine Laboratory, NUS, shares her scientific engagements with partners and communities in the region. This lecture is moderated by Angela Ricasio Hoten (Singapore), Climate Transformation Programme.

Tuesday Lecture 
23 April 2026
6:30 – 8:30pm 
The Hall, NTU CCA Singapore 
Free with registration

Join us online here: https://nus-sg.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Kfm18lCzQsWnahwX6ule4Q

In 2000, scholars Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer proposed the formal recognition of a new ‘Anthropocene’ epoch, a geological era defined by profound human modification of the global environment. How might we understand this epoch through transformations of the Earth’s surfaces––the erosion of coastlines, the clearing of forests, or the accumulation of plastic along ocean horizons? What are the signatures of the “Anthropocene” and how can they be measured? Through material residues, Artist, Curator and Lecturer Wang Ruobing (Lasalle College) creates physical records of discarded objects that wash ashore along Singapore’s coastlines. Associate Professor Edward Park (National Institute of Education and Asian School of Environment, NTU) examines the impacts of sand mining and natural disasters at a geographical scale, tracing changing riverscapes and landscapes through remote sensing technologies and GIS modelling. Moderated by archaeologist Franca Cole, this lecture explores how surfaces of the earth are being radically altered by climate change and human activity and asks how we document and mediate the processes changing our coastlines forever. 

Tuesday Lecture 
7 April 2026
6:30 – 8:30pm 
The Hall, NTU CCA Singapore 
Free with registration

Decarbonisation has emerged as a central organising principle of contemporary climate governance. It refers not merely to the technical reduction of carbon emissions, but to a broader socio-economic transformation that aligns production, consumption, and infrastructure with climate mitigation imperatives. Globally, buildings are responsible for approximately 37% of global energy-related carbon emissions. In Singapore, the built environment contributes 20% of national emissions—this includes both ‘embodied carbon’ from material production and transportation, and operational carbon generated throughout a building’s use. As urbanisation continues, emissions are anticipated to rise substantially, which will intensify the challenge of achieving net-zero emissions within the built environment. Beginning with Associate Professor Matthew Dearth (Nanyang Business School, NTU), he will highlight solutions to decarbonise the building sector and current obstacles that prevent firms from adopting them. Alakesh Dutta (Department of Architecture, NUS) presents research investigating the potential for high-rise building typologies to evolve into low-carbon models in the future. Often associated with higher emissions today, the high-rise typology remains indispensable in high-density cities such as Singapore. This lecture will be moderated by Professor Thomas Schroepfer (Architecture and Sustainable Design, SUTD and Director, FCL Global, Singapore-ETH Centre). 

Tuesday Lecture 
31 March 2026
6:30 – 8:30pm 
The Hall, NTU CCA Singapore 
Free with registration

The workshop brought together an international group of scholars, artists, curators, and researchers from Nanyang Technological University (NTU), King’s College London (KCL), the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPI), and invited colleagues from the National University of Singapore (NUS). Participants came from a wide range of disciplines and backgrounds, including history and digital humanities, history of science and technology, anthropology, law, Chinese medicine and religion, ecology and environmental studies, Chinese studies, archaeology, museum studies, as well as artists, curators, and film scholars. Together, they explored the intersections of biological and cultural diversity through the evolving framework of Biocultural Worlding. The workshop aimed to foster transdisciplinary collaboration across the arts, humanities, natural sciences, and legal studies, while laying the groundwork for a joint research network and shared inquiry platform. Framed around four thematic sessions: (I) Methods of Synchronous Exchange of Knowledge Creation, (II) Asynchrony and Interdisciplinary Rigidity, (III) Local Stewardship of Knowledge, and (IV) Beyond Documentation, participants presented case studies, artistic practices, and on-going research that collectively questioned how ‘’worlding’’ might serve as a conceptual and practical tool to address biocultural diversity across different disciplines, epistemologies, and regions. These presentations were followed by in-depth group discussions that allowed for reflection, dialogue, and knowledge exchange across fields that might otherwise remain siloed. In addition to the four core sessions, the programme also included film screenings of short movies developed by some of the workshop’s participants. This diversity of perspectives and formats enriched the dialogue, fostering richer and more nuanced understandings of Biocultural Worlding.

Research Outputs

What is ‘Worlding’ in Biocultural Worlding Workshop

Programme
Welcome Address by Professor Ute Meta Bauer

SESSION 1: METHODS OF SYNCHRONOUS EXCHANGE OF KNOWLEDGE CREATION, Chaired by Professor Ute Meta Bauer
Case Study I: Knotting and Unknotting Nature and Culture in Amami Ōshima, Presentation by Lisa Onaga, Senior Research Scholar, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
Case Study II: Boundary Objects, Knowledge Exchange,Trading Zones and Epistemic Humility in Singapore Medicinal Gardens, Presentation by Michael Stanley-Baler, Associate Professor of History, NTU SoH and NTU LKCSM, and President, International Association for the Study of Traditional Asian Medicine
Case Study III: Living Heritage and Rapprochement: In the Village of Poets, Presentation by Michael Walsh, Professor of Cultural Studies and Digital Humanities, NTU SoH
Response by Margarida Mendes, Curator and Affiliated Researcher, NOVA Institute of Communication, University of Lisbon

SESSION 2: ASYNCHRONY AND INTERDISCIPLINARY RIGIDITY, Chaired by Sushma Griffin
Case Study IV: Biology as Cultural History or Culture as Biological History: Anthropology and the Faultlines of Human Population Genetics, Presentation by Kriti Kapila, Senior Lecturer, Anthropology and Law, King’s College of London
Case Study V: Achieving Critical Mass at the Borneo Cultures Museum: Working to Design, Conserve and Collaborate in an Institution in Transition, Presentation by Laura Miotto, Associate Professor (Practice), NTU ADM and Co-Chair, Museum Studies and Cultural Practices and Franca Cole, Lecturer, Museum Studies and Curatorial Practices, NTU ADM and Research Fellow, Climate Transformation Programme
Response by Marc Gloede, Associate Professor, NTU ADM and Co-Chair, Museum Studies and Cultural Practices

SESSION 3: LOCAL STEWARDSHIP OF KNOWLEDGE, Chaired by Associate Professor Laura Miotto
Case Study VI: The Orang Laut as Local Stewards of a Way of Knowing, Presentation by Vivienne Wee, Anthropologist and Co-Founder of Ethnographica Private Limited Singapore
Case Study VII: Spirit Possession and the Generation of Alternative Worlds, Presentation by Kenneth Dean, Professor, Department of Chinese Studies, NUS and Director, Wan Boo Sow Research Cente for Chinese Culture
Response by Firdaus Sani, Founder of Oranglaut.sg and Black Sampan, and fourth-generation Orang Laut/Pulau descendant

SESSION 4: BEYOND DOCUMENTATION, Chaired by Dean Jon Wilson, CoHASS
Case Study VIII: Performing the Earth: A Reassessment of the “Meta Ekologi” project in relation to the contemporary Eco-Art discourse, Presentation by Marc Gloede, Associate Professor, NTU ADM and Co-chair, Museum Studies and Cultural Practices
Case Study IX: Worlding and World-Making from the Area Beyond National Jurisdiction, Presentation by Jonathan Galka, Postdoctoral Fellow, Asia Research Institute, NUS
Response by Ina Conradi Chavez, Filmmaker and Associate Professor, NTU ADM
Response by Zara Arshad, Researcher and Curator

PUBLIC KEYNOTE LECTURES
Welcome Address by Professor Ute Meta Bauer and Dean Jon Wilson
Keynote I: Oceanic Worldings, Keynote presentation by Margarida Mendes, Curator and Affiliated Researcher, NOVA Institute of Communication, University of Lisbon
Keynote II: Turtle Worlds as a Way of Living, Lisa Onaga, Senior Research Scholar, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

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. 

In this performance, Kent Chan collaborates with sound artist Zai Tang to fuse storytelling, moving image, and music in an audiovisual act that spins global imaginaries and future scenarios around the Sun. The work revolves around ‘Solar Orders’, speculative societies of a future global tropics defined by a vital relationship to the Sun as a cosmic organising principle and primary energy source. Conjuring entropic dynamics, new social bonds, and ancient divine lore, the work arises from Chan’s ongoing research on the tropics and climate change, channelling his vision of expanded tropical futures.

Please note this is a standing event.
Due to limited capacity, audiences will be accommodated on a first-come basis.

What happens when the human desire to predict weather builds into the power to will weather into the world? Tracing the departure from forecasting the weather to casting it into reality, Casting Weather centres the human relation to all things meteorological in a whirlwind of natural forces, weather deities, and technological interventions. As it threads through modes of observing, summoning, and commanding atmospheric elements, the performance turns into a speculative invocation of weathers to come.

This performance is part of the opening event of Kent Chan. Three Acts of the Sun.

OPENING
Saturday, 17 January 2026
4:00 – 7:00pm

Guest of Honour
H.E. Anneke Adema
Ambassador of the Kingdom of the Netherlands to Singapore

Opening remarks
4:15pm

Kent Chan, Casting Weather, 2026
Lecture performance
4.30 – 5.00pm

Opening reception
Light refreshments will be served
5:00 – 7:00pm

During this gathering, Liz Liu, Research Assistant, will share about her practice as a colour maker working with plants and soil found in Singapore. The session will begin with a brief sharing of the colours she has documented as part of the local botanical inkmaking studio Wild Dot. Participants will then be invited to take part in a simple noticing exercise, exploring the soil around Gillman Barracks through the making of soil paints. We hope to explore how our sensorial understanding of soil can be broadened through this process. 

Tuesday Gathering 

16 December 2025
6:30pm – 8:00pm 
The Hall, NTU CCA Singapore
Blk 6 Lock Road, #01-10 Gillman Barracks, Singapore 108934 

Free with registration

NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore presents Kent Chan. Three Acts of the Sun, the first solo exhibition for the Amsterdam-based artist in his home country since 2019. The exhibition captures a significant chapter of Chan’s artistic trajectory, focusing on the growing entanglement of the artist’s tropical imaginaries with the escalation of the climate crisis in recent years. Featuring a newly commissioned film, performance, and print series alongside a selection of recent works, Three Acts of the Sun gathers speculative visions on the future of our planet. 

Global warming is a planetary process whose compounding complexity engenders far-reaching and profoundly interdependent consequences across ecology and society, economy and culture, politics and emotions. The exhibition charts the tension between the reality of a planet increasingly dominated by heat and Chan’s desire to imagine the tropics in the future tense. It is from this vantage point of impending change that the artist looks forward and summons worlds to come. Set in unspecified futures, the artworks included in Three Acts of the Sun envision scenarios of advanced global warming where the climate demarcations of today have dissolved into a sweeping “tropicalisation” of the Earth. Framing this climatic shift through the prism of the embodied human experience, Chan’s narratives speculate over environmental migrations, the burden of intergenerational injustice, and the hubris of technological mastery of the weather, all haunted by memories of lost climates. The exhibition serves as a portal into the speculative climate futures conjured by the artist, transporting the public into possible worlds ahead where the tales and the songs of our descendants reveal stories of human life as it unfolds on a heated planet.

The centrepiece of the exhibition is the new moving-image work, Weather Casting. Conflating prediction and actualisation, weather lore and techno-agency, divination and doom, the film builds upon the evolution of human relations to the weather from a history of reverence, adaptation, and survival towards one of technologically-empowered intervention addressing our rising ambitions for an engineerable Earth. Weather Casting delves in radical shift from forecasting the weather to casting weather into reality through geoengineering, large-scale interventions in the Earth’s climate system. A series of fictional news presenters report on geoengineered weather along the route of the Asian-Pacific monsoon—one of the largest weather systems in the world—that connects Southeast and East Asia as the two lobes of the same planetary engine. In this speculative era of ‘Tropics_Domain’, the technological mastery of the weather is enacted by AI-driven systems, that are named after ancient local deities once believed to preside over the elements and natural harmony. Programmed to clear the clouds, harness the winds, and rule over rainfall in service of human needs, these “deities” ultimately give voice to geopolitical antagonisms, environmental disruptions, and existential crises. 

For this presentation, the exhibition space—situated on the verge of a secondary tropical rainforest—will relinquish its climate control, allowing Singapore’s heat and humidity to become atmospheric contributors to the exhibition. Through the deliberate immersion of the artworks in the tropical temperature they are informed by, viewers are brought to experience the core concerns of this project not just visually, sonically, and intellectually, but in the flesh of their bodies. 

Three Acts of the Sun contributes to NTU CCA Singapore’s Climates.Habitats.Environments., a long-term line of inquiry aimed at a holistic understanding of this vital triangulation. Initiated in 2017, Climates.Habitats.Environments. focuses on environmentally engaged artistic practices and interdisciplinary collaborations to foster critical thinking and public awareness about the ecological complexities and the escalating climate crisis of our time. 

Kent Chan. Three Acts of the Sun is curated by Dr Anna Lovecchio, Curator, NTU CCA Singapore and is part of Singapore Art Week 2026. 

Part of

Supported by 

Video documentation of the exhibition Kent Chan. Three Acts of the Sun, 18 January – 1 February 2026. Video by Min-Wei Ting. Courtesy NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore.

What can be learned through deep sensing of seismic vibrations and elemental disturbances to the interruptions and murmurs of toxic noise embedded in the ambient background, that stem from anthropogenic pressures such as rapid urbanisation, technological acceleration and extractivism? By using sound as an ecological indicator, how might we identify natural ecosystems in states of transformation and modification? Through site-specific field recordings and compositions, The Observatory, STAR Artists-in-Residence at NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, will chart the more-than-human sound worlds, resonating with their rhythms and registering sounds to make visible the acoustic and material properties of specific nature-culture habitats extending into biological and geological realms. Associate Professor Benoit Taisne, NTU Asian School of Environment, will elaborate on infrasound research as a method for detecting volcanic eruptions in the Southeast Asia region through the deployment of infrasound array in Singapore. This setup captures low-frequency atmospheric sounds below the threshold of human hearing, enabling the detection, analysis, and characterisation of infrasound waves caused by natural events with potential to affect Singapore and society in general. This lecture will be moderated by Professor Ute Meta Bauer, with response by Dr Hari Vishnu, Senior Research Fellow at the Acoustic Research Laboratory, NUS. 

Tuesday Lecture 
9 December 2025
6:30pm – 8:30pm 
The Hall, NTU CCA Singapore
Free with registration

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. 

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.

A central provocation of this special issue is that innovating legal epistemologies of deep-sea governance, and research-driven artistic and curatorial practices, are inseparable. Curatorial methods insist upon the critical value of multivocality in imagining the future, and upon the potential to distribute advocacy among plural knowledge-makers. The papers gathered here together build on how various stakeholders have conceived of opportunities for change both within the scope of UNCLOS and its management at the ISA, as well as beyond these frameworks, exploring deep seabed extraction across cultural theory, jurisprudential theory, artistic practice, and histories of ocean science, law, and governance. 

Contributors include the Deep Currents Collective (Giulia Champion, Mekhala Dave, Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Jonathan Galka, Alejandro Limpo, Susan Reid, Khadija Stewart); economic law researcher Diva Jain; transmedia artist, ocean scientist and writer Mae Lubetkin; lawyer and art historian Mekhala Dave; history researcher Sonya Schoenberger; environmental humanities researcher Yasmin Sani and artist-researcher Sun Woo Yoon. 

Edited by Dr. Nabil Ahmed, Co-Founder of INTERPRT and Professor of Visual Intervention, NTNU (Norway); Ute Meta Bauer, Professor of Curatorial Practice, NTU and Director, NTU CCA  (Singapore); Dr. Jonathan Galka, Historian and Post-doctoral Fellow, NUS ARI (Singapore); Dr. Hervé Raimana Lallemant-Moe, Director General, Digital Economy and Public Law Associate, UFP (French Polynesia). 

The Comparative Law Journal of the Pacific – Journal de Droit Comparé du Pacifique (CLJP-JDCP) was created in 1994 under the name Revue Juridique Polynésienne (RJP). It is an international, multidisciplinary journal focusing on specific topics concerning the Pacific region and in addition to special issues, is published once a year under the auspices of the Association de Legislation Comparée de Pays du Pacifique (ALCPP) [Association of Comparative Legislation of the Countries of the Pacific].  

We thank the Editors-in-Chief Professor Tony Angelo and Dr Sage Yves-Louis and their editorial team for providing the space to present on the timely subject of seabed mining and its attendant regulatory frameworks and ethical questions.

Our gratitude goes to Polynesian artist Maria A., whose image from her work Temeio (2025) featured on the cover of this special issue. 

Read in full online

Join us for a walking and reading session exploring the intersection of art, ecologies, and local knowledge to reimagine relationships within Earth systems.  

Taking inspiration from case studies in the newly published Earth Ethics: Art, Institutions and Regenerative Practices (Monash University Publishing, 2025), co-edited by our current visiting researcher Madeleine Collie, this session explores some of the book’s strategies, offerings and ideas. Through collective reading, walking and discussion we will consider how place-based and relational approaches to art, research, and institution-making can cultivate ways of putting Earth Ethics into practice. 

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.

A response to environmental crisis, founded on the fundamental assumptions of declining energy and resource availability, permaculture is described as an integrated and evolving system of consciously designed landscapes and everyday life that mimic the patterns and relationships found in nature, while yielding an abundance of food and energy to meet local needs.  This lecture asks how do we construct our food systems for resilience in a time of rapidly changing environmental conditions? Bringing together Anne Lochoff, Programme Director of Singapore Agri-Food Innovation Lab, with Leong Tatt Man, Architect and Director of Projects at Tierra Design Studio, they will discuss food innovations, restorative aquaculture and community-supported agriculture systems. This lecture will begin with an introduction by Madeleine Collie, Visiting Researcher, CTP, and will be moderated by Professor Ute Meta Bauer. 

Climate Transformation: Sustainable Societies Lecture Series

Tuesday Lecture 

25 November 2025
6:30 – 8:30pm 
The Hall, NTU CCA Singapore
Free with registration

This lecture explores localised and relational approaches to understanding ecological systems, from quantitative assessments and climate modelling to speculative cartographies and situated local knowledge systems. It brings together artist-researcher Zarina Muhammad and Assistant Professor Perrine Hamel, NTU Asian School of Environment, to discuss their distinct methodologies to environmental research. While Muhammad draws on performance and participatory practice to engage more-than-human worlds in the context of ecological crisis, Hamel will share her research in urban hydrological modelling and ecosystem service frameworks, demonstrating how nature-based infrastructures can contribute to resilient and inclusive cities in the region. Moderated by Associate Professor Laura Miotto, the discussion considers how diverse research methodologies can shape new ways of perceiving, representing, and responding to environmental change. 

Climate Transformation: Sustainable Societies Lecture Series

Tuesday Lecture 
4 November 2025
6:30 – 8:00pm 
The Hall, NTU CCA Singapore 
Free with registration

Visit the database

The Environmentally-Engaged Artistic Practices in South, Southeast Asia and the Pacific Database aspires to provide a comprehensive and rich data source for artists, climate scientists, and policymakers on the artistic practices of artists and collectives from the South, Southeast Asian and Pacific Regions. The complexity of the climate crisis at hand requires a transdisciplinary approach to research and practice, even as we see climate change becoming an ever-pressing theme across the disciplines of science and art. This database does not aim to be an exhaustive list of artists from the South, Southeast Asian and Pacific region but a carefully crafted list of artists and collectives that have a keen focus on environmental themes. Drawing on the expertise built up by NTU CCA over the years, this database animates the expansive network of artists from around the South, Southeast Asian and Pacific regions dedicated to themes related to traditional knowledge, biodiversity and ecosystems, anthropogenic impacts and risk and resilience. The hope is that this database presents an easy to use and initial source of information for scientists, policymakers and artists to find artists relevant to their area of expertise or region of study with the possibility of collaborating with artists in the database toward building transdisciplinary research methods.

The content featured in the database is edited and proofread by an internal team at NTU CCA. If you would like to contribute to, update or edit any of the information that currently exists in the database, please email ntuccacomms@ntu.edu.sg to get in touch.

Visit the database.

The Environmentally-Engaged Artistic Practices in South, Southeast Asia and the Pacific Database aspires to provide a comprehensive and rich data source for artists, climate scientists, and policymakers on the artistic practices of artists and collectives from the South, Southeast Asian and Pacific Regions. The complexity of the climate crisis at hand requires a transdisciplinary approach to research and practice, even as we see climate change becoming an ever-pressing theme across the disciplines of science and art. This database does not aim to be an exhaustive list of artists from the South, Southeast Asian and Pacific region but a carefully crafted list of artists and collectives that have a keen focus on environmental themes. Drawing on the expertise built up by NTU CCA over the years, this database animates the expansive network of artists from around the South, Southeast Asian and Pacific regions dedicated to themes related to traditional knowledge, biodiversity and ecosystems, anthropogenic impacts and risk and resilience. The hope is that this database presents an easy to use and initial source of information for scientists, policymakers and artists to find artists relevant to their area of expertise or region of study with the possibility of collaborating with artists in the database toward building transdisciplinary research methods.

The content featured in the database is edited and proofread by an internal team at NTU CCA. If you would like to contribute to, update or edit any of the information that currently exists in the database, please email ntuccacomms@ntu.edu.sg to get in touch.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

As the urgency of climate-change induced sea level rise threatens Singapore’s coastlines, many technological solutions have been offered to mitigate its worsening effects. In this lecture, moderated by Professor Ute Meta Bauer, Professor Adam Switzer and media artist, researcher, and NTU ADM PhD student Dewi Tan will explore the different strategies adopted to mitigate urban flood risk and build flood resilience in Jakarta and Singapore, including a discussion on The Long Island Plan. This lecture will address coastal development through the lens of engineering solutions and critical artistic practices to understand the socio-economic and ecological potentials and consequences of this newest terraforming endeavour.

Tuesday,12 November 2024, 6:30 – 8:00pm 
The Hall, NTU CCA
Gillman Barracks, Singapore, 108934

About the Climate Transformation: Sustainable Societies Lecture Series
This series brings together artists, policymakers and advocates with academic researchers from NTU’s ‘Climate Transformation Programme’ (CTP) and other academic programmes. Through the triangulation of science-culture-society, we hope to foster a conversation that expands our knowledge of the challenges that confronts us in Singapore and in the broader region.

This research is an inquiry into curatorial, artistic, and academic networks of exchange that foster a pluriversal understanding of Southeast Asia. It will highlight the potential of open-ended curatorial, artistic and textual endeavours that formulate their own modus operandi. Analysing motivations, methods, and audiences of three distinct art initiatives by local practitioners will provide valuable insights for the writing of future cultural policies and alternative metrics to evaluate the impact of nonconforming approaches within regional studies. This will reshape and expand policies and programmes that seek to internationalise or regionalise Singapore art scenes. Acknowledging the long-term impact of such critical thinking and the creation of alternative knowledges and transnational networks would advance traditional perspectives in Southeast Asian scholarship and its funding mechanisms.

Research Outputs

Understanding Southeast Asia as a “Geocultural Formation”: Three Case Studies of Artistic Initiatives from the Region Closed-Door Forum

Programme

Welcome by Ahmad Mashadi, Introduction by Ute Meta Bauer and David Teh

ROUND-ROBIN: INTRODUCING THE CASE STUDIES, response by John Tain

The Flying Circus Project, Introduction by SEON, Presentation by Ong Keng Sen

Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary Art and Modern Art in Asia, Introduction by Ho Tzu Nyen, Presentation by Thanavi Chotrapdit, Vera Mey and Roger Nelson

The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia, Introduction by Ong Keng Sen, Presentation by Ho Tzu Nyen

CONVERSATION: PATRICK FLORES & HSU FANG-TZE, moderated by Siddhartha Perez

CONVERSATION: GRIDTHIYA GAWEEWONG & MELATI SURYODARMO, moderated by Ute Meta Bauer

PANEL: HEIDI ARBUCKLE & KATHLEEN DITZIG, moderated by David Teh

Granted by

NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (NTU CCA Singapore) presents the two-part research presentation Climate Crisis and Cultural Loss. First unfolding at TBA21–Academy’s Ocean Space in Venice, Italy, the research inquiry later materialises in another configuration at ADM Gallery, a university gallery under the School of Art, Design, and Media (NTU ADM) at Nanyang Technological University Singapore. 

This twofold exhibition marks the conclusion of the eponymous research project led by Principal Investigator Ute Meta Bauer at NTU ADM. The inquiry started by asking: how has the slow erosion of diverse, multicultural, and more-than-human ways of living over time impacted the environments in which we live, and what are the longer-term consequences on habitats? Can we begin again with culture, to induce a necessary paradigm shift in the way we think about and respond to the climate crisis? Extending connections and conversations seeded during the inaugural cycle of TBA21–Academy’s The Current fellowship programme led by Bauer from 2015 to 2018, Climate Crisis and Cultural Loss continues to build archipelagic networks across the Alliance of Small Island Developing States, deepening existing collaborations with Oceania Centre for Arts, Culture and Pacific Studies in Fiji, and developing new ones further in the South Pacific Ocean, through the art and media non-profit organisation Further Arts in Vanuatu. 

Bridging conversations from the Pacific to Singapore in the Riau Archipelago, former fellows of TBA21–Academy’s The Currentand current research collaborators artist Nabil Ahmed, social anthropologist Guigone Camus, artist Kristy H.A. Kang, legal scholar Hervé Raimana Lallemant-Moe, and artists Armin Linke and Lisa Rave, join Singapore-based researchers Co-Investigator Sang-Ho Yun and Denny Chee of the Earth Observatory of Singapore – Remote Sensing Lab (EOS–RS) and the Asian School of the Environment, NTU ADM research staff Soh Kay Min and Ng Mei Jia, historian Jonathan Galka, and community organiser Firdaus Sani, as they explore the impacts of extreme weather, rising seas, climate displacement, ocean resource extraction, and the disappearance of material cultural traditions, occurring across what the visionary Pacific thinker Epeli Hau’ofa has termed “our sea of islands.” Featuring interviews, data visualisations, documentation, writings, and artisanal crafts made in collaboration with or generously gifted to the research team by knowledge bearers, community leaders, scientists, scholars, and artists, including writer and curator Frances Vaka’uta, masi artist Igatolo Latu,human rights defender Anne Pakoa and anthropologist Cynthia Chou, the exhibitions present the rich, complex, and multi-layered research findings accumulated over three years, since the Climate Crisis and Cultural Loss project first started in 2021. 

At TBA21–Academy’s Ocean Space, the Climate Crisis and Cultural Loss research inquiry sits adjacent to the exhibition Restor(y)ing Oceania, comprising two new site-specific commissions by Latai Taumoepeau and Elisapeta Hinemoa Heta. Curated by Bougainville-born artist Taloi Havini, whose curatorial vision is guided by an ancestral call-and-response method, the exhibition materialises as a search for solidarity and kinship in uncertain times, in order to slow down the clock on extraction and counter it with reverence for the life of the Ocean. 

At ADM Gallery, Climate Crisis and Cultural Loss is presented alongside the companion show Sensing Nature, curated by Gallery Director Michelle Ho. The exhibition showcases artists representing diverse disciplines, each offering their interpretation of the natural world and its intersection with urban life. Through reflection and experimentation, these works invite viewers to reassess our perceptions and behaviors toward the environment and phenomena beyond human influence. They advocate for a renewed understanding of society’s connection to nature and the land. 

Climate Crisis and Cultural Loss is supported by the Ministry of Education, Singapore, under its Academic Research Fund Tier 2 grant. The research presentation at Ocean Space coincides with the 60th International Art Biennale in Venice, Italy, with public programmes taking place through the exhibition durations in both Venice and Singapore. 

Opening Dates
Ocean Space exhibition preview: 
March 22, 6pm 
Ocean Space, Venice, Chiesa di San Lorenzo Castello

Opening hours 
March 23–October 13, 2024: Wednesday to Sunday, 11am–6pm
Ocean Space 
Chiesa di San Lorenzo Castello 5069, Venice

April 12–May 24, 2024: Monday to Friday, 10am–5pm
ADM Gallery 
81 Nanyang Drive, Singapore 637458

This research project identifies regional climate change mitigation practices, specifically addressing sea level rise on coastlines along the Riau Archipelago. The project brings together artists, scientists, and local communities to co-create digital tools—such as bilingual online manuals—that support the implementation of best practices in climate resilience.

A mixed-method evaluation rubric, using both qualitative and quantitative research design, will assess the impact and effectiveness of these digital tools. The overarching objective is to understand how such tools can support local communities in strengthening their climate mitigation strategies.

This interdisciplinary approach to climate mitigation integrates local knowledge, environmental science, and research-based artistic practice. It offers the potential to develop new ways of understanding and responding to local environmental issues. Given the ecological similarities between Bintan and Singapore—particularly in their shared mangrove ecosystems—and the mutual threat of rising sea levels, the project fosters cross-border learning and cooperation.

By centering community participation and regional specificity, this research contributes to broader conversations around sustainable adaptation strategies for vulnerable coastal areas in Southeast Asia.

Key Research Outputs

Repository on Coastal Ecosystems: Bridging Artistic, Scientific and Community-Led Practices in the Riau Archipelago

Launch and Evaluation of Repository on Coastal Ecosystems, 14–15 June 2026, Bintan, Indonesia

Join us for the Environmentally-Engaged Artistic Practices in South, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Symposium as we hear from artists, scientists, and climate change initiatives about the possibilities of transdisciplinary collaboration addressing the climate crisis. Exploring themes including Anthropogenic Impact and Deep Time, Traditional Knowledge and Cosmologies, Biodiversity, Ecosystems and Livelihoods and Risk, Resilience, and Resistance, this event continues NTU CCA’s decade-long inquiry into research-based artistic practices. This symposium draws from the expansive network of artists engaged in environmentally grounded practices connected to ecology and community.

Schedule

Day 1
Register here. Programme booklet here.

10:00AM – 11:00AM
Opening Address | Simon Redfern, Dean, College of Science, President’s Chair in Earth Sciences, Professor, Asian School of Environment, Nanyang Technological University

Keynote | The Potential and Impact of Environmentally-Engaged Artistic Practices in Collaboration with Academic Research
Presenter: Ute Meta Bauer, Professor at the School of Art, Design and Media, NTU & Founding Director of NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore 

In this keynote speech, Professor at NTU ADM and Director of NTU CCA, Ute Meta Bauer builds on her decade long inquiry into the potential of a cross disciplinary approach in research and practice engaged in the Centre’s overarching research framework Climates.Habitats.Environments. Encouraging inquiries and collaborations between environmentally and socially engaged artistic practices and the fields of climate science, conservation and preservation of cultures and ecosystems is the driver of a new database that has been created over the past 18 months. Drawing from an expansive network of artists mainly active in South and Southeast Asia this website is intended to give access to wealth of environmentally-engaged artistic practices whose long term engagement established impactful examples how to navigate and communicate the complexity of vast changing realities in a tangible way. The database presented in this keynote was designed to connect artists, climate scientists, researchers and policymakers with projects in similar regions to benefit from each other and to generate socially robust outcomes. On this project, Bauer is joined by research assistant Angela Ricasio Hoten, an Environmental Studies graduate from Yale-NUS College and current research assistant at the School of Art, Design and Media, NTU, as well as Eunice Lacaste, a PhD candidate at NTU School of Art, Design and Media. Together they work in close exchange with the more then hundred artists featured in this database. This project is supported by the Ministry of Education Academic Research Fund Tier 1 project (RG39/21) “Environmentally-Engaged Artistic Practices in South, Southeast Asia and the Pacific and their potential impact as contribution for transdisciplinary research in Singapore”. 

11:00AM – 12:00PM
In Conversation | Intersecting Ecosystems: Possibilities across the Arts and Sciences
Panel: Ang Song Nian (Artist, Lecturer at NTU ADM, Singapore), Zen Teh (Artist, Singapore), Dr Ching Jianhong (Assistant Professor, Duke-NUS), Moderated by Angela Ricasio Hoten (ADM NTU)

In our first panel discussion of the symposium, we bring together long-term collaborators, artist Zen Teh and scientist Dr Ching Jianhong (Duke-NUS) alongside artist and lecturer, Ang Song Nian (NTU ADM) to discuss the practice of interdisciplinary collaboration in Singapore. Moderated by Angela R Hoten, environmental research assistant at NTU, this panel will explore the challenges and joys of generating an interdisciplinary artistic practice through local and regional environmental sites. The panel will explore the differences across the various disciplines of art and science while also navigating the tricky distinctions between and across interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary collaboration. 

12:00PM – 1:00PM
Lunch Break

1:00PM – 2:00PM
In Conversation | Islands in Flux: Weathering the Future
Panel: Nice Buenaventura (Artist, Philippines), Serina Rahman (Lecturer, NUS), Moderated by Soh Kay Min (NTU ADM)

Join filipina artist Nice Buenaventura and lecturer Serina Rahman (Department of Southeast Asian Studies, NUS) as they discuss the value and importance of citizen-centered learning in their home localities. Moderated by research associate, Soh Kay Min (NTU ADM), the panel will discuss the ways that weather shapes community practices and strategies across the archipelago and the different ways that our panelists document these practices through art and citizen science. 

2:00PM – 4:00PM
Tropikalye Workshop | Nice Buenaventura

Tropikalye is an exercise in citizen-ethnography, taking shape as a mutual co-learning resource on vernacular material culture, particularly the accidental intersections of aesthetics and the everyday in the Philippines and, occasionally, the region. In this edition, Nice Buenaventura will expand Tropikalye to Singapore’s streets. Supported by MOE Tier 1 Grant Environmentally-Engaged Artistic Practices in South, Southeast Asia and the Pacific, this workshop will bring participants into the digital streets of Singapore, to document the tangible manifestations of folk strategies that respond to tropical and postcolonial conditions. From this workshop participants will build the Singapore edition of the Tropikalye index through written, photographic and audio documentation.

Day 2
Register here. Programme booklet here.

10:00AM – 11:00AM
In Conversation | Collaboration in Crisis: Technology in Disaster Response
Panel: Nashin Mahtani, Peta Bencana (Indonesia), Sang-Ho Yun (NTU EOS), Moderated by Eunice Lacaste (NTU ADM)

For our second day, join our exciting panel discussion between Nashin Mahtani, director of Yayasan Peta Bencana (Disaster Map Foundation), and Sang-Ho Yun, Director of the Earth Observatory of Singapore – Remote Sensing Lab (NTU) on the use of remote-sensing technologies in disaster response. Learn about their previous collaborations together on disaster risk reduction in the Southeast Asian region and how they utilize technology to construct more equitable forms of climate risk response and adaptation for the region. 

11:00AM – 12:00PM
In Conversation | Liquid Landscapes: Designing for Climate Resilience
Panel: Som Supaparinya (Thailand), Dr Erich Wolff (ASE NTU), Stefan Huebner (ARI NUS), Laura Miotto (NTU ADM) 

For our final panel of the symposium, join us for a riveting discussion on designing for climate adaptation in coastal and floating communities with Thai artist Som Supaparinya, Dr Erich Wolff (Earth Observatory of Singapore, NTU), Stefan Huebner (Asia Research Institute, NUS) and moderated by Associate Professor Laura Miotto (NTU ADM). Gathering insights from the disciplines of art, architecture, environmental history, and engineering, the panel will discuss the generative potentialities of different strategies for climate adaptation for water-based communities drawing both from the past and from speculative futures. 

12:00PM – 1:00PM
Lunch Break

1:00PM – 2:30PM
Workshop | #ClimateEmergis, how to design the future together
Workshop by Nashin Mahtani, Founder of Peta Bencana and Climate Emergency Software Alliance (CESA)

Join Nashin in this workshop to develop a unique design development charette to conceptualise and refine the visual representation of “climate emergis”. “Climate Emergis” is a set of digital communications tailored to represent and report various facets of climate change. These symbols, once approved by Unicode and released via updates on every smart phone across the globe, will offer people a simple yet powerful tool to share, report, and cooperate to address urgent environmental challenges.

2:30PM – 4:30PM
Film Screening & Conversation 
In conversation with Yeo Siew Hua and Dr Marc Glöde (NTU ADM)

Join us for a screening of An Invocation to the Earth followed by a Director’s Talk with Director Yeo Siew Hua and moderated by Dr Marc Glöde (NTU ADM). Conceived during the month of the Hungry Ghost Festival in 2019, while large scale fires were consuming the forests of Indonesia, Yeo Siew Hua’s An Invocation to the Earth confronts climate collapse through the lense of pre-colonial folktales and animistic rituals. Through spoken spells and bodily entanglements, the video conjures up the fallen environmental defenders of a region ridden with ecological threats in the hope that their spirits will be reborn once again. 

This topical research cluster connects the Centre’s research & academic programmes, exhibitions, and residencies between 2017 to 2024. Changes in the environment influence weather patterns and these climatic shifts impact habitats, and vice versa. Precarious conditions of habitats are forcing migration of humans and other species at a critical level. The consequences of human intervention are felt on a global scale, affecting geo-political, social, and cultural systems. The Centre intends to discuss and understand these realities through art and culture in dialogue with other fields of knowledge.

CLIMATES. HABITATS. ENVIRONMENTS. follows the overarching topic of PLACE. LABOUR. CAPITAL. (2013–17), continuing to address the complexities and the dynamics that entangle the local with the global.

The Climate Transformation Programme (CTP)—Cross Cutting Theme 1: Sustainable Societies, under which Professor Ute Meta Bauer serves as Senior Principal Investigator (Advisory Panel), consists of a suite of programmes that form a synergistic relay of interdisciplinary research and external outreach. The initiatives aim to cultivate a critical multiplicity of voices, perspectives, knowledges from both within and outside academic realms in the formation of ‘Sustainable Societies’ that engage with questions of climate change.

The Climate Transformation Programme is led by Professor Adam Switzer (Professor, Asian School of the Environment, Nanyang Technological University). The CTP aims to develop, inspire and accelerate knowledge-based solutions and educate future leaders to establish the stable climate and environment necessary for resilient, just, and sustainable Southeast Asian societies.

Key Research Outputs

Climate Transformation: Sustainable Societies Lecture Series Cycle 1 and 2
Climate Transformation Tuesday Gatherings Cycle 1 and 2

Climate Transformation: Sustainable Societies Lecture Series Cycle 1 (November 2024–May 2025) and Cycle 2 (August 2025–April 2026)
Climate Transformation Gatherings Cycle 1 (November 2024–May 2025) and Cycle 2 (August 2025–May 2026) 
Repository on Coastal Ecosystems: Bridging Artistic, Scientific and Community-Led Practices in the Riau Archipelago

Research Publications

Jamil, J and Gebert, J. V. (2026, October) Where Nipa Grows, the Mangrove Lives: Orang Suku Laut, Kawal, and the Politics of Three Plants. Madeleine Collie (CTP Visiting Researcher) and Yvonne Billimore (eds.), Follow the Plants. Preorder here

In recent years, climate change has triggered alarming environmental scenarios in the region. Artists and climate activists have reacted to these circumstances by proposing methods to create awareness and navigate the environmental collapse. This research project aimed to identify artistic inquiries focused on addressing environmental challenges in South, Southeast Asia and the Pacific. By establishing a methodology to evaluate the significance and impacts of each inquiry, it will investigate the capacity of these art projects to deepen the understanding of the effect of accelerated climate change in the aforementioned regions. This project aims to foster a dialogue between artistic forms of knowledge production and the scholarly knowledge generated by scientific practitioners engaged in climate change matters. This research project generated the Environmentally-Engaged Artistic Practices in South, Southeast Asia and the Pacific Database, with over 100 datasets of artistic research projects that are engage in environmental challenges spanning over 20 territories, it offered a first touchpoint for researchers to engage with artists that align across similar themes. This open database, was launched at the eponymous ‘Environmentally-Engaged Artistic Practices’ two-day symposium that took place during Singapore Art Week. Hosted at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, this symposium brought together local and regional artists, scientists, engineers, historians and climate initiatives to discuss the potential and possibilities of transdisciplinary and cross disciplinary collaborations geared towards climate and environmental aware inquiries and solution finding.

Research Outputs

Environmentally-Engaged Artistic Practices in South, Southeast Asia and the Pacific Database

Environmentally-Engaged Artistic Practices in South, Southeast Asia and the Pacific Symposium

Publications

Min, S.K. (2024). Telemetric Feeling in Tita Salina and Irwan Ahmett’s The Ring of Fire (2014–Present). Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia 8(1), 67-89.

This project examines how climate crisis and cultural loss interconnect. The core objective is the co-production of knowledge that can lead to a changed understanding of environmental justice, which, in turn, will suggest changes in existing legal and policy frameworks. The project hypothesises that a fundamental connection between people and their environments has been lost in contemporary urban contexts, resulting in feelings of indifference towards the climate crisis or unexplained feelings of climate anxiety.

It deploys a research team with transdisciplinary methods to build on emerging environmental jurisprudence in the Pacific region and produce narrative visualisations demonstrating the links between cultural loss and climate change. By combining scholarly knowledge with cultural and artistic practices, the project will develop an innovative framework for addressing the impact of accelerated climate change. Using tools from visual studies and forensic architecture, from ethnography and law, to make scientific evidence on climate change socially robust and impactful, it will also create a relay between local perspectives and knowledge generated in different academic fields. Data visualisation and audiovisual presentations of ecological and cultural loss will be instrumental to transform ecological grief and loss into catalysts for climate action. Such narrative visualisations make visible the necessity to re-establish a direct relation between human societies and the environment, especially in the rapidly-changing urban fabric of a metropolis like Singapore.

Research Outputs

Climate Crisis and Cultural Loss Research Presentation, 23 March–13 October 2024, TBA21-Academy Ocean Space, Venice, Italy

Climate Crisis and Cultural Loss Research Presentation, 12 April–24 May 2024, ADM Gallery, 81 Nanyang Drive, Singapore

Special Issue: Climate Crisis and Cultural Loss (Vol. XXVII, 2024), Comparative Law Journal of the Pacific (CLJP), Victoria University of Wellington

Research Publications:

Ahmed, N., Bauer, U. M., & Lallemant-Moe, H. R. (2024, October). Introductions to Cultural loss and climate change. Comparative Law Journal of the Pacific, Special Issue: Climate Crisis and Cultural Loss.

Ahmed, N., Camus, G., Lallemant-Moe, H. R., & Rave, L. (2022, November). Cultural loss and climate change – A new field of research. Comparative Law Journal of the Pacific, 28.

Soh, K. M. (2024, May). Monsoon equinox. Issue 13: Weather. LASALLE College of the Arts.

Shaleh, A. (2024, October). Linking the commons and climate change to collective actions. Comparative Law Journal of the Pacific, Special Issue: Climate Crisis and Cultural Loss.

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NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore is hosting the launch of the Afterall journal issue 46, Autumn/Winter 2018 as well as the latest publication in the Afterall Exhibition Histories series, Artist-to-Artist: Independent Art Festivals in Chiang Mai 1992–98 with the presence of the editors on Saturday, 13 October 2018.

As part of the three-year research and publishing partnership between the Nanyang Technological University and the University of the Arts London started in 2017, issue 46 was conceived in Singapore in a collective effort by the editorial team (Ute Meta Bauer, Ana Bilbao, Charles Esche, Anders Kreuger, David Morris, Anca Rujoiu, and Charles Stankievech). This issue traverses different geographies and contexts, from Southeast Asia to the Americas with a focus on artistic practices that take a clear position against the long-lasting endurance of oppressive systems, be it racial, patriarchal or colonial. The performative body of work of Singaporean artist Lee Wen and his explorations on identity and representation are unpacked in two essays by Alice Ming Wai Jim, Professor and Concordia University Research Chair in Ethnocultural Art Histories, Canada, and Võ H`ông Chu’o’ng-Đài, Researcher at Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong. Yin Ker, Assistant Professor at the School of Art, Design and Media at Nanyang Technical University, Singapore, discusses the internal complexities of the Burmese contemporary art scene in one of this issue’s contextual essays.

The discussion on issue 46 will be preceded by a presentation of Afterall’s history by its Co-founder, Charles Esche, Director of Van Abbemuseum, The Netherlands. Celebrating 20 years of activity this year, Afterall journal is widely acknowledged for its in-depth analysis of artistic practices, contextual essays, engagement with exhibition histories and curatorial practices within various geographical constituencies.

Edited by David Teh and David Morris, Artist-to-Artist: Independent Art Festivals in Chiang Mai 1992–98 is published by Afterall Books in association with Asia Art Archive and the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, United States. The publication is the first comprehensive survey on a series of festivals known as Chiang Mai Social Installation, emerging amidst a regional constellation of artists’ initiatives and independent spaces.  The book presents extensive photographic documentation alongside a multivocal account by its participants and commissioned writers.

SCHEDULE

2.00pm
Introduction by Ute Meta Bauer

2.15 – 3.00pm
20 Years of Afterall, presentation by Charles Esche

3.00 – 4.00pm
Launch of the Afterall issue 46 introduced by editors: Ute Meta Bauer, Ana Bilbao, Charles Esche, Anders Kreuger, David Morris, Anca Rujoiu, and Charles Stankievech

4.15–5.00pm
Launch of the publication Artist-to-Artist: Independent Art Festivals in Chiang Mai 1992–98, AfterallExhibition Histories, introduced by the book’s editors: David Teh and David Morris

5.00–5.30pm
Performative Reading by Peter Daniel Sipeli
*Kindly note that 1angrynative also planned on doing a reading, but due to unforeseen circumstances, will not be able to join. 

BIOGRAPHIES

Ute Meta Bauer (Germany/Singapore) is the Founding Director of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore; Professor at the School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University where she teaches in the MA in Museum Studies and Curatorial Practices; and an editor of Afteralljournal. Previously, she was Professor and Dean of the School of Fine Art at the Royal College of Art, London and Associate Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, United States, where she served as the Founding Director of ACT, the Program in Art, Culture, and Technology.

Ana Bilbao (Mexico/United Kingdom) is an editor of Afterall journal and a Research Fellow in AfterallResearch Centre in Central Saint Martins (CSM), University of the Arts London. She often teaches at the University of Essex courses in modern and contemporary art history, curating, and the history of exhibition-making. Recently she was a Visiting Scholar in the Art History department at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium.

Charles Esche (Netherlands) is Director of Van Abbemuseum, The Netherlands, Professor of Contemporary Art and Curating at CSM, University of the Arts London, and Co-director of Afteralljournal and books. He teaches on the Exhibition Studies MRes course at CSM, and at Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, The Netherlands. He received the 2012 Princess Margriet Award from the Eureopean Cultural Foundation and the 2014 Center for Curatorial Studies Bard College Prize for Curatorial Excellence.

Anders Kreuger (Sweden/Belgium) is Curator at M MKA Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp, and an editor of Afterall journal. He was previously Director of the Malmö Art Academy and Exhibitions Curator at Lunds konsthall, Sweden, and a member of the Programme Team for the European Kunsthalle, Cologne. A frequent contributor to Afterall journal, Kreuger has also published numerous catalogue essays and other texts.

David Morris (United Kingdom) is an editor of Afterall journal and the Exhibition Histories series. He is Associate Lecturer on the Exhibition Studies MRes course at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. He has also been working with the Semiotext(e) archive since 2011, with a focus on the 1975 Schizo-Culture conference.

Anca Rujoiu (Romania/Singapore) is a curator and editor of the Afterall journal. Curator for exhibitions and later Manager of Publications, she was part of the founding team at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore contributing to numerous exhibitions, as well as the public and publishing programme of the institution.

Charles Stankievech (Canada) is founding faculty member of the Yukon School of Visual Arts in Dawson City, Canada; Assistant Professor in the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design at the University of Toronto; and an editor of Afterall journal. Since 2011, he has been Co-director of the art and theory press K. Verlag in Berlin.

David Teh (Australia/Singapore) is Associate Professor at the National University of Singapore. His writings have appeared in journals including Third Text, ARTMargins, Afterall, and Theory, Culture and Society. His book Thai Art: Currencies of the Contemporary was published by MIT Press in 2017. Teh is part of the curatorial team of the 2018 edition of Gwangju Biennale, South Korea.

Questioning Museums: Art Institutions in Singapore critically examines the ways in which shifting social, political, and cultural histories are both produced and made visible through the island-state’s institutional structures, collecting strategies, and modes of exhibition making. Working together in teams, the inaugural class of students from Nanyang Technological University’s Masters of Arts in Museum Studies and Curatorial Practices (MSCP), a programme designed to prepare graduates for professional positions in the highly complex and diverse museum landscape of Southeast Asia, anchor their collective exploration through four in-depth interviews with leading figures of Singapore’s ever-evolving museum field: Kwa Chong Guan, Peter Lee, Angelita Teo, and Kennie Ting.

Please join us for a celebratory book launch with honoured guests, a roundtable conversation with recent graduates, and a welcome reception for the incoming class of MSCP students!

7 Aug 2019, Wed 07:00 PM – 09:00 PM

The Single Screen, Block 43 Malan Road

25 Jun 2016, Sat 2:00pm – 7:00pm Gillman Barracks

We have an array of exciting activities planned for the upcoming Art Day Out! x The School Holidays at Gillman Barracks on Saturday, 25 June. From exhibition tours of SEA STATE, animation screenings by NTU ADM students, to creating your own fizzy drinks in a workshop by Artist-in-Residence Julian ‘Togar’ Abraham – there is something for all ages!

anime
2.00 – 7.00pm
The Seminar Room, Block 43 Malan Road

For Gillman Barracks’ Art Day Out! x The School Holidays, NTU CCA Singapore presents a variety of short animations made by the students of Nanyang Technological University’s School of Art, Design and Media (NTU ADM), selected by Kathrin Albers, Assistant Professor, NTU ADM.

Screening list:

1. Princess (2014)
2D Hand-drawn Animation, Mandarin with English Subtitles, 7:07 mins.
By Andre Quek, Abdul Hadi Bin Abdul Wahab and Vivien Tan. Courtesy of the artists and NTU ADM.

2. MiMo (2014)
Abstract Animation, No Dialogue, 1:43 mins.
By Chang Pei Yee and Oon Qian Yi Shannon. Courtesy of the artists and NTU ADM.

3. Hand-Made (2012)
Stopmotion Paper cut Animation, No Dialogue, 2:18 mins.
By Goh Wei Choon and Jiahui. Courtesy of the artists and NTU ADM.

4. Innocent Memory (2012)
2D Hand Drawn and Painted Animation, No Dialogue, 3:24 mins.
By Nguyen Thi Nam Phuong. Courtesy of the artist and NTU ADM.

5. Bubble (2014)
3D Animation, No Dialogue, 5:40 mins.
By Lam Yee Shing, Quek Yu Lin and Poh Ya Ching. Courtesy of the artists and NTU ADM.

6. 1997 (2014)
2D Flash Animation, No Dialogue, 7:32 mins.
By Goh Wei Choon and Jia Hui Wee. Courtesy of the artists and NTU ADM.

7. The Octopus Lady (2015)
2D Animation, No Dialogue, 3:34 mins.
By Amanda Wang Ziyan. Courtesy of the artist and NTU ADM.

8. La Laine Des Moutons (2012)
2D Animation, French with English Subtitles, 5:53 mins.
By Kapie and Tran Nguyen Tuan Anh. Courtesy of the artists and NTU ADM.

9. Autogenic (2014)
Abstract 3D Animation to music, 3:45 mins.
By Prakash. Courtesy of the artists and NTU ADM.

Curator Tours of SEA STATE
2.00pm: Led by Syaheedah Iskandar, Curatorial Assistant, NTU CCA Singapore
4.00pm: Led by Shabbir Hussain Mustafa, curator, SEA STATE and Senior Curator, National Gallery Singapore
The Exhibition Hall, Block 43 Malan Road

Join our curator-led tours of the exhibition SEA STATE by artist Charles Lim Yi Yong. Commissioned for the Singapore Pavilion for the 56th Venice Biennale, SEA STATE examines the biophysical, political and psychic contours of Singapore through the visible and invisible lenses of the sea. It is an in-depth inquiry by an artist that scrutinises both man-made systems, opening new perspectives on our everyday surroundings, from unseen landscapes and disappearing islands to the imaginary boundaries of a future landmass.

Workshop for kids and teens: Make your own Soda Pop
3.00 – 4.00pm
Studio #01-02, Block 37 Malan Road

Learn to make your own Soda Pop in a workshop with Artist-in-Residence Julian ‘Togar’ Abraham. Open to ages nine and above, concoct your very own fizzy drink using fruits in a healthy, organic fermentation process!

Please RSVP to NTUCCAResidencies@ntu.edu.sg and bring some fruit to flavour your Soda Pop!

On the first day of exhibition Siah Armajani: Spaces for the Public. Spaces for Democracy., curator Ute Meta Bauer will be giving a guided tour from 3.00 – 3.30pm. 

Following the tour, from 3.30 – 5.00pm, Victoria Sung, co-curator of Siah Armajani’s major retrospective shown at Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and the Met Breuer, New York, will expand on Armajani’s practice in her talk Siah Armajani: Follow This Line. Sung will focus on the artist’s Reading Rooms, particularly the one included in the exhibition, Sacco and Vanzetti Reading Room #3, and think through the role of museums as public and educational spaces.A public programme of Siah Armajani: Spaces for the Public. Spaces for Democracy.

20 Jult 2019, Saturday
03:00 PM – 03:30 PM 
The Exhibition Hall, Block 43 Malan Road

10 Nov 2020, Tue 05:30 PM – 07:00 PM
24 Nov 2020, Tue 05:30 PM – 07:00 PM
8 Dec 2020, Tue 05:30 PM – 07:00 PM
22 Dec 2020, Tue 05:30 PM – 07:00 PM
2 Feb 2021, Tue 05:30 PM – 07:00 PM
16 Feb 2021, Tue 05:30 PM – 07:00 PM
Online

This reading group will be held over three modules with each consisting of two sessions discussing a selection of texts on related topics. Participants are highly encouraged to attend both sessions for each module to ensure continuity and quality of discourse.

Sign up here to attend Module 1, Module 2 or Module 3.

Led by visual artist and writer Nurul Huda Rashid and film scholar Phoebe Pua, both PhD candidates, National University of Singapore.

This reading group takes ideas central to Trinh T. Minh-Ha’s writing as points of access to raise questions about the imagined histories, geographies, and communities of Southeast Asia. Over six sessions, the group will discuss themes of storytelling, feminism, and identities, and explore terms such as “third world,” “nusantara,” “woman,” and “native” with an eye towards interpreting them as acts and articulations of counter-narrative.

BIOGRAPHY

Phoebe Pua (Singapore) is a PhD candidate with the Department of English Language and Literature at NUS. Her dissertation is concerned with the controversial figure of the third world woman, as seen particularly in contemporary films from Southeast Asia. 

Nurul Huda Rashid (Singapore) is a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at NUS. Her research interests focus on images, narratives, visual and sentient bodies, feminisms, and the intersections between them.

Accompanying the Non-Aligned exhibition is a library of over 50 books on postcolonialism, decoloniality, the history of the Cold War, the Non-Aligned Movement, archiving, as well as theory of the moving image and publications on and by John Akomfrah, Naeem Mohaiemen, and The Otolith Group. Authors include Frantz Fanon, Stuart Hall, and Richard Wright, as well as Kodwo Eshun, Rosalind C. Morris, Bojana Piškur and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, among many others. 

In light of COVID-19, we have removed the reading corner for the safety of our visitors. 

In place of the physical Reading Corner, the bibliography list and selected texts on or in conversation with the artists were made available for the public to organise their own online reading groups. These additional texts including articles by Vijay Prashad and Elspeth Probyn, and book chapters by Adil Johan and S.R. Joey Long. 

17 Sep 2019, Tue 06:00 PM – 08:00 PM
(Led by Professor Ute Meta Bauer, NTU ADM)

29 Oct 2019, Tue 06:00 PM – 08:00 PM
(Led by Professor Ute Meta Bauer, NTU ADM, and Dr Andreas Spiegl, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna)

The Exhibition Hall, Block 43 Malan Road

Sign up here.

During these reading sessions, participants will look at and discuss texts from books such as Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene and Rosi Braidotti’s The Posthuman. The group will explore the possibility of a critical humanity, ranging from cohabitation with other forms of life to more dystopian scenarios. This links to the Centre’s overarching research topic Climates. Habitats. Environments., which examines, among others, the precarious conditions of human habitats due to climatic shifts, and their impact on geo-political, social, and cultural systems.

Registration required via Peatix: medicinalherbs.peatix.com
This programme will be conducted in Mandarin.

Programme will start at NTU CCA Singapore, Block 43 Malan Road and end at NTU Community Herb Garden, Nanyang Technological University, Nanyang Avenue near Jalan Bahar Gate. One-way transportation from NTU CCA Singapore to NTU is provided.

In conceptualising Quadra Medicinale (2009), Jef Geys asked local collaborators to identify plants that grew on the street, and to research their potential medicinal or beneficial properties. The NTU Community Herb Garden is dedicated to the cultivation of such plants and is home to more than 300 species of tropical plants and herbs with medicinal properties. Ng Kim Chuan founded the Garden in 2009, together with a small group of volunteers consisting of staff, students, and members of the public, to serve as a charitable resource of medicinal herbs for the poor and the needy. Ng will give a tour of the Garden, with the assistance of Lee Jin Long, NTU student, and share his knowledge and work surrounding these medicinal herbs, especially as alternative treatments for cancer and chronic illnesses.

A public programme of Jef Geys Quadra Medicinale Singapore.

“Weeds” are not a group of related plants (like “orchids” or “gingers” or “palms”), nor are they plants with shared physical characteristics (like “trees” or “shrubs”). Although weeds defy easy definition, their name suggests something unwanted or out of place. Many, however, are quite beautiful and merit closer examination and appreciation. This talk will explore different aspects of weeds – what they are, their place in the human psyche, their fascinating life histories – and their inextricable link to human existence.

BIOGRAPHY

Shawn Kaihekulani Yamauchi Lum (United States/Singapore) helped form the Nature Society (Singapore) Plant Group with the intention of promoting an interest in plants and plant conservation as part of a broader effort to promote Singapore’s natural heritage. He is a strong advocate of public participation in nature discovery and monitoring, and believes that our quality of life is made better by becoming acquainted with the beautiful and diverse living world around us.

A public programme of Jef Geys Quadra Medicinale Singapore. 

Course Details

Date: 10 September 2022, Saturday 
Time: 10:00am – 12:00pm
Venue: NTU CCA Singapore, Block 6 Lock Road, Gillman Barracks, Singapore 108934
Course Fee: $85.60 (incl. GST), per adult/child pair

For enquiries, please email ntuccaeducation@ntu.edu.sg

About The Course

Edible Wild is a 2-hour workshop aimed at bringing parents and their children closer to nature. Despite the greenery that surrounds us in our concrete jungle, it is easy to overlook the plants that flank our sidewalks. As the world moves at an ever-increasing pace, we need the occasional reminder to slow down and reconnect with the earth – and one of the best ways to do so is to learn how to care for it.

This workshop is a gentle introduction to the myriad of herbs – both common and uncommon – that can be found growing around our garden city, as well as a chance to understand their history and uses. Participants will learn simple plant identification techniques, understand the structure of a plant, as well as pick up basic gardening skills that they can use at home. The overall goal is to renew a sense of wonder in our green companions, while providing the skills to identify and care for them.

At The End of the Course, You Will…

● Learn how to identify edible local plants from The Farm at NTU CCA Singapore
● Learn general plant identification techniques (leaf shape, flowers, stem structure etc.)
● Pick up basic gardening techniques to grow and care for your own edible greens (proper watering, checking/enriching the soil, checking for pests, pruning & propagation)
● Create simple infusions with ingredients from the garden

Target Audience

Parent/child groups where the children are 7 years old and above.

Course Details

Date:16 April 2022, Saturday 
Time: 9:00am – 5:00pm
Venue: NTU CCA Singapore, The Seminar Room, Block 37 Malan Road, Singapore 109452
Course Fee: $513.60 (incl. GST) SkillsFuture Credits applicable for Singaporeans.

For enquiries, please email ntuccaeducation@ntu.edu.sg

To register, please click here
For enquiries, please email ntuccaeducation@ntu.edu.sg 

About The Course

The Upward Trend: NFTs and On-Chain Art is an introductory course designed for those who are interested to learn about the background and history of crypto art, and are keen to navigate the concept of NFTs, the technology that underlies them and the ecosystems they propel.

During the course, our instructors from NFT Asia will provide an overview of the basic terminologies that surround NFTs, blockchain and Web 3.0. They will also spotlight the relationship between NFTs and contemporary art discourses, as well as its interactions and intersections with broader art communities, such as through Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs).

As a participant, you will examine case studies, recent writings on the technology and engage in group discussions. By exploring different considerations to utilising NFTs which include minting, displaying and community building you will gain insights into the future of NFTs and its potential impact on the roles of artists, creatives, museums, galleries and the art business at large.

Who Should Sign Up

Artists, Arts Managers, Cultural Workers, Designers, Collectors, Gallerists, Arts Enthusiasts

At The End of the Course, You Will…

1. Gain a confident and nuanced understanding of what NFTs are. 

2. Be more familiar with art and creative infrastructures within and beyond the NFT ecosystem.

3. Develop a perspective of the implications of NFTs.

Your Course Instructors

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.

Jonathan Liu is 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.

Entanglements – Writing The Environment 

Course Details

Date: 21, 22, 24 & 25 Feb 2022 
Time:  9:00am – 4:00pm
Location: NTU CCA Singapore, The Seminar Room, Block 37 Malan Road, Singapore 109452
Course Fee: $856 (inc. GST) Skillsfuture credits applicable for Singaporeans.

Registration has closed. 

For enquiries please email ntuccaeducation@ntu.edu.sg

About the Course

Entanglements – Writing the Environment is a 4-day course which offers participants the opportunity to develop their writing skills and interests in ways that promote and illustrate environmental awareness, concerns, and sensitivities.

Participants will explore diverse issues of the environment captured in writing through experimenting with a variety of writing forms from the glossary definition, annotations, essay, review, poetry, short fiction and novel.

The course format will include examination of literary texts related to environmental themes, class discussions, as well as writing and editing practice to texts produced throughout the course.

By the end of this course, participants will have a new literary appreciation and increased confidence in writing about the natural world. Join us in the sandbox of literature to explore new ideas, experiment with language, and arrange words in new and exciting ways with like-minded individuals.

What You Will Learn 

1. To understand different formats of writing and writing conventions that can be applied to other facets of daily life.

2. To integrate environmental concerns in writing of fiction and non-fiction. 

3. To identify and analyse developments in the field of environmental literature through the study of specific works.

4. To develop a personal style of writing by connecting ideas and creating an effective narrative.

Who Should Sign Up

Artists, Cultural Producers, Curators, Researchers, Educators, Naturalists, Editors, Art Critics, Budding Writers or someone who simply enjoys writing 

Course Details

Date: 18 – 20 May 2022 
Time: 9am – 5pm
Location:NTU CCA Singapore, The Seminar Room, Block 37 Malan Road, Singapore 109452
Standard Course Fees: $2247 (full fee), $674.10 (Cat-A SSG Funded Courses), $254.10 (ETSS and MCES)

Register here.
For enquiries, please email ntuccaeducation@ntu.edu.sg

About this course 

Developing projects in the cultural sector comes with distinctive considerations unique to challenges in the field. Some examples of cultural sector projects include exhibitions, performances, festivals and other public presentations. 

In this 3-day programme designed for cultural practitioners and arts administrators, participants will develop the competencies and skills for planning and controlling art projects from ideation to completion. The course will examine the project management life cycle and address issues that drive or derail successful project outcomes. Participants will learn to define project parameters, identify and enrol stakeholders and use effective project management tools to plan, organise and track progress. 

Cultural sector projects often involve multiple, complex sources of funding. The processes involved in receiving the funds may not follow a regular schedule and subsidies sometimes are received after an event is over.  These issues can create uncertainty in the financial management of cultural sector projects. Project managers need to be agile in the both areas of budgeting and financial management in order to enhance project outcomes. 

This programme will also cover grant writing, an important aspect of project development and management. With the understanding that every grant application is evaluated at various stages, participants will learn how to tackle the different aspects of a grant application. Through hands-on writing practice, participants will navigate grant procedures, regulations and evaluation criteria and most importantly, favourably position their projects and increase their chances of receiving funding.

Who Should Sign Up

Arts Managers, Artists, Art Administrators, Curators, Researchers, Arts Educators, Production Managers, Cultural Workers, Arts Enthusiasts

Learning Outcomes

1. Identify key issues in project development life cycles specific to the arts.
2. Write a basic project proposal, timeline, and budget.
3. Identify potential funding sources including grants
4. Present and discuss proposals in a clear and persuasive manner.
5. Understand the current landscape of project development in the Arts in Singapore.
6. Navigate project development in times of crisis and force majeure.

NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore is proud to present Open College, a new educational initiative ­­for everyone who is passionate about personal and professional growth and development in the arts sector. 

Open College programmes are offered on 2 tracks; Discovery and Immersive Series. Discovery Series programmes are short exploratory courses that allow participants to explore topics outside their usual fields of interest, and acquire basic knowledge and skillsets that may be transferrable to other areas of study and work. By contrast, Immersive Series programmes are more in-depth and led by professional educators, researchers and critical thinkers in their fields of expertise. Through a blend of practical projects and discussions to stimulate critical thinking and dialogue, participants will deep dive into a subject matter and gain new perspectives.

Making it Happen! 
Developing Projects for the Cultural Sector

Course Details

Date: 27-29 September 2021 
Time: 9am-5:30pm
Location:NTU CCA Singapore, The Seminar Room, Block 37 Malan Road, Singapore 109452
Standard Course Fees: $2247 (full fee) $674.10 (Cat-A SSG Funded Courses) $254.10 (ETSS and MCES)
Registration for this course has closed.

For enquiries please email ntuccaeducation@ntu.edu.sg 

About this course 

Developing projects in the cultural sector comes with distinctive considerations unique to challenges in the field. Some examples of cultural sector projects include exhibitions, performances, festivals and other public presentations. 

In this 3-day programme designed for cultural practitioners and arts administrators, participants will develop the competencies and skills for planning and controlling art projects from ideation to completion. The course will examine the project management life cycle and address issues that drive or derail successful project outcomes. Participants will learn to define project parameters, identify and enrol stakeholders and use effective project management tools to plan, organise and track progress. 

Cultural sector projects often involve multiple, complex sources of funding. The processes involved in receiving the funds may not follow a regular schedule and subsidies sometimes are received after an event is over.  These issues can create uncertainty in the financial management of cultural sector projects. Project managers need to be agile in the both areas of budgeting and financial management in order to enhance project outcomes. 

This programme will also cover grant writing, an important aspect of project development and management. With the understanding that every grant application is evaluated at various stages, participants will learn how to tackle the different aspects of a grant application. Through hands-on writing practice, participants will navigate grant procedures, regulations and evaluation criteria and most importantly, favourably position their projects and increase their chances of receiving funding.

If you are a…

Arts Manager
Administrator
Artist
Curator
Researcher
Arts Educator
Production Manager
Cultural Worker
Arts enthusiast

Interested in…

Project development life cycles specific to the arts

Available project management tools and communication.

Identifying and enrolling stakeholders.

Identifying potential funding sources including grants.

Project development in times of crisis and force majeure.

You will learn how to…

Identify key issues in project development in the arts.

Write a basic project proposal, timeline, and budget.

Present and discuss proposals in a clear and persuasive manner.

Understand the current landscape of project development in the Arts in Singapore.

Concepts of Concern – A Lexicology of Ecology

Course Details

Date: Monday, 6 December 2021 
Time: 7 – 10 pm
Delivery Mode: Online
Standard Course Fees: SGD 90.95 (inc. GST)

REGISTER HERE.

For enquiries please email ntuccaeducation@ntu.edu.sg

–

About the Course

Concepts of Concern – A Lexicology of Ecology is a survey of terminology in social, cultural and political ecology. Old and new terms such as recycle, sustainable, green, renewable, biomass, climate change, carbon footprint, global warming or anthropocene constitute what can be called concepts of concern. They are used to propose solutions to waste, advance environmental justice and imagine new worlds, but also to justify new forms of resource extraction, industrial production and economic globalisation as necessarily eco-centric.

The 3-hour online course traces the evolution of specific eco-centric terms and their corollary discourses since the global environmental movements of the 1960s, and examines a lexicology of ecology as a springboard to engage the emerging and heterogeneous field of ecocriticism. This course will also discuss several artistic responses that operate outside the bounds of terminological discourses and its trappings.   

This course is divided into three main sections:

Part 1: Overview of dominant terminology in social/cultural/political ecology since the 1960s.

Part 2: Critical examination of selected terms, such as their use in corporate propaganda and political narratives.

Part 3: Survey of non-terminological/artistic responses to the crisis of ecology. 

–

Your Course Instructor

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.

Open College programmes are offered on 2 tracks; Discovery and Immersive Series. Discovery Series programmes are short exploratory courses that allow participants to explore topics outside their usual fields of interest, and acquire basic knowledge and skillsets that may be transferrable to other areas of study and work. By contrast, Immersive Seriesprogrammes are more in-depth and led by professional educators, researchers and critical thinkers in their fields of expertise. Through a blend of practical projects and discussions to stimulate critical thinking and dialogue, participants will deep dive into a subject matter and gain new perspectives.

Join us for an afternoon of drawing, walking, and inquiry inspired by the exhibition, Design Earth: Speculative Fiction for the Climate,  this drawing club invites artists, architects, designers, and students to probe how architectural drawings can unearth the more inconspicuous matters of climate change. In this session, we’ll explore how architectural drawing can be a critical tool to visualise the unseen externalities of deep-sea mining, land reclamation, sand exports, and marine geopolitics—especially in Singapore and its neighbouring shores where earth extraction meets fragile ecosystems.

This Drawing Club invites artists, architects, designers, and students to present their annotated sketches at the NTU ADM Foyer from July to August 2025.

No technical drawing experience needed—just a willingness to trace complexity.
Participants are encouraged to bring dry drawing media (markers, found images, etc) and reading references (articles, books, etc) to share, annotate, and get inspiration from during the session.

DATE
Saturday, 24 May 2025
3:00pm – 5:00pm

VENUE
ADM Gallery 2
NTU School of Art, Design and Media
81 Nanyang Dr, Singapore 637458

EXHIBITION DATES
28 April to 13 June 2025
Open by appointment from 14 June to 15 August 2025

GALLERY HOURS
Monday to Friday: 10:00am to 5:00pm
Saturday: By appointment only
Closed on Sunday and Public Holidays

EMAIL
ADMgallery@ntu.edu.sg

As the climate crisis intensifies, Southeast Asia will experience more intense and frequent extreme weather patterns – including flooding, hurricanes and tornadoes. According to PUB, Singapore faces the risk of flash floods, from abrupt and heavy storms, and coastal flooding in low-lying coastal areas due to rising sea levels and storm surges. As disaster events increase around the region, how can Singapore become a climate-resilient city in light of these projections? Beginning with a presentation by artist Ong Kian Peng (Adjunct Lecturer, NTU Art, Design and Media) he draws on his AI film Disaster Free (2024), visualising urban flooding that challenges the public perception of Singapore as a disaster-free zone. Paired with PhD Candidate, Ning Ding (NTU Asian School of the Environment) and moderated by Dr Karin G Oen(Director, NTU CCA Singapore; Senior Lecturer and Head of Art History, NTU School of Humanities), this dialogue brings together engineering solutions and speculative filmmaking to consider how to prepare for future scenarios.  

15 April 2025, 6:30pm – 8:30pm  
The Hall, NTU CCA, Blk 6 Lock Road, #01-10 Gillman Barracks, Singapore 108934  

Register here

The Climate Transformation: Sustainable Societies Series is organised by members of the Climate Transformation Programme (CTP) Cross-Cutting Theme 1: Sustainable Societies research team, Senior Principal Investigator Professor Ute Meta Bauer, research associate Ng Mei Jia and research assistant Angela Ricasio Hoten.  

Sustainable Societies  

Senior Principal Investigator, Professor Ute Meta Bauer (NTU ADM)   
Principal Investigator, Associate Professor Laura Miotto (NTU ADM)   
Principal Investigator, Professor Dr Thomas Schroepfer (SUTD) 

This Lecture Series is supported by the Singapore Ministry of Education Academic Research Fund Tier 3 grant [MOE-MOET32022-0006] for the Climate Transformation Programme.

What messages echo back to us from the future Earth? What will remain, and what will be mourned of the world as we know it? In a time when planetary futures are continuously mapped, engineered, and imagined, Letters from a Future Earth invites participants to step across the threshold of speculation and listen for voices shaped by rising tides, geoengineered skies, and adaptive ecosystems.

This workshop revolves around The Planet After Geoengineering (2021), a graphic animation by Design Earth, where planetary imaginaries unfold through narrative fragments and visual speculation. Responding to the animation, participants will be prompted to ponder over climate change, environmental design, and planetary care and compose letters and/or postcards from a future Earth. In creating memories of futures yet to be experienced, participants are asked to time-travel into future climates and channel perspectives from the human and other-than-human inhabitants of the Earth to come. The workshop will culminate in a final sharing session where participants will be invited to present their pieces, exchange insights, and reflect on the power of storytelling. In closing, the group will consider how such narratives might shape our actions in the present.

The workshop seeks to make the immediacy of climate change tangible, not only intellectually, but also emotionally by foregrounding personal visions and speculative storytelling with letters serving as intimate vessels for messages of loss, change, and resilience.

The workshop welcomes the general public as well as creatives, artists, writers, architects, designers, students, and everyone interested in the topic of climate change. Suitable for all writing skill levels.

This participatory event is part of a series of public programmes for the exhibition DESIGN EARTH: Speculative Fiction for the Climate on view by appointment at NTU ADM Gallery. Participants are welcome to visit the exhibition before attending the workshop.

This workshop is recommended for participants who are 18 years old and above.

Drawing and writing materials will be provided, participants are also welcome to bring their own.

The works produced will be photographed, and a selection will be featured on NTU CCA Singapore’s media platforms.

This workshop is facilitated by Leila Vignozzi, Intern, NTU CCA Singapore.

Saturday, 5 July 2025 
2:00 – 4:00pm 
The Hall, NTU CCA Singapore

REGISTER

Inspired by Cosmorama (2018), one of four sections in the exhibition Design Earth: Speculative Fiction for the Climate, this third Drawing Club invites artists, architects, designers, and students to respond to the geostories of asteroid mining, orbital debris, and climate refuge in the age of the “New Space.”

The workshop zooms in on architectural drawing as practice to examine planetary issues such as satellite debris and airspace conflicts, that may seem distant from us. Participants will trace the macrocosmic consequences of extractive economies and of their politics beyond Singapore, and beyond the Earth itself, launching critical conversations into speculative drawings.

The annotated sketches produced during the workshop will be displayed at the NTU ADM Foyer until 13 August 2025, alongside the works produced at the previous Drawing Club.

Participants are encouraged to bring dry drawing media (markers, found images, etc) and reading references (articles, books, etc) to share, annotate, and get inspiration from during the session. No technical drawing experience needed.

This workshop is facilitated by Eunice Lacaste, Programmes Associate, NTU CCA Singapore.

REGISTER

DATE: Thursday, 7 August 2025. 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm

VENUE: ADM Gallery 2, NTU School of Art, Design and Media, 81 Nanyang Dr, Singapore 637458

EXHIBITION DATES: Open by appointment from 14 June to 15 August 2025

GALLERY HOURS: Monday to Friday: 10:00am to 5:00pm. Saturday: By appointment only. Closed on Sunday and Public Holidays

BOOKING EMAIL: ADMgallery@ntu.edu.sg

Decay, decomposition, weathering, rot. Landscapes eroding, architectures disintegrating, bodies breaking down, coming apart, becoming dirt. We hardly have a kinship with decay for, like dirt, decay is—in the words of anthropologist Mary Douglas—matter out-of-place in our perpetually renewing cities. Indeed, the city we are brought to inhabit and desire is built with ever-more weatherproof architectures, with cosmetic treatments that maintain the hardness of the buildings and the smoothness of their surfaces impervious to the traces of Nature’s time. In waterfront cities, which novelist Amitav Ghosh regards as a showcase of architectural mastery over the unruly environment, the cartography of terrestrial edges continues to reinforce the separation of interiorised human-made worlds from exteriorised more-than-human environment. Seen through the lens of the city, the design of the future Earth aspires to be atemporal. And like so many transient and shifting environments stilled in human projections of the Earth (from maps to masterplans), the “unweathered” city must thrive outside of time, devoid of stains and discolouration. But does the city have to be in an anxious race against Nature’s time? 

Created and led by Superlative Futures, Drawing Dialogues: Stories of Decay is a workshop for re-attuning our urban selves to Nature’s time. The programme focuses on rethinking the place of decay in the wellbeing of cities and on re-presenting stories of decay as matters of care. The workshop will start off with a walk in the Berlayer Creek­—a rare remnant of Singapore’s mangrove histories once denigrated as a place of dankness and disease—where participants will be led to uncover stories of decay and gather thoughts and materials of decomposition. The second part of the workshop will take place at NTU CCA Singapore where, drawing and dialoguing with decay, participants will be guided to create their own narratives and landscapes of decay culminating in a collaborative artwork. Expanding on Superlative Futures’ speculative design research on new ecological practices for weathering the future city, this workshop marks the beginning of a propositional archive—A Cartography of Decay—that charts different relationships between decay and the city. 

This event is a public programme created in response to the exhibition Design Earth: Speculative Fiction for the Climate, on view by appointment at NTU ADM Gallery 2 until 15 August 2025. 

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.

This special issue strings together authorial perspectives from across disciplines and geographies that are concerned with topics at the nexus of the climate crisis and the links to cultural loss. This issue points to the needed legal approaches within the wider context of the Pacific. Writers include researcher Jake Atienza, artist Stefano Cagol, art critic and curator Maria Chiara Wang, law scholar Johanna Gussman, researcher Shabana Khan, climate advisor Renard Siew, computer scientist Nova Ahmad, and artist-activist Yoon Sun Woo.

Edited by Professor Nabil Ahmed, Professor Ute Meta Bauer, and Dr Herve Raimana Lallemant-Moe, assisted by Research Fellow Dr Adha Shaleh.

We thank the Editors-in-Chief Sage Yves-Louis and Tony Angelo.

This special issue is supported by the MOE AcRF Tier 2 Award, led by Principal Investigator Professor Ute Meta Bauer, with Research Associate Soh Kay Min, Research Assistant Ng Mei Hia, and Research Fellow Dr Adha Shaleh.

Journal on handwoven pandanus mat gifted by Further Arts, Vanuatu.

Read in full online

During STAR Residencies, The Observatory will deepen their entanglement with subterranean phenomena and geological formations. Drawn to the complexity and non-linear nature of volcanoes as well as to their cultural significance in diverse belief systems, the artists will collaborate with the Volcano Group and other EOS researchers to grow their understanding of these unpredictable and explosive entities, with a focus on the volcanic arcs that shape Southeast Asia. In line with their sound-centred approach to experimentation and research, they are particularly interested in exploring the sonic emanations of volcanic phenomena. Furthermore, they also plan to look at the intricate processes of magma transport dynamics, viscous flow, rock formation/deformation, crystallisation, degassing, and solidification. By reinterpreting the data and knowledge produced by EOS researchers, The Observatory aim to develop new perspectives that, synthesising scientific research and artistic imagination, resonate from deep time to contemporary existence.

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.

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.

Embracing a constellatory and process-led approach in her collaboration with multiple researchers at EOS, Zarina Muhammad dedicates STAR RESIDENCY to further her engagement with hybrid forms of ecological witnessing and polycosmologies as well as her exploration of the interdependency of environmental knowledge systems. The artist intends to conduct fieldwork on selected sites where geological and ecological significance resonate with underwater cultural heritage and indigenous knowledge systems, seeking points of convergence with EOS’s work in monitoring and addressing the regional impact of climate change. By exploring remote-sensing techniques and data translations through creative and empirical processes, this research hopes to expand the epistemic frameworks of nonhuman witnessing in the context of environmental crisis. The artist plans to expand her collaborative practice through interdisciplinary exchange, convening scientists, artists, storytellers, and ancestral knowledge keepers to develop speculative maps and multi-layered cartographies inspired by the complexity of environmental data, ecological processes, and trans-indigenous cosmologies.

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.

Through collaboration with EOS for the STAR RESIDENCY, Ng Hui Hsien aims to complement scientific tools and methods of environmental studies with indigenous ecological knowledge shaped by lived experience, oral traditions, and direct observation. On one hand, she will engage with materials such as satellite imagery, seismic monitoring systems, and photomicrographs to understand how Earth scientists observe and evaluate environmental changes and geohazards. On the other hand, drawing on her background in ethnography, she plans to conduct field research and engage with communities and individuals imbued with a deep connection to the environment to understand the rhythms of their lives as they unfold on site, the changes they observe, and their knowledge and cosmologies related to natural processes and phenomena. Ultimately, the artist intends to translate this research across different bodies of knowledge into artistic outcomes that deepen the awareness of ecological interconnectedness and convey a sense of reverence for nature. 

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.

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.

DESIGN EARTH‘s latest project is a series of fables that addresses the elephant in the room—the climate crisis—by animating charismatic figures from natural history museums. This design research identifies and leverages figures from the collections all while unsettling the museum apparatus—the devices, archives, histories, and audiences. Some such figures include a taxidermy of an African matriarch elephant, the skeleton of a stranded blue whale, and a composite structure of a Diplodocuscarnegii. The fragmentary remains of such creatures are animated, brought back to life, so to speak in rhyming verse, colorful imagery, and with some poignant humor. These speculative afterlives stir up potent trouble on the breath-taking capture of life in the Anthropocene to ask how cultural institutions may be responsible to calls for decolonisation and decarbonisation. In Singapore, this hands-on, participatory workshop will focus on the cultural prehistory, present, and speculative futures of the Singapore saltwater (estuarine) crocodile and the Malayan tiger. Facilitated by Rania Ghosn, El Hadi Jazairy, and DESIGN EARTH team member Kelly Koh. Beginning with the Artist Talk on 13 June, participants will engage in DESIGN EARTH creative methodologies including site visits and the building of a research archive while looking into the facts and fictions of these creatures and their homes.

For registration, please visit here.

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.

Join DESIGN EARTH co-founders and co-directors Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy for their first presentation in Singapore, where they will share insights into their collaborative research practice centred on the speculative architectural project as a mode of making the climate crisis public. Their design research brings together spatial history, geographic representation, projective design, and material public assemblies to speculate on ways of living with legacy technologies on a damaged planet. Recipients of the United States Artist Fellowship and the Architectural League Prize for Young Architects and Designers, among other honors, Ghosn and Jazairy have made a practice of telling complex and unwieldy stories of the Earth. Learn more about their ongoing explorations of visual and spatial storytelling.

Friday, 13 June 2025 
6:30 – 8:30 pm

The Hall, NTU CCA Singapore
6 Lock Rd, #01-09/10 Gillman Barracks 108934

Free registration here.

NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore and the European Union Delegation to Singapore are pleased to present the exhibition Hoo Fan Chon, Citra Sasmita, Vuth Lyno: New Works. The exhibition marks the culmination of the first cycle of SEA AiR—Studio Residencies for Southeast Asian Artists in the European Union (SEA AiR). As participating artists in the inaugural cycle of SEA AiR, Hoo Fan Chon (Malaysia), Citra Sasmita (Indonesia), and Vuth Lyno (Cambodia) have each been awarded a three-month-long residency at an art institution in Europe as well as funding for the creation of artworks.

Stemming out of a year-long engagement, Hoo Fan Chon, Citra Sasmita, Vuth Lyno: New Works is the outcome of a multifaceted process made of journeys and institutional collaborations, fieldwork and encounters, research and artmaking.

In the first half of 2022, amidst unrelenting surges of the pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the artists took off from their home countries to conduct three-month-long residencies: Hoo Fan Chon at HIAP – Helsinki International Artist Programme (Finland); Citra Sasmita at WIELS (Brussels, Belgium); and Vuth Lyno at Villa Arson (Nice, France).  The artworks featured in the exhibition Hoo Fan Chon, Citra Sasmita, Vuth Lyno: New Works have been created by the artists in the months following their residencies, a much-needed time for critical reflection and material experimentation that allowed them to develop their research findings and creative inspiration into full-fledged artworks. Ranging from installation and video to sculpture and painting, some of these works also mark these artists’ first attempts at embracing new mediums and materials: 3D animation techniques for Hoo Fan Chon, video for Citra Sasmita, and paper for Vuth Lyno. Most importantly, they bear witness to how the artists’ interests in the cosmetics of food, cultural contaminations, decolonial practices, the empowerment of women, and the resilience of marginalised communities, have evolved over the last year.

The exhibition is curated by Dr Anna Lovecchio, Assistant Director (Programmes), and NTU CCA Singapore. The project leader of SEA AiR is Ute Meta Bauer Founding Director, NTU CCA Singapore, and Professor, School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University.

SEA AiR—Studio Residencies for Southeast Asian Artists in the European Union is funded by the European Union.

Residencies OPEN reveals the rich diversity of contemporary art practices by offering a rare insight into the creative processes that unfold inside the artist’s studios. Discover how the space of the studio constitutes a springboard for artistic experimentation, innovation, and research.

This session of Residencies OPEN offers a unique opportunity for the public to meet our Artists-in-Residence Anthony Chin, Irfan Kasban, and Shahmen Suku (all Singapore)! Come visit the NTU CCA Singapore Residencies Studios to encounter their works-in-progress and explore the processes and research interests developed during their residencies.

The 10^th Cycle of the Residencies Programme by NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore is supported by National Arts Council. This cycle hosts six Singapore Artists-in-Residence: Yanyun Chen, Anthony Chin, Irfan Kasban, Ben Loong, Shahmen Suku, and Zulkhairi Zulkiflee.

Anthony Chin

Saturdays, 20 January & 27 January, 2:00 – 9:00pm
Sundays, 21 January & 28 January, 2:00 – 7:00pm
Block 37 Malan Road, #01-03

Anthony Chin dedicated the past five months researching Singapore’s colonial past through sites such as Gillman Barracks and its surrounding locations. The artist is interested in the historic relationship between Singapore and Japan, and during his residency he looked into OKA 9420, a biological laboratory established by the Imperial Japanese Army soon after the Fall of Singapore in 1942. Anthony seeks to develop a deeper understanding of the history of bio-chemical warfare while unpacking current ethical concerns surrounding the rapid advancements in science and technology. Presented during Residencies Open is OKA-9420, a new work developed during the artists stay at Gillman Barracks. This work is accompanied by three existing works: Air Doa Selamat (2020), TROPHY (2020), and Rinann Steel Mill – INGOT (2021).

The artist will be conducting tours throughout the two weekends. Each tour lasts approximately 35 minutes.
Saturdays, 20 & 27 January: 3pm, 5pm, 7pm
Sundays, 21 & 28 January: 3pm, 5pm

Irfan Kasban

Saturdays, 20 January & 27 January, 2:00 – 9:00pm
Sundays, 21 January & 28 January, 2:00 – 7:00pm
Block 37 Malan Road, #01-01

Irfan Kasban has spent his residency expanding his long-term research project Port of Reciprocity, also the namesake for his studio these past five months which has been opened up as a site for visitors from all walks of life. Hosting a series of activities including cooking, screenings, and sharing sessions, this convivial get together is born out of the artists own experience of burn out. For Residencies Open, visitors will encounter objects created by the artist which can all be activated to make sound. Facilitated activations will be conducted by invited collaborators over the two weekends with hopes of creating a song that comforts the collective consciousness.

Shahmen Suku

Saturdays, 20 January & 27 January, 2:00 – 9:00pm
Sundays, 21 January & 28 January, 2:00 – 7:00pm
Block 37 Malan Road, #01-02

Shahmen Suku explores his own Tamil culture through his family history, cultural ceremony, and food. Having previously addressed different aspects of the rich Tamil cultural traditions of his maternal lineage via the alter ego Radha, the artist has spent his residency letting go of this persona and directly confronting the conflicting and multipolar narratives of his family history which include economic struggles, heated arguments, health issues, and prolonged disagreements. Presented in his studio is documentation of a recent trip to India, alongside research conducted in Singapore that evidence the artist’s attempt to further uncover the story of his maternal grandfather. Documentation on display includes photographs, films, government documents, recipes, and the artist’s family tree that traces back three generations to his grandfather who first migrated to Singapore.

Over the past decade, deep-sea minerals like polymetallic nodules containing copper and cobalt have gained attention as a potential resource for green energy technologies such as batteries, computers, and electric cars. Found mainly on the international seabed, these nodules are regulated by the International Seabed Authority (ISA), which will finalize a mining code in 2025 that determines future deep-sea exploration and exploitation. Following Singapore’s Deep-Sea Mining Act of 2015, Ocean Mineral Singapore, a subsidiary of Keppel Offshore and Marine conducted two deep-sea expeditions to the Pacific Ocean. While some argue this extraction is crucial for the green transition, Pacific nations warn of its harmful impact on marine biodiversity and climate change.

This lecture will explore the environmental and societal implications of deep-sea mining, starting with a screening of the film Blue Peril, 2022 (INTERPRT / Professor Nabil Ahmed, Deep Sea Mining Campaign & Ozeanian Dialog), a science-based visual investigation using architectural and spatial analysis to model the potentially irreversible effects of deep-sea mining in the Pacific Ocean. Paired with testimonies from Pacific Island communities, this film addresses the impacts on their economies and ways of life. Afterward, Tara Maria Davenport (Assistant Professor, Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore and Deputy Director, Asia-Pacific Centre for Environmental Law) and Jonathan Galka(PhD Candidate, History of Science Department, Harvard University) will discuss the historic mining code and its future impact on resource extraction, drawing from legal, historical, and community perspectives.

Tuesday Lecture
10 December 2024, 6:30pm – 8:00pm
The Hall, NTU CCA Singapore
Blk 6 Lock Road, #01-09
Gillman Barracks, Singapore 108934

What worlds transpire and conspire when capitalist violence sparks radically different beings to meet?

In 1887, a 4.7 metre-long crocodile was shot and donated to the colonial-era institution known as The Raffles Library and Museum where a taxidermist stuffed it with straw. The crocodile’s stuffing saw the light of the day again in 2013 when the specimen was opened for conservation by Kate Pocklington, then Conservator at the Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum. Since then, several artists convened by Migrant Ecologies Projects have participated in “gleaning sessions” of these dried stalks more than a century old. Throughout the sessions, the straw released a sleeping ecology of cereal and flower seeds which Finnish and Swedish cultivators and specialists from the Kew Gardens in London are trying to awaken, while their provenance is being investigated by Australian plant geneticists.

In a newspaper article—found by Pocklington—published in The Straits Times in 1948,it was claimed that this very crocodile hosts the spirit of a 19th century tin-mine kongsi leader, mystic, and warrior in the Larut Wars (1861-74) turned anti-colonial fighter. Shrines for this spirit persist alongside the mangroves and rivers of Matang, in the northwestern Malaysian state of Perak. In 2023, a group of artists, researchers, and historians from Singapore and Malaysia went on a field trip there. However, along the way, the initial crocodile trail and tale of the 19thcentury anti-colonial hero began to bifurcate, sending out feelers and drawing the group through other more-than-human waterbodies, mountains, caves, and the devastated landscapes of historic and contemporary mining.

In this panel the project’s participants will share about their work-in-progress on this spirit ecologies, with each contributor variously addressing submerged and emergent sounds, senses, and cinematic practices developed during their research.

Singapore, a high-density tropical city, regularly faces environmental challenges such as the urban heat island effect and air pollution. As these issues intensify due to rising temperatures and increasing urbanisation, how can urban ecosystems provide solutions that prioritise wellbeing for all? This lecture will explore how landscape design – such as rewilding and the Rail Corridor – can improve air quality as air pollution intensifies with rising temperatures. For this lecture, we bring together international renowned scientist of air pollution Steve Yim (Associate Professor, Asian School of Environment and Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, Nanyang Technological University, and Director, Centre for Climate Change and Environmental Health), and Dr. Srilalitha Gopalakrishnan (Associate Director [Research], Future Cities Laboratory Global and President, Singapore Institute of Landscape Architects), to discuss architectural and scientific innovations to enhance green-city livability, focusing on integrated architecture, urban sustainability, and public health. This lecture will be moderated by Dr. Thomas Schroepfer (Professor of Architecture and Sustainable Design, Singapore University of Technology and Design and Director, Future Cities Laboratory Global, Singapore-ETH Centre) with a welcome address by Ute Meta Bauer (Professor, School of Art, Design, and Media, Nanyang Technological University and Senior Principal Research Fellow, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore). 

Tuesday, 18 February 2025
6:30pm – 8:30pm 
The Hall, NTU CCA Singapore
 
Register here

Rising temperatures induced by climate change as well as land-use development are two of the biggest threats to insect populations globally in what has been referred to as the “insect apocalypse.” Here in Singapore, a decline in insect populations could threaten the ecological diversity of our parks and reserves and diminish critical food sources for the migratory land birds that annually visit Singapore in places such as the Botanic Gardens and Pasir Ris Park. Insects also provide vital ecosystem services such as pollination provided by bees, pest regulation by wasps and nutrient cycling aided by dung beetles, which are indispensable to the ecological balance of our forests such as those in the Central Catchment Nature Reserve. In this lecture, moderated by Laura Miotto (Associate Professor, School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University), ecologist Eleanor Slade (Associate Professor, Forest Invertebrate Ecology, Asian School of Environment, Nanyang Technological University and Principal Investigator, Tropical Ecology & Entomology Lab) and artist Wendy Zhang (artist and insect conservation educator) will highlight the critical role insects play in the ecosystems that support our natural spaces in Singapore. Drawing on their expertise in ecology, entomology, insect conservation and art, they will discuss current strategies for biodiversity conservation and the actions needed to protect insect populations in the future.

Tuesday, 11 March 2025
6:30pm – 8:30pm
The Hall, NTU CCA Singapore

Free admission. Register here.

Lecture & Screening of Kimi Takesue’s film That Which Once Was (2011)

Low-lying islands, including Singapore, are increasingly exposed to the risks of sea level rise caused by multiple factors, including the rapid melting of ice at the two poles. This event explores the diverse impacts of climate change, such as displacement. In Kimi Takesue’s fictional film, That Which Once Was, that takes place in 2032, an eight-year old boy from the Caribbean, is coming to terms with a new life in a harsh northern climate. Haunted by memories of the flooding that left him homeless and orphaned, he forms a bond with an Inuk ice carver, likewise displaced, who helps him confront his past. Kim Hie Lim (Associate Professor, Asian School of Environment, and Singapore Centre for Environmental Life Sciences Engineering) will introduce the history of forced migration, already caused by rising sea levels, overlaying data on physical landscapes with genomic data in order to trace gene flow from Southeast Asia to South Asia. Followed by a conversation between film director Kimi Takesue, Assistant Professor Kim Hie Lim and Professor Ute Meta Bauer (Professor, School of Art, Design, and Media, Nanyang Technological University and Senior Principal Research Fellow, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore).

Tuesday, 18 March 2025
6:30pm – 8:30pm 
The Hall, NTU CCA Singapore

Free admission. Register here.

This event is part of The Cross-Cultural Gaze: A Retrospective of Kimi Takesue’s Films curated by Dr Ella Raidel (Assistant Professor, School of Art, Design and Media, NTU) with the support of NTU CCA Singapore and Women@NTU.  

Kimi Takesue’s retrospective is a special segment of the programme Look / See: The Female Gaze in Cinema (7 – 30 March 2025) organised by Asia Film Archive to celebrate International Women’s Day.
Find out about Kimi Takesue’s other talks and screenings through the link below.

MORE INFO

This event marks the Singapore launch of Progressive Disintegrations’ publication about [im]print, their last exhibition which took place at STORAGE¬—an artist-initiated space in Bangkok—from October to December 2023. Thai artist Tanatchai Bandasak, whose conversation with members of Progressive Disintegrations first began during his residency at NTU CCA Singapore in 2019, joined the group in this project. During [im]print: unboxed, members of Progressive Disintegrations will speak about the project’s inception and its relation with the historical and physical context of STORAGE, a former printing press. Together with their deep interest in the unique spatial configurations of exhibition sites, they will discuss how they explored concepts and practices of print and how they orchestrated the interplay of different mediums, such as photography, painting, installation, woodblock prints, and performance, within the exhibition space. This session will also include an activation of the artists’ materials.

Thursday, 14 November, 7 – 8:30 pm
The Hall, NTU CCA Singapore

To register, please click here.

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.

To Burn, Forest, Fire takes place as a series of incense burning ceremonies that awaken our sensorium and elicit an intimate, intuitive relation to the natural world confronting us with the sensorial richness of forest ecologies and the prospect of extinctions caused by humanity. Stemming from collaborations with scientists across different disciplines, the work speculates on the olfactory qualities of the first and last forest on our planet. The earliest forest is believed to have formed in present-day Cairo (New York State, United States) about 385 million years ago; whereas the last forest before environmental collapse is identified with the Yasuni Biosphere Reserve, in the Ecuadorian Amazon, an ecosystem threatened by rampant deforestation and unsustainable agricultural practices. Katie Paterson’s interdisciplinary investigation resulted in the creation of incense sticks, blended by Japanese incense maker Shoyeido, that propagate the distinct fragrances of the two forests pushing our understanding of reality beyond the domain of the visible.

Admission is Free. Entrance is on a first-come first-served basis up to the capacity allowed by the prevailing social distancing measures. Audiences are to arrive at least 15 minutes before the performance starts. Please note that the performance entails the burning of incense inside an indoor space.

The projects of Katie Paterson (b. 1981, Scotland) consider our place on Earth in the context of geological time and change. Her artworks make use of sophisticated technologies and specialist expertise to stage intimate, poetic, and philosophical engagements between people and their natural environment. Combining a Romantic sensibility with a research-based approach, conceptual rigour and minimalist presentation, her work collapses the distance between the viewer, the edges of time, and the cosmos. Her solo exhibitions were presented at NYLO The Living Art Museum, Reykjavík, Iceland (2021); The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (2020); and the Utah Museum of Modern Art, Salt Lake City, United States (2017). To Burn, Forest, Fire is a IHME Helsinki Commission 2021.

Find out more about Free Jazz IV. Geomancers

Science is both a formal academic pursuit and an informal, open-ended endeavour available and accessible to all. Art is a self-referential “world” that connects creative practitioners, discourse, objects, and space; it is also a fundamental human impulse. How do curiosity and creativity manifest in each of these realms? How do they contribute to knowledge creation for the world at large or within oneself? How can art and science learn from or inform each other? How do experiments, experiences, risks, and failures lead to new knowledge? This transdisciplinary panel discussion will engage with history, speculation, and the practices of art, science, and experimentation.

Join us on Thursday, 7 November, 6:30 pm. 
Alliance Française de Singapour Theatre, 1 Sarkies Road

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.

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.

NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore presents the second-cycle exhibition of SEA AiR – Studio Residencies for Southeast Asian Artists in the European Union (SEA AiR), a programme developed by NTU CCA Singapore and funded by the European Union. Titled Passages, this exhibition features new works by artists Priyageetha Dia (Singapore), Ngoc Nau (Vietnam) and Saroot Supasuthivech (Thailand), inspired by their three-month-long residencies in Europe.  

As part of the SEA AiR programme, Dia had undertaken her residency at Jan van Eyck Academie (Netherlands), Nau at Rupert (Lithuania) and Supasuthivech at Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Germany) through the summer. During their time in Europe, they were also funded for field trips supporting further inquiry into their respective areas of research. Passages speak of the three artists’ journeys across geographical and cultural boundaries from one continent to another; the cultural exchanges that take place during this time; and the continuous development of ideas as they return to their home countries to create new works for the exhibition in Singapore.  

Employing new media technologies to aid their storytelling, each artist creates speculative narratives that traverse time and space, shifting between the past and present. Dia’s research on the colonial impact on Malayan plantations is manifested through soundscapes; Nau’s video work navigates the fast-changing urban and social landscape in Vietnam against a backdrop of its Socialist past and Supasuthivech’s installation traces the evolution of Thai funerary rituals and practices as they travel. While distinct in their artistic research and practices, their works evoke memories and explore meanings in liminal spaces, reverberating in their journey from one passage to the next. 

Passages will be held through Singapore Art Week 2024, with a public programme taking place on 20 January 2024. Details will be updated here. 

SEA AiR – Studio Residencies for Southeast Asian Artists in the European Union is made possible thanks to a generous grant of the European Union. 

Passages
SEA AiR – Studio Residencies for Southeast Asian Artists in the European Union
Cycle 2 Exhibition

Opening reception: 
28 November 2023, 6–9pm
Refreshments will be served

Opening hours: 
1 December 2023 – 14 January 2024: Friday – Sunday, 1–7pm
19 – 28 January 2024: Tuesday – Sunday, 1–7pm
20 and 27 January 2024: Saturday, 1–9pm
Closed on 24, 25, 31 December 2023 and 1 January 2024

NTU CCA Singapore Residencies Studios
Block 38 Malan Road
Gillman Barracks
Singapore 109441

After a very successful first iteration of Climate Futures #1: Cultures, Climate Crisis and Disappearing Ecologies its second convening wants to build on its discussions and expand its understanding of the decline in cultural and ecological diversity in the region. It became very clear that such conversations require space and time to process complex issues, if we do not want to simplify and allow more than one way to process how people feel about their situations and want to be heard. Our futures require us to go beyond the status quo of current modes of operating. To not lose cultural knowledge and biodiversity Climate Futures #2: Belonging & Shared Responsibilities will share various narratives and practices that are already in place. It wants to further provide access to communities outside state and institutional structures to further nurture understanding of change in responsibilities and accountability.

The summit intents to further map how the climate crisis informs our contemporary world, and how diverse cultures can adjust or adapt without losing a sense of purpose. It comprises of discussions into alternative approaches to regional studies focusing on urgencies such as rising sea-levels and temperatures and the impact on natural resources of the region. A particular focus will be on areas such as the Mekong River and Delta (Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam) and its water street to Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines including the Straits that plays an essential role in the regions shared history.

The holistic approach of Climate Futures #1: Cultures, Climate Crisis and Disappearing Ecologies showed already how it can successfully stimulate a debate between artists, designers, and architects, scientists, environmentalists, as well as local voices and policy makers. We seek to reach out to an even wider public including younger scholars and practitioners, as well as community leaders and policy makers from the ASEAN region.

The future of our shared prosperity relies on our collective ability to create an inclusive and sustainable foundation for growth.

Read the programme brochure here.

Thursday, 26 October – Saturday 28 October 2023

Sokhalay Angkor Villa Resort, Siem Reap, Cambodia

Thursday, 26 October
Join the livestream here with the passcode 668981.

9:30am Registration & Coffee

10:00am Opening Addresses

Dr Piti Srisangnam, Executive Director, ASEAN Foundation

H.E. Min Chandynavuth, Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts, Cambodia

Prof. Tim White, Vice President (International Engagement); President’s Chair in Materials Science and Engineering; Professor, School of Materials Science & Engineering.

Welcome and Introduction by co-curators Prof. Ute Meta Bauer (Germany/Singapore), Founding Director NTU Centre for Contemporary Art, and Professor School of Art, Design, and Media, NTU Singapore and Magdalena Magiera (Germany/Singapore), Curator Residencies and Programms, NTU Centre of Contemporary Art, Singapore

10:30am The Art of Living Lightly, Keynote Lecture by Rachaporn Choochuey (Thailand), Architect, Co-founder, Design Director, all(zone) ltd

11:40am Between Bots and the Biosphere: Machine Philosophy, Media Ecologies, and Digital Hieroglyphs for Climate Adaptation, Case Study by Nashin Mahtani (Indonesia), Director, PetaBencana.id

12:00pm An Uncommon History of The Common Fence: A Prologue (To the Coast), Case Study by Jason Wee (Singapore), Artist, Writer, Curator

12:20pm Sharing Climate Futures: Developing tools for climate care and action, Case Study by Prof. Ute Meta Bauer (Germany/Singapore), Founding Director NTU Centre for Contemporary Art, and Professor School of Art, Design, and Media, NTU Singapore

1:00pm Discussion with Rachaporn Choochuey (Thailand), Nashin Mahtani (Indonesia), and Jason Wee (Singapore). Moderated by Prof. Ute Meta Bauer (Germany/Singapore)

3:30pm Belonging & Sharing Responsibilities, Closed Workshop by Claudia Lasimbang a.k.a Yoggie, Technical Coordinator Watersheds and Communities, Forever Sabah, Philip Chin a.k.a. Linggit, Technical Coordinator Certified Sustainable Palm Oil, Forever Sabah, and Yee I-Lan (all Malaysia), artist

Friday, 27 October
Join the livestream here with the passcode 400242.

8:45am Registration & Coffee

9:00am Welcome & Introduction

9:10am Creative Digital Lab: how artists, cultural and creative professionals and technologists work together to explore the potentials of XR technology in protecting heritage, safeguarding intangible cultural heritage and contributing to climate action. Lecture by Kamonrat Mali Chayamarit (Thailand), Culture Programme Officer, Lao PDR alternate Focal Point, UNESCO Culture related Conventions Advocate

9:40am Ecology for Non-Futures, Case Study by Binna Choi (South-Korea), Artists, part of Unmake Lab

10:20am Climate impact on social process and social structure, Case study by Daovone Phonemanichane (Laos), Strengthening Climate Resilience Project Manager, Oxfam Mekong Regional Water Governance Program

10:40am When Nature has Economic Value, Case Study by Som Supaprinya (Thailand), Artist

11:20am Discussion with Kamonrat Mali Chayamarit (Thailand), Binna Choi (South-Korea), Daovone Phonemanichane (Laos), and Som Supaprinya (Thailand). Moderated by Bejamin Hampe (Australia), Project Director, KONNECT ASEAN

1:00pm Glimpse of Life on the Water, Closed Workshop Sessions by Sovann Ke (Cambodia), Project Manager, OSMOSE

Saturday, 28 October
Join the livestream here with the passcode 353177.

8:45am Registration & Coffee

9:00am Introduction & Welcome

9:15am Every (de)Force Evolves into A (de)Form, Lecture by Gahee Park (South-Korea), Curator, Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul

10:00am Pedagogy, Community, Art: Bottom-up Urbanism at Phnom Penh’s Wat Chen Dam Daek, Case Study by Lyno Vuth (Cambodia), Artist, and Eva Lloyd (Australia), Lecturer, University of New South Wales (UNSW)

10:20am Luang Prabang: From Cultural Landscape into Practice, Case Study by Phonepaseth Keosomsak (Laos), Architect, Artist

11:00am Snare for Birds: Rebelling Against an Order of Things, Case Study by Kiri Dalena (Philipines), Artist

11:20am Travelling through time, Case Study by Malin Yim (Cambodia), Artist

11:40am The New Word for World is Archipelago, Case Study by Nice Buenaventura (Philippines), Artist

12:00pm Discussion with Nice Buenaventura (Philippines), Kiri Dalena (Philipines), Phonepaseth Keosomsak (Laos), Gahee Park (South-Korea), Lyno Vuth (Cambodia), and Malin Yim (Cambodia). Moderated by Magdalena Magiera (Germany/Singapore)

2:30pm Visit of Blue Art Centre. Welcome by Sareth Svay (Cambodia), Artists, Director, Blue Art Centre

3:00pm Closing workshop by Cynthia Ong (Malaysia), Chief Executive Facilitator Forever Sabah Institute, LEAP

Curated by NTU CCA Singapore

Ute Meta Bauer, Founding Director and Magdalena Magiera, Curator, Residencies and Programmes

Supported by

ASEAN Secretariat

ASEAN-Korea Cooperation Fund

Mission of the Republic of Korea to ASEAN

ASEAN Senior Officials Meeting for Culture and Arts

Programme support by Ministry of Culture and Fine Art, Cambodia

PROJECT PARTNERS

ASEAN FOUNDATION

Since the formation of ASEAN in 1967, ASEAN has embarked on a journey to accelerate economic growth, social progress, and cultural development in the region. After three decades, ASEAN leaders recognised there remained inadequate shared prosperity, ASEAN awareness, and contact amongst the people of ASEAN. As a result, ASEAN leaders established the ASEAN Foundation during the ASEAN 30th Anniversary Commemorative Summit in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia on 15 December 1997.

KONNECT ASEAN

As the post-Cold War reality of a new world has taken shape and formed new directions and conversations, ASEAN has re-entered the contemporary art space via collaborative efforts between various ASEAN bodies. The Republic of Korea celebrated 30 years of diplomatic relations with ASEAN in 2019 and in the same year established KONNECT ASEAN, an ASEAN-Korea arts programme. Supported by the ASEAN-Korea Cooperation Fund and administered by the ASEAN Foundation, KONNECT ASEAN signals both an eagerness by ASEAN to revitalise its once integral role in contemporary visual arts and Korea’s sincerity in establishing closer ties with ASEAN.

The programme celebrates Southeast Asian and Korean arts using different platforms (exhibitions, education and conferences, public programmes, residencies, and publications and archives) to explore and discuss social, political, economic, and environmental issues in the region. The artists’ works and activities engages and strengthen the public’s understanding of ASEAN’s role in facilitating cultural diplomacy. Furthermore, the programme intends to connect with the three major stakeholder groups of government, business, and civil society to achieve the vision of an ASEAN Community. Outcomes provide permanent resources recording why ASEAN matters and its ongoing contribution to the region’s growth, prosperity, and stability.

NANYANG TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY

A research-intensive public university, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) has 33,000 undergraduate and postgraduate students in the Engineering, Business, Science, Medicine, Humanities, Arts, & Social Sciences, and Graduate colleges. NTU is also home to world-renowned autonomous institutes—the National Institute of Education, S Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Earth Observatory of Singapore, and Singapore Centre for Environmental Life Sciences Engineering—and various leading research centres such as the Nanyang Environment & Water Research Institute (NEWRI) and Energy Research Institute @ NTU (ERI@N).

Under the NTU Smart Campus vision, the University harnesses the power of digital technology and tech-enabled solutions to support better learning and living experiences, the discovery of new knowledge, and the sustainability of resources. Ranked amongst the world’s top universities, the University’s main campus is also frequently listed among the world’s most beautiful. Known for its sustainability, over 95% of its building projects are certified Green Mark Platinum. Apart from its main campus, NTU also has a medical campus in Novena, Singapore’s healthcare district. For more information, visit ntu.edu.sg.

NTU CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART SINGAPORE

Situated within Singapore’s premier art precinct Gillman Barracks, NTU CCA Singapore is a pioneering institution that has been instrumental in shaping the contemporary art landscape in Singapore and beyond. With a focus on fostering creativity, innovation, and critical thinking, the Centre’s programmes have consistently challenged the status quo, encouraging artists to explore new realms of artistic expression. For more information, visit ntu.ccasingapore.org.

Image: Climate Futures #1, Jakarta (Indonesia), 2022. Courtesy NTU CCA Singapore, Konnect ASEAN & ASEAN Foundation.

Yan Jun (China) and Yuen Chee Wai (Singapore)
Time is still and we are in revolution
Live performance streamed through LCD screens, approx. 30 min.

Saturday, 16 September 2023
3:30pm – 4:15pm
NTU CCA Singapore Seminar Room
37 Malan Road, #01-04
Singapore 109452

Performance will start on time.
Admission is free on a first-come first-served basis.

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 improvisation made of electronics and vocals, 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.

BIOGRAPHIES

Yuen Chee Wai (Singapore) is a musician, artist, designer, and curator. Often inspired by perspectives glimpsed through the filmic eye and photographic lens, Yuen’s stylistic oeuvre in improvised music is marked by internalised reflections on memory and loss, invisibility and indeterminacy. His latest research interests are in mycology and caves. In 2008, together with Otomo Yoshihide (Japan), Ryu Hankil (South Korea), and Yan Jun (China), he formed FEN (Far East Network), an improvised music unit focusing on the multifaceted networks and collaborations between musicians and artists in Asian countries. He is also a member of The Observatory, in which he plays guitar, synth, and electronics. He tours extensively with FEN and The Observatory, and has presented at MIMI Festival, Lausanne Underground Music and Film Festival, All Ears Festival, Ftarri Festival, Gwangju Biennale and CTM Festival. Yuen was an Artist-in-Residence with NTU CCA Singapore in Cycle 8.

Yan Jun (China) is a musician and poet based in Beijing. His works involve electronics, feedback, site-specific installations, and noise. His improvisation sets follow the unstable relationship between microphones, speakers, the space and his body movement, to create subtle and unstable sound. He is a member of FEN (FarEastNetwork), Tea Rockers Quintet and Impro Committee, and has toured in the US, Australia, Europe and Asia. He has performed at Shanghai Biennale and received an honorary mention by Ars Electronica (Austria), and is the founder of Sub Jam label/organization. As a writer he has published and translated several books and poetry collections and attended the Rotterdam International Poetry Festival, and Berlin International Poetry Festival. Yan Jun was an Artist-in-Residence with NTU CCA Singapore in Cycle 2.

Presented by Assistant Professor Dr. Ella Raidel, School of Art, Design, and Media, and Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, NTU.

Venue: NTU CCA Singapore Screening Room, 38 Malan Road, #01-06, Gillman Barracks. 
Date: 21 April 2023, 7.00pm

Film Programme:
Three films on The Auroville Project (2017)
What is Auroville?, 55 min 
Auroville Archives, 12 min 
Nine Palms, 23 min

 

The three films by Heidrun Holzfeind and Christoph Draeger that are part of their Auroville Project explore the potential for an alternative way of living. These films showcase how engaging in alternative practices and thinking can foster conviviality, ultimately shaping human relations and transforming society into a more welcoming home.

Auroville is an ambitious intentional community located in Southeast India, founded in 1968 by French philosopher Mira Alfassa, who is also known as “The Mother”. The community is designed to bring people of all nationalities and creeds together to live in peace and harmony, making it an experiment in both self-knowledge and collective living. The project explores how the utopian ideals of the community— no private property, no money, no rules, and no religion, in short: divine anarchy—are being realized almost 50 years later.

It investigates how relationships between humans and nature, an ecological and sustainable lifestyle, spirituality, and political ideals of self-development and collectivism can be reimagined in the present day. Despite being one of the few alternative communes born in the 1960s, Auroville not only still exists, but is also growing and thriving.

What is Auroville?, 2018, 55 Min.
What is Auroville? is a film that explores how the utopian ideals of the community are being lived today, almost 50 years after its establishment. In the past, Auroville residents designed utopian living environments that embodied their visionary ideas. The film delves into how Auroville keeps promoting an ecological and sustainable lifestyle while also embracing spirituality and political ideals of self-development and collectivism. It offers insights into how these ideals can be applied in the present day, as we seek to navigate a rapidly changing world.

 

The Auroville Archives, 2017, 12 Min.
The Auroville Archives juxtaposes film footage produced by and about Auroville over the past decades with an interview with the archivist while giving a tour of the catacombs.

Nine Palms, 2018, 23 Min.
Nine Palms portrays two generations of a German family who settled in Auroville’s greenbelt in 1973. The parents’ radical lifestyle, which rejected the conveniences of modern life and technology, has strongly influenced their seven children in their life choices and their quest for living freely.

 

BIOGRAPHIES

Heidrun Holzfeind is an Austrian artist and filmmaker who studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and Cooper Union in New York. Her work focuses on how architecture interacts with people’s everyday lives, questioning inherent architectural and social utopias and exploring the relationships between history and identity, individual histories, and present-day political narratives. Her films have been screened at various prestigious events and institutions, including the Istanbul Biennale 2022, MOMA New York, NTUCCA, Mumok Vienna, MAK Vienna, Belvedere-21 Vienna, and Shibaura House Tokyo. Through her films, Holzfeind continues to push boundaries and challenge traditional perspectives on architecture and society.

Christoph Draeger is a Swiss multimedia artist who works with installation, photography, and video. His work explores our media-saturated culture and society’s struggle with climate change. He is currently a senior lecturer at YALE-NUS Singapore, having joined the faculty in 2022. Draeger’s works have been exhibited worldwide in galleries and institutions such as the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, KW-Kunstwerke Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and MoMA PS1. Some of his recent solo exhibitions include Garage Sale at Y Gallery in New York (2014), Unforced Errors at Lokal 30 in Warsaw (2014), and Destroyin’ L.A. at the Young Projects, in Los Angeles (2015). He also received a scholarship from P.S.1’s International Studio Program in 1996. Through his art, Draeger continues to make powerful statements about the state of our world and its future.

Dr. Ella Raidel is a filmmaker and visual artist. She is Asst. Professor at NTU Singapore (ADM/WKWSCI). In her interdisciplinary works, she focuses on the socio-cultural aspects of globalization, urbanization, and the representation of images. Her hybrid practice is to create a discursive space for filmmaking, art, and research.

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.

Thursday, 1 December – Saturday, 3 December 2022
Veranda Hotel at Pakubuwono
Jakarta, Indonesia

Register and Live Stream Here

Environmental transformations change ancestral relationships to water, forests, soil, animals, and plants. It affects indigenous philosophies and their irreducible oneness of nature and culture, and of human and non-human. The loss of habitat and ecosystems take away the community’s kin, its identity, belonging and dignity and impacts future generations to come. Communities increasingly feel threatened in their collective capacity to thrive and survive. In this moment of significant change, it is essential to discuss possible climate solutions and explore ecologies of care.

The summit intends to map how the climate crisis informs our contemporary world, and how diverse cultures can adjust or adapt without losing a sense of purpose. It will comprise of discussions into alternative approaches to regional studies focusing on urgencies such as rising sea-levels and temperatures and the impact on natural resources of the region.

The holistic approach of Climate Futures #1: Cultures, Climate Crisis and Disappearing Ecologies. is to stimulate a debate between artists, designers, and architects, scientists, environmentalists, as well as local voices and policy makers. We seek to reach out to a wider public including younger scholars and practitioners, as well as community leaders and policy makers from the ASEAN region.

The future of our shared prosperity relies on our collective ability to create an inclusive and sustainable foundation for growth.

Programme

Timings in Jakarta Time (GMT +7)

Thursday, 1 December 2022 
8.30am Registration and Coffee
9.00am Opening addresses by Choi Jaeha (Korea) Minister Counselor, Korean Mission to ASEAN  H.E. Khamsouk Keovongsay (Laos), Director General, National Institute of Fine Arts, Ministry of Information, Culture and Tourism of Lao PDR, Dr. Yang Mee Eng (Malaysia), Executive Director of ASEAN Foundation, Prof. Tim White, Vice President (Singapore) (International Engagement); President’s Chair in Materials Science and Engineering; Professor, School of Materials Science & Engineering 
9.30am Welcome and Introduction by co-curators Prof. Ute Meta Bauer (Germany/Singapore) NTU CCA Singapore and Magdalena Magiera (Germany/Singapore) Curator and Research Associate NTU CCA Singapore and Ben Hampe (Myanmar/Australia) Project Director KONNECT ASEAN, ASEAN Foundation  
9.45am Circularity, Climate, Culture & Community: a Sabah story
Keynote Lecture by Cynthia Ong (Malaysia), Chief Executive Facilitator, Forever Sabah Institute and LEAP 
11am Pendekar Laut: Sea Warrior Fishermen fighting for Survival in the face of Climate Change & Coastal Development 
Case study by Dr. Serina Rahman (Singapore/Malaysia), Lecturer, Department of Southeast Asian Studies, National University of Singapore 
Break 
11.40am Beyond the God’s Eye: Militant Approaches to Cognitive Maps 
Case Study by Cian Dayrit (Philippines), artist 
12pm Indigo as Livelihood 
Case Study by Dr. Chomwan Weeraworawit (Thailand), lawyer, producer curator, creative director of fashion brand Philip Huang 
12.20pm Discussion with Cynthia Ong (Malaysia), Dr. Serina Rahman (Singapore/Malaysia), Dr. Chomwan Weeraworawit (Thailand), and Cian Dayrit (Philippines) 
Moderated by Prof. Ute Meta Bauer (Germany/Singapore)  
Lunch Break 
3pm Introduction by Kathleen Ditzig (Singapore), PhD Candidate at the School of Art Design and Media, NTU 
3.20pm Struggles for Sovereignty 
Case Study presented by Eliesta Handitya (Indonesia) writer, independent researcher and Shilfina Putri Widatama (Indonesia) independent researcher 
3.40pm Connecting trajectory of Classical Science and Cultures in the Anthropocene time 
Case Study by Ignatia Nilu (Indonesia), curator 
Break  
4.20pm Resettlement in Vietnam – Policies and Social Impact Assessment 
Case Study by Huong Vu (Vietnam), architect 
4.40pm The Tonlé 
Case Study by Sao Sreymao (Cambodia), artist 
5pm Keeping the Flow 
Case Study by Lêna Bùi (Vietnam), artist 
5.20pm Discussion with Kathleen Ditzig (Singapore), Eliesta Handitya (Indonesia), Shilfina Putri Widatama, Ignatia  Nilu (Indonesia), (Indonesia), Huong Vu (Vietnam), and Sao Sreymao (Cambodia), Lêna Bùi (Vietnam) 
Moderated by Magdalena Magiera (Germany/Singapore)  

Friday, 2 December 2022
 8.30am Registration and Coffee 
9.00am Introduction by Co-Curators 
9.15am The Language Opacities of Climate Change Discourse
Keynote Lecture by Marian Pastor Roces (Philippines), curator, critic and policy analyst 
10.20am Why Tikar? The Politics, Geographies, Architecture, Stories, and Language of our Mat 
Case Study by Yee I-Lann (Malaysia), artist 
10.40am Bantayan Island: An Island in Transition 
Case Study by Martha Atienza, artist and Jake Atienza (both Philippines), MA Student and Graduate Assistant at University of Hawai’i  
Break
11.20am Archiving Resistance 
Case Study by Elisa Sutanudjaja (Indonesia), co-founder and Executive Director, Rujak Center for Urban Studies  
11.40am Discussion with Marian Pastor Roces (Philippines), Yee I-Lann (Malaysia), Martha Atienza and Jake Atienza (both Philippines), Elisa Sutanudjaja (Indonesia) 
Moderated by Prof. Ute Meta Bauer (Germany/Singapore) 
Lunch Break 
2.00pm CLOSED SESSION 
Ziarah Utara (Pilgrimage to the North) 
Activation by Irwan Ahmett and Tita Salina (both Indonesia), artists 

Saturday, 3 December 2022 
8.30am Registration and Coffee 
9.00am Introduction by Co-Curators 
9.20am Frequencies of Tradition, Frequencies for Sustainable Future 
Keynote Lecture by Hyunjin Kim (Korea), curator and writer
10.20am Moving Earth, Crossing Water, Restless Topographies: Lessons on Threshold Crossing and Wayfinding alongside Non-Human Collaborators 
Case Study by Zarina Muhammad (Singapore), artist 
Break 
11.00am Uncovering Borneo’s Little Green Jade, Moving Towards Post-Colonialism or Unlearning Stockholm Syndrome 
Case Study by Jang Elroy Ramantan (Brunei), artist 
11.20am Case Study by Dr. Yang Mee Eng (Malaysia), Executive Director of ASEAN Foundation 
11.40am Discussion with Hyunjin Kim (Korea), Zarina Muhammad (Singapore), Jang Elroy Ramantan (Brunei), and Dr. Yang Mee Eng (Malaysia)  
Moderated by Dr. Ingo Schöningh (Germany/Indonesia), Head of Cultural Programmes Goethe-Institut Jakarta 
1.00pm Closing Remarks 
Prof. Ute Meta Bauer (Germany/Singapore) NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, Cynthia Ong (Malaysia) Chief Executive Facilitator, Forever Sabah Institute and LEAP and Marian Pastor Roces (Philippines) curator, critic and policy analyst 

Programme information and speaker bios can be read in the official brochure.

KONNECT ASEAN
KONNECT ASEAN is a development project supported by the Republic of Korea and serves as the ASEAN Foundation’s core arts and cultural programme. KONNECT ASEAN signals both an eagerness by ASEAN to revitalise its once integral role in contemporary visual arts and South Korea’s sincerity in establishing closer ties with ASEAN. The programme celebrates Southeast Asian arts using different platforms to explore and discuss social, political, economic, and environmental issues in the region.

Goethe-Institut Singapore and Jakarta
The Goethe-Institut is the cultural institute of the Federal Republic of Germany with a global reach. It promotes knowledge of the German language abroad and fosters international cultural cooperation. Its interdisciplinary work brings together people from different disciplines, cultures, and countries.

This research project is supported by the Ministry of Education, Singapore, under its Academic Research Fund Tier 1 grant.

Conceived by NTU CCA Singapore’s Founding Director Ute Meta Bauer and curator Magdalena Magiera

Image: Tita Salina and Irwan Ahmett, The Call of Fragility – Through the lens of Eurasian Plate fragility in Java Island (Indonesia) and Turkey, 2022, video still. Courtesy the artists. 

Han Nefkens Foundation – Fundació Antoni Tàpies Video Art Production Award
Tekla Aslanishvili
A State in A State
11 Oct 2022, Tue – 6 Nov 2022, Sun
The Screening Room, Block 38 Malan Road, #01-06
12 pm – 7pm, every day except Monday
Film starts every hour

Premier Screening: Tuesday 11 October, 7:00pm-8:30pm
The screening will be followed by a conversation between the artist Tekla Aslanishvili, artistic-scientific collaborator Dr. Evelina Gambino and Assistant Professor Dr. Marc Gloede, School of Art, Design and Media, NTU, Singapore.
The welcome will be given by Ute Meta Bauer, Professor, School of Art, Design and Media, and Founding Director, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, and Dr. Karin Oen, Senior Lecturer and Head of Department, Art History, NTU School of Humanities.

A State in a State is the result of Aslanishvili winning the Han Nefkens Foundation – Fundació Antoni Tàpies Video Art Production Grant 2020, in collaboration with Jameel Art Centre, Dubai; the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design in Manila; NTU CCA Singapore and WIELS, Brussels. The Award appraises the work of emerging artists aged 40 and under, who live in West or Central Asia and have established a solid trajectory but not yet received recognition by international art institutions.

Aslanishvili was selected by an international jury, including NTU CCA Singapore’s Founding Director Ute Meta Bauer and former Deputy Director of Curatorial Programmes, Dr Karin Oen, for her body of meticulously researched work and her commitment to exploring a specific geopolitical context, whilst connecting to a wider discourse on the impact of extractivist economies on a planetary scale.

A State in a State is an experimental documentary following the construction, disruption, and fragmentation of railroads in the South Caucasus and Caspian regions. It examines railways as a technical materialisation of the fragile political borders that have re-emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Revolving around the scenes of delay and waiting that constitute cargo mobility, the film reads the optimistic narratives about the New Silk Road against the grain. It observes how the iron foundation of connectivity can be used as a weapon of exclusion and geopolitical sabotage. Dotting the same lines, other forms of sabotage are deployed by workers to disrupt the political violence. Looking at historic and current practices of resistance, A State in a State explores the potential of railroads for building a different, infrastructural consciousness, and the lasting transnational kinship among the people who live and work around them

The film is developed in artistic-scientific collaboration with Dr. Evelina Gambino, Margaret Tyler Research Fellow in Geography at Girton College, University of Cambridge.

Research & Script: Tekla Aslanishvili / Evelina Gambino
Music: Ani Zakareishvili / Nika Pasuri
Cinematography: Nikoloz Tabukashvili / Tekla Aslanishvili
Typography: Dato Simonia

Editing: Tekla Aslanishvili
Sound: Viktor Bone / Irakli Shonia
Color: Sally Shamas

A State in a State will be also presented at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona  from October 8^th till November 27^th.

BIOGRAPHY

Tekla Aslanishvili (b. Tbilisi, 1988) 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.

Marc Glöde (PhD), is a curator, critic and film scholar. His work is focusing on the relation of images, technology, space, and the body, as well as the dynamics between fields such as art/architecture, art/film, and film/architecture. Since 2017 he is an Assistant Professor at NTU/ADM, Singapore and Co-Director of the MA in Museum Studies and Curatorial Practices.

About 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.

Judging Panel
The winner has been selected by a judging panel chaired by Han Nefkens, Founder of the Han Nefkens Foundation; Carles Guerra, representing the Fundació Antoni Tàpies; Ute Meta Bauer, Founding Director of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art; Dirk Snauwaert, Director of WIELS; Joselina Cruz, Director/Curator at Museum of Contemporary Art and Design and Nora Razian, Head of Exhibitions at Jameel Arts Centre, in the presence of Hilde Teerlinck, Director of the Han Nefkens Foundation; Alessandra Biscaro, Coordinator of the Han Nefkens Foundation; Zoë Gray: Senior Curator of WIELS and Karin Oen, Deputy Director, Curatorial Programmes at NTU Centre for Contemporary Art.

Image Credits
Tekla Aslanishvili
A State in A State, 2022
Colour, black and white, AVCHD Digital film; archival & found footage, sound, 47 min.
video still
Commissioned by Han Nefkens Foundation – Fundació Antoni Tàpies Video Art Production Award
Courtesy the Artist

The Ideal Communist City (Andrei Baburov, Georgi Djumenton, Alexei Gutnov, Zoya Kharitonova, Ilya Lezava, Stanislav Zadovskij), comprised urban concepts by architects and planners at the University of Moscow written during the late 1950s and first published in a journal of a communist youth organisation in 1960. The architects’ collective imagines urban life “structured by freely chosen relationships represents the fullest, most well-rounded aspects of each human personality.”

The Ideal Communist City was first published in English in 1971 within the influential series on architecture and urban theory, the i press series on the human environment, initiated by Mary Otis Stevens and Thomas McNulty. This volume comprises a facsimile edition of the original title with a foreword by Ana Miljacki, professor of architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The Ideal Communist City
Published by NTU CCA Singapore and Weiss Publications, 2022
By Andrei Baburov, Georgi Djumenton, Alexei Gutnov, Zoya Kharitonova, Ilya Lezava, Stanislav Zadovskij. Edited with text by Ute Meta Bauer, Karin G. Oen, Pelin Tan. Afterword by Mary Otis Stevens. Essay by Ana Miljački.
Design by Enver Hadzijaj
© 2022 by the editors, Mary Otis Stevens, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore and Weiss Publications, ISBN: 9783948318161
Distributed by D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers
Copies are available for sale at NTU CCA Singapore.

To purchase your copy, please contact ntuccapublications@ntu.edu.sg

World of Variation is a a visual/verbal essay addressing critical societal issues such as community versus privacy, public versus private realms, social justice and humane, sustainable developments from a global perspective. To avoid datedness and the cultural biases inherent in realistic representations, the two authors, Mary Otis Stevens and Thomas F. McNulty, both MIT graduates and noted for their projects in the Modern Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, formulated an abstract visual language to convey their conceptual ideas.

This new edition contains a facsimile of the original edition published in 1970 with added commentaries by Pelin Tan, sociologist and art historian, professor at Fine Arts Academy, Batman University, and senior fellow of CAD+SR; Karin G. Oen, principal research fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s School of Art, Design, and Media (NTU ADM); Ute Meta Bauer, Founding Director, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore and professor at NTU ADM; and a text by Beatriz Colomina, professor of the history of architecture at Princeton University, and Mark Wigley, professor of architecture and Dean Emeritus, Columbia University.

World of Variation
Published by NTU CCA Singapore and Weiss Publications, 2022
By Mary Otis Stevens, Thomas McNulty. Edited with text by Ute Meta Bauer, Karin G. Oen, Pelin Tan. Afterword by Mary Otis Stevens. Essay by Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley.
Design by Enver Hadzijaj
© 2022 by the editors, Mary Otis Stevens, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore and Weiss Publications, ISBN: 9783948318178
Distributed by D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers
Copies are available for sale at NTU CCA Singapore.

To purchase your copy, please contact ntuccapublications@ntu.edu.sg

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.

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.

Modeling the curatorial as a method for uniting cultural production and science, Climates. Habitats. Environments. weaves together image and text to address the global climate crisis. Through exhibitions, artworks, and essays, artists and writers transcend disciplinary boundaries and linear histories to bring their knowledge and experience to bear on the fight for environmental justice. In doing so, they draw on the rich cultural heritage of the Asia-Pacific, in conversation with international discourse, to demonstrate transdisciplinary solution-seeking.

Climates.Habitats.Environments.
Published by NTU CCA Singapore and The MIT Press, 2022
Edited by Ute Meta Bauer
Design by mono.studio
© 2022 by NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore and The MIT Press, ISBN: 978-0-262-04681-7
Distributed by The MIT Press
Copies are available for sale at NTU CCA Singapore and through MIT Press

To purchase your copy, please contact ntuccapublications@ntu.edu.sg

From its first iteration in 2013, Free Jazz has pushed boundaries and expanded upon pressing concerns of our times. Free Jazz IV. Geomancers continues this approach, featuring artworks ranging from virtual reality to video, performance, and sound as an exercise in planetary awareness. The exhibition presents significant artistic practices from across the globe that are deeply invested in creating an environmental consciousness and that share an understanding of the world as a vulnerable, yet resilient, mesh of coexistences, correlations, and co-creations. As with geomancy, these artworks can help us to read the signs that our planet is trying to send us and that they can inspire a stronger commitment to create a sustainable future for life on Earth.

Alongside scientists, environmental activists, enlightened policy makers and civil society members, contemporary artists are increasingly concerned with future prospects of ecological collapse and planetary survival. They address these issues through the language of art, creating images, sounds, narratives, and experiences that allow us to establish affective and cognitive connections with the environment and partake in the planetary intelligence of the Earth. Stemming from NTU CCA Singapore’s ongoing engagement with the overarching subject of Climates.Habitats. Environments., Free Jazz IV. Geomancers brings together a selection of creative practitioners who are distinctly alert to these urgencies.

Conceived for Singapore Art Week 2022, this programme consists of a film screening series, a virtual reality installation, a performance and a sound installation. Some of the featured artworks zero in on signs of earthly demise, others indicate pathways of resilience and strategies for regeneration. All the works result from long-term research and extensive fieldwork and, when presented together, they engender a kaleidoscopic overview of the multitudinous forms of ecological entanglements.

Artists: Martha Atienza (Philippines), Ursula Biemann (Switzerland), Carolina Caycedo & David de Rozas (United Kingdom; Spain/United States), Chu Hao Pei (Singapore), Liu Chuang (China), Pedro Neves Marques (Portugal), Katie Paterson (Scotland), Rice Brewing Sisters Club (South Korea), Daniel Steegmann Mangrané (Spain/Brazil), Jana Winderen (Norway), Zarina Muhammad & Zachary Chan (Singapore), and Robert Zhao Renhui (Singapore).

Free Jazz IV. Geomancers is supported by National Arts Council Singapore and Nicoletta Fiorucci Russo De Li Galli. NTU CCA Singapore also wishes to thank our collaborators IHME Helsinki, and PUB Singapore’s National Water Agency at Marina Barrage.

Course Details

Date: 18 – 20 May 2022
Time: 9am – 5pm
Location:NTU CCA Singapore, The Seminar Room, Block 37 Malan Road, Singapore 109452
Standard Course Fees: $2247 (full fee), $674.10 (Cat-A SSG Funded Courses), $254.10 (ETSS and MCES)

Register here.
For enquiries, please email ntuccaeducation@ntu.edu.sg

About this course

Developing projects in the cultural sector comes with distinctive considerations unique to challenges in the field. Some examples of cultural sector projects include exhibitions, performances, festivals and other public presentations. 

In this 3-day programme designed for cultural practitioners and arts administrators, participants will develop the competencies and skills for planning and controlling art projects from ideation to completion. The course will examine the project management life cycle and address issues that drive or derail successful project outcomes. Participants will learn to define project parameters, identify and enrol stakeholders and use effective project management tools to plan, organise and track progress. 

Cultural sector projects often involve multiple, complex sources of funding. The processes involved in receiving the funds may not follow a regular schedule and subsidies sometimes are received after an event is over.  These issues can create uncertainty in the financial management of cultural sector projects. Project managers need to be agile in the both areas of budgeting and financial management in order to enhance project outcomes. 

This programme will also cover grant writing, an important aspect of project development and management. With the understanding that every grant application is evaluated at various stages, participants will learn how to tackle the different aspects of a grant application. Through hands-on writing practice, participants will navigate grant procedures, regulations and evaluation criteria and most importantly, favourably position their projects and increase their chances of receiving funding.

Who Should Sign Up

Arts Managers, Artists, Art Administrators, Curators, Researchers, Arts Educators, Production Managers, Cultural Workers, Arts Enthusiasts

Learning Outcomes

1. Identify key issues in project development life cycles specific to the arts.
2. Write a basic project proposal, timeline, and budget.
3. Identify potential funding sources including grants
4. Present and discuss proposals in a clear and persuasive manner.
5. Understand the current landscape of project development in the Arts in Singapore.
6. Navigate project development in times of crisis and force majeure.

Your Course Instructor

Dr Karin Oen is Principal Research Fellow at the Centre for Asian Art and Design; School of Art, Design and Media at Nanyang Technological University, and was recently Deputy Director, Curatorial Programmes for NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore. Prior to that, she was Associate Curator of contemporary art at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, where she played a pivotal role in the growth of the museum’s contemporary collection.  

Dr Oen holds a PhD in History, Theory and Criticism of Art and Architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an MA in Modern Art History, Connoisseurship and Art-Market History from Christie’s Education and a BA with honours in Urban Studies, Art History minor, from Stanford University.

Deeply engaged with the intersection of art, technology and culture, and the migration of people and ideas, Dr Oen is a global modernist whose curatorial practice spans the art and architecture from 19th through to 21st century.

As a curator, scholar and educator, one of Karin’s notable achievements is her role as the curator for ????????????????????????????: ????????????????????????????????????????, a digital immersive exhibition that brought together over 400 people including programmers, designers, and animators. Karin also co-authored the book, ????????????????????????????: ???????????????????????????????????????? , which is a collection of essays, interviews and photographs exploring both the presence of teamLab’s installations and the ideas and processes behind them with a focus on the development of their work.

Register here.
For enquiries please email ntuccaeducation@ntu.edu.sg

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Concepts of Concern – A Lexicology of Ecology

Course Details

Date: Monday, 6 December 2021
Time: 7 – 10 pm
Delivery Mode: Online
Standard Course Fees: SGD 90.95 (inc. GST)

REGISTER HERE.

For enquiries please email ntuccaeducation@ntu.edu.sg

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About the Course

Concepts of Concern – A Lexicology of Ecology is a survey of terminology in social, cultural and political ecology. Old and new terms such as recycle, sustainable, green, renewable, biomass, climate change, carbon footprint, global warming or anthropocene constitute what can be called concepts of concern. They are used to propose solutions to waste, advance environmental justice and imagine new worlds, but also to justify new forms of resource extraction, industrial production and economic globalisation as necessarily eco-centric.

The 3-hour online course traces the evolution of specific eco-centric terms and their corollary discourses since the global environmental movements of the 1960s, and examines a lexicology of ecology as a springboard to engage the emerging and heterogeneous field of ecocriticism. This course will also discuss several artistic responses that operate outside the bounds of terminological discourses and its trappings.   

This course is divided into three main sections:

Part 1: Overview of dominant terminology in social/cultural/political ecology since the 1960s.

Part 2: Critical examination of selected terms, such as their use in corporate propaganda and political narratives.

Part 3: Survey of non-terminological/artistic responses to the crisis of ecology. 

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Your Course Instructor

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.

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).

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).

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.

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.

Zac Langdon-Pole’s projects often take their point of departure in social structures of representation and organisation in order to question how and for whom such structures are posed. His current research relates specifically to the regions of Southeast Asia and the South West Pacific, and is centred on the mythology and historical cultural exchange of the so called ‘birds of paradise’ from Papua New Guinea. His interest lies in how within procedures of cultural exchange the loss of, or transposing and translating of information can itself be a process of formation. Two ideas that are currently helping to inform his research are Walter Benjamin’s notion of ‘the wish image’ that stands at the intersection of materialism and mythology and Peter Mason’s explanation of the process of ‘exotification’, in his book Infelicities. This is the idea that the exotic is not something that exists prior to its ‘discovery’ but rather is formed in the very act of discovery itself.

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.

In partnership with Mapletree Investments Pte Ltd., Culture City. Culture Scape. is a public art education programme launched in 2017. A first of its kind in Singapore, the programme features a series of newly commissioned public art works by Dan Graham, Zul Mahmod, Tomás Saraceno and Yinka Shonibare CBE (RA), nestled at Mapletree Business City II, and aims to bring the arts closer to the communities.

Inspired by the idea of expanded sculptural environments, the artworks explore the interplay between landscape, architecture, and the broader social and economic environments they are placed in. More than being monumental or site-specific, each work alters or permeates its local context to invite visitors to a broader, richer engagement.

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.

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.

Stemming from personal circumstances—due to his father’s employment as commander of the prison tactical unit, the artist grew up in Changi Prison’s quarters —Morton developed a direct, albeit unspoken, intimacy with the tortuous ethical issues and psychological consequences related to the most extreme form of law enforcement. Through researching archival materials, oral histories as well as literature and films from post-independence Singapore, the artist plans to interweave the nightmares and traumas experienced by both the punisher and the punished by steeping the fictional narrative into Malayan myths, folk music, and vernacular architecture.

In this episode of AiRCAST, we venture into the mysterious and mobile mindscape of our Artist-in-Residence, Russell Morton. During the residency, Russell has been deeply immersed in the development of his most ambitious project to date, his first feature film. Find out how a grim, largely forgotten historical event and past personal experiences will contribute to shape the narrative and the ambience of the film. The artist also reveals how he managed to overcome ‘the anxiety of influence’ and expands on his fascination for Southeast Asian folklore, the psychological underpinnings of horror films, and the role music plays in his work.

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 31st Singapore International Film Festival (2020); The Forest of Copper Columns (2015) won the Cinematic Achievement Award at the 57th 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).

Contributor: Russell Morton
Conducted by: Anna Lovecchio
Programme Manager: Kristine Tan
Sound Engineer: Rudi Osman 
Intro & Outro Music: Tini Aliman
Cover Image & Design: Arabelle Zhuang, Kristine Tan

Credits:
11:53: Audio excerpt from Island of Hope, National Archives Website, Record date 1960s, https://www.nas.gov.sg/archivesonline/audiovisual_records/recorddetails/46b4445e-1164-11e3-83d5-0050568939ad
21:35: Recording from Russell Morton’s site visit to a kelong in Singapore. Courtesy the artist.
25:48: Audio excerpt from Russell Morton’s Saudade, 2020. Music by Syafii Ghazali. Courtesy the artist
35:20: Audio excerpt from Tani Yutaka, Marai no Tora, 1943 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lTigyqta_k]
36:58: Audio excerpt from “Siapa Dia” by Zainab Majid, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gDHPP6K-mA]

[See Full Transcript]

https://player.vimeo.com/api/player.js

Within the framework of this project, tree stumps are regarded as witnesses to the ecological and anthropogenic changes resulting from land development, extractive capitalism, and climate change. Despite being seemingly devoid of life, felled trees and their stumps are in fact connected to underground forest ecologies and are part of sprawling fungal and bacterial networks through which plants communicate and send out signals that are not immediately graspable by the human ear. Shifting the acoustic experience of listening to one that is attuned to the sonic manifestation of non-human organisms, the artist will attempt to translate these signals into audible frequencies that merge deep listening and site-specificity. Furthermore, drawing parallels between the organic plant networks and the structure of printed circuit board (PCB), she will also map various sonic and spatial trajectories of plant sensing, survival, and communication. 

In the first episode of AiRCAST, NTU CCA Singapore curator Dr Anna Lovecchio speaks to Artist-in-Residence Tini Aliman about how her sonic practice revolves around a close listening of the natural environment. Tini shares about the experience of growing up in a fast-developing city, her encounters with nature, the human and other-than-human sources of inspiration for her work, and the sonification of tree stumps she is experimenting with during the residency. As a special treat to our ears, the conversation is punctuated with excerpts from her recordings.

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 and plant consciousness, bioacoustics and 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). 

Contributor: Tini Aliman
Conducted by: Anna Lovecchio
Programme Manager: Kristine Tan
Sound Engineer: Rudi Osman
Intro & Outro Music: Tini Aliman
Cover Image & Design: Arabelle Zhuang, Kristine Tan

Credits:
9:11: Recording of plants in Fort Canning Park, Aug 2018. Courtesy the artist.
17: 20: Audio excerpt from Plants emit sound when stressed, ILTV Israel News, Dec 11, 2018, https://youtu.be/5YHnVdA2ZG8
24:01: Audio excerpt from Zarina Muhammad, Flowers of our Bloodlines, lecture performance, NTU CCA Singapore, 2017. Courtesy the artist.
26:35: Audio excerpt from Tini Aliman, Pokoknya, performance, 17 January 2020, NTU CCA Singapore. Courtesy the artist.
30:37: Audio excerpt from Tini Aliman, Pokoknya: Organic Cancellation, 2020, mixed media installation. Courtesy the artist.
36:08: Sounds from Tini Aliman’s studio. Courtesy the artist.
44:54: Underground sounds from the forest at Gillman Barracks captured by Tini Aliman with a geophone, August 2021. Courtesy the artist.
49:06: Field recordings of a walk through the forest at Gillman Barracks, December 2020. Courtesy the artist.

[See Full Transcript]

Drawing from ancestral histories of her birthplace, the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, Taloi Havini’s practice delves into colonial histories, the politics of location, and contested sites and materials. Many socio-political and environmental issues have pervaded Bougainville in the aftermath of a civil war that resulted from the contentious operations of the Panguna copper mine. Frequently collaborating with practitioners from her matrilineal clan in Bougainville, Havini’s ongoing research explores the transmission of indigenous knowledge systems and the conflicting interests of fraught sites in Bougainville through dissecting the biases of official archives and personal records. With issues of climate, migration, and extractive industries orienting her research compass, she will use the residency to connect with other thinkers to trigger exchange of perspectives between Southeast Asia and Oceania.

The artist’s residency was scheduled from October to December 2020. Due to the COVID-19 virus outbreak and international travel restrictions, the residency could not be carried out as planned.

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).

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.

Contemporary art is an excellent educational resource that lends itself to inquiry-based and experiential learning, and encourages creativity, self-expression, and critical thinking. By using the Centre’s past exhibitions and programmes as examples, this guide is developed to help educators explore cross-disciplinary subjects and pedagogical strategies while engaging with contemporary art.

Published by NTU CCA Singapore, 2021
Edited by Kelly Reedy in collaboration with NTU CCA Singapore
Design by mono.studio
© 2021 by NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore

ISBN: 978-981-14-9585-4
Distributed by NTU CCA Singapore

To purchase your copy, please contact ntuccapublications@ntu.edu.sg

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.

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.

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).

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

During the residency, Barbara London will connect with local artists and institutions in Singapore. Reflecting on her experiences at MoMA where she founded the video exhibition and collection programmes, London will deliver a public lecture that will touch upon the museums’ support of the medium from its early formative years to the present. She will also conduct a two-day professional short course titled Time-Based Media in Collections.

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.

The artist’s residency was scheduled from July to September 2020. Due to the COVID-19 virus outbreak and international travel restrictions, the residency could not be carried out as planned.

Research Focus

Continuing his long-term critical examination of everyday life focused on the patterns of labour, leisure, and sleep produced by the “eternal wakefulness” of 24/7 capitalist economies, Danilo Correale intends to further investigate the global phenomenon of outsourced labour and its deep ramifications within Southeast Asia. The artist aims to problematize the differences between night- and day-culture by understanding how nocturnal time and urban nightscapes are inhabited and modified by shift workers operating across different time zones, the profound impact on their bodily rhythms, and the affective relationships within their communities. The realm of the night is therefore framed as a ‘back-door’ to examine the effects of late capitalism on society and understand how BPO (Business Process Outsourced) economy alters urban, cultural, and biological human ecosystems. Building upon fieldwork previously conducted in India and the Philippines, Correale will now further develop his project by taking advantage of Singapore’s unique position within the regional and global economic map.

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.

During the residency, Anthony Huberman will connect with local artists and institutions in Singapore. He will deliver a lecture that addresses concepts of tools, devices, and machines in relation to the exhibition MECHANISMS, he recently curated at CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, United States. Furthering his connection with the region, Huberman will also travel to the Philippines to participate in the Public Lecture Series 2018 at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD), Manila.

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).

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).

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.

Through his research on the theory and practice of “the hyperimage”, Alfredo Cramerotti aims to research and meet artists, curators, and writers working at the cusp of visual information and networked imaging, in order to scope future collaborations. During his residency, Cramerotti will also present a lecture titled The Curator as Meta Artist. Modes of Curation in the Age of [Aesthetic] Uncertainty, discussing three different modes in which curatorial practice can function.

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.

Zac Langdon-Pole’s projects often take their point of departure in social structures of representation and organisation in order to question how and for whom such structures are posed. His current research relates specifically to the regions of Southeast Asia and the South West Pacific, and is centred on the mythology and historical cultural exchange of the so called ‘birds of paradise’ from Papua New Guinea. His interest lies in how within procedures of cultural exchange the loss of, or transposing and translating of information can itself be a process of formation. Two ideas that are currently helping to inform his research are Walter Benjamin’s notion of ‘the wish image’ that stands at the intersection of materialism and mythology and Peter Mason’s explanation of the process of ‘exotification’, in his book Infelicities. This is the idea that the exotic is not something that exists prior to its ‘discovery’ but rather is formed in the very act of discovery itself.

Object-orientated ontology (OOO) is a 21st-century school of thought that rejects the primacy of human existence over non-human objects, thus generating different perspectives on ecological thinking. Combining an ongoing interest in natural environments threatened by urban development with his practice of capturing sonic emanations of the non-human inhabitants of our planet, Tang aims to further his understanding of OOO and sharpen theoretical tools that challenge anthropocentric hierarchies and understanding of nature. The space of the studio provides him with the opportunity to test immersive multisensorial installations that visualize and animate field recordings taken in various natural environments in Singapore. During the residency, the artist is working on new sound compositions and modes of listening that forge alternative connections between humans and nonhumans. He is also experimenting with drawing to create “visual scores” in response to his soundscapes.

Understanding art making as a form of social critique, in 2016 Wu Mali embarked on a long-term project titled Cijin’s Tongue. Set up with the support of the National Sun Yat-sen University in the kitchen of a former military dormitory in Cijin District (Taiwan), Cijin’s Tongue is a multicultural lab for social innovation. Over the last century, what used to be a fishermen’s village turned into a container port and tourist destination gathering a diverse community of inhabitants hailing from China and Southeast Asia. Focusing on the quotidian act of food consumption, Wu utilises cooking, eating, tasting, and sharing as heuristic tools to examine processes of social change brought about by colonialism, the Cold War, and globalisation. During the residency, she plans to broaden the scope of her research by exploring analogous patterns of change in the specific context of Singapore researching local food economies and practices of food consumption.

For the past decade, Zarina Muhammad has embarked on a multidisciplinary research that explores magico-religious belief systems, ritual practices, and sacred sites. The various embodiments of her work, which engage broader contexts of myth-making, ritual magic, gender-based archetypes, and spirits of resistance, frame the cultural biographies of objects and the region’s provisional relationship to mysticism and the immaterial against the dynamics of global modernity. Her research project for the residency takes the trans-local figures of the penunggu (tutelary spirit) and the tuan/puan tanah (Lord of the Land) as points of departure to reconsider notions of territoriality and spectrality against the social production of rationality. During the residency, she will focus on mapping old and new ways to tell stories of unresolved memories, fragmented cosmologies, shapeshifting translations, and haunted histories.

Formally trained in sculpture, Zul Mahmod has continued to build and expand his practice over the last three years to include sculpted sound and live sound performances. Zul’s practice investigates the aural architecture of spaces in order to explore the emotional, behavioural and visceral responses of its inhabitants. While in residence, Zul will explore the aural relationship between readymade sound sculptures and the architecture of space. Sonic characteristics, forms and textures of everyday objects will be examined in order to compose an orchestra of sonic sculptures.

The practice of Wei Leng Tay probes the psychic, systemic, and geopolitical consequences of displacement through personal encounters and intimate conversations captured in photography, videos, and sound recordings. Having lived in Hong Kong for the past 15 years before moving back to Singapore in 2016, Tay plans to devote the time of the residency to re-rooting her artistic practice and transposing Sightlines—a collaborative project initiated with researcher Michelle Wong to explore the relationship of art, aesthetics, society, and politics in Hong Kong in the aftermath of the 2014 Umbrella Movement—in the context of her home country. Furthermore, she will initiate a long-term project which extends her preoccupations with forced movements and migrations by addressing notions of “return” through a series of interviews. The studio space will be used to experiment with materials, techniques, and installations to articulate new ways to present her work.

Over the past five years, Việt Lê has been collecting film footage as well as sociological, historical, and archival materials for his experimental film trilogy Sonic Spiritualties. Interweaving the artist’s interest in popular culture and diaspora studies, the trilogy explores the impact of economic and environmental turbulences on music and various forms of spirituality in Southeast Asia. By framing situations where Buddhism meets pop music and violent displacement is translated into songs, the trilogy envisages sonic environments that challenge the borders of traditional and experimental music, the sacred and the mundane, the sublime and the banal. Halfway between documentary and music video, this hybrid production re-envisages the relationship between music and spiritual practices by working across dance, art history, ethnomusicology, and anthropology. Lê’s residency is dedicated to pursuing follow-up research and post-production editing for the final stages of this project.

Working with a comparative methodology, Valentina Karga intends to delve deep into theories of prehistoric matriarchal societies. Still at an early stage of development, her inquiry embraces multiple sources and ultimately aims to intertwine myths, histories, and political implications of matriarchal societies with the Anthropocene discourse, engaging theories on the posthuman condition that advance the understanding of the planet as a homeostatic system where all living and non-living organisms are connected and interdependent. Among her current sources of inspiration are Helen Diner’s seminal work for women’s cultural history, Mothers and Amazons, published in 1932; Marija Gimbutas’ notion of “archaeomythology” which blends archaeology, comparative mythology, and folklore; and Bruno Latour’s reading of the Gaia Hypothesis formulated by James Lovelock in the 1970s. During the residency, the artist aims to expand her understanding of feminine symbolism by researching prehistoric symbols and archaeological excavations in Southeast Asia.

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.

Pursuing his sustained interest in natural bodies and biological mechanisms, Trevor Yeung intends to explore Singapore’s culture and politics of nature preservation and gardening. More specifically, he will investigate the history of Singapore Botanic Gardens, their role as a laboratory for exploiting natural resources, and the effect of the introduction of foreign plants on local ecosystems. Furthermore, having spent some time working in Singapore in 2011, the artist aims to track down and reconnect with his former colleagues and supervisors, whom he has since lost touch with, in order to gather stories of personal growth and professional development and reflect on the fleeting boundaries that define interpersonal relationships. Ultimately, the artist aims to produce a new series of works that muse on his own relationship with people, plants, and society in Singapore.

Continuing to expand The Migrant Ecologies Project , Lucy Davis will focus on Railtrack Songmaps, the first iteration of which was launched as a multimedia installation at Gillman Barracks in 2016. A three-year research project conducted in conjunction with Nature Society of Singapore and National University of Singapore, Railtrack Songmaps features recordings of birds along the Tanglin Halt rail tracks, collecting the fleeting voices of nature to explore interspecies communication and the entanglements of animal life and urban development. Due to its wide-ranging interdisciplinary approach, the project unfolds through collaborations with several artists, scientists, designers, and photographers based in Singapore.

Launched in 2014 by the Singapore government, the Smart Nation initiative aims to enhance economic productivity and urban efficiency through technological streamlining and boundary-marking of both territories and bodies. Since the onset of her residency, Luca Lum has turned to the “soft architectures” and “non-events” of the city, that loose and ungraspable entanglement of sentiment and decoration, behaviours and bodies that defines urban life. Her research focuses on the diffractive relationship between two specific sites: Geylang, a little-known testbed to many Smart Nation initiatives, and Marina, Singapore’s anchoring “global” image. Understanding the optical phenomena of diffraction and iridescence as relational geometries that connect positions of proximity and distance, generate states of affection, and undergo multiple interferences, the artist is conducting repeated visits to the areas. Through her open-ended explorations, she is in the process of mapping and morphing the distinct attitudes and streaks of desires that inform the two sites. Her eclectic approach spans across various media and materializes in the form of photographs, objects, drawings, recordings, scores, and texts.

In 2012, Liu Yu chanced upon a stack of love letters in a flea market in Taipei. Dating back to the 1970s, the letters were addressed by Dong-Zheng Lai, a seafarer working on cargo ships, to his wife-to-be. Interwoven in this correspondence are descriptions of port cities and fishing villages as well as hints to monsoon seasons and the political climate of the time which cast both history and geography on an intimate scale. During the residency, Liu Yu will work on the second film of a series inspired by Dong-Zheng Lai’s movements and memories. Titled Love Letter and A Map of Memory, this experimental documentary will focus on the monsoon route from Taiwan to Singapore, a busy shipping lane that cuts across the Riau islands and was historically frequented by pirates. Framing the sea as a space impervious to geopolitical boundaries and piracy as an instance of political upheaval, the artist will chart historical events and modern-day occurrences of piracy to create a work that speculates on power and personal relationships growing at the intersection of climatic patterns, geographical features, and human agency.

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

Liu Yu screened Somehow I feel relaxed here (2017) as part of the Residencies Online Screening Programme Stakes of Conscious(ness), conceived by Dr Anna Lovecchio for the three artists whose residency at NTU CCA Singapore has been disrupted by the viral pandemic.

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).

In recent years, as globalisation accelerates the process of urbanisation, both developed and developing countries are experiencing a significant influx of immigrants. The reality of cities erected entirely through foreign labour has become increasingly common and the flows of temporary migration lead to the formation of “mini-nations” nestled within rapidly growing cities, that is enclaves of migrant workers that congregate, cohabit, and share material and immaterial resources in foreign countries. Pursuing his interest in the social, political, cultural, and economic impact of globalisation, during the residency Lim Sokchanlina investigates bureaucratic and political apparatuses as well as the personal and psychological aspects that define Singapore’s communities of migrant workers in Little India and “Little Burma” considered as case studies to be compared with similar enclaves in Cambodia and Thailand.

Thao-Nguyen Phan will expand her research on the introduction of the Latin alphabet as a writing system in Vietnam, exploring how the same transition occurred in other Southeast Asian countries such as Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. In Vietnam, the Romanised script was first introduced in the 17th century by catholic missionaries to spread Christianity, playing a significant role in the process of colonization of the country. While official accounts celebrate the adoption of the Latin alphabet as a symbol of modernity, the implications of this historical process are far more complex and tell stories of cultural loss and gain, national amnesia, and violence.

Throughout the residency, Tanatchai Bandasak will develop a project inspired by a specific trait of the Mekong Delta in southwest Vietnam. In this area, cycles of tides and floods accumulate layers upon layers of sediments turning the river delta in one of the most thriving agricultural land in the region. For the artist, the rich and porous stratification of the territory is reminiscent of the epithelium, the human or animal tissue that covers the outer surfaces of organs and bodies, a thin, protective, and nurturing border between the interior and the exterior where a constant exchange of substances takes place. Resorting to scientific research, onsite fieldwork, and the engagement of his own body, the artist aims to investigate the materiality and spatiality of this particular landscape through the sense of touch and to create a new work that can expand our sensorial and phenomenological understanding of the world.

Research interests:

– Botanical studies and urban planning
– Regional folklore, ghost myths, animistic practices
– Alternative historiographies

Inspired by the recent felling of Khaya senegalensis (a tree species native to West Africa) in one of Ho Chi Minh City’s oldest streets for urban development purposes, Lêna Bùi’s project revolves around widespread regional beliefs about hungry and unresolved spirits residing in trees. The artist plans to delve deeper into the intersections between botanical studies, colonial histories, and urban planning in Indochina, framing them against the backdrop of ancestral wisdom and haunting presences. The research will eventually lead to an articulation of unspoken stories from times gone by.

The residency of Lêna Bùi was scheduled for April – June 2020, 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 Residencies Rewired, a project that trailblazes new pathways to collaboration.


Research Liaison: Elizabeth Ang

Elizabeth Ang is a freelance creative and writer who holds a BA in International History from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research interests include Cold War historiography as well as social, cultural, and religious histories of Southeast Asia.

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.

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.

Tan Pin Pin will use her time in residence to read as well as continue her practice of walking around Singapore, taking photos to gather material for future projects. She will also be exploring the idea of performance in documentaries and how this form may bring us closer to the truth.

Tan Kai Syng’s residency explores global issues through extended conversations with Singapore-based colleagues. In the first part of her residency, she developed the participatory project PICTURING HAPPINESS? with three other artists and two scientists from the School of Computer Science, Nanyang Technological University. Using commercially-available devices that read brain waves, the project explored the parameters that define our sense of well-being, critiquing the market-driven framing of happiness as a motionless, thought-free state of mind. This was the beginning of a cross-disciplinary investigation that the artist is currently pursuing together with several psychiatrists in London. For the second part of the residency, Tan will also examine notions of gender. Working together with pioneer feminist artist Amanda Heng and two other women arts professionals, they will convene a public programme to discuss how gender affects collaborative artistic practices in Singapore and beyond.

Established in 1998 out of a former candy factory in Yokohama, Japan, *CANDY FACTORY PROJECTS is an international platform for collaborative art projects. Since 2001, it has taken on a nomadic existence nestling itself in different institutions around the world to generate exhibitions, publications, and web projects. During the residency, Kogo will set up a local office of *CANDY FACTORY PROJECTS that will function as a research laboratory for site-specific explorations. Relying on several collaborators both physically and through digital platforms, he plans to delve into the geopolitical relationship between Singapore and its bordering countries engaging with vernacular materials such as local newspapers, posters, and media archives. With similar working methodologies, he also intends to observe the manifestations of Singaporean multilingual society in everyday life. The possible outcomes of this research can range from music videos to animated clips, multimedia installations, and special screenings.

Over the course of the residency, Taiki Sakpisit plans to develop A Certain Illness Difficult to Name, an installation that addresses instances of trauma and violence embedded in the process of nation building in Singapore and Thailand through the lens of an individual’s point of view. Looking at historical events through the eyes of a single character is an intentional strategy aimed to personalize and humanize history while, at the same time, composing an allegory of collective torment. Having so far mostly produced experimental short films, Taiki aims to use the space of the studio to test a more complex visual and aural installation that can elicit the sensorium of the viewer and trigger out-of-body experiences.

During the residency, Krist Gruijthuijsen will connect with local artists and institutions in Singapore. He will present a talk titled The Ouroboros Effect featuring a selection of projects initiated over the past decade that reflect upon the importance in his curatorial practice of the artist’s voice and of the material and social conditions of artistic production.

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.

Kray Chen’s practice brings attention to the peculiar characteristics of forms, gestures and behaviours in society to discuss the value of progress. While in residence, Chen continues this line of research into the absurd, such as ‘Waiting’, reflecting on the psyche of a place that pits labour against gratification, fragments against the whole, traditions against modernization.

Koh Nguang How is an artist and independent researcher on Singapore art. His project, Singapore Art Archive Project @ Centre for Contemporary Art (SAAP@CCA) encompasses material touching the Singapore art scene from the 1920s until the arrival of the Internet. An entirely material archive with most documentation provided by the artist himself, this project developed as a response to the lack of a national art archive.

His residency at NTU CCA Singapore enabled public access to the archive for an extended period of time with a wealth of material showing extensive regional exchange as well as many international exhibitions in Singapore, debunking the myth of an isolated art scene .The ensuing dialogue and conversation with Koh are key when visiting this collection. Here the role of the artist is the role of cultural memory keeper.

In the last decade, the artistic practice of Susie Wong unfurled as a prolonged reflection on the nature of memory and the symbolic layers embedded in different modes of representation. During her six-month residency, she is intent on examining the iconic status of certain typologies of images in order to understand how their meaning is affected by the circulation on the web and other modes of consumption. The artist engages with the tropes of romance through the lens of pop culture, from the cult film The World of Suzie Wong (1960) to contemporary East Asian dramas. The fabrication of feelings and the normalization of romance in the mass media is the subject of a series of works which, through subtle gestures of over-layering, inscription, and re-imagining, reflect on the universal currency of romantic clichés, the subtle traps of translation, and the entanglement of desire and exoticism in the representation of the “East.”

Interested in chemical processes caused by human interference in nature, the practice of Susanne Kriemann unfolds slowly across extended periods of time. Splitting her residency into two parts, the first of which took place last August, the artist is conducting field research on the presence of (micro)plastics in the intertidal mangrove habitats of Singapore and the Riau Archipelago. Since the 1950s, plastic has become the chief material of industrial mass production due to its lightweight, durability, and low production costs. With a decomposition time of about 500 years, all plastic items ever produced are still extant on the planet. Through most disposal systems, they enter the oceans where ultraviolet light, heat, wind, and waves progressively reduce them to “mermaid tears”, pellet-shaped particles with a diameter of approximately five millimetres. Kriemann recently participated in a residency in Colombo, Sri Lanka to investigate similar habitats and will spend this final month re-examining and consolidating the gathered materials.

The Straits of Singapore have long been a hotspot for seafaring banditry. Throughout its cultural history, the notion of “pirate” has remained negatively connoted by its ancient definition as “common enemy of mankind”. Kin Chui plans to expand his ongoing research on concepts and practices of piracy in the Southeast Asian archipelago in order to articulate a speculative framework for a decolonised artistic praxis. By unravelling its multiplicity of meanings and manifestations—ranging from sea banditry to unauthorized reproductions, from illegal taxi services to unlicensed broadcasts—and the semantic shift from unlawful practice to mode of resistance, the artist will delve into the intersections between art and activism, subversive disruptions of colonial regimes and global capitalism, and issues of privatisation of the commons. Specifically, he plans to articulate a lexicon of resistance based on the glossary of piracy and conduct anthropological research into both digital pirate initiatives and counter-piracy measures implemented in the region.

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.

Tangled with her own experience of migration, cultural collision, and displacement, the works of Sung Tieu often elicit a variety of sensorial engagements. During the residency, the artist plans to explore the sonic environment of Singapore guided by the following questions: What is the soundscape of a financial capital that trades mostly in abstract exchange rather than in material production? Who occupies public space and in what acoustic proportion? How do aural economies affect the multi-species inhabitants of the city on physical, psychological, and emotional levels? How does sound convey different political and environmental climates? Her investigation on the sounds of contemporary Singapore will also encompass instances of oral communication that operate in a multicultural context characterised by a large linguistic diversity. For this long-term project, Tieu intends to explore the acoustic ecology of several urban soundscapes, extending her research in Vietnam and, possibly, other Southeast Asian countries.

In the context of her research project related to TBA21–Academy, during the residency Hessler aims to develop new collaborations in preparation for the next edition of The Current Convening to be held at NTU CCA Singapore in January 2018.

Over the course of the residency, Chan will delve into his longstanding interest for the rainforest seen as a site of contemporary art. Regarding the opulent wilderness of tropical nature as the physical and conceptual obverse of the white cube space, the artist will research an episode of Singapore’s curatorial history: the first group exhibition of Singaporean artists in the West. Titled Paintings by Singapore Artists, the exhibition took place at the former Imperial Institute in London in 1955 and was organised by the chairman of the Singapore Art Society, Ho Kok Hoe (1922-2015). It is rumoured that the artworks were brought to London without prior arrangements about the venue, leaving the materialisation of the show a matter of conjecture. Focusing on the 1955 exhibition, Chan will explore the epistemological connections between the colony and the imperial capital while also excavating the anxieties that lurk in the global peripheries of the art world.

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).

In line with his multidisciplinary interests, during the residency Kartik Sood intends to engage with a local theatre actor or dance performer as well as research into local literature focusing on the issue of cultural coexistence in Singapore.

Fascinated by the inconsistencies in taxonomic nomenclature and natural history illustrations within her own country, since 2017 Soyo Lee has been tracking the lineage of natural history representations and systems of classification in Korea. Unlike Japan and most South and Southeast Asian countries, Korea did not actively engage with Western naturalism during the modern era. Opposed by Neo-Confucian scholars during the 19th century, scientific systems for classifying and illustrating nature were introduced during the Japanese colonial rule (1910-45), with the first illustrated botanical index by a local botanist being published only in 1943. This longterm research project aims to develop a comparative analysis of the history of nature illustrations in Korea, Japan, and tropical Asia. During the residency, Lee will conduct archival research in order to map the trajectory of European naturalist worldviews in Singapore and Southeast Asia and explore colonial subjectivities embodied in this specific form of representation.

During his residency, Phoumivong will continue to experiment with stop-motion animation, working on a project entitled The Emotion. The 10-minute video installation, produced using locally sourced clay, is an experiment in time and texture. The work is part of the artist’s ongoing investigation into alternative forms of artistic creation, which inform his practice as an artist and educator and are especially significant in Laos, a country where visual art is focused mostly on painting.

In line with Julian ‘Togar’ Abraham’s multidisciplinary practice, Togar will develop DIABETHANOL, a hybrid of the word “diabetes” (a metabolic disease in which the body’s inability to produce any or enough insulin causes elevated levels of glucose in the blood) and “ethanol” (a colourless volatile flammable liquid C2H5OH that is the intoxicating agent in liquors and is also used as a solvent and in fuel. The artist project begins with a curiosity in the possibility of converting diabetic urine into a renewable energy source—bioethanol and increase in the prevalence of diabetes in Singapore and Asia. While in residence, Togar will conduct field research with diabetes related organisations in Singapore, from conducting laboratory experiments to analytics and interview.

Jompet Kuswidananto has long been interested in matters related to the spaces in between the binary oppositions within society. In his previous series, the intersections of past and present, tradition and modernity, magical and mechanical, memory and projections of the future formed the dominant narrative in the presentation of his work. While in residence Kuswidananto will continue to research how voices are valued, performed and spectated, in Indonesia and beyond.

During the residency, Lacey will develop One divides into two, a project which derives its title from a Maoist slogan from the 1960s. The project expands the artist’s investigations into non-western print histories and is backgrounded by her ongoing interest in the differing physical forms of public communication across various broadcasting platforms. Lacey aims to research current approaches to publishing and copyright in the Southeast Asian region with a specific focus on the printing history of Cambodia, looking in particular at bootlegged publications, the flouting of copyright laws, and the histories of digital piracy.

Belgrade-based collective Škart is set to research the relationship between Singapore and the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), excavating the historical, political, and cultural circumstances that framed Singapore’s adhesion to the movement in 1970. In recent years, the artists have been reflecting on the emancipatory potential and radical ideas purported by a movement which actively promoted the process of decolonization by subscribing to principles of cultural equality and mutual respect. Having focused so far mostly on European and South American countries, the residency provides the artists with the opportunity to expand their lines of inquiry into the context of Southeast Asia.

During her residency, siren eun young jung will research the politics of gender in the Singapore social context while considering a significant transition in her artistic development towards what she defines “Another Asian aesthetics.”

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.

The period between 1948 and 1960 witnessed the forced exodus of over 35,000 Malayan leftists to Southern China, including the artist’s own grandfather. Expanding on her long-term research project which excavates overlooked and contested histories of the Malayan anti-colonial war and her own family histories, Sim Chi Yin intends to trace the trajectories of the Malayan deportees, excavating both their individual experiences and the institutional circumstances which lead to their disappearance from collective memory. With the ports of Singapore being both sites of transit and origins of deportation, during the residency Sim will further her investigation through archival research and oral history interviews working towards the development of a new work. Often evoking a sense of spatial haunting, her aesthetic approach consistently slips away from the documentary into the realm of the affective, the imaginary, and the spectral.

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.

During the residency, John Torres plans to experiment with “parasitical filmmaking strategies” as the starting point of a series of works he intends to realise throughout Southeast Asia. By positioning himself at the periphery of ongoing film productions, Torres will collect their multiple “excesses:” spillages in light, sound, props, furniture, scenic design, and everything that may linger outside the perimeter of the main set. Tapping onto other directors’ scraps and making use of resources that have already been paid for to create his own separate narrative, the artist aims to test out a playful method for bypassing the financial limitations of independent film productions. In light of his recent role as father, this work will be developed within the framework of Remote Daddy Project: a way of structuring the artist’s work schedule around his daughter’s sleep and feeding schedule so as to strike a balance between making art and raising a family.

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.

Shubigi Rao deals with issues of language, books, archiving and destruction of knowledge in various forms since 2006. Pulp is part of her lifetime project, as an attempt to bridge languages/histories/cultures and civilisations in a globalised world where homogenisation and imposed ideas of conformity have led to their disappearance. While in residence, Rao will look primarily at Singapore and Southeast and South Asia, drawing connections between languages (Jawi and Sanskrit, for example), the histories of print, mass literacy and the role of archives in defining national identities especially in a post-colonial context. Through this research Rao hopes to create discourse about the way we use collate, sort, keep and discard knowledge, and the relevance of this to individual and national identities, as well as the implications for humanism and our species as a whole.

Throughout the residency, John Low is pursuing an interdisciplinary investigation on the expanding field of contemporary Chinese ink practices in the context of Singapore and Southeast Asia. Extending beyond the technical specificity of the medium, his interests encompass the relationship between place and identity, the patterns of knowledge transmission, and the processes through which a shared diasporic culture becomes localised. Fuelled by conversations with local scholars, practioners, and other relevant interlocutors, this research also tackles the literature on the subject as the artist scrutinises how language, specifically English and Mandarin, affects the production of knowledge and the circulation of discourse. The studio also provides Low with a space to experiment with different spatial configurations of his own works with Chinese ink. During the second part of the residency, he plans to focus on the production of a new floor piece.

In Hawaiian, the native word “au” combines notions of space, time, and flow into a single term suggesting the existence of an ecologically fluid worldview. Challenging the supremacy of Western science as well as the entrenched perceptions of the Pacific Islands and their people as fatefully remote and “scattered,” Sean Connelly has embarked on a long-term project titled Hydraulic Islands, comprising a multi-part anthology and a new-media atlas, that revolves around the pivotal role Hawa’i plays in the history and future of human settlements across Oceania and beyond. During the residency, the artist will work on the graphic atlas which results from a combination of geographic information system (GIS) technologies, counter-mapping techniques, and extensive fieldwork across Hawai’i. By delving deep into aboriginal ecologies, planetary systems, and network economies, he aims to recover indigenous knowledge and practices that can advance more sustainable oceanic systems of urbanism, energy, economy, and time as they relate to cities and natural resources.

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).

During the residency, North will be conducting photographic investigations on the ways in which local plant species manage to adapt to Singapore’s constantly changing built environment. In alignment with his long-standing interest in the intersection between the natural and the artificial, North regards Singapore as a radical case study to observe the complex tensions brimming at the interface between nature and human-made structures. He will also focus on the inescapable cycles of decomposition and renewal that, accelerated by the high humidity of the tropical climate, blur the boundaries between the organic and the man-made.

During the residency, North will be conducting photographic investigations on the ways in which local plant species manage to adapt to Singapore’s constantly changing built environment. In alignment with his long-standing interest in the intersection between the natural and the artificial, North regards Singapore as a radical case study to observe the complex tensions brimming at the interface between nature and human-made structures. He will also focus on the inescapable cycles of decomposition and renewal that, accelerated by the high humidity of the tropical climate, blur the boundaries between the organic and the man-made.

As part of her residency, Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn will expand on The Archive as a Subject, a long-term project that positions photographs and other vernacular artefacts at the junction of the private and the public, as well as the personal and the political, raising complex global issues related to concepts of territory, migration, and identity. Looking at the traces of her own family’s history, she aims to explore the friction that is generated when such mundane items are appropriated by institutional narratives, especially when they are framed in different cultural contexts. While in Singapore, she intends to further her research looking specifically at the history of the refugee camp in Sembawang which housed Vietnamese refugees for twenty years.

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.

Sourcing oral histories and female accounts, delving into archives, and mapping sites associated with different forms of mining, exploitation, and confinement, Rossella Biscotti will deepen her research interest into colonial structures of power and management at the turn of the 20th century and the way in which these structures are interwoven with contemporary practices of production and distribution. Expanding on a recently produced body of works that explore the physical and aesthetic properties of rubber—notably its resistance and its resemblance to human skin—the artist aims to research its production process on site. She will conduct archival research on colonial trade, botanical imports, and intensive cultivations in preparation for her field trips to rubber and oil palm plantations in the region.

Damp: study of an artist at 21, an unconventional survey on the Australian artist group Damp which unfolded through a series of presentations within the context of the university art school in 2016. During her residency, Rosemary aims to expand her research focus investigating several university art galleries in Singapore.

Rosemary Forde’s research looks at “curating as pedagogy” and explores the role of galleries within universities and art schools. For her doctoral dissertation in Curatorial Practice at Monash University, she developed Art holds a high place in my life

Building on the unique opportunity to explore wilderness within the urban context, Izat Arif’s research project aims to survey the topography, history, social memory, and natural environment of the patch of jungle located within the compound of Gillman Barracks. Provisionally titled Living Methods in City Jungle, this investigation is a continuation of an earlier project initiated in 2016 by the artist collective Malaysian Artists’ Intention Experiment (MAIX), of which the artist is a member. The group engaged in manifold activities including planting trees, collecting samples, and gathering information from the locals about traditional beliefs and practices in a tract of forest reserve situated in Perak, Northern Malaysia. Employing similar methodologies, he aims to conduct extensive fieldwork during the residency. The findings will materialise as drawings, photocollages, sound and video recordings, a tool cabinet, and they might potentially coalesce into a guidebook which mobilises both the familiar and the unfamiliar aspects of the territory.

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.

Research Interests:

– Experimental/independent publishing
– Natural and produced environments
– Intertextuality and visual culture
– Transdisciplinary discourse

One part of Isabel Carvalho’s artistic practice manifests itself in the form of editorial work through LEONORANA, an annual bi-lingual (Portuguese/English) cross-disciplinary research publication she established in 2017. LEONORANA’s main goal is to study the relation of conflict and complicity between verbal and visual languages, presenting essays (in text or in visual forms) as the preferred genre for the development of speculative thinking around chosen themes. For the next issue of the publication, the artist intends to tackle the subject of “environments” focusing on the differences between “natural” and “produced” environments (i.e. indoor atmospheres produced by air conditioning; architectural and urban planning strategies to manage pollution, etc.). With a transdisciplinary approach, the issue will prompt curious narratives based on the observation of existing situations, their economic, social, and political aspects, as well as their cultural representations across different media.

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 Residencies Rewired, a project that trailblazes new pathways to collaboration.


Research Liaison: Ang Kia Yee

Ang Kia Yee is a poet and artist interested in speculation, fiction, and alternative futures in which community economies, new language(s), and solarpunk proposals are possible.

Departing from a specific historical episode, the artists will explore the contemporary currency of gestures of sabotage in the context of the geopolitical frictions between Indonesia and Singapore. This research is part of Ring of Fire (2014-ongoing), a long-term project focused on natural disasters and geopolitical collisions named after the vast geographical area that runs from New Zealand to Chile stretching across Southeast Asia. By framing uncanny relationships between tectonic instability and political unrest, the pair seek to address conditions of vulnerability as well as the tensions related to environment, social justice, freedom of expression, and human rights among Southeast Asian countries.

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).

Following her fascination for the unstable properties of matter and the ungraspable substance of the atmosphere, Iris Touliatou intends to pursue a research that goes under the provisional title of Animal Storms. The project approaches Singapore from “a climatic perspective,” it frames the weather as a metaphor of uncertainty, a form of language, and a space of collective resistance that allows us to talk about our futures, bodies, hopes, and fears. Through a combination of fieldwork and studio-based practice, the artist will mobilise diverse methodologies to expand the notion of air and water through physical, symbolic, imaginary, metaphorical associations as well as through states of movement. During the residency, the studio will become a laboratory to develop an open-ended body of works and activities, artistic interventions and temporary collective platforms that variously engage the irrational, the ambiguous, the performative, and the hallucinatory.

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).

Concentrating on Singapore, Philippines, and South Korea as fields of inquiry, Andaur will develop his research on multi-colonial zones. He will examine urban landscapes, cultures, ethnicities, and artistic practices within these chosen countries in order to build an online resource platform with a socio-spatial analysis of the intersections between landscape, culture, and political practice. Throughout his curatorial research process, Anduar will connect with visual artists, researchers, and curators in order to gain a better understanding of local contemporary art practices and their importance within the cultural ecosystem of the region.

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.

During the 1950s, in many Eastern Bloc countries, cultural houses and clubs were created to fulfil the utopian dream of providing ‘culture for everybody’ whilst also structuring opportunities for people to participate in the collective production of culture. At the same time, these communal environments often enabled the state to monitor leisure time and socio-cultural activities. In order to expand their long-term comparative research on these institutions, Irina Botea Bucan and Jon Dean will investigate the history and current role of community centres in Singapore. Aiming to produce an experimental documentary, they will conduct archival and sociological research to understand how these centres operate and the criteria by which they were designed and managed to provide a specific range of social, cultural, and educational activities at a foundational moment in the country’s history. In particular, they are interested in the process of community-building, the nature of people’s participation, and the role community centres played in the formation of Singapore’s post-colonial identity.

With an investment in creative research that combines art, science, and technology, Irene Agrivina’s research project, A Perfect Marriage, investigates the symbiotic relationship between Azolla, an aquatic water fern, and Anabaena, a microscopic blue-green cyanobacterium. The two organisms have never been apart for 70 million years, co-evolving in complementary ways that allow them to be increasingly efficient. Besides ensuring their survival, other outcomes of this remarkably sustainable and mutually beneficial relationship involve the production of biofuel and textile dyes, the purification of water, and the reduction of global warming. During her residency, Agrivina aims to expand on her research and conduct experiments inspired by this unique symbiotic process using eco-friendly materials. A Perfect Marriage intends to emphasise the global importance of patterns of co-dependency and the potential of the photosynthesis process in connection with environmental issues.

Since 2013, Zhao has been collecting old photographs of Singapore, focusing specifically on images that capture the city’s landscape and elements related to her natural history. The project for his residency, provisionally titled The Museum of Disappearance, sets out to unravel the dormant narratives embedded in the photographs in order to shed a different light onto the complex history of our relationship with nature. Further expanding on his interest in the interaction between humans and the natural environment, he plans to conduct extensive fieldwork in the backwoods behind his studio, a patch of secondary forest stretching from Malan Road to Henderson Road, documenting its trees and natural habitat.

Using Singapore as a case study, during the residency, Riksa Afiaty will explore the infrastructures of art institutions, economics, education, and production and the way in which these situations shape and affect art production. These investigations are part of Afiaty’s wider research on art infrastructures in Indonesia, and the conceptualisation of a new space and site of encounters whose commitments are in line with the political, societal as well as cultural shifts taking place both locally and globally.

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.

Furthering his own interests into the histories and properties of materials, during the residency Richard Streitmatter-Tran plans to engage with an active studio practice and to experiment with both animate and inanimate materials from Southeast Asia to develop new skills and focus on the next steps of his production.

Research Interests:

– History of Singapore
– Iraq relations Personal and institutional archives
– Global networks of petroleum and weapons trade
– Counterterrorism intelligence
– International warfare coalitions

Instigated by a familial connection to Singapore dating to 1965, when her grandfather was sent on a training assignment to the Shell Eastern Petroleum Company in Singapore to address labour disputes, Rand Abdul Jabbar is interested in exploring the evolution of the complex bilateral relationship between Singapore and Iraq over the past 60 years, particularly pertaining to politics and counterterrorism intelligence and training.

By probing both institutional and personal archives, the research project will attempt to track relevant petro-histories, workforce tensions, the movement of arms across global trade networks, counterterrorism warfare coalitions, and conflict resolution to map out the elaborate trajectories that characterise the bonds across these two nations.

The residency of Rand Abdul Jabbar 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 Residencies Rewired, a project that trailblazes new pathways to collaboration.


Research Liaison: Rafi Abdullah

Through research, writing, and curating, cultural worker Rafi Abdullah entwines politics of space and personal histories. He recently completed his BA in Arts Management at LASALLE College of the Arts.

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).

In 2018, Prapat Jiwarangsan was awarded a fellowship from the Japan Foundation Asia Center to develop a project on migrant workers in Singapore. On occasion of a fieldtrip to the country, the artist chanced upon Koi Glai Ban (Persons Far from Home), a compilation of short biographies—edited by the late scholar Pattana Kitiarsa—penned by Thai migrant workers. He took particular interest in the stories of oppression and resistance recounted by Ploy, a woman who was employed as a sex worker in a makeshift “jungle brothel” located in the scant forestry of the island city-state. Inspired by Ploy’s diary entry, the artist’s investigation aims to excavate underground stories of transnational labour and frame them within processes of land appropriation for cultural, economic, and leisure pursuits. During the residency, Jiwarangsan will expand his research on migrant workers’ relationship to woodlands with the goal of developing a medium-length documentary film and a new series of works.

During the residency, Phyoe Kyi intends to develop an interactive multimedia installation. The project—which subtly pays homage to the artist’s mother, a recurrent subject in his work— entails both the conceptualization and the rendering of a virtual museum showcasing a selection of artworks that are of special significance to the artist himself. He aims to finalize the architectural plan of the museum as well as to gather video and audio files for his idiosyncratic collection. Concurrently, Phyoe Kyi will also expand the scope of The White Cloth, a project started in 2014 that explores the layered symbolical imagery of white cloth and its social, political, and cultural significance in Burmese culture and language.

Over the course of the residency, iLiana Fokianaki will connect with local institutions and artists. She will present a talk on the ethics of curatorial practice through the institutional trajectory of State of Concept, an independent institution in Athens she founded in 2013. In addition, she will conduct a workshop for postgraduate students at NTU School of Art, Design and Media.

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.

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).

In the last few years, many of Oliver Husain’s projects have spawned from hearsay, rumour, or chance encounters. During the residency, Husain will research and explore the history of the hair animation industry in commercial film and photography which, as the rumour goes, used to be highly developed in Singapore until the rise of digital animation in the 2000s. Fascinated by the abstract and poetic qualities of the purposeless movement of hair freed from narrative constraints and product placement needs, the artist plans to delve into unofficial and queer forms of knowledge by conducting fieldwork in hair salons and interviewing senior hair stylists. At the same time, he will research and collect fashion editorials, photographs, films, and other extant materials of the time in preparation for an experimental hair animation to be possibly realized in collaboration with Computer-generated imagery (CGI) experts in Singapore.

Unfolding through visual, narrative, and performative acts, ila’s artist practice revolves around urgencies for repair, care, and mutual support. Amid frustrations resulting from the ever-shifting urban landscape and rising social inequalities, the artist is interested in navigating the collective emotional psyche through the notion of “wounded city” as described by cultural geographer Karen E. Till. By way of personal and collective exercises, she intends to warp existing spatial relations, map new pathways onto the urban fabric, and engage in the process of memory-work to open up entry points into places of the present through both subjective experiences and stories of the past. These exercises are intended as individual and collective forms of resistance to physical displacement, affective mutilations, and social disempowerment as well as symbolical remedies to mend ecosystem(s) permeated by alienation and loss. Throughout the process, the artist imagines the studio as a fluid space that can offer respite from the outside, resonate with the presence of its different inhabitants, and wherein her roles as mother and artist are organically integrated.

Research interests:

– Techno-environmental models for decolonisation
– Intimate strategies for interspecies communication
– Soil culture, ecological systems, and indoor gardening
– Open-source interaction systems and cryptic dispersal networks
– Global logistics and remote collaborations

Inspired by terra preta (black soil) — the anthropogenic production of a type of dark, fertile soil by Amazonian farming communities in ancient and contemporary times — Nolan Oswald Dennis’ research project Black Earth Study Club braids “Black Earth” and “Black Studies” in a speculative disciplinary twist. This project pursues the cultivation of mutual knowledge through practices of solidarity and soil-making with an interest in the potentialities of telepresence, redistribution, and remote collaboration. The project involves developing “black earth readers”: digital micro/mesocosmic systems for producing anthropogenic soils; collaborative reading (strategies for reading with soil microbes); and hacking global logistics networks for material redistribution. Adopting the form of a “study club” as social assemblage and research method, the project will involve exchanges among practitioners from South America, Europe, South Africa and Singapore to cultivate an ‘other’ possibility of solidarity on a planetary scale.

The residency of Nolan Oswald Dennis was scheduled for April – June 2020, 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 Residencies Rewired, a project that trailblazes new pathways to collaboration.


Research Liaison: Kin Chui

Engaged with modes of resistance and emancipatory struggles, the artistic practice of Kin Chui scrutinises the imprints of colonial past on the present through a socially-oriented and collaborative approach.

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.

During the residency, Nathalie Johnston will connect with local artists and institutions to build connections between Singapore and Myanmar. She will present a talk entitled It’s Complicated to reflect on the contemporary art ecosystem in Myanmar and discuss the attitudes of the artists in light of the country’s current socio-political situation.

The time and space of the residency are being used by Ho Tzu Nyen to map out his current and forthcoming projects for the next three years as well as their conceptual and aesthetic kinships. Other than further iterations of his growing multi-part work The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia (2014-ongoing), the artist is currently engaged in a series of works that probe Asia’s political histories and spiritual thought systems. Specifically, he is interested in the histories of revolt and subversion sited at both the ‘left’ and the ‘right’ end of the political spectrum, paying attention to figures, moments, and movements that eschew classification under an obsolete scheme of polarized opposition. At the same time, he is also intent on speculating about the relevance these questions will carry in 50 years’ time when our existing epistemological frameworks will be drastically altered by accelerated technological transformations, geopolitical shifts, and ecological crises at a planetary level.

During the residency, Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez will connect with local artists and institutions in Singapore. She will deliver a talk to discuss the necessity to engage various art institutional constituencies through curatorial practice in relation to her latest project: Contour Biennale 9: Coltan as Cotton (11 January – 20 October 2019, Mechelen, Belgium). This recently opened exhibition explores the possibility of opening up institutional borders and render them more palpable, audible, sentient, soft, porous and, most of all, decolonial and anti-patriarchal.

Prompted by recent shifts in the political climate of his own country, Munem Wasif is currently working on a film project titled Goom (forced disappearance, kidnapping in Bangla.) The work revolves around the increasing phenomenon of people gone missing, disappearances that often remain unexplained and unaccounted for. Less interested in excavating factual and political circumstances, the artist rather plans to focus on the human figures of the disappeared, tracing the emotional and psychological repercussions of their violent vanishment as an attempt to ultimately reinstate their visibility. Still at an initial stage of development, Goom is conceived as an experimental process which borrows from various techniques and methodologies to capture the affective landscape generated by loss. During the residency, Munem Wasif will try to hone his poetic visual language to convey memory and recollection of these violent losses.

During the residency, Monica Ursina Jäger will examine the shifting topography of Singapore and Southern Malaysia and how it changed over the last century by engaging with urban development, and architecture. Of particular interest is the relationship between built environments and natural landscapes in “the vertical shift” incurred in the notion of landscape. Looking at Singapore as a unique case study, her research aims to focus on and excavate histories related to the social, political and sensorial conversations between natural and built elements and to rethink ‘topography’ as a mental landscape, rather than as a form of visual representation.

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.

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.

During the residency, Miya Yoshida will connect with local artists and institutions in Singapore. She will deliver a lecture Re-framing “Measuring the World” that reconsiders the hype of social engineering and the wide adoption of algorithm through conceptual and post-conceptual practices. Contemplating the equation of art and life as well as “statactivism” (i.e. the mobilization of statistics), Yoshida will draw lines of connections between imagination, affect, and current transformations in technologies of quantification.

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).

Since 2014, Min Thein Sung has been collecting historical, sociological, and material data for the project Mr Tailor had a dream last night: a soft-sculpture installation made of raw linen fabrics that recreates a small tailor shop, a space for craftsmanship that is still common in Myanmar but fast-dwindling in Singapore. Addressing the alienation of the consumer from the garment-maker and the resilience of this kind of handicraft in the face of today’s industrial mass production, the artist intends to engage with local taylors and with the tools of the trade in order to create a new sculptural piece.

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.

Valdez situates his work at the intersection of architecture and sculpture, in a liminal space where the limits of public and private, social and individual, containers and contents are constantly challenged. In line with a series of works developed over the last few years that engage different building methods, the artist will research the technique of concrete sheltering. Looking at monumental sculpture and working with local masons who specialise in concrete sheltering and other construction techniques specific to Singapore, he will experiment new possibile developments for his work.

In November 2017, an article published by scholars from the Korean Women’s Development Institute shed new light on the conditions of “comfort stations” run by the Imperial Japanese Army during the Japanese occupation of Singapore (1942-45). The questionable term “comfort stations” refers to brothels, set up for the use of military personnel, which “employed” women abducted from countries under the Japanese rule (mostly Korea and China). The report estimates that, in Singapore, approximately 600 Korean women were forced into prostitution and it also revealed the existence of 52 records about them in the Oral History Centre at the National Archives of Singapore. Official accounts surrounding this infamous practice are still a matter of controversy and diplomatic friction between Japan and the other countries involved. Continuing his scrutiny of Japanese identity by scavenging the country’s past, Hikaru Fujii plans to conduct extensive archival research on the history of the brothels and collaborate with scholars from various disciplines related to the subject.

Heman Chong will launch his new long-term project entitled The Library of Unread Books, a members-only reference library made up of donated books that are unread by their previous owners. The price for a lifetime membership to the library is the donation of a single unread book. Each member will be issued a membership card which will grant access to the library. For the duration of his residency the Library will also be open to the public every Friday, from 12.00pm to 12.00am.

During the residency, Lee will expand his interest in urban phenomena and inner structures by focusing on cutaways: openings created through the partial removal of the external surface of an object that makes its internal features visible. The artist will research and select a number of case studies in Singapore to explore the function of cutaways with in the urban context and engage with overlooked issues regarding art, architecture, and urban design.

Informed by several theories in the fields of film studies, linguistics, and graphic design, Lee regards cutaways as a method of investigation, a concealment device that can open up a different understanding of urban processes and anxieties as well as provide a penetrating insight into the deep-seated desires of the city.

Haegue Yang will shift her attention to researching film histories in Southeast Asia. These film histories within the region intersect with her research on Korean filmmaker Shin Sangok who was kidnapped by North Korean in 1978 and produced 17 films after his prolific career in South Korea. Shin had co-produced films in partnership with the famed Shaw Brothers of Singapore before his abduction. While in residence Haegue Yang will also examine questions of home, destinies and narratives that are interwoven with migratory figures in a colonial history. Her research on the Southeast Asian Diaspora figures extends from an annual commission, Accommodating the Epic Dispersion – On Non-Cathartic Volume of Dispersion (2012) for Haus der Kunst in Munich. The length of this work’s title is deliberate, in response to the overlapping of diaspora history with the specific history of the work’s location — a large and voluminous hall once known as ‘Ehrenhalle’ under the Third Reich. By critically extending and dispersing a reconstruction of histories in an epic dimension, the work introduced issues of migration, diaspora, movement and thereby, colonialism, through questions such as, “is movement mental or physical? When we migrate, do we lose our sense of home? How do we maintain and accommodate our migratory destinies and narratives?”

The Colony (2017 – ongoing) is the title of Marvin Tang’s long-term research project which examines the impact of botanical institutions on the movement of seeds, plants, and people in the colonial era. For the next iteration of the project, the artist intends to focus on the history and evolution of the Wardian case, a glass container for growing and transporting flora devised by British physician Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward in 1833. The direct precursor of the modern terrarium, this transportable receptacle proved instrumental in allowing the circulation of plants across the globe in the 19th century. Here, it is framed as a point of departure to excavate the social, economic, and environmental implications of planetary plant movements and the displacement of labour forces required to sustain booming plantation economies. During the residency, the studio will be used to conduct durational experiments with natural substances and photographic materials and try out different modes of display.

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).

While in residence Márton Orosz will further his research on György Kepes, the Hungarian-born artist, designer, educator and theorist who founded the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1967 as a “brainstorming laboratory” for artists and scientists to bridge the gap between art and science and address the social responsibility of design. He will explore the trans-regional connections of Kepes’ theories in Southeast Asia to shed light on the values shared by painters, designers, and architects who came into contact with Kepes and maintained a similar interest in the ecological consciousness and art’s capacity to trigger social transformations. Orosz plans to interview Choy Weng Yang, a seminal figure in the Singaporean art scene who visited Kepes in 1973, and to conduct archival research at the National Library and at the National Gallery Singapore.

Born into a family of seafarers, Martha Atienza’s fascination with the maritime is nurtured by her deep-seated connection with the water and modes of living that unfold at sea. During the residency, Atienza aims to explore Singapore’s relationship with water and its geopolitical role in shaping connections and contrasts with neighboring countries. Using the studio as a space for experimentation, she will also further develop her methods of working with water.

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.

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

Marianna Simnett made a new film Tito’s Dog (2020) as part of the Residencies Online Screening Programme Stakes of Conscious(ness), conceived by Dr Anna Lovecchio for the three artists whose residency at NTU CCA Singapore has been disrupted by the viral pandemic.

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.

Whilst in residence, Hardono will draw from personal experiences, to inquire into the impact that societal changes, such as the affect of censorship, have had on popular culture, local music and literature. His research methodology will be based on observations of human behaviour, field records, filming and the gathering of daily objects and images in Singapore and the context of Southeast Asia. In line with his current practice, Hardono will also further explore various approaches towards collaborative performances.

Whilst in residence, Hardono will draw from personal experiences, to inquire into the impact that societal changes, such as the affect of censorship, have had on popular culture, local music and literature. His research methodology will be based on observations of human behaviour, field records, filming and the gathering of daily objects and images in Singapore and the context of Southeast Asia. In line with his current practice, Hardono will also further explore various approaches towards collaborative performances.

During the residency, Michael Birchall will connect with local artists and institutions committed to socially engaged practices. He will give a lecture titled Curatorial Consciousness. Participation between practice and process in the context of Mapletree-NTU CCA Singapore Art Education Programme Series.

Diana Lelonek examines the complex interdependency between growing trends of overproduction and natural ecosystems. Her research Interests include Landfill ecologies, Post-consumer waste, Ecological engagement Interspecies encounters, Post-human and eco-feminist studies. Since 2016, she has been gathering waste-derived specimens under the aegis of The Center for Living Things, a long-term artistic project shaped as an independent grassroots research institute. Classified in collaboration with botanists and other natural scientists, The Center for Living Things’ collection includes discarded commodities and objects that, upon disposal, become part of the natural environment for a number of living organisms. Extending this fascination for how the ecosystems of landfills turn into fertile habitats and are reclaimed by non-human organisms, for her research in Singapore, Lelonek will focus on the offshore landfill Pulau Semakau and its own specific ecosystem. Together with the Liaison (Artistic Research), the artist will explore post-waste environments and the waste-derived specimens that come to life within those contexts. The Liaison should preferably have a strong interest in environmental issues, anthropocene studies, and/or botany. Research Liaison: Denise Lim Through photography, painting and three-dimensional explorations influenced by her background in architecture, Denise Lim examines narratives inherent to the human condition. Central to her research interests are circular design and co-creation with nature in the age of the Anthropocene.

The residency of Diana Lelonek was scheduled for October – December 2020, 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 Residencies Rewired, a project that trailblazes new pathways to collaboration.

In 2015, Dennis Tan was hosted by a family in Kebau, Riau Islands of Indonesia where he honed skills in the construction of the traditional Kolek sailboat. On this journey Tan was introduced to three generations of all; Kolek named Pujangga, each built by a generation within the same family.

Two of the boats were gifted to Tan, who is now its custodian, keeper and bearer. While in residence, Tan will attempt to reconstruct the Kolek whilst investigating ideas of self-organisation and the transmission of skills and knowledge through generations of oral history in the Riau Archipelago and how this enables the continuity of cultural communities.

While in residence, Marco Scotini will connect with local artists and institutions in Singapore. As Biennale artistic director of the 2nd Yinchuan Biennale, opening from June to September 2018, he will present a public lecture on the curatorial concepts and thematics of the Biennale using living systems to produce a new ecological model for conceiving exhibitions.

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.

In the past four years, de Boer has been questioning her practice and the impact that critical recognition and the professionalization of her work as a practicing artist has made upon her creative process. At this self-reflective juncture, the artist is interested in the conditions for thinking and inspiration, investigating notions of open-ended time and of personal and societal rhythms. In her view, to place aimless, untroubled” time in relation to creativity, research, and production offers a political counterpoint to the outcome-driven model that rules the art world and our contemporary life, opening up a space for creation that allows for experimentation, boredom, and failure. During the residency, de Boer plans to further develop this research engaging in conversation with a variety of experts that can help her reframe the question of time.

Intrigued by the state-control of language and the memorialisation of individuals in Singapore, in the past three months Daniel Hui has been researching the forgotten figure of Tan Chu Boon. He was the older brother of Tan Chay Wa (1948–1983), a Malayan political dissident and official of the Malayan National Liberation Front, a militant organisation linked to the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM). With the exacerbation of the relationship between the CPM and both the Singaporean and the Malaysian governments in the post-independence period, Chay Wa was executed in Kuala Lumpur on the charge of possessing firearms. Shortly after burying his brother in Singapore, Chu Boon was imprisoned because the tombstone inscription, which eulogised Chay Wa as a martyr, was deemed by the government “prejudicial to the security of Singapore.” This research will lead to the production of a new work that intertwines personal testimonies, anecdotes, and official histories.

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.

Understanding water as a living entity, a public resource, and a human right, Carolina Caycedo’s project Be Dammed (2012-ongoing) investigates the environmental and social effects caused by human intervention on water flows. During her residency, the artist will expand her research in a two-pronged direction by inquiring on the current state of traditional fishing practices and communities in Singapore and on the country’s integrated water supply strategy known as Four National Taps (FNT). On one hand, she will research the impact of coastal and economic developments on traditional fishermen’s lifestyle in the past two decades, taking into consideration related processes of resistance and/or adaptation to change and dispossession. On the other hand, she will probe the history of rivers and reservoirs and the FNT water management plan implemented by the Public Utilities Board in order to question the internationally acclaimed “holistic approach” of this strategy.

This residency was cancelled due to personal circumstances.

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.

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).

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.

While in residence, Corinne Diserens will connect with local artists and explore the Singapore art scene as well as the region of Southeast Asia. Diserens will also give a public talk discussing the exhibition as medium with the Taipei Biennial as a study, as well as touch on past exhibitions she had curated for artists Dieter Roth, Lygia Clark, and Marcel Broodthaers, amongst others. Diserens will also elaborate on research in the frame of art school and out of school, in relation to her experience as Director of the ERG, higher art and research academy in Brussels, Belgium.

In recent years, Claudia Losi’s artistic research has journeyed around the perception of places creating erratic configurations of language, memory, and imagination that unfold multiple layers of our subjective relationship to the world. For the artist, “being there” denotes a state of being located in the mind of the subject, in the memories and imagination related to a physical environment. These series of investigations coalesced into the publication How do I imagine being there?, realized in 2016 alongside an eponymous exhibition. Following the same train of thought, the research project for the residency is titled Being There or Life is a State of Mind, after the 1979 film by American director Hal Ashby. Losi intends to conduct a series of interviews with people from diverse disciplines, generations, and socioeconomic backgrounds asking them to describe a certain typology of place. Texts, drawings, and possibly a video will be created on the basis of the gathered materials.

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.

During his residency, Chun will pursue his exploration of the inconspicuous fixtures of the urban environment shifting from a detached approach to a more active engagement that involves connecting with the public agencies in charge of the design, production, and installation of such elements. He is also contemplating to create a performance piece which will lend voice to a range of common objects.

During the residency Chong will develop The Economy of Birds (and Maximum Standard of Living), a research-based project that looks at how contemporary societies in Southeast Asia determine the minimum standard of living. The artist investigates the notion of “human dwelling” through a comparison between the human and the animal world by drawing a parallel between the practice of farming swiftlet birdhouses for sale and consumption and the typology of the metropolitan apartment block. In the artist’s vision, a comparative analysis of airflows, relative humidity, air temperature distribution, and light intensity that characterize the farming of edible bird’s nests and the technical requirements that make a human dwelling comfortable and efficient, is instrumental to rethink the guidelines for socially acceptable living environments as well as their implications in terms of economics and human rights.

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

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.

Casting an ironic look at Malaysia and Singapore’s historical merger, We Were Once a Nation is a research project about nation building which unearths the histories of Malaya, Sabah, Sarawak and Singapore. The research will focus on the years between 1963 and 1965, when Singapore and Malaysia split from the merger, in order to map a shared history of hopes, conflicts, and anxieties. Searching Singapore archival materials to decode Malayan history and, therefore, his own Malaysian identity, chi too aims to address the political and personal implications embedded in the construction of a nation state.

Charles Lim explores issues such as the environment, territorial borders and de-territorialisation. Lim researches the notions of borders, histories and everyday life and how these may be generated through our perceptions of the sea to create SEA STATE, recalling the excursions of the Land Art movement of the 1970s. His project scrutinises both natural and man-made systems, opening extraordinary new perspectives on our everyday surroundings, from unseen and alien landscapes, arbitrary borders and disappearing islands, to the imaginary boundaries of a future landmass.

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.

Intrigued by the power tensions embedded in historical narratives, during the residency Chang Wen-Hsuan will further her research on two different projects. Drawing comparisons between the conflicting relationship of the Taiwanese Communist Party, Japan, and China in Taiwan, and the Malayan Communist Party, Japan, and the United Kingdom in Singapore, the artist aims to excavate influences and discrepancies between different colonial legacies and forms of resistance. In parallel, she will also expand Writing FACTory, a roaming platform for writing and publishing that produces discourse, research, and printed matters as a space for artistic and political practice. This latter project, first launched in Taiwan in 2018, performs a critical examination of how writings are framed, shared, and circulated in today’s digital age. Chang will further develop it in the context of Singapore through library research and interviews conducted with independent local publishers, artists, and artist book fair organisers.

The eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 can perhaps be considered the last grandiose natural disaster before the advent of moving images. For Casas, the historical eruption is an active producer of multiple narratives and imaginaries. Fascinated by its sublime stature and by the unique visual, sonic, and meteorological phenomena occurred in the aftermath of the eruption, the artist aims to investigate its socio-symbolic entanglements with Indonesia’s colonial history while also continuing his longstanding meditation on how natural disasters affect our understanding of nature and of our position on the planet. Through archival research and on-site shooting, the artist will collect historical, optical, and sonic data from various research stations and archives in Singapore and Indonesia in preparation for a new work.

Bui Cong Khanh is interested in studying historical flows of Chinese immigration across the Southeast Asian region, and Singapore in particular, by tracking down the movements of Chinese porcelain artifacts. His research intertwines the Chinese ancestry of the artist’s own family and traditional forms of Chinese cultural heritage, while concurrently addressing the complexities embedded in the construction of national identities. During his residency, he also plans to collaborate with local kilns and porcelain workshops.

Illustrating a new way of seeing, Buen Calubayan’s Instructions on Viewing the Landscape is an long-term exercise in seeing the bigger picture, literally and figuratively, which subtly challenges notions of national identity and colonialism. Articulated through a complex set of rules, this conceptual work is an investigative device aimed to unpack the history of late 19th century Filipino art – a period of significant political changes propelled by the revolutions against the Spanish rule. In re-examining and reviewing the landscapes of celebrated painters Juan Luna (1857 – 1899) and Félix Resurrección Hidalgo (1855 – 1913), the artist locates their vanishing points and brings to the fore unexpected tensions between the viewer and the artwork. Over the course of his residency, Calubayan will extend the scope of the project in order to pinpoint the metaphorical vanishing points in Singapore’s landscape, locating their historical, economic, and religious coordinates.

During the residency, Brigitte van der Sande aims to further the scope of her ongoing research on the currencies and potentialities of science-fiction in the context of Asia. By connecting with local artists and cultural practitioners with similar interests, she will explore possibilities of future collaboration for the second edition of the multidisciplinary festival Other Futures that will take place in Amsterdam 2020. Reflecting on these experiences and interests, van der Sande will also present a public talk entitled Speculations on other futures.

During the residency, Bridget Reweti intends to continue her long-term research on Ra’iatea navigator Tupaia. A leading arioi (high priest), skilled star navigator, and diplomat conversant in Māori, Tupaia joined Lieutenant James Cook’s first voyage across the Pacific in 1769, on board of the research vessel HMS Endeavour, and aided the navigation to Aotearoa New Zealand. Tupaia died, whilst en route to Britain, in Batavia (today’s Jakarta) in 1770 and was laid to rest in an unmarked grave on Pulau Damar Besar, an island off the coast of Java. Though relegated to a minor role in the Endeavour’s log books, Tupaia is remembered differently by Pacific communities. Still today, oral histories shared by fishers and voyagers across the ocean frame him as a highly influential figure. By accessing archival records and oral histories, Reweti will attempt to shed light on the reasons why Pulau Damar Besar was chosen as Tupaia’s final resting place.

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.

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

Mapping memories by mobilising narratives, images, and sites has been a recurrent gesture for Boedi Widjaja in the last decade of his practice. Moving beyond cartographic representation, his approach to mapping embraces a multiplicity of angles—from phenomenological responses to archaeological dives into far-off times—through which he retraces our understanding of history and memory. During the residency, he will focus on Medang Kamulan (“Medang the origin” in Javanese), an ancestral site prominently embedded in Javanese collective memory. Believed to be located in Grobogan (Central Java), Medang Kamulan is a place of beginning, the mythical cradle of Javanese civilisation that appears in oral histories, epic literature, and countless legends. In harking back to this site of origin, the artist will speculate on how cultural kinships could be moulded by unhindered flows and unconstrained connections before the rise of colonialism and of the border politics of nation-states. This research is part of Path. (2012 – ongoing), a body of work revolving around migration, movement, and belonging that reframes our existence by recasting our relationship to the past.

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.

Featuring:
Denise Yap, Apartment 2079, 2020
Moses Tan, Study for Dramatic Venus, 2020
Ruby Jayaseelan, STOP., 2020
passthejpeg, passthetime, 2020

<!DOCTYPE work> is a curatorial project that encourages people to rethink productivity in creative practices, influenced by forced remote work situations due to the global pandemic. Borrowing a programming language for the compliance of HTML standards, highlights the use of digital tools and formats for telecommuting. It also signifies the start of an experiment that is open-ended and process-based. Given the context of this current situation, it seeks to chart out the process of exhibition-making while reflecting on these questions: How are our creative practices responding to situational changes and remote working? What are the trajectories of discourse that can arise from the idea of “productivity” in the creative field? What does “productivity” mean to us?

This project, conceived by Leon Tan, Shireen Marican, and Tian Lim, is a pilot programme of the Platform Projects Curatorial Award overseen by NTU CCA Singapore. Currently in its inaugural year, this award supports a curatorial project exploring Spaces of the Curatorial by recent graduates of NTU CCA Singapore and NTU ADM’s MA programme in Museum Studies and Curatorial Practices, as well as NTU ADM’s research-oriented MA and PhD programmes.

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.

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.

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.

passthejpeg is an artist collective based in Singapore.

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.

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).

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wang has been working on an on-going project on Hong Kong. The project that began in 2012 is an examination of Hong Kong’s cultural anxiety and crisis through a set of cinematic explorations of the city’s space. In Singapore while in the residency, he will study the role of sand in Singapore, by not only tracing its physical circulation as a fundamental element for the state’s development but also its symbolic role in the cultural sphere.

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

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

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

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).

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.

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.

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.

During the residency, Baptist Coelho will turn his focus to the history of the Indian National Army (INA) and the Rani of Jhansi Regiment, two military units created in Singapore respectively in 1942 and 1943. During the Japanese occupation of Singapore, almost 20,000 Indian prisoners-of-war were instigated by their Japanese captors to create the INA with the goal to free India from British colonial rule. This short-lived military formation, which was disbanded in 1945, also included the Rani of Jhansi Regiment, one of the very few all-female combat units developed during the Second World War. Coelho aims to trace back patterns of everyday life at a time of war and delve into the reasons that drove INA women, most of who had never set foot in India, to fight for the country’s independence. Continuing his extensive research on the psychological and physical disruptions caused by war and conflict, the artist will critically interweave personal memories, historic accounts, and archival records laying out the groundwork for the production of a new work.

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.

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.

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.