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

The Climate Transformation Programme (CTP) is spearheaded by the Earth Observatory of Singapore (EOS). It 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. 
  
The Climate Transformation Programme–Sustainable Societies Cluster works collaboratively across the CTP themes from Climate and Biodiversity, Mitigation, to Climate Processes and Extremes, to develop 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, and knowledges from both within and outside academic realms in the formation of ‘Sustainable Societies’ that engage with questions of climate change.  
  
The position supports the Sustainable Societies (Arts Sub-Group) Cross-Cutting Cluster under the MOE Tier 3c Climate Transformation Programme (CTP). The CTP is spearheaded by the Earth Observatory of Singapore (EOS). The Sustainable Societies (Arts Sub-Group) Cluster is co-led by Principal Investigator (PI) Professor Laura Miotto. Under the supervision of Professor Miotto, the position serves as a key contact in coordinating projects and initiatives led by the cluster, from the administration and preparation of materials for reporting to the coordination of internal and external stakeholders. The role will assist in general administration and coordinate with various NTU departments as required, from the Finance department to the Administrative Office of EOS. The role will also contribute to content development and the organization of research and educational public programmes such as the Climate Transformation: Sustainable Societies Lecture Series and adjacent gatherings.  
  
This position is for an 8-month contract. The candidate will be based at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore at Gillman Barracks.  
   
Key Responsibilities: 
Key administrative contact for various project stakeholders such as co-investigators, local and international collaborators, research fellows and other internal and external parties, including vendors. 
Provide general administrative support, day to day management, and organisational logistics of the research project.  
Prepare all project materials for all reporting obligations (both grantor and NTU) and ensure timely completion and submission. 
Assist in the preparation of field trips in all matters, ranging from visa to travel and accommodation arrangements. 
Assist Research Associate/Research Fellow/PI in data management and executions of any meetings, conference and exhibitions where necessary. 
Undertake any other duties relevant to the research project such as corresponding with stakeholders and working with other departments (e.g. Finance and event management) 
Support the PI, as well as the Co-I in all grant administration matters. 
 
  
Job Requirements: 
Possess at minimum a Bachelor’s degree in a relevant social science, arts or humanities discipline.  
Demonstrated professional experience in academic, research or educational institutions. 
Strong skills in organisation/administration, project and time management in order to meet competing deadlines. 
Excellent communication and interpersonal skills to liaise with internal and external stakeholders and collaborators. 
Proficiency in Microsoft Office, Excel, Adobe CS, social media programmes 
Excellent proficiency with the English language and demonstrated writing skills for grant applications.  
Experience with A/V equipment assisting with video and audio recording. 
Highly motivated and able to work independently with minimal supervision. 
  
The closing date of the advertisement is 14th August 2026. 
  
We regret to inform that only shortlisted candidates will be notified. 
 
Apply here: https://ntu.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/Careers/job/NTUGillman-Singapore/Research-Assistant–Social-Science-Arts-Humanities-_R00025249 

 

The Max Planck–NTU Singapore Centre for Biocultural Worlding (CBCW) is seeking to appoint one Research Fellow (Curatorial Research and Practice) for a two-year term (renewable), based at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore. The fellow will be embedded in an interdisciplinary environment, hybrid in nature, with the Centre jointly operating across Singapore and Germany. As the CBCW functions as a research centre where curatorial and artistic research methods, legal inquiry, and diverse knowledge traditions converge to explore new forms of collaboration and stewardship of biocultural worlds, applications from candidates whose research interests align with CBCW’s concerns are welcomed. The focus is on biological, cultural, and epistemic diversity, with an approach that works relationally with, alongside, and across situated, grounded initiatives of novel research, experimentation in the fields of curatorial and artistic practices, and local and indigenous knowledge traditions.
 
Key Responsibilities: 
The fellow will conduct independent and collaborative curatorial and artistic research on relevant biocultural worlding topics and forge mutual connections with other CBCW projects. From within the CBCW to public platforms, institutional partnerships, and interventions beyond academic boundaries and museological frameworks, the fellow will advance curatorial and artistic research methods of inquiry to expand epistemic (and material) possibilities, developing new protocols and toolkits for conducting research.
 
Job Requirements:
– PhD degree in fields of curatorial, art and cultural studies, museum studies, visual anthropology, or other related humanities fields.
– Knowledge of and practice in curatorial studies, contemporary art, visual culture and cultural anthropology, art history, or other relevant research methods.
– Outstanding publication achievements in relevant artistic journals, publications, exhibitions and proven visibility in creative projects, whether of international scope or locally specific.
– Strong organisational skills and the ability to manage multiple tasks and deadlines. Proven ability to work independently and collaboratively in an international, interdisciplinary team.
– Excellent academic writing skills with high literacy of artistic and scientific vocabularies that extends beyond text-based forms of knowledge.
– Critically attuned to current curatorial and museological discourse and landscape.
– Familiarity with how injustices result from imbalances among biological, cultural, and epistemic diversity.
– Familiarity with, and research experience in Singapore and/or the Asia-Pacific region would be an asset.
 
Please submit your application on Workday, accompanied by the following supporting documents:
– Cover letter (one-page) and curriculum vitae, including list of publications, conference presentations, creative projects and exhibitions curated or participated in (in a single PDF).
– A two-page curatorial research proposal (excluding references and annexes) outlining:
– Proposed topic of the biocultural research.
– Methodology (specifying key collaborators and knowledge-holding communities)
– Description of activities and outcomes of the project.
– Elaboration on how the proposed research will augment the CBCW’s mission and vision.
– Scanned copies of qualifications (in a single PDF).
– Two letters of recommendation.

For any inquiries about the position, contact us at CBCW@ntu.edu.sg.
 
The deadline for the call has been extended to 15 October 2026. 
 
We regret that only shortlisted candidates will be notified.
 
Hiring Institution: NTU

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

NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore presents Propositions for Planetary Attunement, a live event featuring Artists-in-Residence Ng Hui Hsien, The Observatory, and Zarina Muhammad. Spanning polyphonic storytelling, moving image, live music, and performance, it marks the culmination of the inaugural STAR Residencies (Science, Technology, Art & Research), a pioneering collaboration with the NTU Earth Observatory of Singapore (EOS). A research institute of Nanyang Technological University, the Earth Observatory of Singapore conducts fundamental research on earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, and climate change to better understand the dynamic forces shaping Southeast Asia and the world.

What happens when artists and scientists find common ground in shared concerns and collective care for ecological complexities? What can they reveal about planetary matters that often exceed us—from the unfathomable scales of geological time and elusive frequencies to the molecular texture of rocks and age-old modes of coexisting with non-human formations? Emerging from a year-long exchange between the artists and EOS researchers, Propositions for Planetary Attunement explores the generative potential of interdisciplinary encounters, experimenting with the composition of scientific data into artistic gestures of ecological witnessing, listening, and becoming. These explorations manifest in three acts that metabolise scientific evidence, ancestral knowledge, and other-than-human perspectives. Drifting between geosciences and creative inquiry, each artist offers a unique proposition that merges measurements and musings, interlacing the empirical with the embodied, science with speculation, facts with signals. 

Complementing the artistic propositions is a selection of research materials from the NTU Earth Observatory of Singapore created for this event. This display foregrounds the core scientific work explored by the artists during the residency, offering a glimpse into the data and phenomena that informed their inquiry. Together, these acts chart a non-linear journey to the threshold of our profound unknowing of the invisible forces that shape the planet, inviting us to cultivate deeper forms of attention and attunement to the Earth.

STAR Residencies is conceived and curated by Dr Anna Lovecchio, Curator, NTU CCA Singapore.

Please note this is a ticketed event with limited capacity. Secure your tickets here. 

This event is suitable for ages 16 and above. NTU CCA Singapore reserves the right to refuse admission if patrons are found to be below the requisite age. There will be no refunds or compensation for non-admission.

ABOUT STAR Residencies 

STAR Residencies (Science, Technology, Art & Research) is a pioneering initiative by the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, designed to foster meaningful cross-pollination between artistic and academic research. By embedding artists within world-class research institutes at Nanyang Technological University, the programme creates a unique site for exchange between creative practitioners and academic researchers.

For more information about STAR Residencies,
please visit LAUNCH OF STAR RESIDENCIES (2025-2026).

Video documentation: Ting Min-Wei
Second Camera: Felix Kenneth Galistan / Earth Observatory of Singapore

View the full video documentation here.

Videography: Felix Kenneth Galistan / Earth Observatory of Singapore

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. 

Venture into the research-in-progress conducted by our current Artists-in-Residence Ng Hui Hsien, The Observatory, and Zarina Muhammad within the inaugural cycle of STAR RESIDENCIES (Science, Technology, Art & Research)—a programme that positions scientific research at the core of artistic inspiration.

These open studio sessions present the ongoing research developed through the artists’ engagement and dialogue with earth scientists from the NTU Earth Observatory of Singapore. By foregrounding experimental research methodologies and the creative interpretation of scientific knowledge, the programme highlights the critical role of interdisciplinary exchange in addressing complex planetary phenomena.

Working across a range of ecological terrains and methodologies, the residents engage with the Earth’s shifting matters through diverse polysensory and multi-disciplinary approaches. Ng Hui Hsien traverses volcanic terrains to contemplate human-environment relations through the dual lenses of scientific evidence and lived experience, while The Observatory explores subterranean pulses through sound-based inquiry and interspecies frameworks, seeking to expand our comprehension of tectonic forces through sonic engagement. In parallel, Zarina Muhammad treads through intertidal zones and coastal sites as living archives of sea-level change, ecological memory, and the deep-time relations between land, sea, and climate.

STAR RESIDENCIES OPEN provides a unique entry point into the artists’ studios to observe the non-linear trajectory of creative research; here, visitors can encounter the evolving processes and interdisciplinary materials central to this residency.

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

Dear NTU CCA Singapore Community

2025 was a year of transitions for most of us. As the year draws to a close, we wish you a gentle pause with your loved ones. Let’s take this chance to let the past year subside before we welcome a new orbit.

For this year’s Season’s Greeting, our former artist for the Communities of Practice residency programme in 2025, Ong Kian Peng, offered this video. Accidental Utopia (2024) emerges from a first-person vantage that drifts between submergence and the surface. In this oscillation, the work stages a speculative geography shaped by rising seas, ecological precarity, and infrastructural dreams. This in-between mirrors our present moment: crossroads of divergent futures, hopeful and catastrophic, engineered and accidental, for the human and non-human. By inhabiting this liminal zone,Accidental Utopia imagines what more can still be done. This media work was presented at Art Electronica in 2024.

Let this video be a moment of respite as we acknowledge the year past. Our heartfelt gratitude goes to your support for our Centre, its exhibitions, and programmes. We look forward to welcoming you to our upcoming exhibition at Gillman Barracks during the Singapore Art Week 2026: Kent Chan, Three Acts of the Sun.

Ute Meta Bauer and the NTU CCA Singapore team

Credit: The video is based on Ong Kian Peng’s film Accidental Utopia (2024). Courtesy the artist. 

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.

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

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. 

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

This lecture explores how scientific research and community action could converge around mangrove and wetland restoration, highlighting their critical role in strengthening climate resilience against rising sea levels in Southeast Asia. Pierre Taillardat, Assistant Professor and Principal Investigator of the Wetland Carbon Lab at the Asian School of Environment, NTU, shares insights into the role of mangroves as natural climate solutions, drawing on his research into carbon storage, greenhouse gas fluxes, and hydrological dynamics. He further highlights how conserving and restoring mangroves strengthens coastal resilience, sequesters carbon, and mitigates the impacts of sea level rise, while also addressing the ecological limits and challenges of scaling these solutions. Joining the conversation is Iwan Winarto, founder of Pengudang Mangrove Bintan, a grassroots initiative in Bintan (Riau Islands) that has successfully restored several mangrove areas across the island through community engagement and educational ecotourism. Drawing from his long-standing work with local and Singapore schools and resorts, he shares practical strategies for sustaining community-led restoration projects and cultivating environmental stewardship. This lecture will be moderated by Joshua Gebert, Research Fellow, Climate Transformation Programme. 

Tuesday Lecture 

14 October 2025
6:30pm – 8:00pm 
The Hall, NTU CCA Singapore 

Register

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 fellow Joshua Gebert, 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.  

Coastal communities and island populations, such as those in Singapore and Bintan, are increasingly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, particularly sea level rise. Coral reefs play a critical role as natural breakwaters, aiding to defend against coastal erosion. However, their survival is threatened by the implications of Singapore’s urbanisation on Bintan —through economic and touristic development—, alongside overfishing, rising sea temperatures, and the potential runoff impacts of industrial developments such as petrochemical plants. The lecture opens with a presentation by Professor Ute Meta Bauer (School of Art, Design and Media, NTU) on sea-based livelihoods in the Riau Archipelago and features lectures by coral restoration diver Rudi (Bintan Black Coral Dive) and Associate Professor Peter Todd, (Experimental Marine Ecology Laboratory, NUS; Director, Tropical Marine Science Institute, NUS) , with a response by Dr Karenne Tun (Director, Coastal and Marine Branch, National Biodiversity Centre, NParks) and moderated by Associate Professor Laura Miotto (School of Art, Design and Media, NTU). The session explores current coral restoration projects initiated by Rudi in Bintan, including nature-based solutions, highlighting their significance for coastal communities reliant on reef coastlines for their livelihood. Returning to urban Singapore, Associate Professor Todd will discuss eco-engineered seawalls that function as surrogates for natural habitats, supporting coral growth while simultaneously serving as coastal defense structures against rising tides. 

Tuesday Lecture 

26 August 2025, 6:30pm – 8:00pm 

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 fellow Joshua Vince Gebert, research associate Ng Mei Jia and research assistant AngelaRicasio 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. 

The public keynote lectures are part of an academic workshop titled “What is ‘Worlding’ in Biocultural Worlding?” The workshop probes what “worlding” means within the context of biological and cultural diversity across different disciplines, regions, and epistemologies. The keynote lectures will further explore the processes that shape our understanding of the world through the deep interconnections between cultural and biological life. Presenting these keynotes are Dr Lisa Onaga, Senior Research Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin and curator and researcher Dr Margarida Mendes. Together, their lectures will illuminate how biocultural worlding unfolds across land and sea, and how attending to these entanglements opens new ways of imagining collective futures in times of environmental and epistemic loss.

22 September 2025
6:30pm – 8:00pm 
The Hall, NTU CCA Singapore 

Register here

Keynote Lectures

Oceanic Worldings, Margarida Mendes

Exploring the concept of worlding from the ocean point of view, this presentation foregrounds ecosystemic, political and ontological relations across aquatic realms. It introduces ongoing research and activism on ecoacoustics, deep sea mining, and remote sensing, proposing how different modes of ocean monitoring may contribute to plural oceanic worldings and alliances in the making.

Turtle Worlds As A Way of Living, Lisa Onaga

From the adage “slow and steady wins the race,” symbols of longevity, to imagery of carrying a home upon one’s back, references to turtles appear in many languages and cultures around the world. Such “turtle metaphors” in language and material culture join a range of ways in which humans have regularly expressed themselves in relation to things of nature Diverse living things have long inspired human thought and action. However, propensities to regard nature as a resource can deepen a divide that casts humans apart from the natural world. Another perspective views humans as a part of a world where nature and culture are inseparable, encouraging a different way of knowing and talking about – and with – living things. From the earth known to Indigenous North Americans as Turtle Island, a directional guardian in Chinese cosmology, to ancestral gifts in the Torres Strait Islands, the reptiles we know as turtles, with their domed shells, have played a foundational role in holding together entire worlds, grounded in unique knowledge systems and protocols for correctly living a good life. In this presentation, I will reflect upon research efforts that initiated in 2016 to document the history of the Singapore Live Turtle and Tortoise Museum (LTTM), as the museum faced closure associated with state and city planning. At that time, the private museum held over 2000 objects turtle-themed objects (in the form of, but not made from, turtles), and approximately 600 individual turtles and tortoises – many of them former pets surrendered by members of the public in anticipation of the stricter regulations under the 2002 Singapore Animal and Birds Act, aligned with the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna (CITES) treaty. The case of the LTTM and its persistence since 2001 to this day illustrates that both complementing and countering the separation of nature and culture enables the dynamic forming, maintaining, and caring of a “turtle world.” This example invites reflection on how biological and cultural practices grow entwined and embody forms of knowledge – in this case, “turtle knowledge” – and how that knowledge evolves, is practiced, shared, and passed down to the next generations.

What is ‘Worlding’ in Biocultural Worlding? is supported by CLASS JOINT NTU-ANU NTU-KCL CONFERENCE, SYMPOSIUM, AND WORKSHOP SCHEME.

The public keynote lectures are convened by Professor Ute Meta Bauer, Acting Director, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore and Professor, School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University.

As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly embedded in the systems that shape our world, its growing environmental impact cannot be ignored. This lecture brings into focus the often-overlooked environmental costs of AI: the vast energy consumption required to train and operate large-scale models, the expanding carbon footprint of data centres, and broader planetary implications. In this critical conversation, speculative architect and filmmaker Liam Young draws from his recent work The Great Endeavour (2023) in which he presents his vision of infrastructures capable of removing atmospheric CO₂ at scale. Framing climate mitigation as a monumental design challenge, his film imagines the largest machines ever conceived, inviting us to think in planetary terms and confront the climate crisis not just as a technical problem but a deeply imaginative one. In dialogue with him is Professor Bo An, whose research under the CTP provides advances in machine-learning approaches for climate science. Responding to these lectures, Kathleen Ditzig, Curator at National Gallery Singapore, will comment on the environmental politics of machine learning. This lecture will begin with a welcome address by Honor Harger, Director of ArtScience Museum, and moderated by Professor Ute Meta Bauer, this lecture brings together speculative design and cutting-edge AI research, inviting us to examine the environmental costs of intelligence and imagine sustainable futures. 

Tuesday Lecture 

16 September 2025
6:30pm – 8:00pm 
The Hall, NTU CCA Singapore

Free with Registration

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 fellow Joshua Vince Gebert, 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. 

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.

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

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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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!

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.

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 

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.

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. 

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

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.

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

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

The first iteration of NTU CCA Singapore’s new research platform, Communities of Practice. Techno Diversions convenes three Singaporean artists—Chok Si Xuan, bani haykal, and Ong Kian Peng—whose practice engage with the material, cultural, and emotional layers of technology, its evolving role in contemporary life, and the complexity of our relation to it. As a multidimensional platform that entwines artistic research, experimentation, and the formation of communities across shared interests, Techno Diversions aims to propel a transformative understanding of what technology is through the lens of artistic practices that pursue the renewal of our agency within the technosphere and the re-enchantment with its tools. In an increasingly techno-driven society, these artists embrace the urgency to think critically about the conceptual parameters and material manifestations of technological progress charting new paths of significance by creative acts of repurposing, disrupting, and re-envisioning commonly accepted ideas and existing devices.

As participants in the programme, the artists are offered a five-month residency at the NTU CCA Singapore Research Centre from October 2024 to February 2025 and the agency to shape a research framework in ways that are conducive to the advancement of their practice. The research framework may entail seminars, screenings, peer-oriented sessions, workshops or other programmes engaging interlocutors from various fields. Oriented towards the production and circulation of knowledge, these gatherings will be organised in close collaboration with the participating artists with the goal to unravel their aesthetic inquiries while also catalysing communities and propelling public discourse around the subjects and methodologies of their research.

The programme will culminate with the production of new artworks that will be presented in an exhibition at NTU CCA Singapore during the Singapore Art Week 2025 (17 – 26 January 2025).

Communities of Practice. Techno Diversionsis curated by Dr Anna Lovecchio, Curator, Programmes.

About Communities of Practice

Conceived as seedbed for experimentation, Communities of Practice is a shapeshifting research platform that brings forth communities at the intersection of artistic practices. Holding a communal space where artistic research can develop through interdisciplinary collaborations, exchanges, and processes of co-creation, Communities of Practice situates NTU CCA Singapore within the research-driven core of Nanyang Technological University by configuring the Centre as an interdisciplinary body and advancing its role as convener, capacity builder, and leading-edge incubator in the arts sector.

Nothing has to be the way it is.

Exhibition from 17 to 26 January 2025

NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore is pleased to present Nothing has to be the way it is, an exhibition featuring the artistic propositions created by Chok Si Xuan, bani haykal, and Ong Kian Peng as part of their involvement in Communities of Practice. Techno Diversions, a five-month programme curated by Anna Lovecchio that interlaces artistic research, transdisciplinary encounters, and the formation of communities around shared interests to propel transformative understandings of technology. 

The uncanny symbiosis between humans and the digital devices, interactive interfaces, online platforms, and global infrastructures that increasingly operate our lives is a defining feature of contemporary society. In these wired times of machine intelligence and computational acceleration, microchip wars and platform powers, the artworks featured in this exhibition cast a sideway look at techno-driven progress. Moving across different conceptual frameworks and a multiplicity of mediums, Chok Si Xuan, bani haykal, and Ong Kian Peng share a common investment in reclaiming agency within the technosphere. They divert, possess, possibly disrupt the undisturbed existence of technological artefacts through gestures that question the escalation of technological sovereignty and, ultimately, the role of technology in our lives. Purposefully, these artists do not position themselves at the edge of advanced technologies. Rather, they interfere with existing apparatuses and instil into them worldviews other than those that originally brought them about. The systems they envisioned proceed by appropriations and approximations, frictions and forays, scrambled codes and enigmatic conjectures. In the essay “It Doesn’t Have To Be the Way It Is” which inspired the title of this exhibition, Ursula K. Le Guin remarks that the subversive power of the imagination “gnaw(s) at the very foundation of the belief that things have to be the way they are”.  Nothing has to be the way it is hints at the endless permutations of how things can be.

Nothing has to be the way it is will take place in The Hall, NTU CCA Singapore’s programme space nestled at the heart of the Research Centre and launched in September 2024. This event marks the first time The Hall hosts a group exhibition, bringing home the Centre’s longstanding commitment to dwell upon and experiment with the spaces of the curatorial.

As participants in Communities of Practice. Techno Diversions, Chok Si Xuan, bani haykal, and Ong Kian Peng are conducting a residency at NTU CCA Singapore from October 2024 to February 2025. Revolving around critical engagements with the material, political, and spiritual layers of technology and the complexity of our relation to it, this multidimensional programme is a generative platform that provides artists with time, space, and resources to unravel their aesthetic inquiries and catalyse communities around their interests and creative processes.

The exhibition is couched between two series of public programmes— Empirical Workshops and the Transdisciplinary Lectures—developed in conversation with the artists themselves. Steeped in a do-it-yourself ethos, the Empirical Workshops took place in December 2024. Each workshop germinated by the artist’s own research and was aimed at creating knowledge through skill-sharing and the creative dabbling with raw materials. In Temporal Oscillations, Chok Si Xuan dived into the physics of circuitry and erratic electronics, teaching participants how to assemble common electronic components to modulate the flow of electricity and hijack standard systems of temporality. With METAL MACHINE MISCHIEF (or how to make noise music with bicycles), bani haykal took his workshop participants on an unconventional group ride. Through tinkering and drilling, cranking and whirring, discarded bicycle parts were assembled into unorthodox musical instruments activated in a final jam session that produced a one-of-a-kind audiovisual experience. Different wavelenghts resonated in Ong Kian Peng’s Natural Radio workshop where participants could explore a range of low frequency waves emitted by natural electromagnetic phenomena as a way to tune in to the inaudible voices of the environment. 

Coming up in February 2025, the Transdisciplinary Lectures will bring the artists in conversations with philosophers, sociologists, scientists, and other creatives whose work significantly inspired them. Deepening the ramifications of their research in different disciplines, the Transdisciplinary Lectures will feature contributions by: Tiziano Bonini (Associate Professor, Sociology of Culture and Communication, University of Siena, Italy), Eugene Yew Siang Chua (Nanyang Assistant Professor of Philosophy, School of Humanities, NTU, Singapore), Lee Pooi See (Professor, School of Materials Science and Engineering, NTU, Singapore), Emiliano Treré (Beatriz Galindo Distinguished Professor, Language Theory and Communication Sciences, University of Valencia, Spain and Reader, Data Agency and Media Ecologies, Cardiff University, United Kingdom), and Boedi Widjaja (interdisciplinary artist, Singapore). 

17 to 26 January 2025

Opening hours
Tuesday to Sunday, 12:00 – 7:00pm
Friday 24 and Saturday 25 January, 12:00 – 10:00pm
Closed on Monday

Curator Tours
Saturday 18 January, 3:00pm and 5:00pm

Artists Tour
Saturday 25 January, 3:00 – 4:00pm

The Hall
NTU CCA Singapore
Block 6 Lock Road, #01-09
Gillman Barracks, 108934

Part Of

Artist Talks

by Chok Si Xuan, bani haykal, and Ong Kian Peng

What drives an artist to reconfigure the inner mechanisms of devices we have grown increasingly reliant upon? What acts of mobilisation can an artist perform within existing technological infrastructures to cultivate different types of cultural, social, and emotional agency? Can the artistic imagination interrogate the spiritual dimensions of technology and respond to escalating environmental crises determined by society’s current course of development?

In this joint talk, artists Chok Si Xuan, bani haykal, and Ong Kian Peng reflect upon how these and other similar questions have oriented recent developments in their practices. By addressing structural opacities and power structures, and by fostering an ecological understanding of the relation between humans and technology, their work illuminates some dark corners of fast-paced technological advancement and experiments with alternative forms of being within existing structures. Their research is currently unfolding within the framework of Techno Diversions, the inaugural iteration of NTU CCA Singapore’s research platform Communities of Practice.

Communities of Practice fosters interdisciplinary collaborations and the coming together of communities around shared interests. It situates NTU CCA Singapore as an interdisciplinary body within the research-driven core of Nanyang Technological University, advancing its role as convener, capacity builder, and leading incubator in the arts sector.

Saturday, 9 November 2024, 3.00 – 4.30pm
The Hall, NTU CCA Singapore
Block 6 Lock Road, #01-09
Gillman Barracks, 108934

EMPIRICAL WORKSHOPS

Natural Radio Workshop led by artist Ong Kian Peng

This workshop will introduce participants to natural radio. Natural radio is the emission of Very Low Frequency (VLF) and Extremely Low Frequency (ELF) radio waves due to electromagnetic energy from natural phenomena. These emissions originate terrestrially from lightning and from the Sun’s interactions with the Earth’s magnetosphere, they are among the inaudible voices of the environment. If the low frequencies of these electromagnetic outbursts are transformed into acoustic waves, many of these signals may fall within the range of human hearing. Experiencing electromagnetic waves as acoustic waves will allow listeners to connect with the beauty and complexity of natural radio waves in a unique aural experience.

By the end of the workshop, participants will be able to assemble an analogue handheld radio device that tunes in to natural radio frequencies.

Participants are encouraged to bring their own headphones with a 3.5mm audio jack, along with an optional audio recorder to capture and share their auditory discoveries.

This workshop is part of the Empirical Workshop Series of Communities of Practice. Techno Diversions.

This workshop is suitable for age 18 and above.
No prior knowledge of electronics is required.

Saturday, 21 December 2024, 2 – 5pm
The Hall, NTU CCA Singapore
Block 6 Lock Road, #01-09
Gillman Barracks, Singapore, 108934

METAL MACHINE MISCHIEF (or how to make noise music with bicycles) by bani haykal

“Riding bikes ain’t s#!+ without climate justice, without land back, without liberation of everybody”
Christina Torres, Cyclista Zine

The bicycle is more than just a means of transportation. In our increasingly car-centric and carbon-heavy lifestyle, cycling is a climate action that slows down the rate at which our planet is burning. Inspiring stories from Gaza have shown us how bicycles can be radically repurposed into washing machines, sewing machines, and even power generators.

In the first part of the workshop, participants will be offered a set of unused bicycle components gathered by artist bani haykal and they will be guided to devise and conceptualise new musical or sonic instruments with them. In the second part, these unorthodox instruments will be played in a group jam session!

Participants are encouraged to bring personal items such as mallets, drumsticks, clarinet mouthpieces, and/or any musical bobs and bits they can incorporate into the instruments.

This workshop is part of the Empirical Workshop Series of Communities of Practice. Techno Diversions.

This workshop is suitable for age 18 and above.
No prior knowledge or experience is required.

Saturday, 7 December 2024, 10:30am – 12:30pm
The Hall, NTU CCA Singapore
Block 6 Lock Road, #01-09
Gillman Barracks, Singapore, 108934

Temporal Oscillations. Electronics workshop led by artist Chok Si Xuan

This workshop will explore how to use common electronic components to modulate the flow of electricity, assemble and hijack standard systems of temporality. Participants will learn how a 555 timer integrated circuit (IC) forms an astable multivibrator. The 555 timer IC is a tiny chip found in many everyday devices—blinking LED lights, kitchen timers, alarm systems, sound makers, etc.—that modulates the frequencies of electrical signals. The term ‘astable’ means ‘not stable’ because the circuit never settles into a single state, is a basic electronic circuit that generates a continuous oscillating output, switching between two voltage levels.

Working with pre-assembled circuits created by artist Chok Si Xuan, participants will be able to experiment with various components (small motors, LED lights, and speakers, etc) as outputs. Exploring the transformation of different forms of energy—chemical energy from batteries, mechanical energy , kinetic energy and byproduct thermal energy, the workshop accesses materiality as a manner of understanding the fundamental ways systems unfold.

Through engaging with electronic circuits in a hands-on and accessible way, participants can expect to develop a direct understanding of some visible and less visible aspects that power everyday technology. Participants are encouraged to bring their own components for experimentation. These may include battery-operated toys, LED lights or small light strips, buzzers or small speakers, direct current (DC) motors, small fans, switches or buttons, old electronic parts like sensors or wires, and similar items.

This workshop is part of the Empirical Workshop Series of Communities of Practice. Techno Diversions.

This workshop is suitable for age 18 and above.
No prior knowledge of electronics is required.

Saturday, 7 December 2024, 10:30am – 12:30pm
The Hall, NTU CCA Singapore
Block 6 Lock Road, #01-09
Gillman Barracks, Singapore, 108934

Transdisciplinary Lectures

Entangled Uncertainties

Presentations by Dr Eugene Chua (Singapore) and Boedi Widjaja (Indonesia/Singapore) followed by a conversation with ong kian peng (Singapore)

What is reality? The models we use to conceptualise the world are increasingly under scrutiny, reshaped by the ecological crises of our time and the revelations of quantum theories. Classical distinctions between humans, non-humans, and objects are dissolving as we zoom in at the quantum level, revealing a world of entanglements and uncertainties. This event brings together artist Boedi Widjaja, whose practice explores the intangible and ephemeral, and philosopher of physics Eugene Chua, whose work delves into the complexities of quantum mechanics. Their presentations will be followed by a dialogue moderated by artist ong kian peng. The panel will unfold some intersections of art, science, and philosophy, offering new perspectives on how we perceive, construct, and engage with reality. Through this exchange, the audience will be offered new lenses for understanding the world and reimagine their place within a dynamic, interconnected cosmos.

Wednesday, 12 February 2025
7 – 8:30pm
The Hall, NTU CCA Singapore
Block 6 Lock Road, #01-09
Gillman Barracks, Singapore, 108934

Tactile Transmutations

Lecture by Professor Pooi See Lee (Singapore), followed by a conversation with artist Chok Si Xuan (Singapore)

Will electronics become flexible and soft? As technological advances shrink systems and transition from hard robots to soft machines, how will this affect the way we understand and relate to the devices we interact with?

Professor Lee Pooi See, whose research delves into  human-machine interface, hybrid materials for soft robotics, and nanostructures, will share about the influences and current trajectories of material sciences and human-machine interfaces articulating her insights into the future of a softer and smaller world of technology. In conversation with Chok Si Xuan, the scientist and the artist will discuss the implications of a world driven by mechanisms that escape human vision and they will exchange ideas about the relational qualities of interfaces and the rise of biomimicry in the realm of technological innovation.  

This event is generated by Chok Si Xuan within Communities of Practice. Techno Diversions, a research programme that aims to propel a transformative understanding of technology through artistic practices and transdisciplinary encounters.

Wednesday, 19 February 2025
7 – 8:30pm
The Hall, NTU CCA Singapore
Block 6 Lock Road, #01-09
Gillman Barracks, Singapore, 108934

Algorithms of Resistance. Tracing tactics of agency and solidarity within platform society

Online lecture by Tiziano Bonini (Italy) and Emiliano Treré (Italy/United Kingdom) followed by a conversation with bani haykal (Singapore)

oday, a growing number of social interactions, economic transactions, political engagements, and affective relations are enabled and regulated by a global network of online platforms operated through algorithms. As algorithmic infrastructures become enmeshed in the fabric of society, more and more aspects of everyday life are being captured and released in data streams that feed digital entities unilaterally coded and controlled by profit-driven tech companies. Through extensive online and offline fieldwork conducted across the Global North and the Global South, Tiziano Bonini and Emiliano Treré—co-authors of Algorithms of Resistance. The Everyday Fight Against Platform Power (The MIT Press, 2024)—ventured into uncharted alghoritmic territories. They encountered forms of agency, practices of resistance, and bonds of solidarity enacted by users who negotiate their own terms of existence within the platform regime. In this lecture, the speakers will reflect on how grassroots practices can spark emancipatory frictions that reinvent and disrupt the uneven power relation between users and platforms.

This event is generated by bani haykal within Communities of Practice. Techno Diversions, a research programme that aims to propel a transformative understanding of technology through artistic practices and transdisciplinary synergies. 

Wednesday, 26 February 2025
7 – 8:30pm
The Hall, NTU CCA Singapore
Block 6 Lock Road, #01-09
Gillman Barracks, Singapore, 108934

As an artist and musician, bani haykal (b. 1985, Singapore) experiments with language, sound, and fiction. His work revolves around human-machine relationships / intimacies, and cultural identity formations reflecting critically on how language, tools and technologies have shaped and continue to shape our life experiences. From interfaces to interactions, from fictions to frictions, from commuting to communicating, the creative output of his research often involves the creation of DIY tools and it encompasses site-responsive installations, poetry, and performance as well as publications and music releases. He has participated in various festivals and exhibitions including Busan Biennale (South Korea, 2024), Seeing Sound (touring exhibiton, 2023 -2027), The Rumbling In-between with ila (Jendela Visual Arts Space, Esplanade, Singapore, 2023), [Alternate / Opt] Realities, State of Motion (Singapore, 2021)  among many others. He has been a member of several music bands including B-Quartet, Erik Satay & The Kampong Arkestra, and The Observatory.

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.

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.

Priyageetha Dia is an arts practitioner who experiments with time-based media, 3D animation and game engine software. Her practice addresses the transnational migration of ethnic communities and the intersections of the colonial production with land, labour and capital in Southeast Asia through speculative methods and counter-narratives. She has been invited to participate in several exhibitions including the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, India (2022); Attention Seeker, La Trobe Art Institute, Bendigo, Australia (2022); An Exercise of Meaning in a Glitch Season, National Gallery Singapore (2020); 2219: Futures Imagined, ArtScience Museum Singapore (2019). She was a recipient of the IMPART Art Award in 2019.

The migratory movements of her ancestral lineage from Southern India to Malaysia, and later to Singapore, sparked Priyageetha’s deep-seated engagement in South Asian diasporic histories, the labour relations that underlie plantation agriculture in Malaya and the vast terrain of colonial narratives. Interweaving these research threads in her multimedia practice, her works figure alternative histories that empower subaltern forms of existence. 

During her residency at Jan Van Eyck Academie, the artist is interested in delving deeper into the emergence and expansion of agro-industrial plantation projects, the dispossession and displacement of lands and communities in Southeast Asia, and their relation to The Netherlands through archival research. Moreover, the residency will provide her with a supportive environment to articulate critical viewpoints and counter-narratives through her ongoing and self-led experiments with computer-generated imagery (CGI), animation technologies and game engine software while also allowing her to gain an understanding of issues related to contemporary transnational interactions within Southeast Asia and Europe.

Sea level rise, flash floods, and extreme weather phenomena compel a profound reconsideration of the human relation to the environment. The artist plans to conduct an observational investigation of the island nation to survey a range of existing objects, sites, and development projects and compose them into a visual index of natural and man-made features that may acquire different meanings and functions within advanced climate change scenarios.

In this episode, we invited Viknesh Kobinathan to traverse the trajectory of our Artist-in-Residence Min-Wei Ting’s filmic practice. This conversation marks a full-circle moment for the pair as they first collaborated at the beginning of their careers at the Singapore Short Cuts programme in 2014. In this conversation, they exchange memories that reveal shared notions of space and architecture, while contemplating upon the latent anxieties that stem from the everchanging landscape of Singapore prevalent in Min-Wei’s films. They also touch upon Min-Wei’s ongoing reflections and speculations on the Singapore state’s reactions and endeavours to address climate which he  developed during his time in residence at NTU CCA Singapore. 

Working primarily with the moving image, Min-Wei Ting explores the politics of space and the dynamic of belonging in his native Singapore. Adopting a first-person perspective where the tension between embodiment and disembodiment is often at play, his films enact gestures of protracted observation and slow movement. 

Viknesh Kobinathan is a programmer at the Asian Film Archive (AFA), where he curates film screenings and discursive events that examine issues affecting Asian societies, explore the art of Asian cinema, and furthers the preservation mission of the AFA. He oversees the execution of the commissioning project, Monographs, a series that features critical text-based and audio-visual essays on the moving image. 

Contributors: Min-Wei Ting, Viknesh Kobinathan
Editor: Anna Lovecchio
Programme Manager: Nadia Amalina
Sound Engineer: Ashwin Menon
Intro & Outro Music: Yuen Chee Wai
Cover Image & Design: Arabelle Zhuang, Kristine Tan

[See Full Transcript]

Environmental knowledge and the ways it is communicated through visual arts have been at the core of Wang Ruobing’s practice for the past twenty years. With rising water temperatures and the expansion of the Tropical Warm Pool—a large mass of ocean water that features water temperature above 28 degree within which maritime Southeast Asia is situated—the coastal ecosystems in the region have become a crucial field for environmental research and climate change studies. Drawing equal inspiration from scientific knowledge and from Donna J. Haraway’s theories of ‘sympoiesis’ (making-with), the artist hopes to develop new artworks that reconfigure more sustainable relations to the Earth and all its inhabitants.

In this episode, we hand over the microphone to curator Tamares Goh to interview our Artist-in-Residence Wang Ruobing. Ruobing and Tamares share a long history of working together throughout their careers, one that goes back to 2004 and will continue on in the years to come. This conversation between peers shines a spotlight on Ruobing’s practice rooted in materiality, the importance of found objects in her art-making process, as well as her ongoing research into the symbiotic relationship between environmental sciences and visual arts. They also touch upon the collaborations Ruobing has activated with deep-sea divers and marine scientists, and how these collaborations continue to shape the trajectory of her artistic practice.

Committed to exploring new ways of seeing and methods of knowledge production, the artistic practice of Dr Wang Ruobing stretches from drawing to photography, sculpture, kinetic art, and installation. With a diverse range of methodological approaches to present her ideas, her body of work addresses environmental issues and transcultural discourses on identity and hybridity.

Tamares Goh is the deputy director of Audience Engagement at National Gallery Singapore, overseeing festivals like Light To Night, Painting With Light and the Gallery’s Childrens Biennale. She was the former head of Visual Arts at Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay, and co-headed the Programming department overseeing festivals and programmes. In 2017, she was the Producer for the Singapore Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale.

Contributors: Wang Ruobing, Tamares Goh
Editor: Anna Lovecchio
Programme Manager: Nadia Amalina
Sound Engineer: Ashwin Menon
Intro & Outro Music: Yuen Chee Wai
Cover Image & Design: Arabelle Zhuang, Kristine Tan

[See Full Transcript]

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

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

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.

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 Appetite, IHME Helsinki, and PUB Singapore’s National Water Agency at Marina Barrage.

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Come by the studios of our Artists-in-Residence: Tini Aliman and Russell Morton (both Singapore) for a special insight into their artistic process. This session of Residencies OPEN will allow you to encounter works-in-progress, watch a film screening, browse archival materials, and talk to the artists in person!

TINI ALIMAN
Open Studio

Saturday, 18 September, 1:00 ­– 7:00 pm
Block 37 Malan Road, #01-03
no registration required

As a new development of her long-term research on plant consciousness and biodata sonification, Tini Aliman has come to regard ‘dead’ trees as potential archives of environmental soundscapes, witnesses of urban development and extractive capitalism, ecological events and climate change. Breathing new life into tree stumps, fragments of felled trees, and repurposed wood from previous artworks, the artist is reconfiguring these materials into kinetic and sound sculpture prototypes and she is experimenting with a range of sensory and mechanical modes of activation. Conjunctly, inspired by the structural and functional similarities between Printed Circuit Board (PCB) etching designs and forest underground network ecosystems, Tini is also speculatively imagining a functioning network of closed electronic circuits that mimics how these trees would have communicated while they were still alive. This project is realised in collaboration with Trying.sg.

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

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RUSSELL MORTON
Open Studio

Saturday, 18 September, 1:00 ­– 7:00 pm
Block 37 Malan Road, #01­-02 & Block 38 Malan Road, #01-06
no registration required

For the past six months, Russell Morton has dived deep into gathering research materials and audiovisual references for the script of his first feature film. Inspired by a not well-known historical event—a prison riot which took place in Pulau Senang before Singapore’s independence—, the film interweaves the horrific events of the bloody riot with regional folklore. This open studio session presents a generous selection of archival materials, oral histories, and sound recordings relevant to the development of the script as well as the documentation (shot on Super 8mm film) of the artist’ site visits to a kelong, a type of vernacular architecture on the verge of disappearing that will feature prominently in the film.
Furthermore, there will be the opportunity to watch Morton’s most recent short film Mystic and Momok (2021), see below for more details.  

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).

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RESIDENCIES INSIGHTS

RUSSELL MORTON: ARTIST-LED STUDIO TOUR

Saturday, 18 September, 3:00 – 3:45pm
Block 37 Malan Road, #01-02

In this artist-led studio tour, Russell Morton will talk about his references and unpack some of the research materials that will be woven into the structure of his first feature film: a dark narrative of drifting away from crime and floating in punishment inspired by a grim historical episode which happened in Singapore in the early 1960s. 

Due to safe-distancing measures, this event has limited capacity and is by registration only. Please register here.

TINI ALIMAN: OF UNDERGROUND SCHEMATICS & THE FALLEN TREE
Artist Talk and Performance

Saturday, 18 September, 4:30 – 5:30pm
Block 37 Malan Road, #01-03

In a two-part event consisting of a talk and a performance, Tini Aliman will share her findings and reflections on plant consciousness and on the parallels between the human and the vegetable sensorium, interweaving them with explorations in acoustic memory and sonic symbolism related to her personal musical journey. In the performance, she will engage with her long-standing collaborator, a ficus microcarpa (Malayan banyan tree) named Ara. 

Due to safe-distancing measures, this event has limited capacity and is by registration only. Please register here.

MYSTIC & MOMOK BY RUSSELL MORTON
Film Screening (on loop)
HD video (16:9), stereo, 18min 10sec, 2021
Rating: PG

Saturday, 18 September, 1:00 – 7:00pm
The Screening Room
Block 38 Malan Road, #01-06
No registration required. Please expect waiting time if room capacity is reached.

Completed during the residency, Russell Morton’s latest short film revolves around the eclectic and versatile figure of Mohammad Din Mohammad (1955 – 2007). Artist and mystic, traditional healer and idiosyncratic collector of Southeast Asian cultural items, Mohammad Din Mohammad was also an actor and a silat master. Playfully disclosing the production limitations imposed by the pandemic, the film evokes Mohammad’s multifaceted personality through the faces, voices, and memories of the artist’s family members and an experimental process where affects and sounds are mediated by technology. As it unfolds, the film grows into an upbeat stream of visuals and sounds mixed by Momok, a computer algorithm created by artist bani haykal.

Mystic & Momok was commissioned by National Gallery Singapore for the exhibition Something New Must Turn Up: Six Singaporean Artists After 1965 (7 May – 22 August 2021) which featured Mohammad Din Mohammad’s works.
 
This event marks the opening of The Screening Room, NTU CCA Singapore’s cosy new space dedicated to film screenings and talks.

In a two-part event consisting of a talk and a performance, Tini Aliman will share her findings and reflections on plant consciousness and on the parallels between the human and the vegetable sensoriums, interweaving them with explorations in acoustic memory and sonic symbolism related to her personal musical journey. In the performance, she will engage with her long-standing collaborator, a ficus microcarpa (Malayan banyan tree) named Ara.

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

Admission is free but registration is required. Please register here.

This event is part of Residencies OPEN, 18 September 2021 (1.00 – 7.00pm), for more info click here.

Image: Tini Aliman, untitled, 2021 photography and digital composition (detail). Courtesy of the artist.

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