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

PROGRAM OVERVIEW: 

Centering plural, accountable, and historically grounded forms of inquiry is a core commitment of the Max Planck–NTU Singapore Centre for Biocultural Worlding. We invite proposals for collaborative activities that advance this commitment in concrete and innovative ways.

CBCW seeks projects that demonstrate:

– collaborative efforts that bring biocultural worlding into practice; 
– biocultural thought and practice that make itself publicly relevant through interactive, multimodal, and participatory formats; 
– research approaches that integrate ecological, historical, legal, artistic, and ancestral or intergenerational community perspectives; 
– rigorous, plural collaboration across expertise domains that generate substantive and transformative insights into changing social and natural ecosystems; 
– diverse formats exploring interdependence, relationality, ancestral or intergenerational modes of being, knowing, and doing, and plural temporalities to move beyond problem identification and to engage directly with grounded forms of knowledge production and practice. 

Budget: 10,000 € maximum

WHO CAN APPLY:

– Knowledge-holders, curators, artists, legal scholars, scientists, and researchers of age 21 or older by the deadline. 
– Individuals may apply independently or in collaboration; partnerships with organizations are permitted, but organizations cannot apply or serve as the lead applicant. 
– Applicants must not be enrolled in a degree-seeking program of any kind during the grant period (July 2026 to December 2026). 
– Applicants are encouraged to consult with a member of the CBCW Board of Advisors or Leadership Team in advance of submission. 
– Applicants must not be a member of the CBCW Board of Advisors, the MPIWG Board of Advisors, NTU Board of Trustees, and/or an immediate family member of any of the above. 

CRITERIA:

The evaluation process will review proposals that clearly demonstrate: 

– Alignment with CBCW’s mission and vision. 
– Brings together artistic practice, legal inquiry, and/or ecological, historical, and situated forms of knowledge production to conduct integrative collaborative research. 
– Meaningful engagement with knowledge-holding communities, demonstrating co-creative roles rather than consultative inclusion. 
– A clearly defined thematic and conceptual focus in questions of interdependence, relationality, or intergenerational knowledge. 
– Contextual grounding, specifying the empirical, historical, or conceptual contexts of the project. 
– Innovative or experimental multimodal formats that develop and share analytical biocultural thinking beyond academia. 
– Originality, demonstrating that the project described in the application is newly conceived and requires cross-disciplinary and community collaboration. 
– Ethics and data protection protocols, where applicable. 
– Inclusion of at least one collaborator from NTU College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, and one from the MPI for the History of Science or MPI for Innovation and Competition in the team. 

APPLICATION GUIDELINES:

Applications must be submitted in English, using the form provided below. Each application should be compiled as a single file (Word document or PDF) and named according to the following format: 2026_Smith_Sally.doc (e.g., if your family name is Smith and given name is Sally)

What to submit (space provided in form):
– Title (max. 25 words)
– Abstract/Summary (max. 500 words)
– Keywords (4-6)
– Project Location
– Project Timeline
– Lead Applicant Contact Details 
– Artist/Collaborator Information (including roles of core team members)
– Qualifications of project lead and core team members (max. 500 words)
– Budget (max. 10,000 Euros)
– Impact/Target Audience (max. 250 words)
– Additional Forms of Community Support (e.g., in-kind contributions)
– Supplementary Materials (optional): letters of commitment or interest, permits for public spaces.
– Checklist of Criteria (as outlined above)

Click HERE to download the submission form.

Upload submission to this folder: https://wg-cloud.gnz.mpg.de/s/zcTPcbomJRL6nrx

For questions, please contact: msaidul@ntu.edu.sg or lonaga@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de.
 

WHO ARE WE

Co-Directors 
Professor Ute Meta Bauer, Acting Director, NTU CCA Singapore and Professor, NTU College of Humanities Arts & Social Sciences 
Professor Dagmar Schäfer, Director, Department Artifacts, Action, Knowledge, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science 
Co-Deputy Directors 
Dr Md Saidul Islam, Associate Professor, NTU School of Social Sciences 
Dr Lisa Onaga, Senior Research Scholar, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science 

Scientific Coordinators 
Mei Jia Ng 
Suelyn Tarris 

International Advisory Board 
Professor Nabil Ahmed, Trondheim Academy of Fine Art, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway 
Emeritus Professor Chua Beng Huat, School of Social Sciences, Singapore Management University, Singapore 
Professor Susy Frankel, Lead Director, New Zealand Centre of International Economic Law, Te Herenga Waka · Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand 
Han Song Hiltmann, Programme Director, Stiftung Humboldt Forum im Berliner Schloss, Germany 
Professor Gabriela Soto-Laveaga, Department of the History of Science, Harvard University, United States 
Marian Pastor Roces, Independent curator, cultural critic, policy analyst, and founder, TAOINC, Philippines 
Professor Daniel Robinson, School of Humanities & Language, University of New South Wales, Australia 
Dr Julia Voss, Art historian, art critic, and curator, Deutsches Historisches Museum, Germany 
  
 
 

The Max Planck–NTU Singapore Centre for Biocultural Worlding (CBCW) is a joint initiative between the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin, Germany, and the Nanyang Technological University Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (NTU CCA). Established in April 2026, the Centre is supported by the Max Planck Society and Nanyang Technological University, with staff and leadership based in Berlin and Singapore.

The CBCW envisions a future in which biological and cultural diversity are no longer treated as separate domains, but as mutually dependent conditions for sustaining life on this planet. In this future, insights from diverse histories and knowledge traditions inform more fair, responsible, and locally grounded responses to planetary challenges. We believe in the capacity of people, culture, and nature to generate many worlds—through relationships, practices, and meaning-making—a capacity that depends on the health and integrity of both biological and cultural diversity. This vision calls for empowering people as knowledge holders and for rethinking standards for doing research across legal, scientific, artistic, and local and Indigenous knowledge systems. By inviting people to actively rethink ownership and responsibility in decision-making processes that produce consequences for who thrives, the Centre contributes to building more robust and equitable biocultural futures.

The CBCW functions as a space where artistic practice, legal inquiry, and diverse knowledge traditions converge to explore new forms of collaboration and stewardship of biocultural worlds. The CBCW is driven by a commitment to empowering knowledge holders and communities to shape more just and sustainable planetary futures. The CBCW brings together communities from cultural practices, knowledge-holding traditions, the arts, law, sciences, and the humanities that share inclusive ways of defining shared futures. The Centre prioritizes collective and tangible field-based initiatives to understand and negotiate different worlds that are structured by the separation or integration of culture and nature. The CBCW uses methods of history of science, curatorial practice, storytelling, among others, to advance biocultural matters to public platforms, institutional partnerships, and interventions beyond academic boundaries.

What is Biocultural Worlding?

Biocultural worlding describes the active, plural, and ongoing processes through which human and non-human beings draw on entangled biological and cultural knowledges to collectively shape planetary futures with care, equity, and epistemic humility. At CBCW, biocultural worlding is simultaneously the object of inquiry and the aspiration for how the Centre itself operates: producing knowledge about the world through genuinely pluralized, accountable, and relational practices, across all the disciplines, traditions, and communities it brings together.

For more information:
About Max Planck Centres
Max Planck Institute for History of Science

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

This event launches Some Monologues (Wendy’s Subway, 2025), a publication by Tyler Coburn that gathers fifteen years of the artist’s scripts. On this occasion, Coburn presents a new monologue entitled People that draws influence from A Personal History of American Theatre (1980), a one-person performance by the American actor and writer Spalding Gray (1941–2004). Moving through a set of index cards bearing the names of plays he acted in, Gray told stories related to those productions, dwelling on events unfolding behind the scenes. As the order of the index cards was random, no two performances were ever the same. In Coburn’s version, each of his cards indicates the name of a person who has a role in the book: an academic he interviewed for a project, an amorous attendee to one of his monologues, his collaborator Susan Bennett (the original voice actress of Siri), a data center employee who insulted him, and more. People brings focus to his many collaborators and the monologues they helped create. After the performance, Tyler Coburn will be joined in conversation by artist and writer Jason Wee.

About the book 
Working at the nexus of performance, art writing, and fiction, Tyler Coburn creates monologues that explore how the “I” is marked in speech. His myriad topics—alternate history, legal personhood, digital labor, and resonant frequency, to name a few—defy straightforward modes of presentation, often insisting on site-specificity and social intimacy at the expense of conventional documentation. Some Monologues collects, for the first time, the scripts of Coburn’s work from the past fifteen years, many of which have not previously been published. Accompanying them are texts by eleven artists, writers, curators, and scholars who experienced these performances firsthand, collaborated in their making, conversed with the artist about them, or share an interest in the subjects they engage. Written in theoretical, poetic, and autobiographical registers, these contributions offer new perspectives on the monologue as an expansive and relational form.
 
 

 

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

Research Outputs

What is ‘Worlding’ in Biocultural Worlding Workshop

Programme
Welcome Address by Professor Ute Meta Bauer

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

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

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

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

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

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 The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt warns that isolating individuals and groups renders them politically impotent, arguing that segregation is a fertile ground for totalitarianism. Authoritarianism sows distrust by pitting vulnerable groups against each other, it robs them of agency and prevents them from acting together. In today’s “attention economy,” this manifests as minorities compete against each other for visibility, risking an inversion of the feminist principle “the personal is political” to “only the personal is political”. This approach reduces politics to self-interest, both individual and collective. 

As an antidote to neoliberal “divide and rule” tactics, it is urgent to build alliances by focusing on the intertextuality of our struggles. Drawing on Arendt’s political understanding of friendship, Nikita Dhawan and Maria do Mar Castro Varela will explore the challenges of building coalitions across distinct vulnerabilities and agencies. They argue that the counterforce to tyranny and terror is to nurture alliances across difference, affinities, and shared experiences creating collectivities where we can listen to each other and find our own voices.

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

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

Image courtesy the María do Mar Castro Varela. 

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

Image courtesy Technical University Dresden. 

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. 

Visit the database

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

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

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

Research Outputs

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

Programme

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Granted by

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This 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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Since the 1990s, contemporary art in Thailand has achieved considerable international recognition. While many Thai artists have shed identification with their nation, “Thainess” remains an interpretive crutch for understanding their work. In the first scholarly book on the subject since 1992, Dr David Teh examines the competing claims to contemporaneity staked in Thailand, and on behalf of Thai art elsewhere, against a backdrop of sustained political and economic turmoil.

Part of Symposium: Ghosts and Spectres – Shadows of History

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

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

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

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

SCHEDULE

2.00pm
Introduction by Ute Meta Bauer

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

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

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

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

BIOGRAPHIES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7 Aug 2019, Wed 07:00 PM – 09:00 PM

The Single Screen, Block 43 Malan Road

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 

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.

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

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

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

NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore is pleased to announce the launch of STAR Residencies (Science, Technology, Art & Research), a new residency programme aimed at fostering the cross-pollination between artistic and scientific research. Through partnerships with select NTU research institutes, STAR Residencies embeds artistic residencies at the core of the University, creating a unique opportunity for exchange between artists and academic researchers. A pioneering programme in the context of Singapore and Southeast Asia, STAR Residencies stems from NTU CCA Singapore’s decade-long expertise in developing innovative platforms for knowledge making, creative experimentation, and transdisciplinary collaborations. 

For its inaugural cycle, STAR Residencies unfolds in partnership with NTU Earth Observatory of Singapore (EOS), a research institute of Nanyang Technological University dedicated to the scientific observation of the forces that shape our changing planet. Regarded as a leader on a broad spectrum of geosciences in the Asia-Pacific region, EOS gathers critical data and develops vital knowledge about geohazards, climate change, and their impact on human societies. This collaboration expands Centre’s long-standing research on Climates.Habitats.Environments. and its continued commitment to critical artistic practices that engage with ecological complexities, climate change, and sustainability to advance the collective awareness of planetary interconnectedness in times of environmental distress.

The artists participating in the first iteration STAR Residencies are: Ng Hui Hsien, The Observatory (Dharma, Cheryl Ong, Yuen Chee Wai), and Zarina Muhammad. They were selected from a pool of 19 candidates (nominated by experts in the field) by a Selection Committee composed of: Dr Karin Oen, Director, NTU CCA Singapore, Senior Lecturer and Head of Department, Art History, NTU School of Humanities; Lauriane Chardot, Assistant Director, Community Engagement, Earth Observatory of Singapore, NTU; and Haeju Kim, Senior Curator and Head of Residencies, Singapore Art Museum. 

The first cycle of STAR Residencies takes place from April 2025 to March 2026. Within the programme’s framework, artists are granted unprecedented access to processes and methodologies of fundamental scientific research, state-of-the-art laboratories, data sets, and extensive international networks, being provided with the exceptional opportunity to immerse themselves in EOS’s dynamic scientific community wherein they can expand their intellectual horizon, explore ideas, forge new means of artistic inquiry, and engage creatively with Earth systems and ecological complexities. The programme will conclude with an exhibition in March 2026 that will showcase the research projects developed during the residency. In the words of Karin Oen, “STAR Residencies mark an important new chapter for NTU CCA Singapore in which the intersections of artistic and scientific research can thrive with the support of the broader academic community at NTU.” 

With creative practices that span photography, performance, installation, and sound, the artists will conduct independent research on a variety of Earth systems, interweaving different bodies of knowledge in aesthetic outcomes that foster the awareness of ecological interconnectedness and of the complexity of human relation to nature. Drawing on her background in ethnography, Ng Hui Hsien intends to complement the scientific strategies used to evaluate environmental changes and geohazards with indigenous ecological knowledge shaped by lived experience, oral traditions, and direct observation, creating evocative insights into practices of ecological coexistence. The Observatory will expand their engagement with subterranean phenomena and geological formations. Deepening their understanding of the volcanic arcs that shape Southeast Asia and of the processes of rock formation, they will develop a project that resonates from deep time to contemporary existence. Driven by a process-led and constellatory approach to collaboration, Zarina Muhammad will engage with different scientists to expand epistemic frameworks for ecological witnessing, looking at weather formations, underwater ecologies, polycosmologies and the interdependency of environmental knowledge systems. 

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

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

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.

Expanding his ongoing enquiry into the historical narratives of power structures and their geopolitical reverberations onto the present, Anthony Chin will dedicate his residency to research the ramifications of Singapore’s colonial past. Prompted by the history of Gillman Barracks—where the Residencies Studios are located—as the site of the last battle before Singapore was surrendered to the Japanese. Soon after the Fall of Singapore (1942), the Imperial Japanese Army established OKA 9420, a research centre where experiments on Bubonic plague pathogens were conducted. Addressing lesser-known histories as well as the growing awareness of pathogens due to global events such as the recent pandemic, Anthony seeks to develop a deeper understanding of pathogens while unpacking the ethical concerns surrounding the rapid advancements in science and technology. The research process will encompass both primary and secondary sources and it aims to grow through connections and collaborations with historians, researchers, and scientists so as to lay the foundations for a long-term artistic project that addresses the impact of biochemical weapons on society.

In the Singaporean-Malay slang, “world” is used to signal boastful aspirations towards a social status higher than one’s own, often conveyed through self-aggrandising story-telling. Utilising this as an alternative framework to the postcolonial notion of “worlding”, whereby one’s conceptualisation of the world is devised through colonial attachments, the artist will spend his residency investigating the multitude of meanings behind the word’s usages as a way of unravelling sociolinguistic constructs and processes of identity formation. This research will ultimately result in lens-based explorations that engage with “world” through conceptual propositions and visual arrangements comprising archival photos and sociohistorical accounts. 

Propelled by an interest in the conceptual frictions between art and craftsmanship, artistic and industrial labour, the artist intends to develop this research into a comparative study of masonry and ceramics, two techniques that have significant affinities in terms of materials but carry different class connotations. Focusing on existing sites such as local brick factories and heritage buildings made of bricks, he will also codify the schemas of bricklaying in an attempt to delineate different morphologies of brick architecture. This research will potentially culminate in a series of material experimentations and pictorial mappings of brick trade, bringing to the forefront the overlooked history of this material in the context of Singapore.

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

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

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

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

Against Singapore’s persistent acceleration towards the future through redevelopment and modernisation, the artist is interested in the way certain memories are kept while others are discarded. From her point of view, “the past is more than objects waiting to be discovered; it is a series of perspectives waiting to be unearthed”.​ Investigating the present with the tools of archaeology, she plans to explore the physical sediments of contemporary life through a series of participatory sessions aimed at making, archiving, and combining fragments of the present into new scenarios, perspectives, and meanings.

In this episode, curator Samantha Yap digs deep into the practice of Artist-in-Residence Fazleen Karlan. We are happy to bring the two of them back together, after they first collaborated a couple of year ago on an exhibition titled Time Passes (2020-21), to talk about Fazleen’s evolving artistic sensibility and sources of inspiration.

In this circular conversation that revolves around a shared reading, the novel Lighthousekeeping by Jeanette Winterson, Fazleen and Samantha exchange memories, experiences, and thoughts about time, materiality, pop culture, and the vitality of archaeology in Fazleen’s work. And they do so with that special kind of fluid intimacy that interlaces persons of the same age. Just a few words to introduce them.

The practice of Fazleen Karlan weaves together art-making and archaeology to explore matters of time by mapping and reframing physical remains found within the landscape and socio-historical context of Singapore. By engaging the stratifications of a site and by reassessing the chronology of everyday objects through the tools of archaeology, her work generates news records of contemporary life that cast the relation between past, present, and future into a speculative framework.

Shuffling between writing and curation, Samantha Yap nurtures her interests in forms of reciprocity, the ethics of care, love, vulnerability as well as an ongoing exploration of feminist perspectives across literature and visual culture. She has curated a number of exhibitions in Singapore, including Time Passes, National Gallery Singapore (2020) which marked her first collaboration with Fazleen Karlan. Her curatorial texts are featured in several exhibition catalogues and her creative writing is included in My Lot is a Sky (Math Paper Press, 2018), an anthology of poetry by Asian women. She graduated with a BA (Hons) in English Literature and Art History from Nanyang Technological University of Singapore. 

Contributors: Fazleen Karlan, Samantha Yap
Editor: Anna Lovecchio
Programme Manager: Nadia Amalina
Sound Engineer: Ashwin Menon
Intro & Outro Music: Yuen Chee Wai
Cover Image & Design: Arabelle Zhuang, Kristine Tan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everything begins from small steps. That was the first thing that came through History of Merchant, a solo exhibition of Husein’s work in 2012. A small-intimate approach to his family journeys, from Hadramaut, in Middle East to South East in Indonesia. By collecting, archiving, and listening to the elders stories, the work started to build a strong foundation that led him to one project and then another project. Since that, he started to further seek and question Arabic descendants in Indonesia. The ideas go across the border between art, politics, economy, and also science. What did they do? Why are they doing that? How do they live and adapt? How they see themselves now? As Arabic-Indonesian or Indonesian-Arabic? These questions about identity, adaptation, survival, daily life culture, and also originality are evoked. While doing research for that project, Husein found stories about the transition, from Hyderabad to Singapore. These descendants were supposed to go directly to Indonesia through the Malaya Peninsula but stopped and stayed in Singapore for two years due to the critical situation that happen between British and the Dutch thus it has been said, to have developed a new community. This is the point of entry into Husein’s research for the NTU CCA Residencies Programme. The topic is simplified into three aspects: Identity, Transition, and Journeys. By using those as the main core Husein will explore the story of Arabic society in Singapore, seeking artefact and archives through the stories from the citizens.

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

Working on the expansion of global art geographies, Writer-in-Residence Mechtild Widrich has previously focused her analysis on the opening of the National Gallery Singapore. While in residence, Widrich will expand her research and connect with local artists, curators and art administrators whose work revolves around performance art and issues related to urban development and museum studies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

passthejpeg is an artist collective based in Singapore.

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

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

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

Artist Resource Platform: activate! is an ongoing project that engages with and expands upon the Artist Resource Platform, a growing collection of visual and audio materials from over 90 artists and independent art spaces. The series will negotiate with the limitations of an archive by initiating conversations and experimentations, offering the audience multiple access points to the resource materials and the artists’ practices.

This edition of Artist Resource Platform: activate! will feature three curators based in Singapore, providing a conceptual framework to understand their practices and how they are situated within the local and international contemporary art scene.

Public Programme

Artist Resource Platform: activate! I with Sidd Perez (The Philippines/Singapore), Assistant Curator, NUS Museum Wednesday, 18 May, 7.30 – 9.00pm

Artist Resource Platform: activate! II with Selene Yap (Singapore), Programme Manager (Visual Arts), The Substation Friday, 27 May, 7.30 – 9.00pm

Artist Resource Platform: activate! III with Melanie Pocock (United Kingdom/Singapore), Assistant Curator, Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, LASALLE College of the Arts Friday, 10 June, 7.30 – 9.00pm

CITIES FOR PEOPLE is the pilot edition of the annual NTU CCA Ideas Fest, a platform to catalyse critical exchange of ideas and encourage thinking “out of the box”. It is a bottom-up approach linking the artistic and academic community with grassroots initiatives. This pilot edition expands artistic interventions and engages contemporary issues such as air, water, food, environment, and social interaction in connection to artistic and cultural fields, academic research, and design applications.

The 10-day programme, coinciding with Singapore Art Week 2017 and Art After Dark at Gillman Barracks, comprises a conglomerate of performances, public installations, participatory projects and social experiment, urban farming initiatives, public dialogues, and a variety of workshops. It cumulates in a three-day summit that brings together a prominent group of architects, theorists, researchers, curators, and community groups to discuss and exchange ideas about urbanism, modes of exchange, critical spatial practice, and to envision a future city. CITIES FOR PEOPLE offers a platform to contemplate the possibilities for our shared space, reformulate our demands accordingly, and project solutions and desires for the future.

CITIES FOR PEOPLE, borrowing the title from a book by eminent Singapore architect William S. W. Lim published in 1990, expands on some of the ideas Lim developed, particularly in relation to tropical environments and recycling, as well as his call for a humanistic architecture. Organised on the occasion of the exhibition Incomplete Urbanism: Attempts at Critical Spatial Practice, this event is an invitation to share and engage in cooperative projects and collective experiences that critically reflect on current challenges in urban and social development.

Bring it to LIFE is a curatorial project that engages with NTU CCA Singapore’s Artist Resource Platform which aims to overcome the mediated experience and create direct encounters with artistic production. Structured in four different episodes, Bring it to LIFE brings to the fore artworks by Mona Vatamanu & Florin Tudor, Kray Chen, Sufian Samsiyar, and Geraldine Kang that directly engage with the subject matter of PLACE.LABOUR.CAPITAL. through themes of migration and capital transactions. In addition, it uses spatial interventions as a tool to highlight that the production of meaning is also a spatial process and our movement into a confined place impacts upon the way we relate to it and make meaning out of it.

The work of Mona Vatamanu & Florin Tudor produced during their residency at NTU CCA Singapore is conceived as a visual poem focused on the migrant workers whose individual destinies are influenced by the wider movements of capital flow. Kray Chen’s contribution is a playful installation highlighting how transactional activities such as cutting queues, getting out of a train or simply shopping are punctuating our everyday life. Sufian Samsiyar’s collaborative project tests the thin boundaries between work and life space. Geraldine Kang’s intervention into the spatial arrangement of the Platform is a proposition for another reading and way of engagement with an archive that eschews linearity and prescribed movement into the space.

Conceived by a constellation of voices from NTU CCA Singapore, Bring it to LIFE is curated by Shona Findlay, Curatorial Assistant, Residencies, Syaheedah Iskandar, Curatorial Assistant, Exhibitions, Samantha Leong, Executive, Conference, Workshops & Archive, and Kimberly Shen, Manager, Communications.

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

The Making of an Institution captures different moments in the development of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (NTU CCA Singapore) connecting artistic projects, discursive manifestations, and the institutional apparatus in a seamless display. It looks back into its young past in order to shape its future. Challenging the format of an exhibition, The Making of an Institution creates a communal space where projects and research explorations by the Centre’s Artists-, Curators-in- Residence, and Research Fellows coexist with ongoing series of talks, screenings, performances, and workshops. The project engages the Centre’s main pillars–Exhibitions, Residencies, Research and Academic Education – bringing to a close the overarching curatorial narrative Place.Labour.Capital. that served as a framework for its activities since 2013.

Established in 2013, the Centre embodies the complexity of a contemporary art institution in times of knowledge economy and global art. The role of a contemporary art institution should not be limited to the presentation of art. It feeds off and nurtures the cultural ecosystem it belongs to through a complex series of actions that often reside in the realm of the immaterial. The Centre’s inaugural programme Free Jazz addressed the foundational question “What can this institution be?” highlighting the skill of improvisation and free play. Three years later, different questions are to be raised: What could the role of the NTU CCA Singapore be for the years to come within a fast changing local, regional, and global cultural landscape? What are the criteria to evaluate its achievements and impact?

In revisiting its own process of institutional building, NTU CCA Singapore appropriates the format and language of a “public report”. While a public report is conventionally employed to deliver an official written narrative, the Centre’s report unfolds in the exhibition space through the languages of the performative, the discursive, and the archival.

“It’s amazing how far we were able to come in just three years,” said Ute Meta Bauer, Founding Director, NTU CCA Singapore. “The Making of an Institution is a celebration of the international community we have built, including scholars, artists, and the public. Now it is time for us to reflect and analyse our achievements before the exciting next steps ahead.”

The Making of an Institution is divided into four sections borrowed from the structure of a public report: Reason to Exist: The Director’s Review; Ownership, Development, and Aspirations; Artistic Research; and Communication and Mediation. The first section, Reason to Exist: The Director’s Review maps out a network of institutions, like NTU CCA Singapore, that place research at the core of their identity. Each guest director will closely examine the vision, mission, and operative model of her respective organisation in a series of talks aimed at deepening our understanding of the changing role of contemporary cultural institutions. Ownership, Development, and Aspirations is a public panel with several members of the NTU CCA Singapore’s International Advisory Board and its stakeholders representatives that stresses the importance of feedback and exchange among peers especially in the development phase of an institution. The section dedicated to Artistic Research frames the material and immaterial aspects that constitute contemporary art practices. It takes over the Centre’s physical Spaces of the Curatorial—The Exhibition Hall, The Single Screen, The Lab, and The Vitrine—juxtaposing artworks and research projects by NTU CCA Singapore’s Artists-, Curators-in- Residence, and Research Fellows alongside various formats of public programming. Finally, Communication and Mediation explores the production of an institution’s identity through visual communication and spatial practices. Through workshops and presentations, artists, architects, and designers will discuss how they create diverse visual and spatial identities for art institutions.

The public report will culminate into a book planned for publication in mid-2017, gathering the voices of all the artists, curators, researchers, and academics who have contributed to this first phase of the Centre. The Making of an Institution is curated by Ute Meta Bauer, Founding Director, Anna Lovecchio, Curator, Residencies, and Anca Rujoiu, Manager, Publications.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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