By turning to geological terrains as protagonists—understanding them as earth-building fissures, and in various cultural and spiritual traditions, as guardians—we ask how living in proximity to these terrains is shaped with, by, and at times against Earth’s processes. Beginning with Artist Ng Hui Hsien, she contemplates on photography and art installations as portals to imperceptible landforms, which enact their own agency, sustain their own microclimates, and determine what can or cannot be perceived. These landforms, in turn, animate social lives. Drawing from both previous and recent works, she also looks to the visual medium as a catalyst—a proxy for sensing forces larger than oneself, shaping perceptions, and re-establishing kinship. Professor Simon Redfern examines the crystalline structures that form beneath volcanic terrains. As a mineralogist and crystallographer, he reveals how atomic-scale mineral architectures record volcanic processes and Earth’s deep carbon cycle. Each crystal represents a frozen moment of geological time, encoding the thermal and chemical conditions of its formation. Beyond their extractive value, these minerals serve as archives of dynamic Earth systems, showing how volcanoes participate in climate regulation over deep time through both degassing and the subsequent weathering of volcanic rocks. Moderated by Professor Ute Meta Bauer, this lecture considers: How do these distinct methods offer different understandings of materiality—one grounded in lived, perceptual time, the other in Earth’s deep time—and what emerges when these temporalities are placed in conversation? The title’s allusion to Malcolm Lowry’s novel reminds us that living “under the volcano” is as much about psychological and cultural reckoning as it is about geological reality.
Tuesday Lecture
24 February 2026
6:30pm – 8:30pm
The Hall, NTU CCA Singapore
Free with registration
NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore presents Kent Chan. Three Acts of the Sun, the first solo exhibition for the Amsterdam-based artist in his home country since 2019. The exhibition captures a significant chapter of Chan’s artistic trajectory, focusing on the growing entanglement of the artist’s tropical imaginaries with the escalation of the climate crisis in recent years. Featuring a newly commissioned film, performance, and print series alongside a selection of recent works, Three Acts of the Sun gathers speculative visions on the future of our planet.
Global warming is a planetary process whose compounding complexity engenders far-reaching and profoundly interdependent consequences across ecology and society, economy and culture, politics and emotions. The exhibition charts the tension between the reality of a planet increasingly dominated by heat and Chan’s desire to imagine the tropics in the future tense. It is from this vantage point of impending change that the artist looks forward and summons worlds to come. Set in unspecified futures, the artworks included in Three Acts of the Sun envision scenarios of advanced global warming where the climate demarcations of today have dissolved into a sweeping “tropicalisation” of the Earth. Framing this climatic shift through the prism of the embodied human experience, Chan’s narratives speculate over environmental migrations, the burden of intergenerational injustice, and the hubris of technological mastery of the weather, all haunted by memories of lost climates. The exhibition serves as a portal into the speculative climate futures conjured by the artist, transporting the public into possible worlds ahead where the tales and the songs of our descendants reveal stories of human life as it unfolds on a heated planet.
The centrepiece of the exhibition is the new moving-image work, Weather Casting. Conflating prediction and actualisation, weather lore and techno-agency, divination and doom, the film builds upon the evolution of human relations to the weather from a history of reverence, adaptation, and survival towards one of technologically-empowered intervention addressing our rising ambitions for an engineerable Earth. Weather Casting delves in radical shift from forecasting the weather to casting weather into reality through geoengineering, large-scale interventions in the Earth’s climate system. A series of fictional news presenters report on geoengineered weather along the route of the Asian-Pacific monsoon—one of the largest weather systems in the world—that connects Southeast and East Asia as the two lobes of the same planetary engine. In this speculative era of ‘Tropics_Domain’, the technological mastery of the weather is enacted by AI-driven systems, that are named after ancient local deities once believed to preside over the elements and natural harmony. Programmed to clear the clouds, harness the winds, and rule over rainfall in service of human needs, these “deities” ultimately give voice to geopolitical antagonisms, environmental disruptions, and existential crises.
For this presentation, the exhibition space—situated on the verge of a secondary tropical rainforest—will relinquish its climate control, allowing Singapore’s heat and humidity to become atmospheric contributors to the exhibition. Through the deliberate immersion of the artworks in the tropical temperature they are informed by, viewers are brought to experience the core concerns of this project not just visually, sonically, and intellectually, but in the flesh of their bodies.
Three Acts of the Sun contributes to NTU CCA Singapore’s Climates.Habitats.Environments., a long-term line of inquiry aimed at a holistic understanding of this vital triangulation. Initiated in 2017, Climates.Habitats.Environments. focuses on environmentally engaged artistic practices and interdisciplinary collaborations to foster critical thinking and public awareness about the ecological complexities and the escalating climate crisis of our time.
Kent Chan. Three Acts of the Sun is curated by Dr Anna Lovecchio, Curator, NTU CCA Singapore and is part of Singapore Art Week 2026.
Part of
Supported by
Video documentation of the exhibition Kent Chan. Three Acts of the Sun, 18 January – 1 February 2026. Video by Min-Wei Ting. Courtesy NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore.
What can be learned through deep sensing of seismic vibrations and elemental disturbances to the interruptions and murmurs of toxic noise embedded in the ambient background, that stem from anthropogenic pressures such as rapid urbanisation, technological acceleration and extractivism? By using sound as an ecological indicator, how might we identify natural ecosystems in states of transformation and modification? Through site-specific field recordings and compositions, The Observatory, STAR Artists-in-Residence at NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, will chart the more-than-human sound worlds, resonating with their rhythms and registering sounds to make visible the acoustic and material properties of specific nature-culture habitats extending into biological and geological realms. Associate Professor Benoit Taisne, NTU Asian School of Environment, will elaborate on infrasound research as a method for detecting volcanic eruptions in the Southeast Asia region through the deployment of infrasound array in Singapore. This setup captures low-frequency atmospheric sounds below the threshold of human hearing, enabling the detection, analysis, and characterisation of infrasound waves caused by natural events with potential to affect Singapore and society in general. This lecture will be moderated by Professor Ute Meta Bauer, with response by Dr Hari Vishnu, Senior Research Fellow at the Acoustic Research Laboratory, NUS.
Tuesday Lecture
9 December 2025
6:30pm – 8:30pm
The Hall, NTU CCA Singapore
Free with registration
How do geological forces, local cosmologies, and policy frameworks converge and collide to shape life around an active volcano? This performative lecture by Ng Hui Hsien, STAR Artist-in-Residence, NTU CCA Singapore, and Yoonhee Jung, Senior Research Fellow, Department of History, NUS, delves into the complexities of human-environment relationships in and around Mount Batur in Bali, Indonesia. Drawing on research and lived experience, the presentation examines socio-economic shifts and the fraying of spiritual-ecological bonds intensified by the area’s designation as a UNESCO Global Geopark in 2012.
Through interwoven visual sequences, academic analysis, and textual explorations, the presenters show how artistic and scholarly perspectives diverge and intersect in interpreting this contested ground – and how Mount Batur acts as a sacred agent within local worldviews and ecologies.
Dr Aron Meltzner is a geologist by training. He is an Assistant Professor at the Asian School of the Environment and a Principal Investigator at the Earth Observatory of Singapore, at Nanyang Technological University Singapore. Dr Meltzner’s research interests lie in active tectonics, past sea level and vertical land motion, at timescales from centuries to millennia. Broadly, his work addresses fundamental questions of earthquake hazard, earthquake recurrence and repeatability, fault segmentation, fault interactions, and past sea-level change. Many of his studies involve the use of coral microatolls to infer past changes in relative sea level, which we can use in turn to infer changes in sea-surface and land height, as well as tectonic deformation. He has ongoing research using coral microatolls in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines.
This two-part programme activates the Geology Gallery as an interdisciplinary space where artistic and scientific research converge to illuminate Singapore’s ecological timescales. Science and story-telling, data and divination are engaged as complementary frameworks of knowledge to deepen our understanding of geological and ecological processes.
PART 1
Zarina Muhammad, STAR Artist-in-Residence at NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, and Aron Meltzner, Assistant Professor at NTU Asian School of the Environment and NTU Earth Observatory of Singapore, will present their research on microatolls, circular coral colonies that serve as a natural record of sea-level change. Drawing from their intersecting fieldwork at Tanjong Rimau—one of Singapore’s last remaining coastal cliffs where microatolls were recently discovered—their presentations will weave together quantitative data and ancestral narratives, and entangle scientific interpretations with memories and myths. Their combined perspectives will compose a broader reflection on how rocks, corals, and cultural stories bear witness to the dynamic relationship between land, sea, and climate across the vast expanse of deep time.
PART 2
Amuletic Diagrams for Climate Futures
Participatory workshop by Zarina Muhammad
This hands-on activity reenvisions the Geology Gallery as a living laboratory for dialogue and creative making. Participants will co-create a compass of warnings, memories, futures, and actions, drawing on EOS research into coral microatolls as records of sea-level change and Zarina Muhammad’s investigations into omens, divination, and ecological witnessing. The resulting collective compass will be an amuletic diagram—a tool for orientation across science and stories, deep time, and present urgencies. This temporary installation will serve as a map that guides us to relate differently to the sea, honour memory, and act collectively with care in the face of shifting climates.
Date: Saturday, 8 November 2025, 2:30 – 5pm
Location: Geology Gallery, Sentosa Nature Discovery
51 Imbiah Road Singapore, 099702
Located next to the Skyline Luge Singapore at Imbiah Lookout
Ecological Witnessing: Geology as Archive, Microatolls as Record is organised in collaboration with Sentosa Development Corporation.
The public programme is part of STAR Residencies – Cycle 1, a programme developed by NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore in collaboration with NTU Earth Observatory of Singapore.
The programme is free for all participants. Please note that if you wish to attend both Part 1 and Part 2, a refundable deposit of $10 is required to reserve a slot (attendance to Part 1 is required to participate in Part 2).
The deposit will be returned upon attendance of both the presentation and the workshop. To qualify for a cancellation refund, reservation must be cancelled by 5 November, 12pm.
ABOUT THE GEOLOGY GALLERY
Part of Sentosa Nature Discovery, the Geology Gallery features a display curated by NTU Earth Observatory of Singapore. Through rock samples, fossils, interactive displays, the exhibition showcases the forces that shaped Singapore’s land and coast formations demonstrating the influence of geology onto our life.
In collaboration with
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.
17 Sep 2019, Tue 06:00 PM – 08:00 PM
(Led by Professor Ute Meta Bauer, NTU ADM)
29 Oct 2019, Tue 06:00 PM – 08:00 PM
(Led by Professor Ute Meta Bauer, NTU ADM, and Dr Andreas Spiegl, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna)
The Exhibition Hall, Block 43 Malan Road
Sign up here.
During these reading sessions, participants will look at and discuss texts from books such as Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene and Rosi Braidotti’s The Posthuman. The group will explore the possibility of a critical humanity, ranging from cohabitation with other forms of life to more dystopian scenarios. This links to the Centre’s overarching research topic Climates. Habitats. Environments., which examines, among others, the precarious conditions of human habitats due to climatic shifts, and their impact on geo-political, social, and cultural systems.
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.
Decay, decomposition, weathering, rot. Landscapes eroding, architectures disintegrating, bodies breaking down, coming apart, becoming dirt. We hardly have a kinship with decay for, like dirt, decay is—in the words of anthropologist Mary Douglas—matter out-of-place in our perpetually renewing cities. Indeed, the city we are brought to inhabit and desire is built with ever-more weatherproof architectures, with cosmetic treatments that maintain the hardness of the buildings and the smoothness of their surfaces impervious to the traces of Nature’s time. In waterfront cities, which novelist Amitav Ghosh regards as a showcase of architectural mastery over the unruly environment, the cartography of terrestrial edges continues to reinforce the separation of interiorised human-made worlds from exteriorised more-than-human environment. Seen through the lens of the city, the design of the future Earth aspires to be atemporal. And like so many transient and shifting environments stilled in human projections of the Earth (from maps to masterplans), the “unweathered” city must thrive outside of time, devoid of stains and discolouration. But does the city have to be in an anxious race against Nature’s time?
Created and led by Superlative Futures, Drawing Dialogues: Stories of Decay is a workshop for re-attuning our urban selves to Nature’s time. The programme focuses on rethinking the place of decay in the wellbeing of cities and on re-presenting stories of decay as matters of care. The workshop will start off with a walk in the Berlayer Creek—a rare remnant of Singapore’s mangrove histories once denigrated as a place of dankness and disease—where participants will be led to uncover stories of decay and gather thoughts and materials of decomposition. The second part of the workshop will take place at NTU CCA Singapore where, drawing and dialoguing with decay, participants will be guided to create their own narratives and landscapes of decay culminating in a collaborative artwork. Expanding on Superlative Futures’ speculative design research on new ecological practices for weathering the future city, this workshop marks the beginning of a propositional archive—A Cartography of Decay—that charts different relationships between decay and the city.
This event is a public programme created in response to the exhibition Design Earth: Speculative Fiction for the Climate, on view by appointment at NTU ADM Gallery 2 until 15 August 2025.
This special issue strings together authorial perspectives from across disciplines and geographies that are concerned with topics at the nexus of the climate crisis and the links to cultural loss. This issue points to the needed legal approaches within the wider context of the Pacific. Writers include researcher Jake Atienza, artist Stefano Cagol, art critic and curator Maria Chiara Wang, law scholar Johanna Gussman, researcher Shabana Khan, climate advisor Renard Siew, computer scientist Nova Ahmad, and artist-activist Yoon Sun Woo.
Edited by Professor Nabil Ahmed, Professor Ute Meta Bauer, and Dr Herve Raimana Lallemant-Moe, assisted by Research Fellow Dr Adha Shaleh.
We thank the Editors-in-Chief Sage Yves-Louis and Tony Angelo.
This special issue is supported by the MOE AcRF Tier 2 Award, led by Principal Investigator Professor Ute Meta Bauer, with Research Associate Soh Kay Min, Research Assistant Ng Mei Hia, and Research Fellow Dr Adha Shaleh.
Journal on handwoven pandanus mat gifted by Further Arts, Vanuatu.
How might the architectural imagination make sense of the Earth at a moment in which the planet is presented in crisis? For Design Earth, imagination fuels the production of stories and images that come together as geographically situated speculations—neither documentary nor completely fictional.
Today we live in an epoch shaped by extensive shifts in industrialization, with environmental risks and destruction felt at a planetary scale. Paradoxically, while the threats are serious, we remain little mobilized—in part because of the “abysmal distance between our little selfish human worries and the great questions of ecology.”[1] If we are worried once again that the sky may be falling on our heads, how is it that we have done so little about it? In this light, the environmental crisis can be seen not only as a crisis of the physical and technological environments; it is also a crisis of the cultural environment—of the modes of representation through which society relates to the complexity of environmental systems.
Design Earth: Speculative Fiction for the Climate springs from the conviction that climate change demands urgent transformations in the ways we care for and design the Earth, moving away from a visual rhetoric of crisis that aestheticizes calamity. Design Earth, a research practice founded and led by Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy engages the medium of the speculative architectural project to make public the climate crisis. Their design research brings together spatial history, geographic representation, projective design, and material public assemblies to speculate on ways of living with legacy technologies on a damaged planet. This work is developed simultaneously through the medium of drawing and the creation of books, two of which are excerpted and put in conversation in this art exhibition.
The first book, Geostories: Another Architecture for the Environment (Actar Publishers, 2018), is a manifesto for environmental imagination in twelve architectural projects engaging the planetary scale through drawing divided by the organising principles of Aquarium, Terrarium, and Planetarium. This exhibition highlights three chapters from the larger work, each addressing a planetary common as matter of concern – the atmosphere, deep seabed, outer space: After Oil (2016), Pacific Aquarium (2016), and Cosmorama (2018). It examines geographies of extractive technological systems, foregrounding externalities as political concerns for architecture. Geographic portraits employing axonometry, sections, and split-level views describe the political and ethical implications of our ecological actions while speculating on survival and adaptation strategies that invite us to make sense of the Earth envision it in ways that generate inquisitive, delightful, and potentially subversive responses.
The second book, The Planet After Geoengineering (Actar Publishers, 2021) is a graphic novel which imagines the worlds of climate modification technologies and their controversies. It thinks with and against geoengineering – technologies that counteract the effects of anthropogenic climate change by deliberately intervening in Earth systems as a form of planetary management. In five chapters, The Planet After Geoengineering assembles a planetary section that cuts through the underground, crust, atmosphere, and outer space. Each geostory— Petrified Carbon, Arctic Albedo, Sky River, Sulfur Storm, and Dust Cloud—depicts possible future Earths that we come to inhabit on the heels of a geoengineering intervention all while situating such promissory visions within a genealogy of climate-control projects from nineteenth-century rainmaking machines and volcanic eruptions to
Cold War military plans.
Together these projects help us begin to address the open question of how (else) could we tell the story of the Earth? Beyond the binaries of the preservation of a Blue Marble and the promises of technological solutionism, what geostories can we imagine or envision?
[1] Laura Collins-Hughes, “A Potential Disaster in Any Language: ‘Gaïa Global Circus’ at the Kitchen,” New York Times, September 25, 2014.
Design Earth: Speculative Fiction for the Climate is co-organised by NTU Centre for Contemporary Art and ADM Gallery
OPENING RECEPTION
Friday, 25 April 2025
6:30 – 8:30 pm
VENUE
ADM Gallery 2
NTU School of Art, Design and Media
81 Nanyang Dr, Singapore 637458
DATES
28 April to 13 June 2025
Open by appointment from 14 June to 15 August 2025
GALLERY HOURS
Monday to Friday: 10:00am to 5:00pm
Saturday: By appointment only
*Closed on Sunday and Public Holidays
ADMgallery@ntu.edu.sg
Public Programmes
Join DESIGN EARTH co-founders and co-directors Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy for their first presentation in Singapore, where they will share insights into their collaborative research practice centred on the speculative architectural project as a mode of making the climate crisis public. Their design research brings together spatial history, geographic representation, projective design, and material public assemblies to speculate on ways of living with legacy technologies on a damaged planet. Recipients of the United States Artist Fellowship and the Architectural League Prize for Young Architects and Designers, among other honors, Ghosn and Jazairy have made a practice of telling complex and unwieldy stories of the Earth. Learn more about their ongoing explorations of visual and spatial storytelling.
Friday, 13 June 2025, 6:30 pm – 8:30 pm
The Hall, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore
6 Lock Rd, #01-09/10 Gillman Barracks 108934
DESIGN EARTH Workshop: Elephant in the Room and Other Creatures
DESIGN EARTH‘s latest project is a series of fables that addresses the elephant in the room—the climate crisis—by animating charismatic figures from natural history museums. This design research identifies and leverages figures from the collections all while unsettling the museum apparatus—the devices, archives, histories, and audiences. Some such figures include a taxidermy of an African matriarch elephant, the skeleton of a stranded blue whale, and a composite structure of a Diplodocuscarnegii. The fragmentary remains of such creatures are animated, brought back to life, so to speak in rhyming verse, colorful imagery, and with some poignant humor. These speculative afterlives stir up potent trouble on the breath-taking capture of life in the Anthropocene to ask how cultural institutions may be responsible to calls for decolonisation and decarbonisation. In Singapore, this hands-on, participatory workshop will focus on the cultural prehistory, present, and speculative futures of the Singapore saltwater (estuarine) crocodile and the Malayan tiger. Facilitated by Rania Ghosn, El Hadi Jazairy, and DESIGN EARTH team member Kelly Koh. Beginning with the Artist Talk on 13 June, participants will engage in DESIGN EARTH creative methodologies including site visits and the building of a research archive while looking into the facts and fictions of these creatures and their homes.
13 – 19 June 2025
The Hall, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore
6 Lock Rd, #01-09/10 Gillman Barracks 108934
Curator’s Exhibition (de)Tour
Join NTU CCA Singapore Director Karin G. Oen for a closer look at the collaborative practice of DESIGN EARTH, including drawing, writing, animation, and sound components of Design Earth: Speculative Fiction for the Climate. Explore the research and influences that comprise these multi-layered artworks, from the terrestrial principles of geoengineering and petroleum geology, to the supranational domains of the deep seabeds and outer space. Highlighting the long traditions of poetry, science fiction, and image creation that help us to conceptualise these realms, we will consider what it means to tell the stories of the earth, and to live with unsightly “externalities.”
Saturday, 17 May 2025
11:00 am – 12:00 pm
ADM Gallery 2
NTU School of Art, Design and Media
81 Nanyang Dr, Singapore 637458
Student-Led Exhibition (de)Tour
Join Vaishnavi Peddapalli, NTU School of Humanities Class of 2025, for a student-led (de)tour of Design Earth: Speculative Fiction for the Climate that will explore how speculative fiction can reconsider Southeast Asian geographical catastrophes borne from human intervention. Considering localised discourse around climate change and its impact on younger generations, this experience provides space for speculation for our planet’s future.
Saturday, 31 May 2025
11:00 am – 12:00 pm
ADM Gallery 2
NTU School of Art, Design and Media
81 Nanyang Dr, Singapore 637458
Come walk, draw, and speculate. Drawing as a visual and creative practice can also be a tool for scientific inquiry and speculation. Plotting detailed lines can help process the larger picture of the distanced and abstracted planet crisis. Inspired by the exhibition, Design Earth: Speculative Fiction for the Climate, this drawing club invites artists, architects, designers, and students to probe how architectural drawings can unearth the more inconspicuous matters of climate change. Facilitated by Eunice Lacaste, Programme Associate, NTU CCA Singapore.
This Drawing Club invites artists, architects, designers, and students to present their annotated sketches at the NTU ADM Foyer from July to August 2025.
No technical drawing experience needed—just a willingness to trace complexity. Participants are encouraged to bring dry drawing media (markers, found images, etc) and reading references (articles, books, etc) to share, annotate, and get inspiration from during the session.
Saturday, 24 May 2025
3:00 pm – 5:00 pm
ADM Gallery 2
NTU School of Art, Design and Media
81 Nanyang Dr, Singapore 637458
Decay, decomposition, weathering, rot. Landscapes eroding, architectures disintegrating, bodies breaking down, coming apart, becoming dirt. We hardly have a kinship with decay for, like dirt, decay is—in the words of anthropologist Mary Douglas—matter out-of-place in our perpetually renewing cities. Indeed, the city we are brought to inhabit and desire is built with ever-more weatherproof architectures, with cosmetic treatments that maintain the hardness of the buildings and the smoothness of their surfaces impervious to the traces of Nature’s time. In waterfront cities, which novelist Amitav Ghosh regards as a showcase of architectural mastery over the unruly environment, the cartography of terrestrial edges continues to reinforce the separation of interiorised human-made worlds from exteriorised more-than-human environment. Seen through the lens of the city, the design of the future Earth aspires to be atemporal. And like so many transient and shifting environments stilled in human projections of the Earth (from maps to masterplans), the “unweathered” city must thrive outside of time, devoid of stains and discolouration. But does the city have to be in an anxious race against Nature’s time?
Created and led by Superlative Futures, Drawing Dialogues: Stories of Decay is a workshop for re-attuning our urban selves to Nature’s time. The programme focuses on rethinking the place of decay in the wellbeing of cities and on re-presenting stories of decay as matters of care. The workshop will start off with a walk in the Berlayer Creek—a rare remnant of Singapore’s mangrove histories once denigrated as a place of dankness and disease—where participants will be led to uncover stories of decay and gather thoughts and materials of decomposition. The second part of the workshop will take place at NTU CCA Singapore where, drawing and dialoguing with decay, participants will be guided to create their own narratives and landscapes of decay culminating in a collaborative artwork. Expanding on Superlative Futures’ speculative design research on new ecological practices for weathering the future city, this workshop marks the beginning of a propositional archive—A Cartography of Decay—that charts different relationships between decay and the city.
It is recommended to bring water, sunblock, umbrella, mosquito repellent, and notetaking materials (e.g. pencil/pen and paper). This is a rain or shine event.
This event is a public programme created in response to the exhibition Design Earth: Speculative Fiction for the Climate, on view by appointment at NTU ADM Gallery 2 until 15 August 2025.
This programme is free with registration. Limited capacity.
Workshop Schedule
9:00 – 10:00am
Meet at Labrador Park MRT, Exit A
Move as a group to Berlayer Creek
10:30am – 12:00pm
Drawing session at The Hall, NTU CCA Singapore
This workshop will revolve around The Planet After Geoengineering(2021), a graphic animation by Design Earth, where planetary imaginaries unfold through narrative fragments and visual speculation. Responding to the animation, participants will be prompted to ponder over climate change, environmental design, and planetary care and compose letters and/or postcards from a future Earth. In creating memories of futures yet to be experienced, participants are asked to time-travel into future climates and channel perspectives from the human and other-than-human inhabitants of the Earth to come. The workshop will culminate in a final sharing session where participants will be invited to present their pieces, exchange insights, and reflect on the power of storytelling. In closing, the group will consider how such narratives might shape our actions in the present.
The workshop seeks to make the immediacy of climate change tangible, not only intellectually, but also emotionally by foregrounding personal visions and speculative storytelling with letters serving as intimate vessels for messages of loss, change, and resilience.
We welcome the general public as well as creatives, artists, writers, architects, designers, students, and everyone interested in the topic of climate change. Suitable for all writing skill levels.
This workshop is facilitated by Leila Vignozzi, Intern, NTU CCA Singapore.
Saturday, 5 July 2025
2:00 – 4:00pm
The Hall, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore
6 Lock Rd, #01-09/10 Gillman Barracks 108934
Inspired by Cosmorama (2018), one of four sections in the exhibition Design Earth: Speculative Fiction for the Climate, this third Drawing Club invites artists, architects, designers, and students to respond to the geostories of asteroid mining, orbital debris, and climate refuge in the age of the “New Space.”
The workshop zooms in on architectural drawing as practice to examine planetary issues such as satellite debris and airspace conflicts, that may seem distant from us. Participants will trace the macrocosmic consequences of extractive economies and of their politics beyond Singapore, and beyond the Earth itself, launching critical conversations into speculative drawings.
The annotated sketches produced during the workshop will be displayed at the NTU ADM Foyer until 13 August 2025, alongside the works produced at the previous Drawing Club.
Participants are encouraged to bring dry drawing media (markers, found images, etc) and reading references (articles, books, etc) to share, annotate, and get inspiration from during the session. No technical drawing experience needed.
This workshop is facilitated by Eunice Lacaste, Programmes Associate, NTU CCA Singapore.
Thursday, 7 August 2025. 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm
ADM Gallery 2
NTU School of Art, Design and Media
81 Nanyang Dr, Singapore 637458
Lecture & Screening of Kimi Takesue’s film That Which Once Was (2011)
Low-lying islands, including Singapore, are increasingly exposed to the risks of sea level rise caused by multiple factors, including the rapid melting of ice at the two poles. This event explores the diverse impacts of climate change, such as displacement. In Kimi Takesue’s fictional film, That Which Once Was, that takes place in 2032, an eight-year old boy from the Caribbean, is coming to terms with a new life in a harsh northern climate. Haunted by memories of the flooding that left him homeless and orphaned, he forms a bond with an Inuk ice carver, likewise displaced, who helps him confront his past. Kim Hie Lim (Associate Professor, Asian School of Environment, and Singapore Centre for Environmental Life Sciences Engineering) will introduce the history of forced migration, already caused by rising sea levels, overlaying data on physical landscapes with genomic data in order to trace gene flow from Southeast Asia to South Asia. Followed by a conversation between film director Kimi Takesue, Assistant Professor Kim Hie Lim and Professor Ute Meta Bauer (Professor, School of Art, Design, and Media, Nanyang Technological University and Senior Principal Research Fellow, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore).
Tuesday, 18 March 2025
6:30pm – 8:30pm
The Hall, NTU CCA Singapore
Free admission. Register here.
This event is part of The Cross-Cultural Gaze: A Retrospective of Kimi Takesue’s Films curated by Dr Ella Raidel (Assistant Professor, School of Art, Design and Media, NTU) with the support of NTU CCA Singapore and Women@NTU.
Kimi Takesue’s retrospective is a special segment of the programme Look / See: The Female Gaze in Cinema (7 – 30 March 2025) organised by Asia Film Archive to celebrate International Women’s Day.
Find out about Kimi Takesue’s other talks and screenings through the link below.
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.
Yan Jun (China) and Yuen Chee Wai (Singapore)
Time is still and we are in revolution
Live performance streamed through LCD screens, approx. 30 min.
Saturday, 16 September 2023
3:30pm – 4:15pm
NTU CCA Singapore Seminar Room
37 Malan Road, #01-04
Singapore 109452
Performance will start on time.
Admission is free on a first-come first-served basis.
Isn’t there a paradox in any revolution in that they circle back as they move forward? A revolving disc spins the two performers, together with their respective environments and audiences, at the same speed across vast geopolitical distances: an apartment in Bejing (Yan Jun) and former military barracks converted into artist studios in Singapore (Yuen Chee Wai). Set in a mysterious code, Time is still and we are in revolution is an experiment in remote improvisation made of electronics and vocals, cyclical contacts and recurring departures.
Time is still and we are in revolution results from an experimental working methodology developed by Yan Jun and Yuen Chee Wai. The first outcome of this ongoing collaboration, The Riddle of the Machine, was presented at the Trans-Southeast Asia Triennial Research Exhibition Series Review, Guangzhou, China, earlier in 2023.
BIOGRAPHIES
Yuen Chee Wai (Singapore) is a musician, artist, designer, and curator. Often inspired by perspectives glimpsed through the filmic eye and photographic lens, Yuen’s stylistic oeuvre in improvised music is marked by internalised reflections on memory and loss, invisibility and indeterminacy. His latest research interests are in mycology and caves. In 2008, together with Otomo Yoshihide (Japan), Ryu Hankil (South Korea), and Yan Jun (China), he formed FEN (Far East Network), an improvised music unit focusing on the multifaceted networks and collaborations between musicians and artists in Asian countries. He is also a member of The Observatory, in which he plays guitar, synth, and electronics. He tours extensively with FEN and The Observatory, and has presented at MIMI Festival, Lausanne Underground Music and Film Festival, All Ears Festival, Ftarri Festival, Gwangju Biennale and CTM Festival. Yuen was an Artist-in-Residence with NTU CCA Singapore in Cycle 8.
Yan Jun (China) is a musician and poet based in Beijing. His works involve electronics, feedback, site-specific installations, and noise. His improvisation sets follow the unstable relationship between microphones, speakers, the space and his body movement, to create subtle and unstable sound. He is a member of FEN (FarEastNetwork), Tea Rockers Quintet and Impro Committee, and has toured in the US, Australia, Europe and Asia. He has performed at Shanghai Biennale and received an honorary mention by Ars Electronica (Austria), and is the founder of Sub Jam label/organization. As a writer he has published and translated several books and poetry collections and attended the Rotterdam International Poetry Festival, and Berlin International Poetry Festival. Yan Jun was an Artist-in-Residence with NTU CCA Singapore in Cycle 2.
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.
The research-driven conceptual practice of Anthony Chin (b. 1969, Singapore) grows out of site-specific engagements with the historical, social, and architectural stratifications of a place. Through the articulation of ordinary materials into poetic installations, his work unravel the latent power structures and complex geopolitical narratives that undergird the colonial past and the post-colonial present. He has regularly presented his work in Singapore and abroad. His recent solo exhibitions include S$1,996/- S$831.06/-, Comma Space, Singapore (2021); TROPHY, Metropolitan Museum of Manila, Philippines (2020); and Western Pacific, Mo Shang Experiment, Beijing, China (2016). Among the group exhibitions are SAM Contemporaries: Residues & Remixes, Singapore Art Museum, Singapore (2023); For the House; Against the House, Gillman Barracks, Singapore (2022); Concept 88, Comma Space, Singapore (2022); three editions of OH! Open House, amongst others. Anthony has previously taken part in other residency programmes such as National NAC-MET international Artist Residency, Manila, Philippines (2020) and Taipei International Artists Residency season 4, Taiwan (2018).
Dr. Yanyun Chen (b. 1986, Singapore) is a visual artist who works across drawings, new media, and installation. Her artistic practice unravels fictional and philosophical notions of embodiment exploring how heritage and legacies are grounded in the physicality of human and botanical forms. Her solo exhibitions include Stories of a Woman and Her Dowry, Grey Projects, Singapore (2019) and Scars that write us, part of the President’s Young Talents 2018, Singapore Art Museum (2018). She has participated in group exhibitions such as While She Quivers, Objectifs – Centre for Photography and Film, Singapore (2021); Thailand Biennale, Korat 2021 (2021); Clouds: The 6th International Exhibition on New Media Art 2020, CICA Museum, South Korea (2020); Fiction Non Fiction, Cultural Affairs Bureau, Macau (2019); 2291: Futures Imagined, Art Science Museum, Singapore (2019) among others. Yanyun has received the Young Artist Award in 2020 and the IMPART Art Prize in 2019. Her works were also awarded the Prague International Indie Film Festival Q3 Best Animation Award (2020), National Youth Film Awards Best Art Direction Award (2019), Singapore Art Museum President’s Young Talents People’s Choice Award (2018), and the Lee Kuan Yew Gold Medal Award (2009).
Han Nefkens Foundation – Fundació Antoni Tàpies Video Art Production Award
Tekla Aslanishvili
A State in A State
11 Oct 2022, Tue – 6 Nov 2022, Sun
The Screening Room, Block 38 Malan Road, #01-06
12 pm – 7pm, every day except Monday
Film starts every hour
Premier Screening: Tuesday 11 October, 7:00pm-8:30pm
The screening will be followed by a conversation between the artist Tekla Aslanishvili, artistic-scientific collaborator Dr. Evelina Gambino and Assistant Professor Dr. Marc Gloede, School of Art, Design and Media, NTU, Singapore.
The welcome will be given by Ute Meta Bauer, Professor, School of Art, Design and Media, and Founding Director, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, and Dr. Karin Oen, Senior Lecturer and Head of Department, Art History, NTU School of Humanities.
A State in a State is the result of Aslanishvili winning the Han Nefkens Foundation – Fundació Antoni Tàpies Video Art Production Grant 2020, in collaboration with Jameel Art Centre, Dubai; the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design in Manila; NTU CCA Singapore and WIELS, Brussels. The Award appraises the work of emerging artists aged 40 and under, who live in West or Central Asia and have established a solid trajectory but not yet received recognition by international art institutions.
Aslanishvili was selected by an international jury, including NTU CCA Singapore’s Founding Director Ute Meta Bauer and former Deputy Director of Curatorial Programmes, Dr Karin Oen, for her body of meticulously researched work and her commitment to exploring a specific geopolitical context, whilst connecting to a wider discourse on the impact of extractivist economies on a planetary scale.
A State in a State is an experimental documentary following the construction, disruption, and fragmentation of railroads in the South Caucasus and Caspian regions. It examines railways as a technical materialisation of the fragile political borders that have re-emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Revolving around the scenes of delay and waiting that constitute cargo mobility, the film reads the optimistic narratives about the New Silk Road against the grain. It observes how the iron foundation of connectivity can be used as a weapon of exclusion and geopolitical sabotage. Dotting the same lines, other forms of sabotage are deployed by workers to disrupt the political violence. Looking at historic and current practices of resistance, A State in a State explores the potential of railroads for building a different, infrastructural consciousness, and the lasting transnational kinship among the people who live and work around them
The film is developed in artistic-scientific collaboration with Dr. Evelina Gambino, Margaret Tyler Research Fellow in Geography at Girton College, University of Cambridge.
Research & Script: Tekla Aslanishvili / Evelina Gambino
Music: Ani Zakareishvili / Nika Pasuri
Cinematography: Nikoloz Tabukashvili / Tekla Aslanishvili
Typography: Dato Simonia
Editing: Tekla Aslanishvili
Sound: Viktor Bone / Irakli Shonia
Color: Sally Shamas
A State in a State will be also presented at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona from October 8th till November 27th.
BIOGRAPHY
Tekla Aslanishvili (b. Tbilisi, 1988) is an artist, filmmaker and essayist based between Berlin and Tbilisi. Her works emerge at the intersection of infrastructural design, history and geopolitics. Tekla graduated from the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts in 2009 and she holds a MFA from the Berlin University of the Arts – the department of Experimental Film and New Media Art. Aslanishvili’s films have been screened and exhibited internationally at PACT Zollverein, Neue Berliner Kunstverein, Baltic Triennial, Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Kasseler Dokfest, Kunsthalle Münster, EMAF – European Media Art Festival, Videonale 18, Tbilisi Architecture Biennial. She is a 2018–2019 Digital Earth fellow, the nominee for Ars-Viva Art prize 2021 and the recipient of the Han Nefkens Foundation – Fundació Antoni Tàpies Video Art Production Award 2020.
Marc Glöde (PhD), is a curator, critic and film scholar. His work is focusing on the relation of images, technology, space, and the body, as well as the dynamics between fields such as art/architecture, art/film, and film/architecture. Since 2017 he is an Assistant Professor at NTU/ADM, Singapore and Co-Director of the MA in Museum Studies and Curatorial Practices.
About Han Nefkens Foundation
The Han Nefkens Foundation was established in 2009 with the aim of connecting people through art. In 2016, Han Nefkens decided to focus exclusively on supporting emerging and mid-career international video artists through Awards, Production Grants, and Mentorship Grants. The Foundation is not only involved in producing new works with the artists, but also finding international residencies, producing publications, purchasing working tools, finding technical support, and bringing artists into contact with art institutions and peers. With an extensive network in countries such as Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Korea, Ecuador, Peru, Spain, and the Netherlands, the Foundation is able to present artists to a diverse and global audience.
Judging Panel
The winner has been selected by a judging panel chaired by Han Nefkens, Founder of the Han Nefkens Foundation; Carles Guerra, representing the Fundació Antoni Tàpies; Ute Meta Bauer, Founding Director of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art; Dirk Snauwaert, Director of WIELS; Joselina Cruz, Director/Curator at Museum of Contemporary Art and Design and Nora Razian, Head of Exhibitions at Jameel Arts Centre, in the presence of Hilde Teerlinck, Director of the Han Nefkens Foundation; Alessandra Biscaro, Coordinator of the Han Nefkens Foundation; Zoë Gray: Senior Curator of WIELS and Karin Oen, Deputy Director, Curatorial Programmes at NTU Centre for Contemporary Art.
Image Credits
Tekla Aslanishvili
A State in A State, 2022
Colour, black and white, AVCHD Digital film; archival & found footage, sound, 47 min.
video still
Commissioned by Han Nefkens Foundation – Fundació Antoni Tàpies Video Art Production Award
Courtesy the Artist
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.
Spanning moving image, sculpture, as well as performative installations, Priyageetha Dia (b. 1992, Singapore) addresses identity politics by questioning dominant narratives and socio-spatial relations. In the past few years, her practice has been consistently experimenting with a variety of world-making gestures that envision alternative futures. Her works have been part of several group exhibitions including, Attention Seeker, La Trobe Art Institute, Bendigo, Australia (2022); An Exercise of Meaning in a Glitch Season, National Gallery Singapore (2020); 2219: Futures Imagined, ArtScience Museum Singapore (2019). She was a recipient of the IMPART Art Award in 2019.
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.
Antariksa (b. 1975, Indonesia) is a researcher and co-founding member of KUNCI Cultural Studies Center, Yogyakarta, Indonesia. He has conducted research about Indonesian art, culture and history and is author of Tuan Tanah Kawin Muda: Hubungan Seni Rupa-LEKRA 1950–1965(The Linkage Between the Arts and the Institute of People‚ Culture in Indonesia 1950‚1965) (2005). He is currently working on his new book, Art Collectivism in Japanese-Occupied Indonesia.
Working across video, sound, and installation, Martha Atienza (b. 1981, Philippines) explores a wide range of physical, sociological, and emotional connections with water focusing on the environment as well as the communities of her hometown Bantayan Island, situated in the northwestern end of Cebu. These observations have culminated into immersive installations and socially engaged projects that delve into economic, social, and environmental issues tackling the notion of vulnerability while also questioning the role of art as a tool for change. Recent exhibitions include Singapore Biennale (2016); Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland, Australia (2016); Sharjah Biennale, United Arab Emirates (2013). She was most recently the recipient of the 19th Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel Statement 2017.
University of the Arts London is a collegiate university in London, England, specialising in arts, design, fashion and the performing arts.
