Brigitte Oetker was a Professor for Creative Processes at KMM, Institut für Kultur- und Medienmanagement, Hamburg, Germany, from 2008 to 2016. She has been the editor of Jahresring—Annual of Fine Arts since 1989. Since 1988 she has been a member of the board of Villa Romana Residency in Florence, which gives grants to young artists, and assumed the mantle of chairwoman from 2019. She also serves on the board of the Friends of the German Pavilion of the Biennale di Venezia. She is a member of the International Council of MoMA, New York and of the International Council of Centre Pompidou, Paris.

Cally Spooner is an artist based in Athens. Her installations unfold in evolutionary phases, in conjunction with the delivery of a project or an exhibition. Recent solo shows include Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève; Whitechapel Gallery, London; The New Museum, New York; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Her book Scripts was published by Slimvolume in 2016 and her novel Collapsing In Parts by Mousse in 2012.

Calvin Chua is an architect, urbanist, and educator. He leads Spatial Anatomy, a firm that designs spaces, objects, and strategies for cities. In parallel, he serves as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Singapore University of Technology and Design, leading seminars and design studios on adaptation and urban regeneration. He is recognised as one of the leading voices on Korean peninsula issues. For the past eight years, Chua has piloted capacity-building programmes and urban advisory work in the DPRK. His works and opinions have been featured in various news media, including Monocle, Reuters, and CNN. Prior to founding his practice, Chua worked for various architecture and urban-planning firms in Europe and Asia. A registered architect in the UK, he graduated from the Architectural Association School of Architecture.

Carles Guerra is an artist, art critic and independent curator based in Barcelona. He was the Chief Curator at MACBA (2011-2013) and Director of La Virreina Centre de la Imatge (2009-2011). Guerra is currently an associate professor at the Universitat PompeuFabra. In 2011, he was awarded the Ciutat de Barcelona Prize for his contribution in the field of visual arts. He is currently the member of the editorial board at Cultura/s since 2001 where he authored numerous essays, N for Negri (2000), Allan Sekula speaks with Carles Guerra (2005) and Negatives of Europe. Video Essays and Collective Pedagogies (2008).

The Center for Contemporary Art, CCA Kitakyushu is an institute for research and study, subsidised by the City of Kitakyushu, Japan, established in May 1997.

Cecilia Tortajada (Mexico and Spain/Singapore), Senior Research Fellow, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore (NUS). The main focus of her work at present is on the future of the world’s water, especially in terms of water, food, energy and environmental securities through coordinated policies. Tortajada has been an advisor to major international institutions including the United Nations Development Programme, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Canada International Development Research Centre, World Bank, and Asian Development Bank. She is a member of the OECD Initiative in Water Governance, and she was previously President of the International Water Resources Association and also the Third World Centre for Water Management in Mexico

Charmaine Toh is currently Curator at National Gallery Singapore where she researches on contemporary art and photography from Southeast Asia. Recent exhibitions includ Danh Vo, Earth Work 1979 (2016) and Siapa Namu Kamu?: Art in Singapore since the 19th century (2015–). Previously, she was the Programme Director at Objectifs Centre for Photography and Film. Toh was one of the curators for the Singapore Biennale 2013 an the i Light Festival 2012, and founder of The Art Incubator, a residency programme that ran from 2009 to 2014.

Wong Chen-Hsi (Singapore) is a filmaker and educator. Her debut feature film, Innocents (2012), won Best Director -New Talents Award at the Shanghai International Film Festival. Wong’s short films include Who Loves the Sun (2006), which premiered at Clermont-Ferrand, and the documentary short Conversations on Sago Lane (2010). She is an alumna of the Berlin Talents, the Torino Film Lab, and a Film Independent Los Angeles fellow. Wong’s films are often about displacement and the nature of our environment. She is an Assistant Professor in Film at the School of Art, Design and Media Nanyang Technological University.

Chomchon Fusinpaiboon, PhD, is a lecturer at the Faculty of Architecture, Chulalongkorn University, and a practising architect. His research interests cover modern and contemporary architecture in Asia. His doctoral dissertation examines how a modern architectural culture was established in Thailand, and how it transformed traditional ideas of architecture and vice versa. His published and ongoing works include studies on unconventional works of Thai architect Prince Vodhyakara Varavarn, who reinterpreted English arts and crafts philosophy to adapt to modern Thai architecture of both the pre-war and the post-war periods, and the establishment of Thailand’s first architecture school that involved a Belgian architect and Chinese migrants. Currently he is doing design research on the shophouse, a non-pedigree modern architecture that played a major role in the urbanisation of Thailand during the 1960s and 1970s, questioning its legacy and its future in relation to contemporary architectural practice and urban issues.

Christina Leigh Geros (United States/Indonesia) is a Design Research Strategist at PetaBencana.id, Jakarta, Indonesia.

Christoph Knoth is a graphic designer, teacher, web developer and researcher who focuses on digital typography and the Internet as a platform for experimenting with visual language. In 2012 he was a design researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, Netherlands, with the project Computed Type which explores the historic and future possibilities of parametric typeface generation. Since 2011 he works together with Konrad Renner and he is currently a guest researcher at the Bauhaus University Weimar, Germany. He collaborated with various artists and art institutions and worked on the websites of Casco — Office for Art, Design and Theory Utrecht, Netherlands, Schauspiel Stuttgart, Germany, and the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2015 amongst others.

Chung Chee Kit graduated in Naval Architecture from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom. His career with Keppel Corporation, Straits Steamship and IMC Shipping brought him into contact with ship repair, shipbuilding, offshore engineering, ship management and port development, and he has developed a deep love for all things connected with the sea and ships. Currently retired, he now enjoys painting maritime subjects, and is an advocate of a greater appreciation of maritime heritage in Singapore.

Conrad H. Philipp (Germany/Singapore), Future Cities Laboratory, Singapore-ETH Centre

Constance Singam (Singapore) is an author and civil society activist.

Tan Dan Feng (Singapore) is the Director of Asian Urban Lab, Singapore.

Dr David Teh is Assistant Professor, Department of English Language and Literature at National University of Singapore. He is also a writer, curator, art advisor, and researcher specialising in SoutheastAsian contemporary art. Before moving to Singapore, he worked as an independent curator and critic in Bangkok (2005-2009), and has since realised projects in Germany, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore. His writings have appeared in Third Text, Afterall, LEAP Magazine, Art Asia Pacific, artforum.com and The Bangkok Post. His new book on Thai contemporary art will be published in 2017 by MIT Press.

Dinu Bodiciu is a fashion and accessories designer currently teaching Fashion Design in Singapore at LASALLE College of the Arts. His designs are conceptualised as extensions of the human body, tackling aspects situated at the border between dress and skin. His projects include collaborations with Lady Gaga, Hunger Games ep3&4, KCPK, while his designs have been featured in various fashion and design magazines and specialist books published around the world.

Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez is an Associate Professor of the University of the Philippines Diliman Department of Art Studies. Currently working within UP’s Doctorate in Social Development program in line with long-term research on site-specific community art initiatives across the Philippines, she continues to work across the fields of criticism and art history. She presently serves as editorial collective member of the journal Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia.

Dr Elizabeth A. Povinelli is an anthropologist, writer, and filmmaker. In her writing and film work, she developed a critical theory of late liberalism that supports an anthropology of the otherwise. She was previously the editor of Public Culture and has published widely, including Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (2016), Economies of Abandonment (2011), and The Empire of Love (2006). She is a founding member of the Karrabing Film Collective. Povinelli is the Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University, New York.

Ella Raidel, Ph.D., is a filmmaker, artist and researcher. Since April 2019 she is Assistant Professor at NTU Singapore at ADM School of Art, Design and Media and WKWSCI School of Communication and Information.

Dr Etienne Turpin is a philosopher, research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and founding director of anexact office in Jakarta, Indonesia. He is principal co-investigator of the exhibition-led inquiry Reassembling the Natural and co-editor of the intercalations: paginated exhibition series. In 2016, he was Visiting Research Fellow at NTU CCA Singapore where he continued his research on the role of urban labs, maker spaces, and hacker collectives in the context of urbanisation in Asia.

Research Focus

Fellowship period: 1 June – 31 December 2016

During his residency, Dr Etienne Turpin will be researching the role of urban labs, maker spaces, and hacker collectives, in the context of South and Southeast Asian urbanisation. His work will help to develop the Urban Lab Network Asia, simultaneously investigating the work of urban labs through ethnographic research and inviting organisations to participate in the platform which enables the network. With the support of his design practice—anexact office—Dr Turpin will further the work of “making the multiple” by documenting encounters with activists, organisers, and community groups who are experimenting with urbanisation processes through various types of design-led inquiry and applied research. The outcome of this research, a film titled “Is the City a Laboratory?” and a working-documentary process assembled as “The Multiple Must Be Made,” will be included in the forthcoming NTU CCA Singapore exhibition Incomplete Urbanism: Attempts of Critical Spatial Practice, and will help to develop the web-based platform labnet.asia.

Eugene Heng (Singapore), Founder and Chairman, Waterways Watch Society;

Dr Eugene Tan is Director of National Gallery Singapore. He was co-curator of the inaugural Singapore Biennale in 2006 and curator for the Singapore Pavilion at the 2005 Venice Art Biennale. His previous appointments include Programme Director (Special Projects) of Singapore Economic Development Board, Director of Exhibitions at the Osage Gallery (Hong Kong, Singapore, Beijing, Shanghai), Director for Contemporary Art at Sotheby’s Institute of Art – Singapore, and Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore.

He oversaw the development of Gillman Barracks as Programme Director (Special Projects) at the Singapore Economic Development Board and curated the exhibition Engaging Perspectives: New Art from Singapore (2013) that preceded the official opening of NTU CCA Singapore. Tan is also a member of NTU CCA Singapore’s Governing Council.

Farah Wardani is currently Assistant Director of the Resource Centre at the National Gallery Singapore. She was previously Director of the Indonesian Visual Art Archive (IVAA), Yogyakarta, Indonesia, a centre for digital archive and documentation of Indonesian art, as well as a platform for research. Wardani has also been active as a teacher, writer, and curator. Her curatorial work encompasses collaborations with art spaces such as Cemeti Art House, Yogyakarta and ruangrupa, Jakarta, Indonesia. She also served as artistic director of Biennale Jogja XII Equator #2, Indonesia (2013).

Fareed Armaly is an artist and curator. He was the Artistic Director for Künstlerhaus Stuttgart (1999–2002) and as an artist he has collaborated with several institutions including more recently Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva, and SALT Galata, Istanbul. Armaly considers the open definition of artistic practice as the medium by which to render a contemporary syntax implicit to a politics of representation, culture, and identity. In 2015, Armaly translated spatially the curatorial framework Place. Labour.Capital. through a new interior architecture of the NTU CCA Singapore’s exhibition area.

Filipa Ramos (Portugal/United Kingdom) is a writer and editor, currently Editor-in-Chief of art-agenda, commissioning and publishing experimental and rigorous writing on art. She is a lecturer in art and moving image at the Experimental Film MA Programme of Kingston University, and at the MRes Art: Moving Image of Central Saint Martins/ University of the Arts, both in London, and works with the Master Programme of the Institut Kunst, Basel. She is co-founder and co-curator of Vdrome, and was previously Associate Editor of Manifesta Journal; contributed to documenta 13 (2012) and 14 (2017). Interested in the way art, and particularly time-based work, provides a site of encounter for humans and nonhumans, Ramos has written, lectured, and curated exhibitions and film programmes on the topic, having edited Animals (Whitechapel Gallery/ MIT Press, 2016). Ramos was a Writer-in- Residence at NTU CCA Singapore in 2016. She has been a guest curator at several institutions and her writing has been published in several magazines and catalogues.

FormContent is a curatorial initiative, founded in 2007 with the intent of experimenting with exhibition formats and fostering collaborations that challenge the reciprocity of artistic and curatorial practices. Its current programme It’s moving from I to it has been developed as a nomadic curatorial project under the format of a script.

Giuliana Bruno is a professor in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. She is internationally known for her research on the intersections of the visual arts, architecture, film, and media. Her seminal body of work Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (2002) is an intellectual journey into cinematic spaces, providing new directions for visual studies. In her latest book, Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (2014), she revisits the concept of materiality in the contemporary world. She has contributed to numerous monographs on contemporary artists, including Isaac Julien’s Riot (2014), The Imaginary Landscapes of Jesper Just (2013), Chantal Akerman’s Too Far, Too Close (2012), and Jane and Louise Wilson: A Free and Anonymous Monument (2004), among others. She was a contributing writer for NTU CCA Singapore publication Theatrical Fields: Critical Strategies in Performance, Film, and Video.

Gridthiya Gaweewong is currently a Curator and Artistic Director of the Jim Thompson Art Center in Bangkok. She is co-founder and director of Project 304, a non-profit art space based in Bangkok, focusing on multidisciplinary and cross-cultural contemporary art projects by local and international artists. Gridthiya has curated numerous exhibitions and films festival including the Bangkok Experimental Film Festival (1997-2007), Under Construction (2002), Politics of Fun (2005), Saigon Open City (2006-7), Short Film Festival from Southeast Asia (2009), Between Utopia and Dystopia (2011) and Primitive (2011).

The Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative (MAP) was an unprecedented collaboration between the Guggenheim and UBS that enhanced access to and understanding of global contemporary art.

Guo-Liang Tan is an artist working primarily with painting and text. Tan’s practice explores the tension between the phenomenological and the psychological in the process of painting and writing. His artist publication, Aversions (2009), brought together reflections from Singaporean artists on writing, drawing, and conceptualism. Between December 2015 and April 2016, Tan was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore, where he continued his research on abstraction and the notion of touch as an indexical and invocative gesture.

H. Koon Wee is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Architecture and Faculty Member of the Hong Kong University Advanced Cultural Leadership Program. He served as the former Academic Director of the HKU Shanghai Study Center and Adjunct Professor of the New York University Shanghai Program. He taught previously as a visiting critic and teaching fellow at Pratt Institute and Yale University. At HKU, Koon teaches classes in urbanism, memory and identity, globalisation, and architectural design. As a registered architect and founding principal of art and architecture practice SKEW Collaborative, Koon gained a number of awards and recognitions from the Asia Pacific Design Center, Condé Nast, Architectural Record Magazine (China), ID Magazine, Modern Media Group, Design Singapore Council, National Arts Council, and Lee Foundation. Koon supports government and non-profit bodies in a number of advisory roles, including the Leaders in Urban Governance Program at the Singapore Centre for Liveable Cities, the Haiti International University Center, Orphans International, AA Asia, Asian Urban Lab, and Design Singapore Council.

Heidrun Holzfeind is an artist and filmmaker, explores the interrelations between history and identity, individual histories and political narratives of the present.

Dr Helena Varkkey is Senior Lecturer at the Department of International and Strategic Studies, University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. She specialises in environmental politics of the Southeast Asian region, specifically transboundary haze pollution and its links to the palm oil industry. The findings of her PhD research have been published as a book under the Routledge Malaysian Studies Series, entitled The Haze Problem in Southeast Asia: Palm Oil and Patronage (2016). In 2016, Varkkey contributed to NTU CCA Singapore’s public programming by conducting an Exhibition (de)Tour as part of Amar Kanwar’s exhibition, The Sovereign Forest (2016).

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.

Dr Hilde Van Gelder is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at KU Leuven. Her research focuses on how the photographic and moving image contribute to shaping insights of the global political and socio-economic sphere. Van Gelder contributed to NTU CCA Singapore’s public programming in 2015, conducting a workshop and participating in an international symposium held in conjunction with the NTU CCA Singapore exhibition Allan Sekula: Fish Story, to be continued (2015).

Ho Rui An (b. 1990, Singapore) is an artist and writer working in the intersections of contemporary art, cinema, performance and theory. His work investigates the emergence, transmission and disappearance of images within contexts of globalism and governance. Working primarily across the mediums of lecture, essay and film, his recent research considers questions surrounding liberal hospitality, participatory democracy and speculative futures.He has presented projects both locally and internationally, gaining attention for his discursively compelling performances that sift through historical archives and contemporary visual culture to probe into the shifting relations between image and power. Ho has presented work at Queensland University of Technology Art Museum, Australia (2016); Hessel Museum of Art and CCS Bard Galleries, United States (2015); LUMA/Westbau, Switzerland (2015); Para Site, Hong Kong (2015); Witte de With, The Netherlands (2014); Kochi-Muziris Biennale, India (2014); and Serpentine Galleries, United Kingdom (2013), among others.

Ho was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore, between September 2016 and January 2017, where he continued his research into the aesthetics of “futurecraft” and “horizon scanning” programmes run by state and private entities in Singapore and beyond. He also contributed to NTU CCA Singapore’s public programming in January 2015 when he conducted an Exhibition (de)Tour as part of Yang Fudong’s exhibition, Incidental Scripts.

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.

Hong Phuc Dang (Vietnam) is Founder of FOSSASIA, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

Hyungmin Pai (South Korea) is a historian, critic, and curator. Currently a Professor at the Univeristy of Seoul, he recieved his PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, and is a two-time Fulbright Scholar. Pai is author of The Portfolio and the Diagram (2002), Sensuous Plan: The Architecture of Seung H-Sang (2007), and The Key Concepts of Korean Architecture (2013). He was twice curator for the Korean Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2008, 2014), and in 2014 was awarded the Golden Lion for best national participation. Pai was Head Curator of the 4th Gwangju Design Biennale (2010-11), guest curator for numerous international exhibitions and is presently Director of the inaugural Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism.

indieguerillas, founded in 1999, is a duet of artists from Yogyakarta, Indonesia. They are the couple Santi Ariestyowanti (b. 1977, Semarang) and Dyatmiko “Miko” Bawono (b. 1975, Kudus). The former has a background in visual communication design and the latter in interior design. Both are alumni of the Faculty of Art of the Indonesian Institute of the Arts in Yogyakarta (ISI Yogyakarta). In addition to their being known for their interest in folklore, indieguerillas are also recognised for their proficiency in visual effects and inter-media experimentation in their works.

Jacques Derrida was a French semiotic theorist and philosopher. Celebrated as the founder of deconstructionist thought, Derrida examined and rejected traditional binary forms of analysis, asserting that duality is in fact always hierarchical. He wrote over forty books, which include his seminal Speech and Phenomena and Writing and Difference, both from 1967. Derrida applied his theory of deconstruction to works in the philosophy of art, while also demonstrating how artworks themselves could be deconstructive of historical discourses on art. His writings on visual arts include his explorations of representation in The Truth in Painting (1978) and later in Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins (1993). Throughout his work, Derrida expressed strong interest in the radicality of Artaud’s theater, aligning the practice of deconstruction with Artaud’s projected new theater.

Jason Wee lives and works in Singapore and New York. His practice is concerned with hollowing out singular authority in favour of polyphony. He transforms singular histories and spaces into various visual and written materials, with particular attention to architecture, idealism, and unexplored futures. Wee is the founder and director of Grey Projects, an artists’ space, library, and residency programme that focuses on emerging artists, experimental curatorial practices, new forms of writing, and design propositions. He is editor of the poetry journal Softblow.

His work has been included in group shows at the Chelsea Art Museum, New York, United States; Casino Luxembourg, Luxembourg; Singapore Art Museum, Singapore. He has been Artist-in-Residence at Artspace, Sydney, Australia; Tokyo Wonder Site, Tokyo, Japan; Gyeonggi Creation Center, Ansan-si, South Korea. He received the 2008 Young Artist Award for visual arts in Singapore and has been Studio Fellow in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.

Between October 2016 and January 2017, Wee was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore where he continued his research interest in the cycle of redevelopment that is endemic to the life of Asian global cities.

Jean Rouch is a ethnographer-turned-filmmaker, was the father of modern cinéma vérité together with his collaborator, Edgar Morin. Their work has had great influence on French New Wave filmmakers.

Jean-Francois Lyotard was a French philosopher. His influential book The Postmodern Condition (1979) would come to define postmodernism. He introduced the concept of “master narrative” as a critique of hegemonic forms of knowledge that attempt to construct and make sense of history. His writings span philosophy, politics, and aesthetics, all unified by a persistent view that reality consists of singular events that cannot be accurately represented. Lyotard made a substantial contribution in theatrical theory where he opposed the analytic rigidity of semiotics. Lyotard’s vision of a “theater of energies,” rather than of signs, was particularly relevant in the theoretical grounding of the concept of performance.

Jeremy Chia (Singapore) is a Researcher at Asian Urban Lab and AA Asia, Singapore.

Jesko Fezer is an architect, designer, and Professor for Experimental Design, University of Fine Arts of Hamburg, co-manager of the thematic bookshop Pro qm, Berlin, and co-editor of the political architecture magazine An Architektur. Fezer has authored several publications including Design in and Against the Neoliberal City (2013). He was Visiting Research Fellow at NTU CCA Singapore in 2014, when he worked on the design for the Centre’s Research and Office space.

Research Focus

Urban subjects, politics, pop, economic criticism, architecture, design, art and theory

Jiat-Hwee Chang is Associate Professor at the Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore. He is the author of A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture: Colonial Networks, Nature and Technoscience (2016), which was awarded an International Planning History Society Book Prize 2018, and shortlisted for the European Association for Southeast Asian Studies Humanities Book Prize 2017. He is also co-editor of Southeast Asia’s Modern Architecture: Questions in Translation, Epistemology and Power (2019) and (with William S. W. Lim) Non West Modernist Past (2011). Chang was recently a Canadian Centre for Architecture-Mellon Foundation Researcher, 2017–19. In 2019–20, he will be Manton Fellow at the Clark Art Institute and Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society, Germany, researching the sociocultural histories and techno-politics of air conditioning and climate change in urban Asia. He is also co-writing a book on everyday modernism in Singapore with Justin Zhuang and photographer Darren Soh.

John Akomfrah is a highly respected artist and filmmaker of Ghanaian descent, living and working in London. His works are characterised by their investigations into memory, postcolonialism, temporality, and aesthetics, often exploring the experiences of migrant diasporas globally. He combines text, music, and archival documents to shift debates on politics, media, and conventional historic narratives. Akomfrah was a founding member of the influential Black Audio Film Collective, which started in London in 1982 alongside the artists David Lawson and Lina Gopaul, who he still collaborates with today. He has had numerous solo exhibitions including ICA Boston (2019); New Museum, New York (2018); Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, Durham (2018); SFMOMA, San Francisco (2018); Barbican, London (2017); Nikolaj Kunsthal, Copenhagen (2016); and Tate Britain, London (2013-14). He has participated in the Ghana Pavilion, 58th and 56th Venice Biennale (2019 and 2015); Prospect 4, New Orleans (2017); La Triennale di Milano (2017); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2017); SeMA, Seoul (2014); Sharjah Biennial 11 (2013); Liverpool Biennial (2012); and Taipei Biennial (2012). He was awarded the Artes Mundi Prize in 2017.

John Tirman is the Executive Director and a Principal Research Scientist at MIT’s Center for International Studies. Tirman is author, or coauthor and editor, of 14 books including, most recently, Dream Chasers: Immigration and the American Backlash (2015) and The Deaths of Others: The Fate of Civilians in America’s Wars (2011). Earlier published work includes The Fallacy of Star Wars (1984), the first important critique of strategic defense, and Spoils of War: The Human Cost of America’s Arms Trade (1997). In addition, he has published more than 100 articles in periodicals such as the The Nation, Boston Globe, New York Times, Washington Post, Esquire, Wall Street Journal, and Boston Review. Past apppointments include Programme Director, Social Science Research Council, New York. He is also a trustee of the Institute for War & Peace Reporting, which has offices worldwide.

John Wagner’s architectural practice is defined by engagement with diverse community members, artists, activists, leadership, and financial stakeholders. His design practice creates spaces of interaction unique to the communities they serve. His collaboration with Matthew Mazzotta applies architectural practice to artistic creation addressing issues rooted in the convergence of public space, art, justice, and the built environment. Wagner, NCARB, is a licensed architect, received a B.Arch from Virginia Tech, a Masters in Architecture from Harvard Graduate School of Design, and is currently an Irving Innovation Fellow at Harvard University.

Joris Ivens was a documentary filmmaker whose career spanned over 60 years. He filmed more than 50 international documentaries that explored leftist social and political concerns during the 20th century. Named film commissioner in 1944 for the Dutch East Indies, he later resigned in protest over the Dutch’s resistance to decolonisation. Among the notable films he has directed or co-directed, there are A Tale of the Wind (1988), The Spanish Earth (1937), and Far from Vietnam (1967). In 1988, Ivens received the Golden Lion Honorary Award at the Venice Film Festival and in 1989, he was knighted in the Order of the Dutch Lion.

Josette Féral is a professor in the Drama Department of the Université du Québec à Montréal, where she has taught since 1981. She was vice president of the International Federation for Theatre Research from 1995 until 1999 and its president from 1999 to 2003. Her publications include Teatro, teoría y práctica: Más allá de las fronteras; Mise en scène et Jeu de l’acteur, volumes I and II, which deal with many European as well as North American stage directors; Rencontres avec Ariane Mnouchkine (1995) and Trajectoires du Soleil (1999) on Mnouchkine’s work; and La culture contre l’art: Essai d’économie politique du théâtre (1990).

Joshua Comaroff is an academic geographer and designer at Lekker Architects. He studied literature and creative writing at Amherst College before joining the Master of Architecture and Master of Landscape Architecture programmes at Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Comaroff’s doctoral research focused upon the subject of haunted landscapes and urban memory in Singapore. In recent years, he has written about architecture, urbanism, and politics, with an Asian focus, and is the co-author (with Ong Ker-Shing) of Horror In Architecture(2013). In addition to practice, Comaroff teaches at Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD).

Julian ‘Togar’ Abraham is an artist and musician. His practice develops at the junction between art, environment, science, technology, and culture. Between April and June 2016, Togar was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore where he researched on the possibilities of converting diabetic urine into a renewable source of energy. Drawing on his research and his interest in DIY production, Togar led several workshops during his residency, spreading knowledge and first-hand experience about processes of fermentation and distillation.

König Books is an imprint of Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König (VWKG), a publishing house which was founded in 1968 in Köln/New York by Walther and Kasper König.

Karpo Godina is a prominent filmmaker and cinematographer. He is an essential figure and a pioneering member of the Yugoslav Black Wave film movement of the 1960s and 1970s. His film career was launched in the 1960s when he independently produced 8mm experimental shorts and numerous sociocritical films. His film Artificial Paradise was screened at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival.

Katharina Sykora is a curator and professor of Art History at Braunschweig University of the Arts and author of Die Tode der Fotografie (vol. I, 2009; vol. II, 2015). She was the Max Kade Visiting Professor at Bloomington University, Indiana, research fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, and an Opus Magnum Research Fellow, a joint venture between the VolkswagenStiftung, Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, Bucerius Stiftung, and Deutscher Wissenschaftsverband. Since 2013 she has been the head of the Photographic Dispositif PhD program funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.

Professor Kenneth Dean is Professor, Head of the Department of Chinese Studies, and Senior Researcher at the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore (NUS). He received his PhD from Stanford University and his current research concerns transnational trust and temple networks linking Singapore Chinese temples to Southeast China and Southeast Asia. Professor Dean contributed to NTU CCA Singapore’s public programming in March 2016 when he conducted an Exhibition (de)Tour as part of Joan Jonas’s exhibition: They Come to Us without a Word.

Kevin Chua is an Associate Professor of Art History at Texas Tech University, USA. He specializes in the history of 18th- and 19th-century European and Southeast Asian art, and has published in a wide range of journals, including Art History, Representations, Art Journal, Third Text, Artforum, and nonsite.

Professor Kwok Kian-Woon is a sociology faculty and currently Associate Provost (Student Life) at Nanyang Technological University. His research interests include the study of social memory, mental health, civil society, and heritage and the arts. As a sociologist and a citizen, he has been actively involved in public life. He has served on many key committees of the Heritage Board, on the boards of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Arts and the Intercultural Theatre Institute, and as external advisor to the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts. He was President (1997-2001) of the Singapore Heritage Society, which has worked with many Singaporeans to shape the national agenda on heritage conservation.

Kimi Takesue is an award-winning filmmaker and recipient of the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Fellowships in Film.

Koh Nguang How is an artist and independent researcher on Singaporean contemporary art. Between July 2014 and January 2015, Koh was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore. As part of his residency, he presented to the public his long-term artistic endeavour, Singapore Art Archive Project (SAAP). For more than 30 years, Koh has been documenting the local art scene, gathering an impressive collection of printed matters ranging from exhibition flyers, catalogues, newspapers, as well as photographs and audio recordings produced by the artist himself.

Wee H Koon is Assistant Professor at the HKU Department of Architecture, and founding director of the Cities in Asia Summer Program. He served as the Academic Director of the HKU Shanghai Study Center between 2008-2011. He received a number of international accolades for the design of industrial buildings and campuses, such as Blueprint, Green Dot, LEAF, and the Chicago Athenaeum Awards. Koon was selected to be the co-director for the 2017 Architecture Festival “Archifest” by the Singapore Institute of Architects. He is a founding member of the Docomomo Hong Kong Chapter, and advisory board member of Asian Urban Lab. He supports governments and NGOs in advisory roles, including the Singapore Centrefor Liveable Cities’ Leaders in Urban Governance Programme, Design Singapore Council, Hong Kong Buildings Department, Haiti International University Centre, Orphans International, AA Asia, and Modern Asian Architecture Network.

Kray Chen is an artist. His practice brings attention to the peculiar characteristics of forms, gestures, and behaviours in society to discuss the value of progress. Between April and August 2016, Chen was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore where he developed a Feng Shui survey of his residency studio and the larger Gillman Barracks precinct, with the aim to enliven and invigorate a site of art that is aiming to establish itself as a vibrant cultural hub.

Kristy H.A. Kang is a practice-based researcher whose work navigates the triangulation of place, geographies, and cultural memory. She is Associate Professor of Urban Media Art and Design in the GAME School and the ASU Media and Immersive eXperience (MIX) Center, Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts. Prior to joining ASU, she was Assistant Professor at the School of Art, Design and Media at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and received her doctorate in media arts and practice at the School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California. Her research interests combine urban and ethnic studies, mapping, and emerging media arts to visualise cultural histories of cities and communities. Her works have been presented at the Gwangju Design Biennale, South Korea; the Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore; the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; the Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe; and the Jewish Museum, Berlin, among others and received the Jury Award for New Forms at the Sundance Online Festival.

Laleen Jayamanne is a filmmaker and Professor of Cinema Studies at the Power Department of Fine Arts at the University of Sydney, Australia.

Larry Ng is the Group Director of Architecture & Urban Design Excellence, URA.

Laura Anderson Barbata, born in Mexico City, is a transdisciplinary artist currently based in Brooklyn and Mexico City. Since 1992, she has worked primarily in the social realm, and has initiated projects in the Venezuelan Amazon, Trinidad and Tobago, Mexico, Norway, and the United States. Barbata is also known for her project Transcommunality (2001–ongoing), working with stilt walkers, artists, and artisans from Mexico, New York, and the Caribbean. This project has been presented at various museums, schools, and other venues in the US, Mexico, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, and Singapore. Her work is in various private and public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; El Museo de Arte Moderno, México D.F.; Landesbank Baden-Württemberg Gallery, Stuttgart, Germany; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, California; Museo Jaureguía, Navarra, Spain, and Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Austria. Her work has been featured in numerous publications, including the New York Times, Sculpture Today, Kunstforum Germany, ARTnews, Art in America, ArtNexus, and 160 Años de Fotografía en México (INBA).

Lee Wenwas awarded the Cultural Medallion of Singapore in 2009. He entered the art scene comparatively late in the ‘80s, but quickly gained attention. His early practice was associated with The Artists Village in Singapore and later forged a more individuated artistic career. Lee Wen has been exploring different strategies of time-based and performance art since 1989. He helped initiate both R.I.T.E.S. (Rooted In The Ephemeral Speak) (2009-) and Future of Imagination (2003-), an international performance art event. Since 2012, he has taken an active interest in the memory of Singapore’s performance art history through the initiation of the Independent Archive. Recent group exhibitions include SUNSHOWER: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia 1980s to Now, The National Arts Centre and Mori Art Museum, Japan (2017), Secret Archipelago, Palais de Tokyo, France (2015) and a solo show at the Singapore Art Museum (2012). Lee Wen was an NTU CCA Singapore Artist-in-Residence from August 2014 to February 2015.

Lee Weng Choy is president of the Singapore Section of the International Association of Art Critics, and a part-time consultant with A+ Works of Art in Kuala Lumpur. Previously, Lee was Artistic Co-Director of The Substation, Singapore; he has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and the Sotheby’s Institute of Art—Singapore. His essays have appeared in journals such as Afterall, and anthologies such as Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art: An Anthology (Cornell SEAP, 2012), Over Here: International Perspectives on Art and Culture (MIT Press, 2004), and Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985 (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). He writes the “Ask a Critic” column for Plural Art Mag.

Leon van Schaik AO is Professor of Architecture and Innovation Chair in Design Practice Research at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT). From his base in Melbourne, he has promoted local and international architectural culture through an influential practice-based research programme and the commissioning of innovative architecture. His Architecture and Design PhD programme at RMIT has become an important template for institutions worldwide. In 2005, at the 75th anniversary awards of the Australian Institute of Architects, Professor Van Schaik was awarded the inaugural Neville Quarry Architectural Education Prize. In 2006, he was made an Officer (AO) in the General Division of the Order of Australia for his services to architecture and education. Some of his recent publications include Practical Poetics in Architecture (Chichester: Wiley, 2015) and Ideograms (Melbourne: Lyon Foundation and Lyon Housemuseum, 2013).

Lilian Chee is an Associate Professor at the Department of Architecture in the National University of Singapore (NUS). She is a writer, academic, designer, curator, and award-winning educator who has lecturered at the Bartlett, Delft, ETH Zurich, Melbourne, and the Berlage Centre. Her work is situated at the intersections of architectural representation, gender, and affect in a contemporary interdisciplinary context. Her research explores the emergence of architecture through, and from within, everyday encounters and its archives, influenced by film, art and literature. She conceptualised, researched, and collaborated on the award-winning architectural essay film about single women occupants in Singapore’s public housing 03-FLATS (2014), which won the best ASEAN documentary Salaya (2015); shortlisted for the Busan Wide Angle Documentary Prize 2014; and screened at the Singapore Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2016. She is working on a book about public art in Singapore, and co-editing a volume on domesticity in architecture.

Lucy Orta (B. Sutton Coldfield, UK, 1966) and Jorge Orta (B. Rosario, Argentina, 1953) founded Studio Orta in 1991. Lucy and Jorge’s collaborative practice focuses on the social and ecological factors of environmental sustainability. They present their work using a diverse range of media that includes drawing, sculpture, installation, couture, painting, silkscreen, photography, video and light, as well staged interventions and performances. Among their most iconic series are: refuge wear and body architecture portable minimum habitats bridging architecture and dress; hortire cycling the food chain in global and local contexts; 70 x 7 the meal the ritual of dining and its role in community networking; nexus architecture alternative modes of establishing the social link; the gift a metaphor for the heart and the biomedical ethics of organ donation; ortawater and clouds water scarcity and the problems arising from pollution and corporate control; Antarctica international human rights and freer international migration; and Amazonia – the value of the natural environment to our daily lives and to our survival. In recognition of their contribution to sustainability, the artists received the Green Leaf award in 2007 for artistic excellence with an environmental message. This was presented by the United Nations environment programme in partnership with the natural world museum at the Nobel peace center in Oslo, Norway. In 2013 the artists’ monumental meteoros clouds was selected for the inaugural terrace wires public art commission for St Pancras international in London.

Lukas Feireiss (Germany) works as curator, writer, art director, and educator in the international mediation of contemporary cultural reflexivity beyond disciplinary boundaries. He attained his graduate education in Comparative Religious Studes, Philosophy and Ethnology. Feireiss’ Berlin-based creative practice Studio Lukas Feireiss aims at the critical cut-up and playful re-evaluation of creative and intellectual production modes and the diverse socio-cultural and medial conditions. He is author and editor of numerous books, and curator of manifold exhibitions. Feireiss has lectured and taught at various universities worldwide, and is Head of the new Masters Programme Radical Cut-Up at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam. With the publisher Gestalte, Feireiss had edited numerous volumes, including Imagine Architecutre: Aristic Visions of the Urban Real (2014), Utopia Forever: VIsions of Architecutre and Urbanism (2011), and Architecture of Change 1 &2: Sustainability and Humanity in the Built Environment (2008 and 2009).

Dr Marc Glöde is a curator, critic and film scholar. He is currently an Assistant Professor, School of Art, Design and Media, NTU, Singapore and Co-Director of the Master of Arts in Museum Studies and Curatorial Practices. He received his PhD at The Free University Berlin (FU Berlin). He taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden, FU Berlin, Academy of Fine Arts Berlin, and as Assistant Professor at the ETH Zürich. He curated the exhibition “STILL/MOVING/STILL – The History of Slide Projection in the Arts” at Knokke, Belgium. He was a senior curator of Art Film, Art Basel’s film program from 2008 – 2014. He was co-editor of Umwidmungen (2005), Synästhesie-Effekte (2011) and his writings are widely published. He was previously a Visting Research Fellow at NTU CCA Singapore from 25 February to 26 May 2016. Dr Glöde is a regular contributor to NTU CCA Singapore’s programmes.

Research Focus

Residency period: 25 February – 26 May 2016

Dr Marc Glöde’s work is informed by his interest in questions concerning images and image politics, as well as the correspondences between different artistic disciplines or cultural positions. For his research at NTU CCA Singapore he will specifically address the dynamics of the relation between images and the development of urban ideas and architecture – on the impact of images on a critical reflection of urbanism.By re-visiting the landmark project “Cities on the Move” almost 20 years after its occurrence, one of the key questions will be how this exhibition/debate has left its imprint on the discussion in Asia and how the situation has developed since then. From there Dr Glöde’s research will dig deeper into the impact of artists, filmmakers, and curators on the discussion. Dr Glöde’s research will be accompanied by a combination of workshops, film screenings, and discussions with artists and architects from the region.

Marina Warner has written several studies in cultural history, as well as novels and short stories. Much of her work explores symbols and figures in myth and fairy tales, from Catholic cults to the Arabian Nights. Her books include Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (1976), Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (1985), and Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights (2011). Warner has also curated exhibitions and contributed to a range of contemporary art matters, exploring new ways of seeing and connections with our cultural heritage. She is professor of English and Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, University of London. She was awarded the Holberg Prize in 2015 and made a Dame the same year.

Mark Nash is a curator and writer, and Professor, University of California Santa Cruz. He was Head of Department Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art London, and prior Director of Fine Art Research at Central St Martins. He was a senior lecturer in Film History and Theory at the University of East London, visiting lecturer at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, and visiting research fellow at the NTU CCA Singapore (2015). He holds a PhD from Middlesex University. Nash has written extensively on artists’ work with the moving image, having curated One Sixth of the Earth, ecologies of image at ZKM, Karlsruhe and MUSAC, Leon (2012-13) and Experiments with Truth, Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia (2004-5).

Research Focus

1. Historical legacy of independence and liberation struggles and cold war politics, including the non-aligned movement, in terms of the different affective relationships these alternative world views propose particularly as realised in South East Asian art

2. Alternative philosophies and aesthetics of the moving image – e.g. how Chinese or Indonesian artists approach the moving image, and the concepts of the image embedded in their linguistic etymology

3. Moving image and photographic works along the Asian part of the Silk Road

Matthew Mazzota is a conceptual artist whose work lies at the intersection of art, activism, architecture, design, and urban planning. His interactive public projects explore the relationship between people and their environments, as well as between each other. Between November 2014 and January 2015, Mazzotta was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore where he recreated his community-specific public art project Outdoor Living Rooms at a hawker centre in Singapore. In 2017, Mazzotta was one of the speakers in the Centre’s public summit Cities for People NTU CCA Ideas Fest 2016/17. He received an undergraduate degree from the School of the Art Insitute of Chicago, and a Master of Science in Visual Studies from the Massachusetts Institue of Technology, Cambridge, United States.

Dr May Adadol Ingawanij (Thailand/United Kingdom) is a moving image theorist, teacher, and curator, and co-director of the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM), University of Westminster, London. She is currently writing a book titled Animistic Cinema: Moving Image Performance and Ritual in Thailand. Her publications include Exhibiting Lav Diaz’s Long Films:Currencies of Circulation and Spectatorship (2017); Nguyen Trinh Thi’s Essay Films (forthcoming); Animism and the Performative Realist Cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul (2013). May’s curatorial projects include Lav Diaz Journeys (London, 2017), and On Attachments and Unknowns (Phnom Penh, 2017).

Mercedes Vicente is a curator, writer, and currently interim Director of Education and Public Programmes at the Whitechapel Gallery, London. Vicente was Darcy Lange Curator-at-Large at Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Zealand and expanded her research on the pioneering work of Lange through an AHRC-funded PhD at the Royal College of Art, London. In conjunction with the NTU CCA exhibition Allan Sekula: Fish Story, to be continued (2015), Vicente curated in The Lab the project Darcy Lange: Hard, however, and useful is the small, day-to-day work.

Michael T. Taussig is an Australian anthropologist and professor at Columbia University. He has visited Colombia annually since 1969. In 2012 and 2015 he made three short visits to the extensive swamps of northern Colombia in the Bolívar department, for a total of seven weeks. Two of these visits were with the Colombian law professor, Juan Felipe García, working pro bono with the peasant-colonists of the village of Buenos Aires in Colombia, consisting of 144 houses on the island of Papayal. Since 2007 the village has been under siege by oil palm plantation owners trying to rid the peasants of the land, using armed force as well as the courts. Further west in Chocó in the mid-1990s, entire communities have been subject to aerial bombing combined with paramilitary ground assault for the same purpose.

Mikhail Kalatozov was a prominent film director who largely contributed to both Georgian and Russian cinema. He studied economics before starting his extensive filmmaking career in 1923. He had his solo directorial debut in 1930 with the documentary Salt for Svanetia and directed several propaganda films during World War II. He also worked as a cultural attaché at the Soviet Embassy in the United States, and was later appointed Deputy Film Minister of the Soviet Union. He is best known for his World War II drama, The Cranes Are Flying (1958), which won the Palm d’Or at the 1958 Cannes Film Festival.

They Come to Us without a Word was organised for the U.S. Pavilion of the 56th Venice Biennale by the MIT List Visual Arts Center and co-curated by Paul C. Ha, Director of the MIT List Visual Arts Center and Ute Meta Bauer, Founding Director of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore.

Naeem Mohaiemen was born in London and grew up in Dhaka. In his works, he uses film, installation, and essays to research socialist utopias and incomplete decolonisation. Despite underscoring the left’s historic errors, a hope for a future global left is always a basis for the work. Mohaiemen is author of Midnight’s Third Child (Nokta, 2020) and Prisoners of Shothik Itihash (Kunsthalle Basel, 2014); co-editor (with Eszter Szakacs) of Solidarity Must be Defended (Tranzit, 2020); and co-editor (with Lorenzo Fusi) of System Error: War is a Force that Gives us Meaning (Sylvana, 2007). Solo exhibitions include Tripoli Banchal, Bengal Foundation, Dhaka (2020); There is no Last Man, Museum of Modern Art (PS1), New York (2017); and My Mobile Weighs a Ton, Gallery Chitrak, Dhaka (2008). Group exhibitions include Chobi Mela (2019, 2017, 2009); Lahore Biennial (2018); documenta 14 (2017); Venice Biennale (2015); and Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2014). Mohaiemen has worked in activist collectives in New York (Gulf Labor Coalition, Visible Collective, 3rd i South Asian Film, South Asia Solidarity Network) and Dhaka (Drishtipat, Alal O Dulal). He was nominated for the 2018 Turner Prize, London, and is a 2020-21 postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University, New York.

Narawan Pathomvat (b. 1980, Thailand)is the founder and director of contemporary art library and non-profit platform, The Reading Room, Bangkok. She is also lecturer at the Department of Art History, Faculty of Archaeology at Silpakorn University, Bangkok. She received her MPS (Arts and Cultural Management) from Pratt Institute, New York and previously worked for Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York, and Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong. Pathomvat is also an independent curator, writer, and translator.

Nashin Mahtani is the director of PetaBencana.id, a non-profit organisation developing methods and integrated software infrastructures for community-led disaster co-management. She leads a multi-disciplinary design research team in developing real-time visualisations of disaster events to support democratised practices of mutual aid for climate adaptation. Mahtani also creates new representational forms and data visualisation strategies to explain humanitarian information and communication technologies and systems. With a background in architecture, her research and design work investigates the relational complexities of urban infrastructure, computation, and neuroscience.

Natasha Ginwala is an independent curator, researcher, and writer. She was a member of the artistic team at the 8th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (2014). Her recent work includes Metabolic States: Becoming Image at Artists’ Cinema, Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014, the multi-part curatorial project Landings (with Vivian Ziherl) presented at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, David Roberts Art Foundation, NGBK (as part of the Tagore, Pedagogy and Contemporary Visual Cultures Network), Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and other partner organisations, 2013–ongoing, as well as The Museum of Rhythm at Taipei Biennial 2012 (with Anselm Franke). Ginwala regularly contributes to several publications and periodicals.

Nguyen Trinh Thi is a Hanoi-based filmmaker and moving image artist. Her diverse practice—traversing boundaries between film and video art, installation and performance—consistently engages with memory and history, and reflects on the roles and positions of art and artists in society and the environment. Nguyen studied journalism, photography, international relations, and ethnographic film in the United States. Her films and video art works have been shown at festivals and art exhibitions including Asia Pacific Triennale of Contemporary Art (APT9) in Brisbane (2018); Sydney Biennale 2018; Jeu de Paume, Paris; CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux; the Lyon Biennale 2015; Asian Art Biennial 2015, Taiwan; Fukuoka Asian Art Triennial 2014; Singapore Biennale 2013; Jakarta Biennale 2013; Oberhausen International Film Festival; and the Rotterdam International Film Festival. Nguyen is founder and director of Hanoi DOCLAB, an independent centre for documentary film and the moving image art since 2009. She previously showed at NTU CCA Singapore in the exhibition Ghosts and Spectres – Shadows of History (2017).

Nikolaus Hirsh is an architect, editor and curator. He was the Director of Städelschule and Portikus in Frankfrut, Germany, and currently teaches at Columbia University in New York, United States. His architectural work includes the award-winning Dresden Synagogue (2001), Hinzert Document Center (2005), Cybermohalla Hub in Delhi (2008-2012), an artist residency building at The Land (with Rirkrit Tiravanija), and Museum of Immortality in Mexico City (2016). Hirsch curated numerious exhibition at the Portikus, the Folly project for the Gwangju Biennale (2014), and Wohnungsfrage (Housing Question) at HKW in Berlin (2015). He is the co-founder and editor of the Critical Spatial Practice series at Sternberg Press and the new e-flux Architecture platform.

Nora A. Taylor is the Alsdorf Professor of South and Southeast Asia Art and Chair of the Department of Art History, Theory and Criticism at the School of Art Institute of Chicago, United States. She is the author of Painters in Hanoi: An Ethnography of Vietnamese Art (University of Hawaii Press, 2004, and NUS Press, 2009) and co-editor of Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art: An Anthology (Cornell SEAP, 2012).

Orit Gat (b. 1984, Israel) is a writer whose work focuses on contemporary art, publishing, internet culture, and their different meeting points. Gat is currently the feature editor of Rhizome, managing editor of WdW Review, and contributing editor at The White Review. Gat has taught at CCS Bard and the City College of New York, United States and founded a monthly reading group of art magazines, organised in various cities around the world, including New York, London, and Singapore. In 2015, she won the Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant in the short-form writing category and is currently nominated for the 2017 Absolut Art Writing Award.

Ousmane Sembène was a preeminent Senegalese film director and writer. His writings observed the political scene in Senegal where he wrote several volumes on the developing national consciousness. In the early 1960s, he turned to film and went to study in Moscow. He is often called the “Father of African Cinema,” a title befitting the first African to make a film distributed outside of Africa. His works examine the multiplicities of a continent emerging from the colonial era, at grips with the tensions of independence and modernity, historicising Africa’s political and social transformation throughout the 20th century.

Park Chan-kyong is a media artist, film director and writer. He graduated from Seoul National University with a BFA in Painting in 1988, and the California Institute of the Arts with a MFA in Photography in 1995. Park served as the Artistic Director of the SeMA Biennale Mediacity Seoul in 2014. His major works include Manshin: Ten Thousand Spirits (2013), Night Fishing (2011, co-directed by Park Chan-wook), Sindoan (2008), Power Passage (2004) and Sets (2000). Park’s work has been exhibited internationally in numerous solo and group exhibitions including Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2017), Taipei Biennial (2016), Anyang Public Art Project (2016), Iniva, London (2015), Art Sonje Center, Seoul (2013), and Atelier Hermès, Seoul (2012, 2008). Park was awarded the Hermès Korea Art Award in 2004, and the Golden Bear for best short film at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2011 for Night Fishing. His works are included in the collection of major art institutions, such as the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea; KADIST, Paris and San Francisco; Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes; Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul; Seoul Museum of Art; Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Ansan; and Art Sonje Center, Seoul.

Patrick D. Flores is a Professor of Art History and Criticism at the Department of Art Studies, University of the Philippines, Quezon City, where he is also the curator of the Jorge B. Vargas Museum. In 2015, he curated the Philippine Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale. Recent publications include “Contemporaneity and Art in Southeast Asia,” a special issue of Third Text (2011), co-edited with Joan Kee, and Past Peripheral: Curation in Southeast Asia (NUS Museum, 2008). He is the Curator of the Taiwan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2022.

Paul Tan is Deputy Chief Executive Officer of the National Arts Council (NAC) Singapore. Previously, Tan was Director of Sector Development (Literary Arts) at NAC and helmed the Singapore Writers Festival. He has also published four volumes of poetry. Tan is the Co-Chair of NTU CCA Singapore’s Governing Council.

Paul Teng (Singapore) is Principal Officer at the National Institute of Education, and Adjunct Senior Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of Internaitional Studies, Nanyang Technology University. His experience on agrifood security issues is from the WorldFish Center, the International Rice Research Institute, and Monsanto Company. Professor Teng is a Fellow of the American Phytopathological Society and The World Academy of Sciences, and he has won prestigious awards such as the Eriksson Prize (Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences), and an Honorary Doctorate in Science for his work on food security. He chairs several international and national scientific groups and has published 9 books and over 250 technical papers.

Pen Sereypagna is the director of the Vann Molyvann Project and a freelance architect and urban researcher based in Phnom Penh City. He has been awarded scholarships and fellowships including the Chevening Scholarship (2017–18), US/ICOMOS and East West Center (2015–16), Sa Sa Art Projects (2014–15), Asian Cultural Council (2012–13), and the School of Constructed Environments PARSONS as a visiting scholar (2012). Sereypagna’s work on Genealogy of Urban Form Phnom Penh, Genealogy of Bassac, and Phnom Penh Visions has been the subject of several exhibitions and presentations in Cambodia and selected venues in Asia, Australia, and the US. His publications on urban transformation with a focus on Phnom Penh, Cambodia, include: Cité de l’Architecture & du Patrimoine (forthcoming 2019), National University of Singapore’s Urban Asias (2018), Chulalongkorn University’s Nakhara journal (2015), and Parsons Journal (2014).

Philip TINARI has served as Director of UCCA, Beijing, the institution at the heart of Beijing’s 798 Art District, since late 2011. His programme has brought to China international figures including Robert Rauschenberg, Elmgreen & Dragset, Haegue Yang, William Kentridge, Taryn Simon, and Tino Sehgal, and has tracked China’s evolving art scene through retrospectives and surveys of artists including Zhao Bandi, Zeng Fanzhi, Liu Wei, Xu Zhen, Wang Keping, Wang Xingwei, Kan Xuan. In 2009, he launched LEAP, an internationally distributed, bilingual art magazine published by the Modern Media Group. He is a contributing editor of Artforum, and was founding editor of the magazine’s online Chinese edition. He holds degrees from Duke University and Harvard University, and is currently a PhD candidate in art history at the University of Oxford.

Pratchaya Phinthong creates situations as an invitation made to the visitor to share an experience with him. His projects (without any specific or pre-defined form) suggest a crack in which the spectators are invited to fill the gaps. He builds a set, a fiction, or a process where he can test our perceptions. He proposes to his audience a story with multiple paths. A trip down memory lane combined with subjective perceptions. His projects are often constructed in a dialogue between the artist and the others, making the artist‚ movement glide towards the social field. Beyond any artistic or formal experience, the artist is looking to find his place and his identity playing on the economic representations and cultural existences. The ‚Äògallery‚ space becomes a free area.Therefore, Phinthong works in a dynamic area in between different realities underlining the space and distance that separates them: two geographical points, two societies, two economic systems.

Phinthong was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore between October and December 2014. As part of his residency, Phinthong explored the idea of airspace as monitored and ambiguous, researching into the histories and negotiations of airspace between Singapore and its neighbours, with particular attention given to Thailand.

Samson Young, Para Site, Hong Kong (2016); A Luxury We Cannot Afford, Para Site, Hong Kong (2015); Why Stay If You Can Go?, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2012); Three Artists Walk Into A Bar…, de Appel, Amsterdam (2012); and Telah Terbit: Out Now,, Singapore Art Museum (2006).

Xyza Cruz Bacani, Arrow Factory, Beijing (2016); Orchestrations

Qinyi Lim (Singapore) is an independent curator and writer. She previously held curatorial positions at Para Site, Hong Kong: National University of Singapore Museum, and the Singapore Art Museum. Lim completed the de Appel Curatorial Programme in 2012. Her past projects include The Outlier

Regina Bittner (Germany) studied Cultural Theory and Art History at Leipzig University, and recieved her doctorate from the Institute for European Ethnology, Humboldt University of Berlin. As Head of the Academy and Deputy Director of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, she conceptualises and teaches the postgraduate programme for architecture and modern research. Bittner has curated numerous exhibitions on the architectural, urban and cultural history of modernism, her research focus being international architectural and urban research, the modern era and migration, the cultural history of modernism and heritage studies. Recent publications include In Reserve: The Household! Historic Models and Contemporary Positions from the Bauhaus (with Elke Krasny, 2016), and The Bauhaus in Calcutta: An Encounter of the Cosmopolitan Avant-Garde (with Kathrin Rhomberg, 2013). She has also conducted extensive research on Singapore’s public housing commonly referred to as HDBs.

Regis Durand is an art critic and independent curator based in Paris. He has served as the artistic director of the Printemps de Cahors Festival, director of the Centre National de la Photographie, and director of the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris. He was written extensively on contemporary art, with a focus on the practice of photography, and has co-authored monographs on the work of Cindy Sherman, Thomas Demand, and Orlan, among others.

Renée Staal is the chief librarian of The Library of Unread Books, a project managed in collaboration with artist Heman Chong.

Roger Buergel is an art critic, a curator, and a member of Parasophia: Kyoto International Festival of Contemporary Culture 2015’s Professional Advisory Board. Before serving as a guest curator for the Museum of Contemporary Art Barcelona he taught art history at Luneburg University (1999–2005) and the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe (2007–09). He was appointed the artistic director of Documenta XII (Kassel, 2007) with art historian and curator Ruth Noack. Buergel also served as the artistic director of the 6th Busan Biennale (2012). In 2010, he was appointed the Founding Director of the Johann Jacobs Museum in Zurich, an exhibition space and research institution dedicated to the cultural residue of global trade routes.

Ise’s work includes installations, publications, animations, collages, participatory events, and the artist space Parking Project (run out of his apartment in Kuala Lumpur). This practice is informed by expressions of popular culture such as comics and graffiti and the manner in which they serve to represent alternative histories of place and culture. Whatever final form it takes, Ise‚ work is always participatory, embedded in conversation, friendship and the experiences of simply living life amongst a multitude of communities internationally. Iseis a graduate of Mara University of Technology in Selangor, Malaysia. Selected exhibitions and Biennials and Residencies include: Singapore Biennale (2011); Asia Triennial Manchester, United Kingdom (2011); Jakarta Biennale with Indonesian collaborative Ruangrupa (2009) Artist-in-Residence at Artspace Visual Arts Centre, Sydney (2006) and the 9th Istanbul Biennial (2005); He is the co-founder of Sentap, a quarterly art publication in Malaysia.

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.

Sam Durant is an artist and Lecturer at the California Institute of the Arts, United States. Often referencing American history, his work explores the varying relationships between culture and politics, engaging subjects as diverse as the civil-rights movement, southern rock music, and modernism. Between July and August 2014, Durant was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore where he researched into the 1955 Bandung conference and its subsequent non-aligned movement.

Sanne Oorthuizen is a curator, editor, translator, feminist, daughter, educator and partner. She is Co-Chief Curator at Cemeti — Institute for Art and Society, Yogyakarta, Indonesia where she is currently working with Alec Steadman on Maintenance Works, a year-long project in which they envision alternative futures for Cemeti. Previously she was Curator at Casco-Office for Art, Design and Theory in Utrecht, Netherlands (2012—2016), curatorial team member for the SONSBEEK Triennial, Arnhem, Netherlands (2015—2016, with ruangrupa).

Seng Yu Jin is an art historian and Senior Curator at The National Gallery Singapore. He completed his PhD at the University of Melbourne. He lectures at the National University of Singapore’s Minor in Art History, and LASALLE College of the Arts’ MA in Asian Art Histories programme. Seng’s research interests include the modern and contemporary histories of Southeast Asia, focusing on exhibition histories, collectivism, and forms of socially engaged artistic practices in the region.

Seth Denizen is a landscape architect trained in evolutionary ecology and is currently completing a PhD in Geography at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley). His doctoral research is currently investigating the vertical geopolitics of urban soil in Mexico City, where he is working with geologists and systems ecologists to characterise the material complexities and political forces that shape the distribution of geological risk in Distrito Federal’s urban periphery. In 2014 he was the recipient of a SEED-fund grant supporting his research “Mapping the Microbiome of Hong Kong”, which is an ongoing collaboration between the Faculty of Architecture and the Faculty of Science at the University of Hong Kong to investigate the genetic diversity of transportation infrastructure. In 2013, Denizen took 1st prize in an international information design competition: OUT OF BALANCE – CRITIQUE OF THE PRESENT by ARCH+ Journal for Architecture and Urban Design and the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation.

Shabbir Hussain Mustafa is Curator at the National Gallery Singapore, where he researches art from Singapore and Southeast Asia, and leads the curatorial team overseeing the Singapore Gallery, a permanent exhibition space that surveys art in Singapore from the 19th century to the present. He was formerly a curator at the National University of Singapore Museum (NUS Museum), where his curatorial practice centered on the deployment of archival materials to engage different modes of thinking and writing, whilst opening the archive to the varied struggles of perception and reading. Amongst Shabbir Hussain Mustafa’s numerous exhibition projects, he was the curator of Camping and Tramping through The Colonial Archive: The Museum in Malaya (2011), and an initiator of a new project space at NUS Museum titled Prep Room – Things That May or May Not Happen (2011). Most recently, he curated In Search of Raffles’ Light: an art project with Charles Lim (2013). He has written extensively about curatorial methodologies and practices in Singapore, and is a member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA).

Sharon Siddique is Director, Asian Urban Lab, Singapore; Visiting Professiorial Fellow, Lee Kuan Yew Centre for Innovative Cities, Singapore University of Technology and Design; and Adjunct Professor, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore.

Shireen Seno studied architecture and cinema at the University of Toronto before relocating to Manila. Her work addresses memory, history and image-making, often in relation to the idea of home.

Shubigi Rao is a writer and visual artist. Her interests include archaeology and neuroscience, libraries, archival systems, histories, literature, contemporary art theory, and natural history. Between October 2015 and January 2016, Rao was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore where she continued her research on a decade-long project on the histories of print and book destruction, leading to Pulp: A Short Biography of the Banished Book (2016), a first volume in a series of five.

Simryn Gill grew up in Port Dickson, Malaysia, and has returned to make her work there since 1993. The key photographs in this book, in which the artist becomes an oil palm tree, are a continuation of her work Vegetation (1999– ongoing), where she records herself in various places disguised as local plants: tumbleweed and agave in Texas, grass tree and paperbark tree in rural New South Wales, and an epiphytic fern in a rare derelict site in Singapore.

Sissel Tolaas is a smell researcher and artist. Since 1990 she has collected an archive of 7,800 scents and has conducted City SmellScape research of and for 52 cities around the world. Tolaas is the founder of the Institute of Functional Smells and SMELL Re_searchLab. In 2016, Tolaas was Visiting Research Fellow at NTU CCA Singapore where she researched on the smell identities of Singapore’s diverse neighbourhoods and presented her work as part of the exhibition Incomplete Urbanism: Attempts of Critical Spatial Practice (2016–17).

Research Focus

Fellowship period: 1 July – 31 December 2016

During her fellowship, Sissel Tolaas will be carrying out fieldwork and research on everyday smells in urban environments: smell and tolerance, smell and communication, smell and navigation, etc. Her research focus is on the smell identities of Singapore’s diverse neighbourhoods. Tolaas will carry out fieldwork in selected neighbourhoods, particularly areas that have been developed by Singaporean architect William Lim. She will collect and investigate the smell phenomena of each neighbourhood, mapping these neighbourhoods according to their smells. The outcome of Tolaas’ research will be presented in NTU CCA Singapore’s forthcoming exhibition Incomplete Urbanism: Attempts of Critical Spatial Practice.

The artistic practice of Souliya Phoumivong (b. 1983, Laos) radically shifted from painting to photography, video art, and stop motion animation as a result of a residency at Youkobo Art Space, Tokyo, in 2010 during which the artist experimented with new media art and created his first Claymation work. In 2012, Phoumivong established Clay House Studio which focuses on video and stop-motion works, and is the first of its kind in Laos. The studio is responsible for an array of projects, including the production of the first clay animation TV show in Laos which has reached its 4th season. Phoumivong is currently a lecturer at the Department of Communication Design at the National Institute of Fine Art in Vientiane and Junior Curator for‚”Condition Report” in 2017, a collaborative project by Japan Foundation Asia Centre, featuring emerging curators from Japan and Southeast Asia. His work has been included in exhibitions such as Missing Links, The Jim Thompson Art Center, Bangkok, Thailand (2015) and Cross+Scape, ASEAN-Korea Contemporary Media Art Exhibition, Kumho Museum of Art, Seoul, South Korea (2011).

SPACElogic is a Singapore-based company that offers interior design services.

Stefano Harney is Professor of Strategic Management Education at Singapore Management University and co-founder of the collective Ground Provisions. He is a regular speaker on the subject of business ethics, manage- ment, sociology, anthropology, and postcolonial studies. Recent publications include The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013) co-authored with Fred Moten. Harney has contributed to NTU CCA Singapore’s public programming in 2014, presenting the lecture “Post-colonial critique today,” and an Exhibition (de)Tour together with Tonika Sealy Thompson, as part of the exhibition Theatrical Fields.

Svay Sareth (b. 1972, Cambodia) was born during a period of political turmoil and violence that would last until he was 18 years old. Svay began making art as a young teenager in the Site 2 refugee camp, near the Thai-Cambodian border. He describes life as a refugee as “void nationality…a time and place you imagine escaping from.” Drawing and painting became a daily activity for Svay ‚ a process of bearing witness to the psychological and physical violence that was an everyday experience, as well as a way to symbolically escape and dream of change. After the wars ended, Svay went on to co-found Phare Ponlue Selepak, a non-governmental organisation and art school in Battambang that continues to thrive today. In 2002, the artist continued his studies in France, earning the Diplôme National Supérieur d’Études des Arts Plastiques / MFA in 2009, after which he returned to Siem Reap to live and work.

Syafiatudina‚ (b. 1988, Indonesia) curatorial practices lies inthe interplay between theory and practice, thinking and doing. Her ideasstemfrom the belief that artistic practices are part of knowledge inquiriesthat contribute to social and political change. She is currently working as researcher and curator at KUNCI Cultural Studies Center in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.

T. K. Sabapathy is an art historian and curator. Sabapathy has published extensively on the art histories of Southeast Asia. His publications include: Vision and Idea: Re-Looking Modern Malaysian Art (1994), Modernity and Beyond: Themes in Southeast Asian Art (1996), Road to Nowhere: The Quick Rise and the Long Fall of Art History in Singapore (2010), and recently Intersecting Histories: Contemporary Turns in Southeast Asian Art (2014), the catalogue for the eponymous exhibition he curated at NTU ADM Gallery. He is Adjunct Associate Professor at NUS since 1981; and he has lectured at NTU since 2006. Sabapathy was the first Research Fellow at NTU CCA Singapore.

Thanavi Chotpradit is a lecturer in modern and contemporary Thai art history at the Department of Art History, Faculty of Archaeology, Silpakorn University, Bangkok, Thailand, and a member of the editorial collective of Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia. She completed her PhD in art history from Birkbeck, University of London. She has contributed essays for both Thai and international scholarly journals such as Aan, Fah Diew Kan, and Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture and South East Asia Research, art magazines, as well as exhibition catalogues. In 2015–16, she participated in a cross-regional research programme, “Ambitious Alignments: New Histories of Southeast Asian Art.” Her current research on photographs of the 6th October Massacre (1976) is funded by the Thailand Research Fund (TRF) for 2019–21. Chotpradit’s areas of interest include modern and Thai contemporary art in relation to memory studies, war commemoration, Thai politics, and archival practices.

Thao-Phan Nguyen focuses on historical events, traditional narratives through a combination of painting, video, performance, and installation. She has the ability to condense the manifold references to history, literature, philosophy, and theory that always frames her research into poetic works that open up new spaces for reflection. In 2016, she is the protégé of American artist Joan Jonas within the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, a programme which pairs gifted young artists with internationally recognised masters, sponsoring them to spend a year in a one-to-one mentoring relationship. Her recent exhibitions include Poetic Amnesia (2017), the Factory Contemporary Art Centre, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and Nha San Collective, Hanoi, Vietnam; Concept Context Contestation, Art and the Collective in South East Asia, Goethe Institut, Hanoi, Vietnam (2016); Haunted Thresholds: Spirituality in Contemporary Southeast Asia, Kunstverein Göttingen, Germany, (2014). and Tâm Tã, Hanoi Fine Arts Museum, Vietnam (2014). In 2018, she was the Grand Prize winner of the APB Foundation Signature Art Prize, organised by Singapore Art Museum. Nguyen founded the collective Art Labor together with artist Truong Cong Tung and curator Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran Phan in 2012.

The Otolith Group is an award-winning artist-led collective founded by Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun in 2002. Their moving image, audio works, performances, and installations are characterised by an engagement with the legacies and potentialities of diasporic futurisms that explore modes of temporal anomalies, anthropic inversions, and synthetic alienation. Their work is driven by extensive research into the histories of science fiction and the legacies of transnationalism. Recent solo exhibitions include Xenogenesis, Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven (2019); Reconstruction of Story 2, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (2018); In the Year of the Quiet Sun, CASCO, Utrecht (2014); Novaya Zemlya, Museu Serralves, Porto (2014); and Medium Earth, REDCAT, Los Angeles (2013). They have participated in exhibitions at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2019); Carnegie International, 57th Edition (2018); Kochi-Muziris Biennale, (2018); Rubin Museum of Art, New York (2018); Villa Empain – Fondation Boghossian, Brussels (2017); Sharjah Biennial 13, (2017); Gwangju Biennale (2016); and Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2015).

The Press Room is a Singaporean visual communication agency that specialises in content creation and content interpretation.

Tiffany Chung is an artist and co-founder of Sàn Art, an independent art space in Ho Chi Minh City. Her practice examines conflict, migration, and displacement in relation to history and cultural memory through geographical shifts in countries traumatised by war, human destruction, or natural disaster. Chung was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore between July and September 2014, when she explored the notion of “colonialism as civilising mission” in Singapore and in Indochina and continued The Syria Project, a cartographic research of forced migration in the current refugee crisis.

Timothy Murray is director of the Society for the Humanities, curator of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, professor of Comparative Literature and English at Cornell University, and codirector of the Cornell/East China Normal University Center for Comparative Culture. His publication Mimesis, Masochism & Mime: The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought (1997) brought together essays by leading French thinkers, highlighting the political importance of theatricality and its contribution to continental theory. His interest in the theatrical and cinematic has been explored in other publications including Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds (2008); Drama Trauma: Specters of Race and Sexuality in Performance, Video, Art (1997); and Like a Film: Ideological Fantasy on Screen, Camera, and Canvas (1993).

Tomás Gutiérrez Alea is a prominent and highly celebrated Cuban film director. He is an influential figure in shaping Cuba’s film industry. Originally trained in law, he went on to study filmmaking in Italy. His socially-driven works expose the plight of the working class and the Cuban revolution. He explored various genres such as Neorealism, comedy, and historical film to reflect on the lives and people of Cuba.

Tony Godfrey is an art historian and curator. His most recent curatorial collaboration was “Far away, but strangely familiar: twenty-three contemporary artists from the Philippines” (2019). From 2014 to 2020, he published Tuesday in the Tropics, an online-distributed illustrated weekly letter. In 2020, his book on the Chinese painter Ding Yi was published (co-written with Wang Kaimei, publ. Lund Humphries), as was his history of contemporary art, The Story of Contemporary Art (Thames and Hudson). He was a research fellow at NTU CCA Singapore in 2015.

Research Focus

1. Conceptual art in Southeast Asia (Maritime) and its relationship to conceptual art globally

2. The status of conceptual art and nature of installation art in Southeast Asia

Tyler Coburn is a New York-based artist and writer whose practice focuses on the entanglement of technology and human subjectivities, information systems and those who make them. Coburn’s work has been presented at Centre Pompidou, Paris; Kunsthalle Wien; South London Gallery; Kunstverein Munich; Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm; Art Sonje Center, Seoul; Sculpture Center, New York; and in the 11th Gwangju Biennale and 10th Shanghai Biennale. Coburn was an NTU CCA Singapore Artist-in-Residence from June to July 2017.

University of the Arts London is a collegiate university in London, England, specialising in arts, design, fashion and the performing arts.

Ute Meta Bauer is a Professor at the School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University Singapore (NTU). She is currently the Acting Director and Principal Research Fellow at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (NTU CCA Singapore); and is the Chair of the Masters in Museum Studies and Curatorial Practices (MA MSCP) programme. Having served as the Founding Director of NTU CCA Singapore for over a decade, her work as educator and curator over the past years has focused on Climates. Habitats. Environments. At the Centre, she curated and co-curated The Oceanic (2017/2018), Trees of Life. Knowledge in Material (2018), and The Posthuman City (2020). In 2022, she served as curator for the Singapore Pavilion at the 59th Biennale di Venezia, featuring artist Shubigi Rao. Her recent large scale projects include the 17th Istanbul Biennial (2022), co-curated alongside David Teh and Amar Kanwar, and the artistic direction of the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale 2024. She is a Trustee of the Art Foundation TBA21 and a member of the Governing Council of n.b.k. Berlin. Bauer was recently conferred an Honorary Doctorate of Art and Design by Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Helsinki, Finland.

Vladimir Seput is a curator and researcher based in London. He studied film in Zagreb and did postgraduate research in film/video studies at University Paris 8 (2013-14), where he wrote about Mediterranean iconography in film and moving image, and researched the cinematic aspects of the sea as a place where politics, history, and mythology intersect. He holds a Masters in Film Curation from Birkbeck, University of London (2017). For the last 10 years, he has published on film and moving image art, and translated and edited books on philosophy, literary criticism, and contemporary art for various publications in Croatia and the United Kingdom.

Wilfried Kuehn is the co-founder of the architectural office Kuehn Malvezzi established in 2001 together with Simona Malvezzi and Johannes Kuehn. Past projects include the architectural design for Documenta11, the Flick Collection in the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Germany, the Julia Stoschek Collection in Düsseldorf, Germany, which was nominated for the international Mies van der Rohe award. The firm has designed the reconfiguration of a number of contemporary and historical art collections, and dealt with sensitive preservation issues for listed buildings such as the Belvedere Museum, Vienna, Austria. Their projects have been shown in international solo and group exhibitions, including the 10th, 13th and 14th Architecture Biennial in Venice and Manifesta 7 in Trento, Italy. Kuehn Malvezzi participated in the 1st Chicago Architecture Biennial in 2015.

Yee I-Lann is an artist. Her practice speculates on issues of culture, power, and the role of historical memory in our social experience by way of allusion to historical, popular, and everyday references, often through the medium of photography. Recent exhibitions include Away from the Long Night, MSAC, Taipei (2014); The Roving Eye: Contemporary Art from South East Asia, ARTER, Istanbul (2014); Welcome to the Jungle: Contemporary Art in Southeast Asia, Yokohama Museum of Art (2013); Suspended Histories, Museum Van Loon, Amsterdam (2013); Art of Memory: Contemporary Textile Expressions, Jim Thompson Art Center, Bangkok, Thailand (2013). She was a member of the curatorial team for the 2013 Singapore Biennale. Yee also works in the film industry in Malaysia. 

Between April and July 2015, Yee was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore where she continued her research on folkloric ghost stories of female spirits, specifically the figure of the Pontianak, depictions of which are found throughout Southeast Asia.

Yin Ker is Assistant Professor at the School of Humanities and School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She owes her training in art history to the Sorbonne University. Her work focuses on Myanmar’s pioneer modern painter, Bagyi Aung Soe (1923–1990). Her research interests include “art” and “art history” as variable constructs, “art” and matrices of power and authority, and the intersections of ancient and modern methods of knowledge and image-making.

Yuko Hasegawa is s Chief Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOT), Tokyo and Professor at the Tama Art University in Tokyo, Japan. Since 2008, Yuko has been a member of the Asian Art Council at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, United States. She is also currently Artistic Director of Inujima Art House Project, Okayama, Japan. Past appointments include curator of Encounters for Art Basel in Hong Kong (2012 –2014), Founding Artistic Director, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan; Curator of 11th Sharjah Biennial, United Arab Emirates (2013); co-curator of 29th São Paulo Biennial, Brazil (2010); co-curator of the 4th Shanghai Biennale, China (2002), and Artistic Director of the 7th International Istanbul Biennial, Turkey (2001).

Dr Yvonne P. Doderer is Professor for Gender & Cultural Studies at the University of Applied Sciences in Düsseldorf, and runs the Office for Transdisciplinary Research & Cultural Production. Her work focuses on the linkage of urbanism, gender, and contemporary art. Her most recent publication is Shining Cities. Gender and Other Issues in Urban Development of the Twenty-First Century (2017). Doderer was Visiting Research Fellow at NTU CCA Singapore in 2014, and returned in 2017 as a participant of the Centre’s public summit Cities for People NTU CCA Ideas Fest 2016/17.

Dr Yvonne Spielmann is a researcher and academic writer. Previously she was Dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts at LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore. She is the author of Hybrid Culture (2012) and Video: The Reflexive Medium (2007), both published in English by MIT Press. Between January and March 2016, Spielmann was Visiting Research Fellow at NTU CCA Singapore. During her fellowship, she continued to work on her survey Contemporary Indonesian Art: Artists, Art Spaces, and Collectors (2017) published by NUS Press.

Research Focus

Residency period: 1 January – 31 March 2016

Yvonne Spielmann’s research aims to explore contemporary arts in Southeast Asia comparatively, discussing the contexts of contemporary arts practices with a focus on infrastructure, social and political framework, aesthetic and cultural tradition, colonial/postcolonial history, religious and ethnic diversity, and the point of departure of the development of modern and contemporary arts practices in each country. Spielmann’s comparative study will give an overview on the Southeast Asian region, focusing on the countries Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

Zoe Butt is a curator, writer, speaker, and educator. Her curatorial practice centers on building critically thinking and historically conscious artistic communities, fostering dialogue among cultures of the globalizing souths. She is currently Artistic Director of The Factory Contemporary Arts Centre, Ho Chi Minh City; formerly in directorial/curatorial roles with Sàn Art (Ho Chi Minh City), Long March Project (Beijing); Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Gallery of Modern Art (Brisbane). Her work has been published by Sharjah Art Foundation, Hatje Cantz, ArtReview, ArtAsiaPacific, JRP-Ringier, Routledge, and Sternberg Press, amongst others.

Zulkifle Mahmod is a sound-media artist. Formally trained in sculpture, Zulkifle has expanded his practice to include sculpted sound and live sound performances. Zulkifle’s practice investigates the audible attributes of physical space to explore the emotional responses of its inhabitants. Zul is one of the participants for the 52nd Venice Biennale in Italy for the Singapore Pavillion in 2007 along with three other artists. Zul‚ practice signals an encompassing and expanded visual arts sensory experience.

Between February and June 2016, Zulkifle was Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore, where he explored the aural relationship between ready-made sound sculptures, and the architecture of space, and examined the sonic characteristics, forms, and textures of everyday objects.

Co-founded in 2005 by curator Nur Hanim Mohammed Khairuddin and Ise, sentAp! fostered for ten years writing about contemporary art in Malaysia and the region. Informed by the social nature of Ise’s artistic process, his penchant for connectivity and exchanges, this special issue embraces the dialogic form. In-depth interviews conducted by writer Tan Zi Hao with curators Ark Fongsmut, Russell Storer, and Khairuddin, a hybrid exchange by curator Anca Rujoiu with different members of ruangrupa close to the artist provide context, reflections, and intimate insights on Ise’s work. Full reproduction of the works Operation Bangkok (2014) and Comic Drawings (2018–20), exhibition documentation, and a related essay capture at length the artist’s much-contemplated solo project, completed posthumously.

SentAp!
Special Issue for Roslisham Ismail aka Ise
Published by Teratak Nuromar with support from NTU CCA Singapore and A+ Works of Art, 2021
Edited by Nur Hanim Mohamed Khairuddin and Anca Rujoiu
Design by Yan
© 2021 Teratak Nuromar, NTU CCA Singapore, and A+ Works of Art
ISBN: 978-983-43887-6-8

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

Interested in the idea of landscapes as a quiet witness to history, artist Nguyen Trinh Thi collects and compilates hundreds of images in which anonymous persons are portrayed pointing towards seemingly empty locations within a landscape. Taken by innumerable Vietnamese press photographers, figures are always captured in the same position, gesturing towards the landscape to indicate a past event, the location of something gone or something lost or missing. We are left with no information about the people and their specific thoughts or feelings, only their repetitious sameness of pointing towards an “evidence” within the silent landscape.

The land bearing witness to the volatile transitions in our geo-political, cultural, and social systems questions the extent of which unsustainable and environmentally-taxing practices effect the environment. Does a landscape harbour ill-feelings towards events and circumstances that have caused it harm? And if it were to break its silence, what forgotten stories would it reveal? Rather than disregarding the land, Nguyen’s photographs suggest these environments contain a plethora of unspoken histories.

Nguyen’s works are built upon and are often generative of one another. Parallel to this presentation, two of her films, Vietnam the Movie (2015) and Fifth Cinema (2018), will be on view in The Single Screen from 28 May – 9 June and 11 – 23 June respectively. This screening is part of the Centre’s Film Screening Programme: Faces of Histories, 14 May – 17 July 2019.

Envisioned in 1956 by Indonesian artist Iljas Hussein*, along waves of gravity –a solidar y of holes was to be a monument to the short-lived Principal Liaison Centre (PLC) established in Singapore in 1926. Pivotal in the international surge of anti-colonial struggles, the PLC was a point of liaison between the 3rd International and the region and it was meant to serve as an organ for the amplification of the voices of the marginalised and the oppressed.

At the Asian-African Conference held in Bandung in 1955, Hussein was entrusted with the task of imagining a monument that encapsulated the spirit of the PLC. One year later, he presented the idea for along waves of gravity –a solidar y of holes: a triangulation of holes strategically placed across the island that would gather and continuously echo the voices uttered into them. Inspired by theories of general relativity and topological properties of continuous deformation, Hussein’s design articulates, spatially as well as acoustically, an anti-monumentalist stance. Rather than asserting an univocal shape, the monument retreats into the ground as a series of interconnected and shapeshifting vessels which reverberate and transform sound waves throughout time. Hussein kept experimenting with these ideas until his death in 1989 but, due to its scale and technical complexity, his visionary project remained unbuilt. The surviving renderings and audio experiments of the unrealised monument are now displayed in The Vitrine.

* Iljas Hussein is a fictional artist conceived by Kin Chui. The name is one of the many aliases used by Tan Malaka (1897 –1949), an influential revolutionary thinker and fighter in the political struggles for Indonesia’s independence. Specifically, this alias was used to pen Malaka’s magnum opus Madilog (1943), the Indonesian acronym for Materialisme Dialektika Logika (Materialism Dialectics Logics).

Free Jazz, NTU CCA Singapore’s inaugural programme brings together artists, curators, art critics and scholars to imagine and contribute to the thinking and envisioning of the potentials for this new Centre for Contemporary Art in Singapore. As the title suggests, Free Jazz is about improvisation, the ability to listen, to respond and engage into a less prescribed and controlled environment.  Improvisation stands for a form of inquiry that can become an active tool to generate new possibilities for conceptualising and programming art institutions. Free Jazz at NTU CCA  Singapore presents a series of paired presentations and juxtaposes different approaches into a single platform as a playful way to encourage conversational and performative interactions that can take spontaneous, fluid, unplanned moves.

SEA STATE by artist Charles Lim Yi Yong, commissioned for the Singapore Pavilion for the 56th Venice Biennale and curated by Shabbir Hussain Mustafa, will be presented at the NTU CCA Singapore from 30 April to 10 July 2016. For over a decade, Lim’s ongoing project SEA STATE examines the biophysical, political and psychic contours of Singapore through the visible and invisible lenses of the sea. SEA STATE is an in-depth inquiry by an artist that scrutinises both man-made systems, opening new perspectives on our everyday surroundings, from unseen landscapes and disappearing islands to the imaginary boundaries of a future landmass.

First held at the Palazzo Franchetti on the occasion of the Singapore Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale, the symposium The Geopolitical and the Biophysical: a structured conversation on Art and Southeast Asia in context will continue and expand upon the debate with a second iteration at NTU CCA Singapore during Lim’s exhibition on 17 and 18 June 2016.

The presentation of SEA STATE and the symposium The Geopolitical and the Biophysical: a structured conversation on Art and Southeast Asia in context, Part II held at NTU CCA Singapore are generously supported by the Ministry of Culture, Community & Youth, National Arts Council Singapore and the Singapore Tourism Board.

Fish Story, to be continued presents an investigation of the global maritime industry, an extensive research of the late artist, theorist, photography historian and critic, Allan Sekula. Showing for the first time in Southeast Asia, NTU CCA Singapore will juxtapose chapters from Fish Story (1988 – 1993) alongside two film works, Lottery of the Sea (2006) and The Forgotten Space (2010) co-directed with Nöel Burch. With a focus on the core works of his explorations of the maritime world, this exhibition aims to emphasise Allan Sekula’s sustained argument that the sea is the “forgotten space” of the contemporary global economy. Fish Story, to be continued will include works from the collections of Fond Regional d’art contemporain Bretagne, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York and Thyssen Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA 21), Vienna.

An International Symposium is organised on the occasion of Fish Story, to be continued on Saturday 26 September 2015. Bringing together different researchers and artists who have collaborated or share common interests with Allan Sekula’s work, the symposium will focus on key themes of his practice including questions of critical realism in contemporary art and representation of labour.

This exhibition is part of NTU CCA Singapore’s curatorial programme PLACE.LABOUR.CAPITAL., a trandisciplinary research addressing the complexities of a world in flux and the network of connections that such underlying elements define at both local and global scale.

Incomplete Urbanism: Attempts of Critical Spatial Practice is an open-ended exhibition that serves as a laboratory of ideas, exploring the indeterminacy and changeability of urban living. Borrowing its title from eminent Singaporean architect William S.W. Lim’s book Incomplete Urbanism: A Critical Urban Strategy for Emerging Economies (2012), this multifaceted project takes Lim’s practice and the initiatives of the Asian Urban Lab that he started with colleagues in 2003, as a point of departure. It presents various researches into the spatial, cultural and social aspects of city life according to the publications Lim was involved with.

Acknowledging Lim’s contributions as a prolific urban theorist and catalyst of ideas, whose vision asks that we reconsider the traditions of Asian architecture for the “contemporary vernacular”, Incomplete Urbanism is a direct response to his critical ideas – a space is generated to encourage participation and agency.

Lim’s key ideas will be explored by commissioned projects from several contributors, including Dr Marc Glöde (Germany/Singapore), film curator, Visiting Scholar, School of Art, Design (ADM) and Media, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore; Laura Miotto (Italy/Singapore), Associate Professor, NTU ADM; Shirley Surya (Indonesia/Hong Kong), Associate Curator for Design and Architecture, M+, Hong Kong and NTU CCA Singapore Visiting Research Fellows; Dr Etienne Turpin (Canada/Indonesia), Research Scientist, Urban Risk Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States; and Sissel Tolaas (Norway/Germany), smell researcher and artist.

Incomplete Urbanism seeks to present a dynamic space to engage urban issues, through discussions, debates, a programme on classic Singapore films, workshops and other collective efforts.

Paradise Lost is NTU CCA Singapore’s inaugural exhibition, curated by Ute Meta Bauer (Founding Director) and Anca Rujoiu (Curator for Exhibitions). Conceived as a constellation of three artistic productions that together explore narratives of travel and migration, place and displacement, the personal intertwined with colonial history, Paradise Lost introduces an imaginary Asia — Asia as a space of projections and desires stemming from an experience of dislocation and asynchronicity.

The exhibition juxtaposed trans-generational perspectives, bringing together three major installations of moving image: Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989) by Trinh T. Minh-ha, Yellow Patch (2011) by Zarina Bhimji and Disorient (2009) by Fiona Tan.

While all three artists are of Asian descent, their education and artistic practice unfolded in Europe and the U.S., gaining international exposure from there. Paradise Lost marked the first time these works were shown in Asia in an exhibition context.

The Disappearance situates itself in the architectural setting of a previous exhibition Paradise Lost. It works with what is left out: the traces of the show in the space; its echoes in our memory, The Disappearance conceals and reveals: what has happened before and what will follow. Subject to operations of installation and de-installation, an exhibition space if continuously edited: we erase one text to inscribe another. The Disappearance acknowledges the inherent changes into an exhibition space and its continuous rewriting. What happens after an exhibition is over? What we remember? How we remember?

Curated by Anca Rujoiu (Curator for Exhibitions) and Vera Mey (Curator for Residencies), The Disappearance is conceived as a durational event unfolding over two days including a continuous series of manifestations from live performances to film screenings.

The nine artists and collectives, who are at differing stages of their careers from emerging artists to those who have exhibited internationally will examine the diverse but related ways in which they engage with the everyday. Their works explore the physical structures as as the invisible structures and networks that govern our everyday lives, the relationship of our increasingly urbanised environments to nature, as well as the systems of meaning making through the creation of images and signs that exists in our society. The exhibition aims to provide new perspectives about the everyday within the context of Singapore, and how this engagement with the everyday is also invariably an engagement with global perspectives.