Climate Crisis]]> Cultural Production]]> Edited by Ute Meta Bauer
Design by mono.studio
Printed by DZA Druckerei zu Altenburg GmbH
© 2022 the artists, the authors, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, Nanyang Technological University 
ISBN: 978-0-262-04681-7 
Distributed by The MIT Press 
Copies are available for sale at NTU CCA Singapore and through MIT Press S$80/US$60

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

Experimental in form as well as in method, Climates. Habitats. Environments. features an inventive book design by mono.studio that puts word and image on equal footing, offering a multiplicity of media, interpretations, and manifestations of interdisciplinary research. For example, botanist Matthew Hall draws on Ovid's Metamorphoses to discuss human-plant interpenetration; curator and writer Venus Lau considers how spectrality consumes—and is consumed—in animation and film, literature, music, and cuisine; and critical theorist and filmmaker Elizabeth Povinelli proposes “Water Sense” as a geontological approach to “the question of our connected and differentiated existence,” informed by the “ancestral catastrophe of colonialism.” Artists excavate the natural and cultural DNA of indigo, lacquer, rattan, and mulberry; works at the intersection of art, design, and architecture explore “The Posthuman City”; an ongoing research project investigates the ecological urgencies of Pacific archipelagos. The works of art, the projects, and the majority of the texts featured in the book were commissioned by NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore.

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Ute Meta Bauer]]> Anna Lovecchio]]> Michael Marder]]> Kong Yin Ying]]> Marian Pastor Roces]]> Ravi Agarwal]]> Donna J. Haraway]]> Matthew Hall]]> Nikos Papastergiadis]]> Donna J. Haraway]]> David Pledger]]> Dan Koh]]> Tan Zi Hao]]> May Adadol Ingawanij]]> Michael M. J. Fischer]]> Venus Lau]]> Elizabeth A. Povinelli]]> Cynthia Chou]]> Nina Oeghoede]]> Philippe Pirotte]]> Epeli Hau'ofa]]> Nabil Ahmed]]> Édouard Glissant]]> Tania Roy]]> Alfian Sa'at]]> Jake Atienza]]> Kenneth Dean]]> Faizah Zakaria]]> Stefanie Hessler]]> Huang Jui-mao]]> Anna Källén]]> Philippa Lovatt]]> Laura Miotto]]> Rob Nixon]]> Khim Ong]]> Markus Reymann]]> Dirk Snauwaert]]> Matariki Williams]]> Irene Agrivina]]> Nabil Ahmed]]> Irwan Ahmett]]> Tita Salina]]> Atif Akin]]> Animali Domestici]]> Apichatpong Weerasethakul]]> Martha Atienza]]> Tarek Atoui]]> Laura Anderson Barbata]]> Rosella Biscotti]]> Guigone Camus]]> Choy Ka Fai]]> Roko Josefa Cinavilakeba]]> Sean Connelly]]> Ade Darmawan]]> Lucy Davis]]> Ines Doujak]]> Jef Geys]]> Tue Greenfort]]> Newell Harry]]> Ho Tzu Nyen]]> Chia-Wei Hsu]]> Pierre Huyghe]]> ila]]> inhabitants]]> The Institute of Critical Zoologists]]> Kristy H. A. Kang]]> Susanne Kriemann]]> Zac Langdon-Pole]]> Jae Rhim Lee]]> Liang Shaoji]]> PerMagnus Lindborg]]> Armin Linke]]> Nicholas Mangan]]> Alice Miceli]]> Manish Nai]]> Nguyễn Trinh Thi]]> Phi Phi Oanh]]> Lucy + Jorge Orta]]> Park Chan-kyong]]> Sophia Pich]]> Marjetica Potrč]]> Shubigi Rao]]> Lisa Rave]]> Lucy Raven]]> Bridget Reweti]]> Hito Steyerl]]> Melati Suryodarmo]]> Tanatchai Bandasak]]> Sung Tieu]]> Jegan Vincent de Paul]]> Wu Mali]]> Vivian Xu]]> Yeo Siew Hua]]> Zarina Muhammad]]> Edouard Glissant]]> Anna Kallen]]> Nguyen Trinh Thi]]> Marjetica Potrc]]> mono.studio]]> Publication]]> Southeast Asia]]> Asia]]>
Performance]]> Archipelagic State]]> History]]> Oceans & Seas]]> Globalisation]]> A Tumbling Inch is a performative action by Jakarta-based artists Irwan Ahmett and Tita Salina, which crystallised in the hydrospheric spatiality between Batam, the Indonesian island closest to Singapore, and the undulating maritime borders between the two countries. The work revolves around a nostalgic longing for the Lion City. Following the free movement of sea waves across the Straits of Malacca, the performance addresses archipelagic histories and the impact of global economic development.]]> Irwan Ahmett]]> Tita Salina]]> Southeast Asia]]> Environmental Crisis]]> Oceans & Seas]]>
In 2014, Tita Salina and Irwan Ahmett initiated Ring of Fire, a 10-year long research project that addresses manifold forms of vulnerability. Ring of Fire explores the intricate network of human-made collisions occurring in the eponymous geographical area that runs around the Pacific Ocean, from New Zealand to Chile stretching across Southeast Asia­—one of the deadliest places on earth due to plate movements and volcanic eruptions. Fascinated by how subterranean tectonic clashes find uncanny counterparts in the political turmoil above the ground, the artists will discuss the scope of Ring of Fire and reflect on how their work engage with humanitarian crisis, environmental disasters, and the darkest histories in the Southeast Asian region. They will also talk about the research initiated during their residency which, inspired by a historical moment of friction between Indonesia and Malaysia in 1965, tackles sabotage practices and haze threats.
]]>
Tita Salina]]> Irwan Ahmett]]> Video]]> Southeast Asia]]>
Geopolitics]]> Decolonialism]]>

#1: Mise-en-Scéne and Misalignments: Resetting the Postcolonial Stage

While the Cold War raged on in the years following 1945, in the spaces between East and West, smaller theatres of war were emerging throughout the postcolonial world. This collection highlights moments of mise-en-scène that reset a global stage framed by colonial axes of power, featuring thinkers and artists such as Isaac Julien, Mark Nash, Stefano Harney, Škart, and Bojana Piškur.

Paradise Lost: Lecture: Postcolonial critique today – Stefano Harney
7 March 2014

Referencing the works of Zarina Bhimji and Trinh T. Minh-ha in the exhibitionParadise Lost, Dr Stefano Harney investigates the renewed power of postcolonial critique today. By returning to the great thinkers of the “colonial situation” and its aftermath, Harney re-evaluates the proposition that globalisation has erased “old ideas of the lines between coloniser and colonised.”

Theatrical Fields: Special Brunch and Screening Session with Isaac Julien and Mark Nash
26 October 2014

Dr Mark Nash and Isaac Julien discuss theatricality as criticality through Vagabondia (2000), Julien’s seven-minute film for Theatrical Fields, in which the figure of the vagabond is used to explore how the Sir John Soane’s Museum collection has benefitted from colonisation. Julien’s Playtime (2014), a part-documentary part-fiction exploration of global capital, plays following their conversation.

Residencies Insights: Non-Aligned Movement: New Spaces of Liberty, New Lines of Alliance, New Modes of Creativity
22 November 2017

Belgrade-based collective Škart and Bojana Piškur situate the Non-Aligned Movement’s ideas, ideals, and principles in the present and apply them to exhibition-making and cultural exchange. Looking beyond the complex history of the Non-Aligned Movement, they map out possible prototypes for institutions, networks, and politics within art and culture today.

#2: Phantasms and Futurities: Decolonial Propositions

From a global stage reset in Mise-en-Scéne and Misalignments, this collection rescripts the linear trajectories of colonial pasts and postcolonial presents, towards the realisation of decolonised futures. Prof Timothy Murray noted in his keynote lecture that “the theatrical script always opens to the arrival of the future; they are contingent and dependent upon futurity”. Artists, performers, and curators, such as Zarina Muhammad and Brigitte van der Sande enact and identify heterotopias — spatial alterities or counter-sites wherein alternative realities are constructed — that rewrite these politicised narratives through explorations of mythmaking and science fiction.

Theatrical Fields: Symposium: Screening Theatrical Phantasms: Toward an Uncertain Futurity
Keynote Lecture by Prof Timothy Murray
23 August 2014

This talk addresses the fascination of artworks in our previous exhibition Theatrical Fields in 2014, which introduces theatricality as a critical strategy in performance, film and video. In providing a brief theoretical overview of “the politics of theatricality,” Murray will reflect on the exhibition’s screenic re-possession of cinematic characters, buried stories, and influential texts in ways that challenge the historical groundings of theatricality in the ethnocentric certainty of culture and law. 

Lecture Performance: Flowers from our Bloodlines by Zarina Muhammad, artist; Stefania Rossett, choreographer; Vivian Wang pianist; Eric Lee, artist; and Tini Aliman, sound artist
22 September 2017

Drawing from concepts of the demonised and desired body, gender-based archetypes, and mythmaking, this lecture performance invokes family histories and revokes the lineages of colonisation in Southeast Asia. Intergenerational and cross-cultural exchanges, facilitated by storytelling, rituals, gestures, and embodied movement, are explored through the rites of the Wolf Spider and the Harimau Jadian (Were-Tiger), and their multiple translations and adaptations.

Residencies Insights: Speculations on other futures by Brigitte van der Sande, former Curator-in-Residence
6 December 2018

Brigitte van der Sande explores how science fiction is used to envision alternative futures and critique existing power structures while shunning censorship, within countries where continuous change is the status quo because of war or political instability. Her long-term project Other Futures, “a multidisciplinary online and offline platform for thinkers and builders of other futures”, features non-Western science fiction makers and thinkers.

#3: Tidalectic Topographies, Counter Cartographies  

Extending the exploration of counter-sites from Phantasms and Futurities, this collection carries postcolonial inquiry from landlocked cartographies to liquid liminalities. Reflecting on shifting geopolitical, sociocultural, ethnoreligious, and environmental rhythms that ripple throughout the global hydrosphere, artists, curators, and scholars including Ade Darmawan, Shubigi Rao, Melati Suryodarmo, Prof Philippe Pirotte, Tita Salina, Irwan Ahmett, Dr Cresantia Frances Koya Vaka’uta, and Dr Cynthia Chou introduce a tidalectic worldview – in the tradition of Barbadian poet and historian Kamau Brathwaite – as a way of troubling territorial borders that became embedded during the post-Cold War wave of nationalist independence movements.

In Conversation Part I: Arus Balik with artists Ade Darmawan, Shubigi Rao, and Melati Suryodarmo, Moderated by curator Philippe Pirotte
23 March 2019

This panel discussion focuses on the Indonesian epic Arus Balik (1995) – loosely translated to mean “turn of the tide” – by revolutionary writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer, which served as the starting point for the eponymous exhibition Arus Balik – from below the wind to above the wind and back again(2019). Three of the participating artists – Ade Darmawan, Shubigi Rao, and Melati Suryodarmo – join exhibition curator Philippe Pirotte in a discussion on Pramoedya’s body of work, its influence and legacy, as well as notions of censorship and the forbidden book.

Performance: A Tumbling Inch by Former Artists-in-Residence Irwan Ahmett and Tita Salina
11 June 2019

A Tumbling Inch is a performative action by Jakarta-based artists Irwan Ahmett and Tita Salina, which crystallised in the hydrospheric spatiality between Batam, the Indonesian island closest to Singapore, and the undulating maritime borders between the two countries. The work revolves around a nostalgic longing for the Lion City. Following the free movement of sea waves across the Straits of Malacca, the performance addresses archipelagic histories and the impact of global economic development.

The Current Convening #3 Tabu / Tapu – Who Owns the Ocean?
Rights of Cultures, Rights of Nature: Case Studies by Dr Cresantia Frances Koya Vaka’uta, Director, Oceania Centre for Arts, and Dr Cynthia Chou, Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Iowa
27 January 2018

Rights of Cultures, RIghts of Nature features case studies that position oceanic spaces as charged relational spaces. Dr Cresantia Frances Koya Vaka’uta’s exposition on tabu/tapu – the Fijian indigenous practice of taboo – outlines the relationality between environment and peoples, complicated by histories of colonial extractivism and the globalising project of cultural and environmental commodification. Dr Cynthia Chou brings these relationalities closer to home with a study of the Orang Suku Laut of the Riau archipelago. The practices of oceanic indigenous communities presented explore how a tidalectic way of living can inform modes of engagement with the hydrosphere, challenge conceptions of land-based embeddedness, and contribute to a vision of fluid futures.

#4: Summoning Spectres: Historiography as Hauntology

This month’s curated selection of NTU CCA Singapore’s past programmes draws on Jacques Derrida’s concept of hauntology – the return or persistence of elements from the past manifesting as ghosts and apparitions. – Summoning Spectres: Historiography as Hauntology speaks to the remnants of personal and collective cultural memory incompletely erased by imperial and colonial violence. These traces of erasure remain inscribed in post-Cold War regional histories and embedded in their lexicon and legacy. Using historiography as a method of inquiry, this playlist showcases the ways in which curator Dr June Yap, artists Sung Tieu, Amy Lien, and Enzo Camacho approach the subjectivation of colonial spectres through their practices, to surface historical narratives of oppression and to summon the ghosts of lost futures.

Symposium: Ghosts and Spectres – Shadows of History
In the Interest of Time by Dr June Yap, Director of Curatorial Programmes and Publications, Singapore Art Museum

28 October 2017

Through a survey of historiographical works by artists Nguyen Trinh Thi and Ho Tzu Nyen, Dr June Yap addresses how cinematic works engage their medium specificity in a play of historical phantoms and repressed collective memories. These works contribute to a broader artistic tradition involving the subjectivation of histories, which is at its heart a process of self-determination: “in subjectivation there is constitution — the constitution of the self and or an identity… as a rising, as produced or perpetuated… as temporal, as arising from relations, as produced in a struggle”. As Yap aptly phrases, “in temporal consciousness, an identity is arrived.”

Residencies Insights: Two Worlds, Four Spirits by Sung Tieu, Former Artist-in-Residence

3 December 2019

Central to the artistic practice of Sung Tieu is a personal experience of migration from Vietnam to Germany, which impels her to address Post-Cold War histories and the multiple negotiations that underpin a diasporic identity haunted by the spectres of French colonialism in Vietnam and Cold War military violence during the American-Vietnam wars. In this talk, the artist discusses recent projects — Memory Dispute (2017), Coral Sea As Rolling Thunder (2017), Remote Viewing (2017) and Loveless(2019) — which variously employ text, performance, installation, moving image, and sound to convey a sense of dislocation while offering deliberate interventions into canonical readings of history.

Behind the Scenes: On Alfonso Ossorio’s Angry Christ mural by artists Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho 

1 December 2018

In this talk, collaborating artists Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho present their research on the Filipino-American modernist painter, Alfonso Ossorio (1916–1990), focusing on his 1950 mural, Angry Christ. For the artists, this mural, located in the province of Negros Occidental, the “sugar bowl of the Philippines”, is a “multivalent cipher”. When it is decoded, spectres of sixteenth century Spanish colonial violence — from the accorded name “Negros” to enforced religious, economic, and environmental functions — and the ghosts of indigenous people who were displaced or exterminated materialise. Lien and Camacho question whether the Angry Christ can be “radically reprogrammed” from the specific and highly privileged subjectivity of Ossorio, its maker, and the Ossorio family’s sugar dynasty, its commissioning patron.

]]>
Isaac Julien]]> Mark Nash]]> Stefano Harney]]> Škart]]> Bojana Piškur]]> Timothy Murray]]> Zarina Muhammad]]> Stefania Rossett]]> Vivian Wang]]> Eric Lee]]> Tini Aliman]]> Brigitte van der Sande]]> Ade Darmawan]]> Shubigi Rao]]> Melati Suryodarmo]]> Philippe Pirotte]]> Tita Salina]]> Irwan Ahmett]]> Cresantia Frances Koya Vaka’uta]]> Cynthia Chou]]> June Yap]]> Sung Tieu]]> Amy Lien]]> Enzo Camacho]]> Alignments from the Archive video collection]]> Southeast Asia]]>
Performance]]> Archipelagic State]]> History]]> Oceans & Seas]]> Globalisation]]> Name Laundering during which Ahmett made the solemn pledge (sumpah) not to return to Singapore, an oath that holds true until today. A Tumbling Inch is a performative action from Batam, the Indonesian island closest to Singapore.. Performed from a vantage point rife with strategic and symbolic implications, the work revolves around a man’s nostalgic longing for the Lion City. Following the free movement of sea waves across the Straits of Malacca, the man addresses archipelagic histories, the relations between Indonesia and Singapore, and the inequalities created by ruthless economic development.

The closing programme for Irwan Ahmett and Tita Salina: The Ring of Fire (2014 – ongoing).]]>
Irwan Ahmett]]> Tita Salina]]> Southeast Asia]]>
Oceans & Seas]]> Environmental Crisis]]> Climate Crisis]]> 28 Mar 2018, Wed 07:30 PM - 09:00 PM
Block 38 Malan Road, #01-05

In 2014, Tita Salina and Irwan Ahmett initiated Ring of Fire, a 10-year long research project that addresses manifold forms of vulnerability. Ring of Fire explores the intricate network of human-made collisions occurring in the eponymous geographical area that runs around the Pacific Ocean, from New Zealand to Chile stretching across Southeast Asia­—one of the deadliest places on earth due to plate movements and volcanic eruptions. Fascinated by how subterranean tectonic clashes find uncanny counterparts in the political turmoil above the ground, the artists will discuss the scope of Ring of Fire and reflect on how their work engage with humanitarian crisis, environmental disasters, and the darkest histories in the Southeast Asian region. They will also talk about the research initiated during their residency which, inspired by a historical moment of friction between Indonesia and Malaysia in 1965, tackles sabotage practices and haze threats.

The talk will take place in the artists’ studio.]]>
Tita Salina]]> Irwan Ahmett]]> Southeast Asia]]> Asia]]> Oceania]]> South America]]>
The Ring of Fire (2014 – ongoing) by Irwan Ahmett and Tita Salina Exhibition Guide]]> The Ring of Fire (2014 – ongoing) by Irwan Ahmett and Tita Salina Exhibition Guide]]> Irwan Ahmett]]> Tita Salina]]> Guide]]> Asia]]> Oceania]]> Geopolitics]]> Ring of Fire (2014-ongoing), a long-term project focused on natural disasters and geopolitical collisions named after the vast geographical area that runs from New Zealand to Chile stretching across Southeast Asia. By framing uncanny relationships between tectonic instability and political unrest, the pair seek to address conditions of vulnerability as well as the tensions related to environment, social justice, freedom of expression, and human rights among Southeast Asian countries.]]> Irwan Ahmett ]]> Tita Salina]]> Southeast Asia]]> Politics]]> Irwan Ahmett]]> Tita Salina]]> Southeast Asia]]> The Ring of Fire (2014 – ongoing) by Irwan Ahmett and Tita Salina]]> Geopolitics]]> Migration]]> Politics]]> Activism]]> Irwan Ahmett and Tita Salina, this geologically unstable territory demarcates a field of artist inquiry.

Since 2014, the Indonesian duo have embarked upon a journey that engages issues of social injustice, political struggles, colonial histories, and environmental crises encountered along erratic routes that stretch from Indonesia to New Zealand, from Taiwan and South Korea to Japan. The Ring of Fire (2014–ongoing) brings together for the first time the most significant works realised by the artists, either together or individually, since the inception of the project.]]>
Irwan Ahmett]]> Tita Salina]]> Video]]> Print]]> Object]]> Installation]]> Asia]]> Oceania]]>