Mythology]]> Supernatural]]> 28 Oct 2017, Sat 09:30 AM - 08:00 PM
The Single Screen, Block 43 Malan Road

On the occasion of the exhibition Ghost and Spectres – Shadows of History curated by Professor Ute Meta Bauer and Khim Ong, and the 4th anniversary of NTU CCA Singapore.

Taking the works in the current show as points of departure, the symposium brings together the artists of the exhibition, as well as curators and scholars researching on the subject matter, to generate a discussion on muted histories and legacies, as they cast light upon past events that still impact society today, particularly in terms of power structures and restriction of social freedom. The role of the moving image—the medium used by the four exhibiting artists—will be analysed to demonstrate how it reveals, as much as it conceals, past traumas that evade representation.

Divided into two sessions, the symposium explores the artists’ working processes and methodological approaches through structured conversations consisting of lectures, presentations, and moderated discussions. The focus will lie on the sources of inspiration as well as on the motivations of the artists’ practices, and on the construction and contestation of official narratives. Ho Tzu NyenNguyen Trinh Thi, and Park Chan-kyong will expand on the historical events and socio-political contexts that feed into their work, and on the different strategies employed to revive collective memory. Scholar Dr Clare Veal will highlight the medium specificity in the works of Apichatpong Weerasethakul to address conflicted histories, whereas the lectures by curators Dr June Yap and Hyunjin Kim, as well as the keynote lectures by Dr May Adadol Ingawanij and Professor Kenneth Dean, aim to articulate the complicated geopolitical relations in contemporary Asia.

11.00am – 1.10pm
Session I: Shadows of History

Chaired by Dr Roger Nelson, curator and art historian, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, School of Art Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), and NTU CCA Singapore

Dedicated to the uncovering of neglected histories, this session will look at the construction of historical narratives and their role in reflecting social, political, and cultural conditions. Occluded by the propagation of progress and nation building, what has been left out and rendered unspeakable in the region’s bid to establish national identities and political autonomy? Referencing the works of Ho Tzu Nyen and Nguyen Trinh Thi, this session traces post-war and Cold War legacies in Asia and investigates their lingering spectres.

2.30 – 5.30pm
Session II: Ghosts and Spectres

Chaired by Dr David Teh, researcher and curator, Assistant Professor, Department of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore (NUS)

Referencing the works of Park Chan-kyong and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, this session deals with notions of ghosts and spectres as allegories of historical moments and dreamlike realities. Embedded in myths and folklore, what roles do they play in constructing an understanding of the past and in reflecting socio-political circumstances? How do cinematic works engage their medium-specificity in a play of historical phantoms and repressed collective memories, to create a language for portraying trauma, loss, dreams, and nightmares?

]]>
Ute Meta Bauer]]> May Adadol Ingawanij]]> June Yap]]> Nguyen Trinh Thi]]> Ho Tzu Nyen]]> Khim Ong]]> Hyunjin Kim]]> Park Chan-kyong]]> Clare Veal]]> Roger Nelson]]> David Teh]]> Kenneth Dean]]> Southeast Asia]]> Asia]]>
Materiality]]> Nature]]> Artistic Research]]> ]]> Manish Nai]]> June Yap]]> Video]]> Asia]]> History]]> Politics]]> Identity]]>
On the occasion of the exhibition Ghost and Spectres – Shadows of History curated by Professor Ute Meta Bauer and Khim Ong, and the 4th anniversary of NTU CCA Singapore

SESSION I: SHADOWS OF HISTORY 11.10am – 1.10pm

Lecture: “In the Interest of Time” Dr June Yap, Director of Curatorial Programmes and Publications, Singapore Art Museum

The incidences and treatment of history within the works of contemporary artists raise a few questions: What are the purposes of and reasons for undertaking such aesthetic mediations? How efficaious have these undertakings been? With a focus on works of this nature, the lecture considers the notions of subjectivity and subjectivation as key ideas in the examination of these works. In the notion of subjectivity, the historical act is appraised as a self-regarding activity that emerges from a sense of historicity. Following from this, it is considered if subjectivity might lead to subjectivation.]]>
June Yap]]> Video]]> Asia]]>
History]]> Identity]]> Politics]]>
On the occasion of the exhibition Ghost and Spectres – Shadows of History curated by Professor Ute Meta Bauer and Khim Ong, and the 4th anniversary of NTU CCA Singapore

SESSION I: SHADOWS OF HISTORY

In Conversation: Dr Roger Nelson with Ho Tzu Nyen, Nguyen Trinh Thi, and Dr June Yap

Dedicated to the uncovering of neglected histories, this session will look at the construction of historical narratives and its role imn reflecting social, political, and cultural conditions. Occluded by propaganda of progress and nation building, what has been left out and rendered unpseakable in the region's bid to establish national identities and politcal autonomy? Referencing the works of Ho Tzu Nyen and Nguyen Trinh Thi, this session traces post-war and Cold War legacies in Asia and investigates its lingering spectres.]]>
Roger Nelson]]> Ho Tzu Nyen]]> Nguyen Trinh Thi]]> June Yap]]> Video]]> Asia]]>
Politics]]> History]]> Identity]]> Globalisation]]>
No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia is part of the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative which was launched in April 2012, a multi-year collaboration that charts contemporary art practice in three geographic regions—South and Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East and North Africa—and encompasses curatorial residencies, international touring exhibitions, audience-driven education programming, and acquisitions for the Guggenheim’s permanent collection.

Curated by June Yap, No Country at NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore brought the artworks back to the Southeast Asia region from which many of the artists hail and called for an even closer examination of regional cultural representations and relations. This return suggests the possibility of a renewed understanding through a process of mutual rediscovery that transcends physical and political borders. The exhibition in Singapore also marked the debut of two works from the Guggenheim UBS MAP Purchase Fund not previously shown as part of No Country: Loss by Sheela Gowda and Morning Glory by Sopheap Pich.]]>
June Yap]]> Video]]> 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]]>
They Beat Your Father: Arin Rungjang in conversation with Dr June Yap]]> Diaspora]]> Migration]]> Arin Rungjang]]> June Yap]]> Southeast Asia]]> Europe]]> Materiality]]> 1 Sep 2018, Sat 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
The Single Screen, Block 43 Malan Road

Manish Nai is interested in discovering the abstract dimensions of form through the manipulation of matter, exploring the new life assumed by the cast-offs that change from objects of use—jute, cardboard, newspapers, old cloths—to art objects, divested from any function or utility. This conversation uncovers the multitude of representations and associations of indigo seen in Nai’s work. Featured in Trees of Life – Knowledge in Material is his installation of 99 pieces of compressed indigo jute cloths.

A public programme of Trees of Life – Knowledge in Material.]]>
Manish Nai]]> June Yap]]> Asia]]>
Symposium: Ghosts and Spectres – Shadows of History

Session I: Shadows of History
In Conversation: Dr Roger Nelson with Ho Tzu Nyen, Nguyen Trinh Thi, and Dr June Yap]]>
History]]> Mythology]]> Supernatural]]> The Single Screen, Block 43 Malan Road]]> Roger Nelson]]> Ho Tzu Nyen]]> Nguyen Trinh Thi]]> June Yap]]> Asia]]> Southeast Asia]]>
Symposium: Ghosts and Spectres – Shadows of History

Session 1: Shadows of History
Lecture: “In the Interest of Time” by Dr June Yap, Director of Curatorial Programmes, Singapore Art Museum

]]>
History]]> Cultural Production]]> 28 Oct 2017, Sat 11:00 - 11:45 AM
The Single Screen, Block 43 Malan Road

The incidences and treatment of history within the works of contemporary artists raise a few questions. What are the purposes and reasons for undertaking such aesthetic meditations? How efficacious have these undertakings been? With a focus on works of this nature, the lecture considers the notions of subjectivity and subjectivation as key ideas in the examination of these works. In the notion of subjectivity, the historical act is apprasied as self-regarding activity that emerges from a sense of historicity. Following from this, it is considred if subjectivity might lead to subjectivation.


]]>
June Yap]]> Southeast Asia]]>