Arus Balik: From below the wind to above the wind and back again]]> Oceans & Seas]]> Ecology]]> The Anthropocene]]> Politics]]> Geopolitics]]> Archipelagic State]]> Arus Balik – From below the wind to above the wind and back again, an exhibition project that initiated from a conversation between Belgian curator Philippe Pirotte and Jakarta-based artist Ade Darmawan. Reconsidering Indonesian author Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s epic book Arus Balik (1995), which could be translated into English as a “turning of the tide,” the eponymous exhibition takes the novel as a starting point to reflect on perspectival shifts in geopolitical, cultural, social, religious, and natural spheres.

In his fictional account, Pramoedya elaborates on the weakening of the maritime culture of Javanese kingdoms in the early 16th century, the progressive Islamisation, and the beginning of Portuguese occupation on parts of the now Malay and Indonesian peninsula and archipelago. Important is that Pramoeda’s reversal of perspective as a meta-geographical impulse is comparable to the notion of the “inverted telescope” Benedict Anderson advances in his seminal book Spectre of Comparisons (1998): as a non-Eurocentric method of comparison in which for example Portugal is viewed from the standpoint of Southeast Asia, as through an inverted telescope, which causes a kind of vertigo. Pramoedya suggests that the final decline of the Majapahit empire, and the “change from traditional independence to colonial possession,” was largely caused by the different Javanese kingdoms having gradually turned their backs to the sea.

The participating artists expand on this prompt through installations, sculptures, films, performances, and texts, both existing works as well as new commissions. Ade Darmawan re-read Arus Balik with a special focus on how protagonists use natural resources, and will create a distilling dispositive with alkaline water from the straits, recalling that all the scrambling for the control of the archipelago was about the extraction of ore and goods. ila questions what it means to be Boyanese, Buginese, Minangkabau, or Javanese through encounters with Singapore residents now conflated as Malay. Their testimonies will be written on her body and wither, while exposed to salty water and weather on reclaimed areas of Singapore island. Paradise Blueprint (2017), a wallpaper designed by Zac Langdon-Pole, based on a cyanotype photogram of the removed legs of a so-called “Bird of Paradise,” addresses the history of cultural exchange and mythology surrounding the birds native to Papua New Guinea. Lucy Raven creates silk paintings or monoprints, made by imprint of sedimentation in erosion tables, as scrim backdrops she uses for a forthcoming film-production, called Kongkreto, inspired by the 1991 eruption of Mt Pinatubo in the Philippines that finally chased off the Americans from Clark Airbase. Book-aficionado, artist, and writer Shubigi Rao delves into the stories related to the difficult conditions, but also extraordinary examples of solidarity Pramoedya faced on prison island Buru while writing Arus Balik. A new video-installation by Melati Suryodarmo, Dancing under the Black Sky (2019), traces the history behind Reog performances, an art form of resistance and criticism of Ponorogo people of East Java towards Bhre Kertabhumi, a Majapahit king who slowly lost his authority in the 15th century, before Islam became a major force in Demak and controlled the coastal region of Java.

The exhibition Arus Balik aims to imagine the implication of histories and politics in processes of transition, such as colonisation and decolonisation, or shifts in maritime power for people and ports below (the straits of Malacca, South China Sea, Java Sea, and further east) and above (the Indian Ocean and further West) the wind. Have the multiple colonisations in Southeast Asia alienated the people from the sea coast? Is it possible to attempt a return? The reversal of the colonial fact, the promise of reversal of a geo-political, -cultural, and social systems, initially embodied by the Bandung conference in 1955, caused Afro-American author Richard Wright to write that “it smacked of tidal waves, of natural forces.”

The accompanying public programmes further investigate the topics raised, including a conversation on Saturday, March 23, around the book Arus Balik and the reception of Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s oeuvre. On Saturday, May 25, another conversation will focus on living with the sea and the history of the straits.

Arus Balik – From below the wind to above the wind and back again is NTU CCA Singapore’s response and contribution to this year’s nation-wide bicentennial commemorations that reflect on Singapore’s history since the arrival of the British statesman Sir Stamford Raffles in 1819, considered the founder of modern Singapore.

Guest curated by Philippe Pirotte, Rector, Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste – Städelschule, and Director, Portikus, Frankfurt, and Visiting Professor (2018/19), MA Museum Studies and Curatorial Practices, School of Art, Design and Media, NTU.]]>
Ade Darmawan]]> ila]]> Zac Langdon-Pole]]> Lucy Raven]]> Shubigi Rao]]> Melati Surydarmo]]> Philippe Pirotte]]> Video]]> Film]]> Multimedia Installation]]> Drawing]]> Photography]]> Mixed Media]]> Southeast Asia]]>
Arus Balik: From below the wind to above the wind and back again Exhibition Brochure]]> Arus Balik: From below the wind to above the wind and back again Exhibition Brochure]]> Ade Darmawan]]> ila]]> Zac Langdon-Pole]]> Lucy Raven]]> Shubigi Rao]]> Melati Surydarmo]]> Philippe Pirotte]]> Brochure]]> 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]]>
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.

]]>
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]]>
Arus Balik with artists Ade Darmawan, Shubigi Rao, and Melati Suryodarmo, Moderated by curator Philippe Pirotte]]> Postcolonialism]]> Ade Darmawan]]> Shubigi Rao]]> Melati Suryodarmo]]> Philippe Pirotte]]> Southeast Asia]]>
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Postcolonialism]]> The first session of a two-part conversation, this panel discussion will focus on the book Arus Balik (1995) by Indonesian author Pramoedya Ananta Toer, which is the starting point for the eponymous exhibition that will be on view. Three of the participating artists will be joined by Philippe Pirotte, the curator of the exhibition, to discuss Ananta Toer’s body of work, its influence and legacy, as well as notions of censorship and the forbidden book.]]> Arus Balik]]> Ade Darmawan]]> Shubigi Rao]]> Melati Suryodarmo]]> Philippe Pirotte]]> Southeast Asia]]>
Geopolitics]]> History]]> Politics]]> Postcolonialism]]>
The second session of a two-part conversation, this panel discussion will focus on the history of the straits, historical maps, and the geography of maritime Southeast Asia. This involves an approach to Southeast Asia through underlying indigenous patterns, which will necessarily stretch the limits of ingrained westernised cultural visions and mental habits. The participants will discuss complexities of heritage, notions of belonging, and strategies of mapping. Rather than a static given, the Straits will be considered as an environment with an incipient psychology, invoking a transpiring age-old knowledge of the region, but also as a habitat that continues to profoundly influence our existence.]]>
Mirwan Andan]]> Nirkan Arsuka]]> Zac Langdon-Pole]]> ila]]> Juria Toromae]]> Philippe Pirotte]]> Video]]> Southeast Asia]]>
Oceans & Seas]]> 25 May 2019, Sat 03:30 PM - 05:30 PM
The Single Screen, Block 43 Malan Road

The second session of a two-part conversation, this panel discussion will focus on the history of the straits, historical maps, and the geography of maritime Southeast Asia. This involves an approach to Southeast Asia through underlying indigenous patterns, which will necessarily stretch the limits of ingrained westernised cultural visions and mental habits. The participants will discuss complexities of heritage, notions of belonging, and strategies of mapping. Rather than a static given, the Straits will be considered as an environment with an incipient psychology, invoking a transpiring age-old knowledge of the region, but also as a habitat that continues to profoundly influence our existence.

A public programme of Arus Balik – From below the wind to above the wind and back again.]]>
ila]]> Mirwan Andan]]> Nirwan Ahmad Arsuka]]> Zac Langdon-Pole]]> Imran bin Tajudeen]]> Juria Toramae]]> Philippe Pirotte]]> Southeast Asia]]>
Posthumanism]]> Sustainability]]> Coexistence]]> Biodiversity]]> Ecology]]> Technology]]> Climate Crisis]]> Philippe Pirotte]]> Southeast Asia]]> Activism]]> Politics]]> 14 May 2019, Tue 07:00 PM - 08:30 PM
The Single Screen, Block 43 Malan Road

Screenings by Filipino human-right activist, artist, and filmmaker Kiri Dalena and by American artist Lucy Raven will be followed by a conversation with both artists. Based on the true story of the drowning of a young activist, Dalena’s film From The Dark Depths (2017) opens with a beautiful and surreal sequence underwater in which a woman dances slowly brandishing a red flag. Around her, many red flags are planted in the seabed. This hypnotic and captivating dream is shuttered by sequences with authentic 16mm, analog and digital video footage from the artist’s own archive with documentation of political unrest spanning for two decades, and an ominous long-track of a police car at night prompting the citizens to respect the curfew—a gloomy reminder of a lost freedom. Lucy Raven will screen materials connected to a new film-in-progress, alongside several recent short videos.

A public programme of Arus Balik – From below the wind to above the wind and back again.]]>
Kiri Dalena]]> Lucy Raven]]> Philippe Pirotte]]> Southeast Asia]]> North America]]>