Nature]]> Performance]]>
17 Jan 2020, Fri 08:00 PM - 09:30 PM Block 43 Malan Road

Exploring plant consciousness and communication networks in forests, sound artist Tini Aliman has developed a practice that involves collaborating with diverse plant species. Together with her guests, the artist will translate captured biodata into music and aural architecture. Finding ways of interspecies communication through pick-up mics and feedback loops, this performance allows for a deeper contemplation of what it means to share existence and listen to life. Pokoknya is a term in Bahasa Melayu/ Indonesia that translates to “essentially” or referring to the root of an issue, which is a play on the word “tree.” The word could also be read as the “tree belonging to…”]]>
Tini Aliman]]> Video]]> Southeast Asia]]>
Biodiversity]]> Performance]]> Nature]]> 17 Jan 2020, Fri 08:00 PM - 09:30 PM
Block 43 Malan Road

Exploring plant consciousness and communication networks in forests, sound artist Tini Aliman has developed a practice that involves collaborating with diverse plant species. Together with her guests, the artist will translate captured biodata into music and aural architecture. Finding ways of interspecies communication through pick-up mics and feedback loops, this performance allows for a deeper contemplation of what it means to share existence and listen to life. Pokoknya is a term in Bahasa Melayu/ Indonesia that translates to “essentially” or referring to the root of an issue, which is a play on the word “tree.” The word could also be read as the “tree belonging to…”

A public programme of The Posthuman City.Climates.Habitats.Environments.]]>
Tini Aliman]]> Southeast Asia]]>
Nature]]> Ecology]]> Ecosystems]]> Materiality]]> Tini Aliman]]> Video]]> Southeast Asia]]> Mythology]]> Indigenous Knowledge]]> Ritual]]> History]]>
A public programme of Ghosts and Spectres – Shadows of History.]]>
Zarina Muhammad]]> Stefania Rossetti]]> Vivian Wang]]> Eric Lee]]> Tini Aliman]]> Southeast Asia]]>
Performance]]> Saturday, 23 June 2018, 6.00 – 7.00pm
The Exhibition Hall, Block 43 Malan Road

Derived from the sonic exchanges that will take place throughout the course of the exhibition between Tarek Atoui’s guest hosts—Vivian Wang, Mark Wong, and Yuen Chee Wai—this series of performative situations are conceptualised as an open invitation for other invited performers to use the exhibition space as an experimental platform. Each of the evenings will be the result of an exchange between the performers and the three guest hosts.

A public programme of Tarek Atoui The Ground: From the Land to the Sea.

Part of Art Day Out! x The School Holidays Edition 2018 at Gillman Barracks.]]>
Tini Aliman]]> Dharma]]> Sudarshan Chandra Kumar]]> Cheryl Ong]]> Zai Tang]]> Wu Jun Han]]> Yuen Chee Wai ]]> Southeast Asia]]>
Performance]]> Friday, 1 June 2018, 7.30 – 9.00pm
The Exhibition Hall, Block 43 Malan Road

Derived from the sonic exchanges that will take place throughout the course of the exhibition between Tarek Atoui’s guest hosts—Vivian Wang, Mark Wong, and Yuen Chee Wai—this series of performative situations are conceptualised as an open invitation for other invited performers to use the exhibition space as an experimental platform. Each of the evenings will be the result of an exchange between the performers and the three guest hosts.

A public programme of Tarek Atoui The Ground: From the Land to the Sea

Part of Art Day Out! x The School Holidays Edition 2018 at Gillman Barracks.]]>
Tini Aliman]]> Cheryl Ong]]> The Analog Girl]]> Vivian Wang]]> 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]]>
Tarek Atoui The Ground: From the Land to the Sea Exhibition Guide]]> Tarek Atoui The Ground: From the Land to the Sea Exhibition Guide]]> Vivian Wang]]> Yuen Chee Wai]]> Mark Wong]]> Darren Ng]]> Uriel Barthélémi]]> Tini Aliman]]> Wu Junhan]]> The Analog Girl]]> Cheryl Ong]]> Zai Tang]]> Bani Haykal]]> Dharma]]> Sudarshan Chandra Kumar]]> Guide]]> Asia]]> Southeast Asia]]> Tarek Atoui The Ground: From the Land to the Sea]]> Performance]]> Body]]> Materiality]]> Nature]]> Tarek Atoui, conceived as a composition that unfolds in space with its unique sound library and instruments. It is the first large-scale exhibition that Atoui has created through interweaving objects, instruments, and recordings, some borrowed from pre-existing projects, others newly collected and produced.

The Ground: From the Land to the Sea comprises two layers of auditory experiences that interact with each other as well as with the spatial and sonic qualities of NTU CCA Singapore’s exhibition hall, merging them into a single composition. Enveloping the main exhibition space are a set of speakers that play the sounds of underwater environments as well as human and industrial activities in the harbours of Athens and Abu Dhabi, recorded for the project I/E (2015–ongoing). Building upon the sound collection, Atoui has, as part of this presentation in Singapore, recorded at local harbours and waterfronts, together with composer and sound artist Éric La Casa.

The recording process in Singapore took Atoui and La Casa to a range of waterfront sites and islands including the Jurong Fishery Port, Pulau Sebarok (an oil storage facility and refuelling port off the Southern coastline), on an oil tanker, and along the Singapore shores. During these trips, the duo picked out acoustic features of these environs, both underwater and on land, and captured them in their diverse forms—as vibrations, audible noise, and inaudible audio waves, etc.— using devices such as a recorder, a hydrophone, contact microphones, and selfmade omnidirectional microphones. Drawing reference to the emergence of acoustic ecology, which attempts to understand and analyse characteristics of sonic environments such as geological formations, organisms, and human interactions, Atoui’s auditory library is an artistic interpretation of the ecology of our times. Set within a “white cube,” the audience is transposed into an immersive audio-visual topography, becoming part of the installation.

Most of the instruments shown are part of The Ground project, the result of the artist’s five-year-long investigation of natural cycles in the Pearl River Delta, first presented at Mirrored Gardens, a project space in Guangzhou, China, in 2017. Also presented are instruments created for previous projects, such as The Reverse Collection (2014–16) and WITHIN (2012–13). This ensemble of unusual instruments is enriched with new additions, including a set of porcelain and ceramic discs, on which traditional Arabic rhythms are engraved, and a customised record player that rotates at irregular speeds, never reading a disc the same way twice.

At the core of Atoui’s practice lies an ongoing process of inviting composers, musicians, and artists to collaborate on his pieces in search of new ideas, gestures, and experiences. For the current exhibition, Atoui will engage with local and international musicians who will be invited to appropriate his composition and intervene in the exhibition space. He will work with acclaimed sound artists and musicians Vivian Wang and Yuen Chee Wai, as well as music curator Mark Wong, who in turn will invite other musicians and sound artists to inhabit the installation throughout the course of the exhibition.

The exhibition is curated by Ute Meta Bauer, Founding Director, NTU CCA Singapore, and Professor, School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University, and Khim Ong, Deputy Director, Curatorial Programmes, NTU CCA Singapore. Supported by Institut français, with the additional support of the Embassy of France in Singapore and Institut français Singapour.

Tarek Atoui has invited local and international musicians to engage with his exhibition and appropriate the installation for given periods of time. He worked with acclaimed sound artists and musicians Vivian Wang and Yuen Chee Wai, as well as music curator Mark Wong, who each will host three other musicians and sound artists. The guests will inhabit the exhibition and freely experiment with Atoui’s instruments throughout the course of the exhibition.

Schedule for upcoming Guest Musicians in the Exhibition Hall:

Vivian Wang (Singapore): 26 – 30 March
Yuen Chee Wai (Singapore): 31 March – 3 April
Darren Ng (Singapore): 7 – 10 April
Uriel Barthélémi (France): 13 – 17 April
Tini Aliman (Singapore): 28 April – 1 May
Wu Junhan (Singapore): 2 – 5 May
The Analog Girl (Singapore): 10 – 13 May
Cheryl Ong (Singapore): 19 – 22 May
Zai Tang (Singapore): 31 May – 3 June
Bani Haykal (Singapore): 4 – 7 June
Dharma (Singapore): 13 – 16 June
Sudarshan Chandra Kumar (Malaysia): 19 – 22 June]]>
Tarek Atoui]]> Yuen Chee Wai]]> Mark Wong]]> Vivian Wang]]> Darren Ng]]> Uriel Barthélémi]]> Tini Aliman]]> Wu Junhan]]> The Analog Girl]]> Cheryl Ong]]> Zai Tang]]> Bani Haykal]]> Dharma]]> Sudarshan Chandra Kumar]]> Ute Meta Bauer]]> Khim Ong]]> Multimedia Installation]]> Installation]]> Sound]]> Object]]> Asia]]> Southeast Asia]]>
Free Jazz III. Sound. Walks.]]> Experiential]]> Nature]]> Technology]]> Free Jazz III. Sound. Walks. offers the curatorial proposition that collectivity and communality can be explored through art experiences that draw on the long histories of sound and walking, offering concrete ways to connect with nature, technology, and each other during times of social distancing. Dematerialized, asynchronous, and participatory, these artworks each reflect how our current collective negotiations between physical and online realms need not be seen as binary opposites, but as opportunities for rethinking social interaction through our senses.

We invite you bring your headphones and your walking shoes to experience the artworks of Free Jazz III. Sound. Walks.

Free Jazz III. Sound. Walks. is curated by Magdalena Magiera (Germany/Singapore), NTU CCA Singapore Curator, Education and Outreach, and Dr Karin Oen (United States/Singapore), NTU CCA Singapore Deputy Director, Curatorial Programmes.]]>
Tini Aliman]]> Arahmaiani]]> Jimmy Ong]]> Christa Donner]]> Andrew S. Yang]]> bani haykal]]> Lee Weng Choy]]> Diana Lelonek]]> Denim Szram]]> Cheryl Ong]]> Ana Prvački]]> Joyce Bee Tuan Koh]]> Galina Mihaleva]]> Reetu Sattar]]> anGie seah]]> Vivian Wang ]]> Magdalena Magiera]]> Karin Oen]]> Southeast Asia]]>