Geopolitics]]> Politics]]> 11 Oct 2022, Tue – 6 Nov 2022, Sun
The Screening Room, Block 38 Malan Road, #01-06
12 pm – 7pm, every day except Monday
Film starts every hour

Premier Screening: Tuesday 11 October, 7:00pm-8:30pm
The screening will be followed by a conversation between the artist Tekla Aslanishvili, artistic-scientific collaborator Dr. Evelina Gambino and Assistant Professor Dr. Marc Gloede, School of Art, Design and Media, NTU, Singapore.
The welcome will be given by Ute Meta Bauer, Professor, School of Art, Design and Media, and Founding Director, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, and Dr. Karin Oen, Senior Lecturer and Head of Department, Art History, NTU School of Humanities.

A State in a State is the result of Aslanishvili winning the Han Nefkens Foundation – Fundació Antoni Tàpies Video Art Production Grant 2020, in collaboration with Jameel Art Centre, Dubai; the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design in Manila; NTU CCA Singapore and WIELS, Brussels. The Award appraises the work of emerging artists aged 40 and under, who live in West or Central Asia and have established a solid trajectory but not yet received recognition by international art institutions.

Aslanishvili was selected by an international jury, including NTU CCA Singapore’s Founding Director Ute Meta Bauer and former Deputy Director of Curatorial Programmes, Dr Karin Oen, for her body of meticulously researched work and her commitment to exploring a specific geopolitical context, whilst connecting to a wider discourse on the impact of extractivist economies on a planetary scale.

Revolving around the scenes of delay and waiting that constitute cargo mobility, the film reads the optimistic narratives about the New Silk Road against the grain. It observes how the iron foundation of connectivity can be used as a weapon of exclusion and geopolitical sabotage. Dotting the same lines, other forms of sabotage are deployed by workers to disrupt the political violence. Looking at historic and current practices of resistance, A State in a State explores the potential of railroads for building a different, infrastructural consciousness, and the lasting transnational kinship among the people who live and work around them

The film is developed in artistic-scientific collaboration with Dr. Evelina Gambino, Margaret Tyler Research Fellow in Geography at Girton College, University of Cambridge.

Research & Script: Tekla Aslanishvili / Evelina Gambino
Music: Ani Zakareishvili / Nika Pasuri
Cinematography: Nikoloz Tabukashvili / Tekla Aslanishvili
Typography: Dato Simonia

Editing: Tekla Aslanishvili
Sound: Viktor Bone / Irakli Shonia
Color: Sally Shamas

A State in a State will be also presented at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona  from October 8th till November 27th.

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Tekla Aslanishvili]]> Marc Glöde]]> Marc Glode]]> Hans Nefkens Foundation]]> Ute Meta Bauer]]> Karin Oen]]> Europe]]>
Vampir-Cuadecuc, Pere Portabella, Spain, 1970, 66 min]]> Ways of Seeing]]> Mythology]]> Politics]]> 29 Oct 2017, Sun 05:00 PM - 07:00 PM
The Projector, Golden Mile Tower, #05-00, 6001 Beach Road

Tickets: S$13.50 standard; S$11.50 concession. Purchase at theprojector.sg

Introduction by Professor Ute Meta Bauer, Founding Director, NTU CCA Singapore, and Professor, School of Art, Design and Media (ADM), NTU

Vampir-Cuadecuc is arguably one of the key films for understanding the transition in the Spanish film world from the period of the “new cinemas” (permitted by the Franco government) towards the illegal, clandestine, or openly antagonistic practices against the Franco regime. The film consists of shooting the filming of a commercial film El Conde Drácula by Jesús Franco. Portabella practices two types of violence on the standard narrative: he totally eliminates colour and substitutes the soundtrack with a landscape of image-sound collisions by Carles Santos. Filmed provocatively in 16mm with sound negative, Vampire-Cuadecuc stages the tensions between the black and white of the film stock, and reveals the “fantasmatic materialism” that dominant narrative cinema is reliant upon.

This Screening is part of the public programme of Ghosts and Spectres – Shadows of History.

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Pere Portabella]]> Ute Meta Bauer]]> Europe]]>
Oceans & Seas]]> 3 Feb 2018, Sat 12:00 PM - 04:00 PM
4 Feb 2018, Sun 12:00 PM - 06:30 PM
The Single Screen, Block 43 Malan Road

What do we look at when we look at the ocean? From where do we look at when we look at the ocean? What shapes the visions of the sea, what are the sources of our personal and collective imaginaries, the references for our impressions, desires, and fears in relation to the sea?

During the past two years, a dispersed community of artists, thinkers, writers, and researchers was summoned, assembled, and brought together by curator Ute Meta Bauer on a set of three expeditions on board of the Dardanella, TBA21-Academy’s research vessel, which was travelling across various locations in the Pacific Ocean.

These expeditions were deeply cinematic experiences. In itself the boat was both a real and figurative site of projection: at once a privileged place from where to observe the ocean, the life forms, transactions, and infrastructures it hosts, and at the same time a vessel that embodied the tropes of the expedition, voyage, and exploration that were being performed.

Further pursuing the production and sourcing of images of the ocean and all that surrounds it—from its infrastructure, to the politics and cultures of extraction and management, to the observation of its social and natural landscapes—the selection of films of Liquid Traces—visions (a title borrowed from Charles Heller and Lorenzo Pezzani’s film Liquid Traces: The Left-to-Die Boat Case film) followed the collective agency of Ute Meta Bauer’s Dardanella expeditions. The films presented were chosen by the 12 participants of the expeditions.

The selection of films has been arranged around two programmes, the first focuses on poetic, dreamlike approaches and the second on documentarist portraits of more concrete scenarios and realities. Together, they interrogate the cinematic references that shape our dreamscapes and they offer glimpses of what sort of moving images inform the common gazes of the expeditions participants, their discourses and encounters.

PROGRAMME 1

Saturday, 3 February 2018, 12.00 – 4.00pm
Proteus, David Lebrun, 2004, video, 60 min

Proteus is an animated documentary film that depicts a 19th-century understanding of the sea with a particular emphasis on the life and work of German biologist and naturalist Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919). Haeckel was a promoter of Darwinism in Germany who discovered, described, drew and named thousands of new species, namely an extensive number of underwater creatures.

The key to Haeckel’s vision was a tiny undersea organism called radiolaria, one of the earliest forms of life. Haeckel discovered, described, classified and painted four thousand species of these one-celled creatures. In their intricate geometric skeletons, Haeckel saw all the future possibilities of organic and created form. Proteus explores the metamorphoses of the radiolarian and celebrates their beauty and seemingly infinite variety in animation sequences based on Haeckel’s graphic work. Proteus weaves a tapestry of poetry and myth, biology and oceanography, scientific history and spiritual biography.

Marsa Abu Galawa (Careless Reef Part 4), Gerard Holthuis, 35mm film transferred to digital file, 2004, 13 min

Marsa Abu Galawa (Careless Reef Part 4) is a psychedelic, mind-altering, rhythmic sequence of images of the underwater world shot in the Red Sea and pacing at the soundtrack of Egyptian shaabi singer Abdel Basset Hamouda. The structure of the film is based on flicker films, in which the whole unconscious experience of the flux of images is more important than the single shots. Marsa Abu Galawa is the fourth part of the “Careless Reef” series, four short films made by Gerard Holthuis, which deal with the underwater world.

Million Dollars Point, Camille Henrot, video, 2011, 5 min 35 sec

Courtesy the artist and kamel mennour, Paris.

Million Dollars Point is the name of a dive site on Santo Island, Vanuatu—a lagoon that became an underwater cemetery for hundreds of tanks and canons abandoned by the North American army after the Second World War. The site was named after the amount offered by the local islanders to buy out this war debris. Million Dollars Point juxtaposes the images of this submarine battlefield with footage of a local music video showing a French moustached man dancing and singing on a Pacific beach, flanked by Polynesian girls wearing typical costumes. The choreography of the young women seems to respond the images of engulfed weapons, they hide their faces as a refusal to see and they mimic waves, which recall the borderline between the surface and the sea bottom.

Limits to Growth, Nicholas Mangan, HD video, 2017, 8 min 55 sec

Limits to Growth begins by staging a comparison between two virtual monetary currencies: the cryptocurrency Bitcoin and Rai, the Yapese currency. While bitcoins are virtual and in a sense immaterial, Rai are made of stone and are often very large and heavy. Bitcoins are mined by computers solving complex algorithms, often collectively, working in a blockchain. In order to “mine” Bitcoins, vast quantities of energy are consumed by the computers processing the algorithms as they labour to verify and record transactions. Processor farms must labour continuously to keep the network alive. Although Bitcoin’s medium of exchange is virtual, it remains, like Rai, bound to the physical world. (…) My interest in Bitcoin was piqued by the use of terminology such as “mining” and “workers.” Trawling through various online forums, I found someone in Australia who was actually mining bitcoin, despite the fact that the country’s high electricity costs render it unprofitable. I came across a discussion taking place within a remote community in Western Australia that was established by a mining company to service an actual mine. As is common practice, the company provided free housing and electricity to workers, as well as much needed air-conditioning in the hot climate. In the online thread, a worker from the mine suggested that a Bitcoin rig could be set up at his company-funded housing in order to take advantage of this free electricity and cooling. This physical mine could indirectly provide the climate for profitable virtual mining in Australia. This situation of a parasitical economy and how the potential overlay of the physical and the dematerialised might function in relation to resource extraction was of particular interest. Limits to Growth includes an underwater video of a Rai stone lying on the bottom of the Miil Channel off the northwest coast of Yap. The sound of a human breathing through a scuba apparatus is taken directly from the video.”

Nauru – Notes from a Cretaceous World, Nicholas Mangan, HD Video, 2010, 14 min 50 sec
Courtesy the artist; Sutton Gallery, Melbourne; Hopkinson Mossman, Auckland; and LABOR, Mexico City.

“I wanted to look at this moment in human history within a much longer period of time. I wanted to place human agency within the contours of a deeper time frame and an evolving ecosystem that doesn’t place humans as the primary organism.”

—Nicholas Mangan

NauruNotes from a Cretaceous World is a video essay that contrasts the ancient geological history of the Pacific nation of Nauru with the country’s more recent political and economic situation. Historically, Nauru’s coral limestone rocky landscape has been rich in phosphate—a valuable mineral which, in Nauru, is the product of a mixture of decomposed marine life and guano deposits compressed over millions of years. In the 1920s, the British Phosphate Commission initiated industrial strip-mining of Nauru’s ancient coral landscape, selling the phosphate mineral off to Australia, the United Kingdom and New Zealand, where it was processed into a superphosphate fertiliser used to enrich agricultural soil.
Over the coming decades, the Nauruan government allowed mining to occur at such intensity that, by 1977, the tiny island nation of Nauru had become the second-richest nation per capita after Saudi Arabia. That year, as a sign of its wealth, Nauru built the then-tallest sky scraper in Melbourne. Called Nauru House, it was crudely dubbed “Bird Shit Tower” by many Australians. By the turn of the millennium, as phosphate levels became depleted, the Nauruan government began to default on numerous major international loans and declared bankruptcy. At this time, the Australian government initiated its so-called Pacific Solution (2001–07) policy, and later Operation Sovereign Borders (2013–ongoing), in which it paid the financially desperate Nauru to house asylum seekers attempting to arrive in Australia by boat.

Drawing Restraint 9, Matthew Barney, video, 2005, 135 min

Drawing Restraint 9 comprises the presented feature-length film, alongside large-scale sculptures, photographs, drawings and books. The “Drawing Restraint” series consists of 19 numbered components and related materials. Some episodes are videos, others sculptural installations or drawings.

Drawing Restraint 9 is a love story set in Nisshin Maru, a Japanese whaling vessel making its annual journey to Antarctica. The histories and traditions of Shinto religion, Japanese tea ceremony, whaling, and global forms of fuel extraction are intertwined in this non-narrative, monumental epic. Two actions unfold simultaneously on the vessel: one on deck and one beneath it. The narrative on deck involves the process of casting a 25-ton petroleum jelly sculpture that rivals the scale of a whale. Below deck, the two characters participate as guests in a tea ceremony, where they are formally engaged after arriving on the ship as strangers. As the film progresses, the guests go through an emotional and physical transformation slowly transfiguring from land mammals into sea mammals, as they fall in love. The petroleum jelly sculpture simultaneously passes through changing states, from warm to cool, and from the architectural back to the primordial. The dual narratives, the sculptural and the romantic, come to reflect one another until they merge into one.

AXIS – Anatomy of space, Good Company Arts / Daniel Belton, video, 2017, 6 min

“With the same evolutionary effect that was followed by the ancient Greeks in their search for beauty, AXIS offers a resonating, lyrical space. Dancers are seen travelling through apertures tensioned with the happening of projected light. Their choreography establishes a circuitry of luminosity. Like a great celestial dynamo, the screen environment transmits oscillating shafts of digital dance and sound—illuminating song cycles in a cosmic choreography of light. We are each made up of photons.
Photons are particles of light. Light is inspiration. Every space has an “anatomy.” AXIS creates a new search with the human figure in space, as projected film and processed sound performance combine. Nothing is in stasis.”

—Good Company Arts

Note: This single-channel version of AXIS was created from parts of the original full-length work of 38 minutes made for 360º full-dome cinema.

Programme 2

Sunday, 4 February 2018, 12.00 – 6.30pm

Trobriand Cricket: An Indigenous Response to Colonialism, Gary Kildea and Jerry Leach, 1976, 54 min

Anthropologist and filmmaker Jean Rouch described Trobriand Cricket as “a wonderful film, perhaps one of the greatest anthropological films of recent time”
(Film Quarterly, 1978).

A key reference of ethnographic cinema, Trobriand Cricket depicts the transformations introduced by the inhabitants of the Trobriand Islands in Papua New Guinea to the British version of cricket, a game that was introduced to Trobriand by a British Methodist missionary in the early 20th century as a way to replace violent tribal warfare with Western sportsmanship.

The film shows how the islanders responded to a British colonial imposition by appropriating and transforming the game into an expression of tribal rivalry, mock warfare, community interchange, eroticised dancing and chanting, and unruly fun.

The Shark Callers of Kontu, Dennis O’Rourke, 16mm transferred to video, 1982, 54 min

From 1974 to 1979, Dennis O’Rourke lived in Papua New Guinea, where he taught documentary filmmaking. Made during his stay there, The Shark Callers of Kontu depicts the ancient tradition of ‘sharkcalling’ in the village of Kontu, on the west coast of New Ireland. The documentation of Kontu inhabitants’ traditional way of shark hunting, in which sharks are called and killed by hand, is combined with a portrait of their lives and environment, presented both from still images commented by O’Rourke and interviews with the local population. The film explores the changes to cultural values and traditional customs wrought by colonisation, alcohol, commerce, and Christianity.

The People’s Elect – Pouvanaa te Metua, Marie-Hélène Villierme, HDCam PAL, 2012, 90 min

In the late 1940s, the French Establishments in Oceania (now French Polynesia), saw the dawn of a local political era. In 1949, Pouvanaa a Oopa (1895–1977) became the first Tahitian to serve in the French Chamber of Deputies. Pouvanaa was also the charismatic leader of the country’s first political party, the RDPT (Democratic Rally of the Tahitian People). A supporter of the independence of Tahiti, he strongly opposed the French colonial administration and the French nuclear testing in the Tuamotu Archipelago during the 1960s. Sentenced to prison and exile in metropolitan France, Pouvanaa only returned to French Polynesia in 1968. Combining archival materials, found footage, newsreels and interviews, The People’s Elect offers a vivid portrait of this important figure of French Polynesian political life.

Liquid Traces: The Left-to-Die Boat Case, Forensic Oceanography (Charles Heller and Lorenzo Pezzani), video, 2014, 17 min

Liquid Traces offers a synthesis of our reconstruction of the events of what is known as the “left-to-die boat” case, in which 72 passengers who left the Libyan coast heading in the direction of the island of Lampedusa on board a small rubber boat were left to drift for 14 days in NATO’s maritime surveillance area, despite several distress signals relaying their location, as well as repeated interactions, including at least one military helicopter visit and an encounter with a military ship. As a result, only 9 people survived.

In producing this reconstruction, our research has used against the grain the “sensorium of the sea”—the multiple remote sensing devices used to record and read the sea’s depth and surface. Contrary to the vision of the sea as a non-signifying space in which any event immediately dissolves into moving currents, with our investigation we demonstrated that traces are indeed left in water, and that by reading them carefully the sea itself can be turned into a witness for interrogation.

As a time-based media, the animation also gives form to the Mediterranean’s differential rhythms of mobility that have emerged through the progressive restriction of legal means of access to the EU for certain categories of people and the simultaneous acceleration of the flows of goods and capital.”

Neytal Diary, Ravi Agarwal, HD video, 2016, 38 min

Neytal Diary was shot over one year off the coast of Tamilnadu in South India. It derives from artist and environmental activist Ravi Agarwal’s ongoing work with a fishing community near the town of Pondicherry, which seeks to examine the ecological understandings and conflicts from the perspective of its inhabitants. The texts of the film are extracts from a diary (Ambient Seas, published in 2016) kept by Agarwal over the years, and contain his reflections on the complex ecological, cultural, and political underpinnings of the fishermen’s lives and their absence from the dominant global debates on the Anthropocene and climate change.

One Belt, One Road: Documentary – Episode One: Common Fate, video, 2016, 55 min 

One Belt, One Road: Documentary – Episode One: Common Fate focuses on “One Belt, One Road” or the “Belt and Road Initiative,” a development strategy and framework proposed by Chinese paramount leader Xi Jinping. This strategy focuses on connectivity and cooperation among countries and primarily between the People’s Republic of China and the rest of Eurasia, consisting of two main components: the land-based “Silk Road Economic Belt” and oceangoing “Maritime Silk Road.”

The strategy underlines China’s push to take a bigger role in global affairs, and its need for priority capacity cooperation in areas such as steel manufacturing.

Matthew Barney: No Restraint, Alison Chernick, video, 2006, 72 min

Matthew Barney: No Restraint documents artist Matthew Barney and his then partner, collaborator, and singer-songwriter Björk, as they film Drawing Restraint 9.

Selection of films made by TBA21–Academy’s participants to Ute Meta Bauer’s The Current three expeditions to the South Pacific: Nabil Ahmed, Atif Akin, Laura Anderson Barbata, Newell Harry, Stefanie Hessler, Dr Kristy H. A. Kang, Dr PerMagnus Lindborg, Armin Linke, Filipa Ramos, Lisa Rave, and Jegan Vincent de Paul.

A public programme of The Oceanic.

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Ute Meta Bauer]]> Nabil Ahmed]]> Atif Akin]]> Laura Anderson Barbata]]> Newell Harry]]> Stefanie Hessler]]> Kristy H. A. Kang]]> PerMagnus Lindborg]]> Armin Linke]]> Filipa Ramos]]> Lisa Rave]]> Jegan Vincent de Paul]]> Oceania]]> Asia]]>
Public Sphere]]> Public Art]]> The Exhibition Hall, Block 43 Malan Road

On the first day of exhibition Siah Armajani: Spaces for the Public. Spaces for Democracy., curator Ute Meta Bauer will be giving a guided tour from 3.00 – 3.30pm

Following the tour, from 3.30 – 5.00pm, Victoria Sung, co-curator of Siah Armajani’s major retrospective shown at Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and the Met Breuer, New York, will expand on Armajani’s practice in her talk Siah Armajani: Follow This Line. Sung will focus on the artist’s Reading Rooms, particularly the one included in the exhibition, Sacco and Vanzetti Reading Room #3, and think through the role of museums as public and educational spaces.

A public programme of Siah Armajani: Spaces for the Public. Spaces for Democracy.]]>
Ute Meta Bauer]]> Southeast Asia]]>
Architecture]]> Urbanism]]> Published by NTU CCA Singapore and Weiss Publications, 2022
By Andrei Baburov, Georgi Djumenton, Alexei Gutnov, Zoya Kharitonova, Ilya Lezava, Stanislav Zadovskij. Edited with text by Ute Meta Bauer, Karin Oen, Pelin Tan. Afterword by Mary Otis Stevens. Essay by Ana Miljački.
Design by Enver Hadzijaj
Printed by Kopa
© 2022 the editors, Mary Otis Stevens, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore and Weiss Publications
ISBN: 9783948318161
Distributed by D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers
Copies are available for sale at NTU CCA Singapore S$35/US$25

The Ideal Communist City
(Andrei Baburov, Georgi Djumenton, Alexei Gutnov, Zoya Kharitonova, Ilya Lezava, Stanislav Zadovskij), comprised urban concepts by architects and planners at the University of Moscow written during the late 1950s and first published in a journal of a communist youth organisation in 1960. The architects’ collective imagines urban life “structured by freely chosen relationships represents the fullest, most well-rounded aspects of each human personality.”

The Ideal Communist City was first published in English in 1971 within the influential series on architecture and urban theory, the i press series on the human environment, initiated by Mary Otis Stevens and Thomas McNulty. This volume comprises a facsimile edition of the original title with a foreword by Ana Miljacki, professor of architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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Andrei Baburov]]> Georgi Djumenton]]> Alexei Gutnov]]> Zoya Kharitonova]]> Ilya Lezava]]> Stanislav Zadovskij]]> Ute Meta Bauer]]> Karin Oen]]> Pelin Tan]]> Ana Miljački]]> Ana Miljacki]]> Mary Otis Stevens]]> Europe]]>
Architecture]]> Design]]> Urbanism]]> Published by NTU CCA Singapore and Weiss Publications, 2022
By Mary Otis Stevens, Thomas McNulty. Edited with text by Ute Meta Bauer, Karin Oen, Pelin Tan. Afterword by Mary Otis Stevens. Essy by Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley.
Design by Enver Hadzijaj
Printed by Kopa
© 2022 the editors, Mary Otis Stevens, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore and Weiss Publications
ISBN: 9783948318178
Distributed by D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers
Copies are available for sale at NTU CCA Singapore S$35/US$25

World of Variation
is a a visual/verbal essay addressing critical societal issues such as community versus privacy, public versus private realms, social justice and humane, sustainable developments from a global perspective. To avoid datedness and the cultural biases inherent in realistic representations, the two authors, Mary Otis Stevens and Thomas F. McNulty, both MIT graduates and noted for their projects in the Modern Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, formulated an abstract visual language to convey their conceptual ideas.

This new edition contains a facsimile of the original edition published in 1970 with added commentaries by Pelin Tan, sociologist and art historian, professor at Fine Arts Academy, Batman University, and senior fellow of CAD+SR; Karin G. Oen, principal research fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s School of Art, Design, and Media (NTU ADM); Ute Meta Bauer, Founding Director, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore and professor at NTU ADM; and a text by Beatriz Colomina, professor of the history of architecture at Princeton University, and Mark Wigley, professor of architecture and Dean Emeritus, Columbia University.

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Mary Otis Stevens]]> Thomas McNulty]]> Ute Meta Bauer]]> Karin Oen]]> Pelin Tan]]> Beatriz Colomina]]> Mark Wigley]]> North America]]>
Culture City. Culture Scape, Best Non-Fiction Title nomination, Singapore Book Awards 2022]]> Public Art]]> Urbanism]]> Shortlisted for Best Non-Fiction Title category, Singapore Book Awards 2022]]> Ute Meta Bauer]]> Southeast Asia]]> Theatre]]> Ways of Seeing]]> Performance]]> TheatreWorks, 72-13 Mohamed Sultan Road, Singapore 239007

10.30 am - Welcome Note: Ute Meta Bauer

10.40 - 11:00 am - Introduction to Theatrical Fields: Anca Rujoiu, CCA Curations, Exhbitions

11.00 am - 12.00 pm - Roundtable Discussion: Eva Meyer and Eran Schaerf, Artists in conversation with Ute Meta Bauer and Katarina Pierre, Director of Bildmuseet
Moderator: Ong Keng Sen, Festival Director of Singapore International Festival of Arts (SIFA)

12.00 -1.00 pm - Lunch Break

1.00 - 2.00 pm - Screening Theatrical Phantasms: Toward an Uncertain Futurity, Keynote, Timothy Murray, Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Cornell University

2.15 - 3.15 pm - Life or Theatre? Events so far...Keynote, Eva Meyer, Artist, Writer and Filmmaker

3.30 - 4.00 pm Q+A

The symposium is a public programme of Theatrical Fields: Critical strategies in performance, film and video.]]>
Ute Meta Bauer]]> Anca Rujoiu]]> Eva Meyer]]> Eran Schaerf]]> Katarina Pierre]]> Ong Keng Sen]]> Timothy Murray]]> Asia]]> Europe]]> North America]]>
Geopolitics]]> Regionalism]]> History]]> Fri 17 Jun 2016, 7:00pm - 9:00pm
Sat 18 Jun 2016, 9:30am - 6:00pm
National Gallery Singapore and NTU CCA Singapore

The NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (NTU CCA Singapore) presents The Geopolitical and the Biophysical: a structured conversation on Art and Southeast Asia in context, Part II, a symposium addressing the multiple notions of “Southeast Asia” and the various issues surrounding its borders, territories, dilemmas and anxieties. SEA STATE by artist Charles Lim Yi Yong, commissioned for the Singapore Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale, explores the biophysical, political and psychic contours of Singapore and served as a point of departure for the symposium. Part I of the symposium took place in Venice, Italy during the opening days of the Biennale, and this second iteration will continue and deepen the discussions on the occasion of SEA STATE’s presentation at NTU CCA Singapore.

Southeast Asia, as a geographical region and conceptual category, is a contested entity shaped by diverse cultures and communities. The possibilities and uncertainties in this region – such as urban development, geopolitical relations, and anxieties surrounding national and regional identities – continue to pose unique social and political challenges.

The Geopolitical and the Biophysical: a structured conversation on Art and Southeast Asia in context, Part II brings together an array of eminent speakers and respondents to address questions of contemporary art and culture through interdisciplinary approaches – considering bodies of water as cultural-territorial spaces in an exploration of rivers, land reclamation, sea ports, and nomadic communities. The conversations arising from this symposium offers insight into the Southeast Asian consciousness and how it informs the region’s evolving relationship with the wider world.

The symposium is organised by NTU CCA Singapore under its Research & Education programme, which aims to connect research based artistic practices with other forms of knowledge production. As a prelude to the symposium, NTU CCA Singapore will screen films by Thai artist and filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul on 1 and 3 June 2016 to set up a “conversation” between two artist-filmmakers, Apichatpong and Charles Lim Yi Yong.

Prelude

Screening of films by Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Day 1: Wednesday, 1 June 2016, 7.30 – 10.00pm | Cemetery of Splendour (2015)
Day 2: Friday, 3 June 2016, 7.30 – 10.00pm | Tropical Malady (2004)

NTU CCA Singapore, The Single Screen
Block 43 Malan Road, Gillman Barracks, Singapore 109443

Symposium programme

Day 1: National Gallery Singapore, Friday 17 June 2016, 7.00 – 9.00pm

7.00 – 7.30pm
Registration & refreshments

7.30 – 7.45pm

Welcome address
Paul Tan (Singapore), Deputy CEO, National Arts Council
Professor Ute Meta Bauer (Germany/Singapore), Founding Director, NTU CCA Singapore, and Professor, School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University (NTU)

7.45 – 9.00pm
Keynote Lecture
In a Time of Earthquakes: Contemporary Chinese Artists Shake the World
by Professor Aihwa Ong (Malaysia/United States), Robert H. Lowie Distinguished Chair in Anthropology and Chair of Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley)
Respondent: Professor C.J. Wee Wan-ling (Singapore), Division of English, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, NTU

Day 2: NTU CCA Singapore, Saturday 18 June 2016, 9.30am – 6.00pm

9.30 – 10.00am
Registration & refreshments

10.00 – 10.10am

MORNING SESSION
Opening address by chairperson, Professor Ute Meta Bauer

10.10 – 11.20am
Keynote lecture
SEA STATE: Charles Lim’s Video-and Photo-graphic Eye
by Professor Michael M.J. Fischer (United States), Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, and Professor of Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Respondent: Dr Kristy H.A. Kang (United States/Singapore), Assistant Professor, School of Art, Design & Media, NTU

11.20am – 12.30pm

Session 1: The River and its Representations
Speaker: Gridthiya Gaweewong (Thailand), Artistic Director and Curator, Jim Thompson Art Center, Bangkok
Respondent: Dr David Teh (Australia/Singapore), Assistant Professor, Department of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore (NUS)

12.30 – 1.30pm
Lunch Break

1.30 – 1.40pm

AFTERNOON SESSION
Opening address by chairperson, Dr David Teh

1.40 – 2.50pm
Session 2: The Land and its Reclamations
Speakers: Joshua Comaroff (United States/Singapore), design consultant, Lekker Architects; and Seth Denizen (United States), PhD candidate, Department of Geography, UC Berkeley
Respondent: Shabbir Hussain Mustafa (Singapore), curator, SEA STATE, and Senior Curator, National Gallery Singapore

2.50 – 4.20pm

Session 3: Of Nomads and Sea Ports
Speakers: Dr Donna Brunero (Australia/Singapore), Senior Lecturer, Department of History, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, NUS; Dr Wee Beng Geok (Singapore), Consultant, Nanyang Business School, NTU; and Dr Vivienne Wee (Singapore), independent anthropologist and researcher
Respondent: Dr Imran bin Tajudeen (Singapore), Assistant Professor, Department of Architecture, School of Design and Environment, NUS

4.20 – 4.40pm
Tea Break

4.40 – 6.00pm

Roundtable Discussion
Participants: Professor Michael M.J. Fischer, Charles Lim Yi Yong, Shabbir Hussain Mustafa, and Professor Aihwa Ong.
Moderators: Professor Ute Meta Bauer and Dr David Teh.

The programme is commissioned by the National Arts Council (NAC) and supported by the Singapore Tourism Board (STB), with additional support from U.S. Embassy Singapore and National Gallery Singapore.

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Paul Tan]]> Ute Meta Bauer]]> Aihwa Ong]]> C.J. Wee Wan-ling]]> Michael M.J. Fischer ]]> Kristy H.A. Kang]]> Gridthiya Gaweewong]]> David Teh]]> Joshua Comaroff]]> Seth Denizen]]> Shabbir Hussain Mustafa]]> Donna Brunero]]> Wee Beng Geok]]> Vivienne Wee]]> Imran bin Tajudeen]]> C. J. Wan-ling Wee]]> C. J. W.-L. Wee]]> Asia]]> Southeast Asia]]>
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?

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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]]>