Performance]]> 5 Dec 2014, Fri 8:00pm - 10:00pm

An improvised set by Artist-in-Residence, Bani Haykal and collaborators ila and Tim O’Dwyer.]]>
Bani Haykal]]> ila]]> Tim O'Dwyer]]> Southeast Asia]]>
Performance]]> 22 Nov 2014, Sat 8:00pm - 10:00pm

NTU CCA Artist-in-Residence Bani Haykal, ila and Zai Kuning came together for a performance that incorporated music and overhead projections.]]>
Bani Haykal]]> ila]]> Zai Kuning]]> Southeast Asia]]>
NTU CCA Singapore]]> ila]]> 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]]> Climate Crisis]]> Ecology]]> Sustainability]]> NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore and the New Museum are pleased to announce participants and collaborators for the second edition of the NTU CCA Ideas Fest, IdeasCity Singapore, guest-curated by IdeasCity, taking place in Singapore and across Southeast Asia from February 15 to 22, 2020.

Building upon the NTU CCA Singapore’s research theme Climates. Habitats. Environments. and IdeasCity’s exploration of the role of art and culture beyond the walls of the museum, IdeasCity Singapore’s residency and public program will examine the urgency of solidarity structures in negating climate change and its impact on Southeast Asia and communities worldwide.

Twenty practitioners have been selected from an international open call for the residency program at the NTU CCA Singapore to develop independent research at the intersection of art and ecology. Throughout the residency, participants will engage in workshops and lectures presented by local artists, practitioners, and community leaders, including Heman ChongLynette ChuaDrama BoxCharles LimZarina Muhammad, and Post-Museum, along with organizations such as New NaratifThe ProjectorSingapore Community Radiosoft/WALLS/studs, and The Substation.

Residency Fellows include: Francisco Brown (United States), Jane Chang Mi (United States), Kar-men Cheng (Singapore), Lingying Chong (Singapore), Chloe C. Chotrani (Philippines/Singapore), Calvin Chua (Singapore), Fataah T. Dihaan (United States), ila (Singapore), Heider Ismail (Singapore), Lily Kwong (United States), Clarissa Ai Ling Lee (Malaysia), Michelle Lai (Singapore), Kwan Q Li (Hong Kong), Angela Mayrina (Indonesia/United Kingdom), John Kenneth Paranada (Philippines/United Kingdom), Patricia Sayuri (Japan/Brazil), Pen Sereypagna (Cambodia), Shahmen Suku (Singapore/Australia), Ruby Thiagarajan (Singapore), Dat Vu (Vietnam), Nikan Wasinondh (Bow) (Thailand) and Jason Wee (Singapore). For more information please visit: http://www.ideas-city.org.

On February 22, 2020 at NTU CCA Singapore, IdeasCity Singapore will present and broadcast a series of dialogues between local and international artists and community leaders on topics including food sovereignty (Angela Dimayuga and Emeka Ogboh), underground archives (Heman Chong and Monica Narula of Raqs Media Collective), image and power (Ho Rui An and Shumon Basar), ecofeminism (Marwa Arsanios), and traces of migration (Kunlé Adeyemi, Eleena Jamil, Bouchra Khalili and Alfian Sa’at). A sequence of debate circles will examine the roles of solidarity and speculation in addressing climate injustice, featuring interdisciplinary perspectives from speakers such as Becca D’Bus, Kirsten Han, Prasoon Kumar and Zarina Muhammad.

Workshops and conversations facilitated by Bakudapan Food Study Group and a presentation of new VR work by artist Rindon Johnson will invite select audiences to engage directly with artists envisioning pathways to equitable and sustainable futures. The programme will also feature screenings, showings, and remarks by performance artist ila and Digital Minister of Taiwan, Audrey Tang.

Responding to the context of climate crisis, in which artists, activists, and scholars around the world are working today, IdeasCity Singapore will include a series of programmes across Southeast Asia in collaboration with The Forest Curriculum and Nomina Nuda (Los Baños, Philippines), Malaysia Design Archive (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia), House of Natural Fiber (Yogyakarta, Indonesia), The Land (Chiang Mai, Thailand),  Sàn Art (Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam) and Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (Boston, United States).

Facilitated by IdeasCity and workshopped at NTU CCA Singapore with an advisory council of Singaporean community members whose work exemplifies equitable practices, a community agreement was developed that details best practices for achieving an accountable, sustainable, and authentic collaboration in Singapore.

Programme on 22 February 2020 
10.00am
Start and Finish by Ute Meta Bauer and Vere van Gool
10.15am
Dialogues by Shumon Basar and Ho Rui An on capitalism and the extreme self
11.00am
Lecture by Kirsten Han on emergent medias and speech
11.20am
Film screening by ila
12.00pm
Presentation by Heman Chong on archives as commons
12.15pm
Lecture Screening by Marwa Arsanios on ecofeminism and community
1.00pm
Presentation by Monica Narula on submarine horizons
1.30pm
Performance by Radha “Midnight Masala”
1.55pm
Hologram lecture by Audrey Tang
2.00pm
Conversation between Becca D’Bus and Fellows on solidarity with nature
3.00pm
Discussion by Shumon Basar, Heman Chong, Vere van Gool, Charles Lim, and Zarina Muhammad on sovereignty and indigenous contexts
4.00pm
Lecture by Emeka Ogboh on food diasporas
4.15pm
Reading by Alfian Sa’at on the poetics of migration
4.30pm
Presentations by House of Natural Fiber and the Land Foundation on strategies for combatting climate change
5.00pm
Video Presentation by Angela Dimayuga on culture and cookbooks
5.10pm
Discussion by Ute Meta Bauer, Vanessa Ho, and Prasoon Kumar on trust networks and sustainability
6.00pm
Kitchen Mapping Workshop by Bakudapan Food Study Group
6.30pm
VR Demo by Rindon Johnson on speculative futures
7.00pm
Roundtable by Fellows
7.45pm
Live Music by Bani Haykal
8.00pm
Lecture Screenings by Kunlé Adeyemi, Eleena Jamil, and Bouchra Khalili on the poetics of migration
10.00pm
Start and Finish by Ute Meta Bauer and Vere van Gool

NTU CCA Ideas Fest 2020 is guest-curated by IdeasCity, New Museum, New York.

]]>
Heman Chong]]> Lynette Chua]]> Drama Box]]> Charles Lim]]> Zarina Muhammad]]> Post-Museum]]> New Naratif]]> The Projector]]> Singapore Community Radio]]> soft/WALLS/studs]]> The Substation]]> Francisco Brown]]> Jane Chang Mi]]> Kar-men Cheng]]> Lingying Chong]]> Chloe C. Chotrani]]> Calvin Chua]]> Fataah T. Dihaan]]> ila]]> Heider Ismail]]> Lily Kwong]]> Clarissa Ai Ling Lee]]> Michelle Lai]]> Kwan Q Li]]> Angela Mayrina]]> John Kenneth Paranada]]> Patricia Sayuri]]> Pen Sereypagna]]> Shahmen]]> Ruby Thiagarajan]]> Dat Vu ]]> Suku]]> Nikan Wasinondh]]> Jason Wee]]> Ho Rui An]]> Shumon Basar]]> Angela Dimayuga]]> Emeka Ogboh]]> Monica Narula]]> Marwa Arsanios]]> Kunlé Adeyemi]]> Eleena Jamil]]> Bouchra Khalili]]> Alfian Sa’at]]> Becca D’Bus]]> Kirsten Han]]> Prasoon Kumar ]]> Ute Meta Bauer]]> Ideas City]]> Vere Van Gool]]> Bani Haykal]]> Rindon Johnson]]> Bakudapan Food Study Group]]> Vanessa Ho]]> House of Natural Fiber]]> Land Foundation]]> Audrey Tang]]> Radha]]> Southeast Asia]]>
Identity]]> Displacement]]> ila]]> Film]]> Performance]]> Southeast Asia]]> Performance]]> Identity]]> History]]> ila]]> Southeast Asia]]> 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]]>