Sok Chanrado, Memory (2012), reverses footage of his childhood friend Rada who is reciting memories from the site of their former home known as “Small Building”. The building was originally used as a practice venue for traditional folk dance and music in the 1960s before its residents were evicted during the Khmer Rouge era. Resettled by many families following the war, including those of Rado and Rada, Small Building was forcibly emptied again in 2009 during the Dey Krahom evictions.
Tith Kanitha, Heavy Sand (2012), is a film of a performance event title Reclamation Recreation: An Urban Beach Party, where artist Tith Kanitha staged diurnal ritual: a shower as is taken in a humble household, manually, with buckets of water. Her only covering was a bikini and a clinical facemask normally associated with protection from pollution but also more recently used to conceal protestors’ identities. At the time a resident of Boeung Kak lakeside, Tith’s performance brings to bear aspects of life experienced there since 2008, where people risked their lives to protest evictions; women and children at the front lines.Sok Chanrado, Memory (2012), reverses footage of his childhood friend Rada who is reciting memories from the site of their former home known as “Small Building”. The building was originally used as a practice venue for traditional folk dance and music in the 1960s before its residents were evicted during the Khmer Rouge era. Resettled by many families following the war, including those of Rado and Rada, Small Building was forcibly emptied again in 2009 during the Dey Krahom evictions.
Tith Kanitha, Heavy Sand (2012), is a film of a performance event title Reclamation Recreation: An Urban Beach Party, where artist Tith Kanitha staged diurnal ritual: a shower as is taken in a humble household, manually, with buckets of water. Her only covering was a bikini and a clinical facemask normally associated with protection from pollution but also more recently used to conceal protestors’ identities. At the time a resident of Boeung Kak lakeside, Tith’s performance brings to bear aspects of life experienced there since 2008, where people risked their lives to protest evictions; women and children at the front lines.Conversation between Amar Kanwar (India), artist, The Sovereign Forest; Professor Ute Meta Bauer (Germany/Singapore); and Dr June Yap (Singapore)
In Conversation with artist Ang Song Nian (Singapore), artist Chua Chye Teck (Singapore), and artist and filmmaker Sherman Ong (Singapore/Malaysia). Moderated by Silke Schmickl (Germany/Singapore), Curator, National Gallery Singapore
Richard Bell established the Aborignal Tent Embassy outside the Australian National parliament in 1972. It was founded to challenge the status and rights of Aboriginal people in Australia. Until today, the Tent Embassy remains in place as one of the longest ongoing (artistic) struggles in the world. Bell will introduce the Embassy (2013 -) as a public space for imagining and articulating futures beyond oppression and displacement, while referring to the history of black power politics, political theatre and performance art. Bell will further draw the idea of his Embassy as a satellite of the original Tent Embassy, utlizing his agency within the infrastructure of ast as a means of furthering its reach: the work shall be understood as coalition building, seeking solutions towards fairness through solidarity.
Part of the Art, Urban Change, and the Public Sphere: Public Art Education Summit, 17 - 19 October 2019
With contributions by:
Shahidul Alam (Bangladesh), Bodies of Power / Power for Bodies (Sanne Oorthuizen and Alec Steadman) with Mumtaz Khan Chopan (Indonesia), Bread and Puppet Theater (United States), Center for Political Beauty (Germany), Kin Chui (Singapore), Kirsten Han (Singapore), Nursyazwani Jamaludin (Singapore/United States), Stefan Kruse Jørgensen (Denmark), Raeesah Khan (Singapore), Dima Mabsout (Lebanon), Ayman Nahle (Lebanon), Erkan Özgen (Turkey), Alfian Sa’at (Singapore), and Jonas Staal (Netherlands).
Mf D’s inaugural Assembly is hosted and supported by NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore.
Programme
Saturday, 28 November 2020
7.00pm
Lecture: Aggressive Humanism by Thilda Rosenfeld, Center for Political Beauty
The Center for Political Beauty (ZPS), active since 2009, is an art collective based in Germany that combines performance and human rights activism. In this presentation, ZPS member Thilda Rosenfeld will convey the main ideas behind the Center’s initiatives and introduce three projects in detail. Their interventions focus mainly on genocides, migrant rights, and political apathy. Founder Philipp Ruch understands why some consider their work controversial: where people are expecting fiction, they encounter reality.
8.00pm
Screening and Q&A: Wonderland, Erkan Özgen, 2016, 3 min 54 sec
A deaf-mute boy called Muhammed uses gestures and sounds to describe the experiences his family went through when escaping the war. Muhammed’s home city Kobanî in the Kurdish area of Syria at the border of Turkey became famous in 2015 when it was besieged by jihadist organisation Isis. After long battles, Kobanî managed to become liberated, but thousands of Kurds were forced to leave their homes. The wordless story by the 13-year-old Muhammed is a powerful statement against war, captured on video.
8.20pm
Lecture: Insurrection, Resurrection, Lamentation—the role of the arts in confronting our failed normality by Peter Schumann, Founder, Bread and Puppet Theatre
9.20pm
Roundtable: Kirsten Han, Nursyazwani Jamaludin, Dima Mabsout, moderated by Mohammad Golabi
10.00pm
Screening and Q&A: Now: End of the Season, Ayman Nahle, 2015, 20 min
Documentary détournement on the state of the Syrian crisis. The film pictures the everyday entanglement of refugees, tourists, and passersby in the Turkish seaport town of Izmir, where a sense of limbo and standstill looms as illegalised migrants await departure to the unknown. The soundtrack to the film is from a phone call by Hafez al-Assad to Ronald Reagan made some thirty years earlier. A caller on hold, an impatient translator… In Nahle’s words, “more confused than ever, the world is on the edge, showing the disoriented face of a smiling disaster.”
Sunday, 29 November 2020
7.00pm
Lecture: Stateless Assembly by Jonas Staal
Artist Jonas Staal founded his artistic and political organisation New World Summit in 2012. Ever since, he has developed alternative parliaments for stateless and blacklisted organisations, amongst others in collaboration with the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation UNPO (Brussels, 2014) and the Autonomous Administration of North and West Syria (Dêrik/Eindhoven, 2015-18). Can we understand statelessness not only a term that signifies a condition of exclusion, but also as a precondition for liberating democratic practices from the state? Building on the theories of revolutionary Abdullah Öcalan, Staal will discuss his own projects as well as that of artists that are part of stateless movements, in order to explore unstated practices of art and culture. He will expand this exploration also in the field of ecologies of non-human comradeship, through his recent Interplanetary Species Society (2019).
8.00pm
Roundtable: Bodies of Power/ Power for Bodies, Mumtaz Khan Chopan, Kin Chui, moderated by Ana Sophie Salazar
8.40pm
Screening and Q&A: The Migrating Image, Stefan Kruse Jørgensen, 2018, 28 min
By following a fictional group of refugees across Europe, the film questions the production of images surrounding real-life tragedies. Each segment of the film takes its cue from the destination of the refugees, from FRONTEX depicting the refugees on the Mediterranean Sea, to a photojournalistic reportage from a warehouse in Belgrade. Where do all these images about refugees come from? How do they reshape the geography of Europe?
9.20pm
Roundtable: Shahidul Alam, Raeesah Khan, Alfian Sa’at, moderated by Canan Batur
With contributions by:
Shahidul Alam (Bangladesh), Bodies of Power / Power for Bodies (Sanne Oorthuizen and Alec Steadman) with Mumtaz Khan Chopan (Indonesia), Bread and Puppet Theater (United States), Center for Political Beauty (Germany), Kin Chui (Singapore), Kirsten Han (Singapore), Nursyazwani Jamaludin (Singapore/United States), Stefan Kruse Jørgensen (Denmark), Raeesah Khan (Singapore), Dima Mabsout (Lebanon), Ayman Nahle (Lebanon), Erkan Özgen (Turkey), Alfian Sa’at (Singapore), and Jonas Staal (Netherlands).
Mf D’s inaugural Assembly is hosted and supported by NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore.
Programme
Saturday, 28 November 2020
7.00pm
Lecture: Aggressive Humanism by Thilda Rosenfeld, Center for Political Beauty
The Center for Political Beauty (ZPS), active since 2009, is an art collective based in Germany that combines performance and human rights activism. In this presentation, ZPS member Thilda Rosenfeld will convey the main ideas behind the Center’s initiatives and introduce three projects in detail. Their interventions focus mainly on genocides, migrant rights, and political apathy. Founder Philipp Ruch understands why some consider their work controversial: where people are expecting fiction, they encounter reality.
8.00pm
Screening and Q&A: Wonderland, Erkan Özgen, 2016, 3 min 54 sec
A deaf-mute boy called Muhammed uses gestures and sounds to describe the experiences his family went through when escaping the war. Muhammed’s home city Kobanî in the Kurdish area of Syria at the border of Turkey became famous in 2015 when it was besieged by jihadist organisation Isis. After long battles, Kobanî managed to become liberated, but thousands of Kurds were forced to leave their homes. The wordless story by the 13-year-old Muhammed is a powerful statement against war, captured on video.
8.20pm
Lecture: Insurrection, Resurrection, Lamentation—the role of the arts in confronting our failed normality by Peter Schumann, Founder, Bread and Puppet Theatre
9.20pm
Roundtable: Kirsten Han, Nursyazwani Jamaludin, Dima Mabsout, moderated by Mohammad Golabi
10.00pm
Screening and Q&A: Now: End of the Season, Ayman Nahle, 2015, 20 min
Documentary détournement on the state of the Syrian crisis. The film pictures the everyday entanglement of refugees, tourists, and passersby in the Turkish seaport town of Izmir, where a sense of limbo and standstill looms as illegalised migrants await departure to the unknown. The soundtrack to the film is from a phone call by Hafez al-Assad to Ronald Reagan made some thirty years earlier. A caller on hold, an impatient translator… In Nahle’s words, “more confused than ever, the world is on the edge, showing the disoriented face of a smiling disaster.”
Sunday, 29 November 2020
7.00pm
Lecture: Stateless Assembly by Jonas Staal
Artist Jonas Staal founded his artistic and political organisation New World Summit in 2012. Ever since, he has developed alternative parliaments for stateless and blacklisted organisations, amongst others in collaboration with the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation UNPO (Brussels, 2014) and the Autonomous Administration of North and West Syria (Dêrik/Eindhoven, 2015-18). Can we understand statelessness not only a term that signifies a condition of exclusion, but also as a precondition for liberating democratic practices from the state? Building on the theories of revolutionary Abdullah Öcalan, Staal will discuss his own projects as well as that of artists that are part of stateless movements, in order to explore unstated practices of art and culture. He will expand this exploration also in the field of ecologies of non-human comradeship, through his recent Interplanetary Species Society (2019).
8.00pm
Roundtable: Bodies of Power/ Power for Bodies, Mumtaz Khan Chopan, Kin Chui, moderated by Ana Sophie Salazar
8.40pm
Screening and Q&A: The Migrating Image, Stefan Kruse Jørgensen, 2018, 28 min
By following a fictional group of refugees across Europe, the film questions the production of images surrounding real-life tragedies. Each segment of the film takes its cue from the destination of the refugees, from FRONTEX depicting the refugees on the Mediterranean Sea, to a photojournalistic reportage from a warehouse in Belgrade. Where do all these images about refugees come from? How do they reshape the geography of Europe?
9.20pm
Roundtable: Shahidul Alam, Raeesah Khan, Alfian Sa’at, moderated by Canan Batur