<i>Yang Fudong: Incidental Scripts</i>
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Yang Fudong, a leading international figure of contemporary art and one the most important artists to emerge out of China in the 1990s, staged his first major solo exhibition in Southeast Asia at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore. The exhibition, <i>Incidental Scripts</i>, presented a selection of four works by Yang: <i>An Estranged Paradise</i> (1997-2002), <i>The Fifth Night (II) Rehearsal</i> (2010), <i>On the Double Dragon Hills</i> (2012) and <i>About the Unknown Girl – Ma Sise</i> (2013-2014). These works are emblematic of his multi-faceted approach towards the creation of visual imageries that complicates our understanding of reality / fiction, and our experience of space / time. <br /><br />The exhibition was curated by Ute Meta Bauer (NTU CCA Singapore Founding Director) with Khim Ong (Independent Curator).
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<i>Ulrike Ottinger: China. The Arts – The People, Photographs and Films from the 1980s and 1990s</i>
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The exhibition <i>China. The Arts – The People, Photographs and Films from the 1980s and 1990s</i> by acclaimed filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger (b. 1942 in Constance, Germany) is the first large-scale exhibition by the award-winning filmmaker and artist in Asia. The selection of works focuses on Ottinger’s research and travels in China and Mongolia during the 1980s and 1990s, comprising four films and more than one hundred photographs. The photographs, created largely in parallel with the production of her films, will be unfolded along the artist’s leitmotifs. <br /><br />Starting with <i>China. The Arts – The People</i> (1985), the exhibition leads a journey through the cultures and geographies of China, while also exploring the relationship between moving image and still life. The three acts of the documentary are presented on a three-screen installation, documenting everyday life in Beijing (February 1985), Sichuan Province (March 1985), and Yunnan Province (March 1985). While meeting the film director Ling Zifeng in one chapter, a Bamboo factory is visited in another, and in parallel the Sani people, a minority group, show their habitat, the Stone Forest. <br /><br /><i>Taiga. A Journey to Northern Mongolia</i> (1992), a documentary over eight hours long that will be presented on multiple monitors throughout the exhibition space, looks into the everyday life of nomadic peoples in Mongolia. Furthermore, on view in the cinematic space of the Centre, The Single Screen, will be <i>Exile Shanghai</i> (1997), a film telling the six life stories of German, Austrian, and Russian Jews intersecting in Shanghai after their escape from Nazi Germany, as well as <i>Johanna d’Arc of Mongolia</i> (1989), Ottinger’s only feature fiction film presenting a cast starring Badema, Lydia Billiet, Inés Sastre, and Delphine Seyrig. <br /><br />From 1962 to 1968, Ulrike Ottinger was living as an independent artist in Paris, where at the University of Paris-Sorbonne she attended lectures on ethnography and religion of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Louis Althusser, and Pierre Bourdieu. Over the decades, she has created an extensive image archive, including films, photographs of her own as well as collections of postcards, magazine illustrations, and other iconographic documents from times and places worldwide. Driven by her curiosity for people and places, the artist’s images alternate between documentary insight and theatrical extravagance, presenting encounters with everyday realities at the intersection of the contemporary, the traditional, and the ritual. <br /><br />The extraordinary filmic and photographic oeuvre from China and Mongolia of the 1980s and 1990s prove her outstanding practice and beyond. Fighting for permission to travel and film in communist China, Ottinger’s interest in Asia also broke with the Cold War stereotype of that time. Her inimitable universe of provinces and regions of China is filled with rich imagery of various provinces in China and nomadic societies in Northern Mongolia and their history, paying attention to the presence of local details and reaching far beyond its described territory. <br /><br />The exhibition is accompanied by an intensive public programme, starting with a <i>Behind the Scenes</i> discussion with the artist on her practice as photographer and filmmaker. The programmed talks and screenings will reflect on the notion of the documentary, the intersection of documentary and fiction, and the potential that artistic production can have for anthropology, cultural studies, and history. <br /><br />Initially a painter, Ottinger came to filmmaking in the early 1970s. She furthermore produced operas, several theatre plays, and radio dramas. Her films have received numerous awards and have been shown at the world’s most important film festivals, as well as appreciated in multiple retrospectives, including Rio de Janeiro International Film Festival (2013), Centre Pompidou, Paris (2010), Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid (2004), The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2000), and Cinémathèque française, Paris (1982). Her work has been featured in major international exhibitions such as Documenta (2017, 2002), Gwangju Biennale (2014), Berlin Biennale (2010, 2004), and Shanghai Biennale (2008). Recent solo shows include, among others, Johanna Breede Photokunst, Berlin (2015, 2013), Sammlung Goetz, Munich (2012), Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2011), Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin (2011), and Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam (2004). Major monographs include Ulrike Ottinger: World Images (2013), <i>Ulrike Ottinger</i> (2012), <i>Ulrike Ottinger: N.B.K. Ausstellungen Band 11</i> (2011), Floating Food (2011), and <i>Image Archive</i> (2005). In 2011, she was awarded the Hannah Höch Prize for her creative work, and in 2010 honoured with the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. <br /><br /><i>Ulrike Ottinger: China. The Arts – The People, Photographs and Films from the 1980s and 1990s</i> is curated by Ute Meta Bauer, Founding Director, and Khim Ong, Deputy Director, Exhibitions, Residencies and Public Programmes.
<a href="/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=37&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Ulrike+Ottinger">Ulrike Ottinger</a>
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<i>Ghosts and Spectres – Shadows of History</i>
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<i>Ghosts and Spectres — Shadows of History</i> features video installations and films by <b>Apichatpong Weerasethakul</b> (Thailand), <b>Ho Tzu Nyen</b> (Singapore), <b>Nguyen Trinh Thi</b> (Vietnam), and <b>Park Chan-kyong</b> (South Korea). The artists’ research into their own cultural and historical backgrounds gain shape through allegories that re-evaluate the social and political reforms in Post-War and Cold-War Asia. The cinematic works in the exhibition combine fact and fiction. They not only allude to rarely discussed subject-matters but also raise crucial questions about power and authority, construction of narratives, repression of identities, and collective trauma. <br /><br />Embedded in the vernacular, ghosts, myths, and rituals present systems of knowledge that enable the expression of unknown worlds. <i>Ghosts and Spectres — Shadows of History</i> brings to light clouded histories at times not officially recounted but those that remain a lingering presence in collective memories through local mythologies, ghostly figures, and traditions. The works create their own language and systems of reference, reflecting current efforts of exposing written historical accounts and contemporary situations that subvert mainstream narratives. <br /><br />In parallel, The Lab, NTU CCA Singapore’s platform for research in-progress, will be featuring projects by <b>siren eun young jung</b> (South Korea) and <b>Choy Ka Fai</b> (Singapore/Germany), both recent NTU CCA Singapore artists-in-residence. While jung focuses on <i>Yeoseong Gukgeuk</i>, a vanishing form of traditional Korean theatre featuring only female performers, Choy brings up his long-time research into <i>Butoh</i> dance, also called “dance of darkness,” and looks at its evolution and influence through one of the <i>Butoh</i> founders, Tatsumi Hijikata. <br /><br />Ghosts and Spectres—Shadows of History is curated by <b>Ute Meta Bauer</b>, Founding Director, NTU CCA Singapore, and Professor, School of Art, Design and Media, NTU, and <b>Khim Ong</b>, Deputy Director, Curatorial Programmes.
<a href="/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=37&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Apichatpong+Weerasethakul">Apichatpong Weerasethakul</a>
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<i>Creatif Compleks</i> by Michael Lee
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Developed during his residency at NTU CCA Singapore, <i>Creatif Compleks</i> (2018) is the culmination of <b>Michael Lee</b>’s reflection on the function of the artist’s studio within the arts ecology of a city. The work takes the form of a diagram about a hypothetical property development consisting of various configurations of the artist’s home/studio. The use of LED light strips, a popular fixture in advertising and interior design, alludes to latent apprehensions about the development and promotion of the arts in Singapore which today are, arguably, at a feverish pitch. Informed by myths and fantasies of artists in their studios, the work takes a speculative leap into the utopian and the absurd.
<a href="/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=37&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Michael+Lee+">Michael Lee </a>
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<i>along waves of gravity –a solidar y of holes</i> by Kin Chui
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<a href="/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=49&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Fiction">Fiction</a>
Envisioned in 1956 by Indonesian artist Iljas Hussein*, <i>along waves of gravity –a solidar y of holes</i> was to be a monument to the short-lived Principal Liaison Centre (PLC) established in Singapore in 1926. Pivotal in the international surge of anti-colonial struggles, the PLC was a point of liaison between the 3rd International and the region and it was meant to serve as an organ for the amplification of the voices of the marginalised and the oppressed. <br /><br />At the Asian-African Conference held in Bandung in 1955, Hussein was entrusted with the task of imagining a monument that encapsulated the spirit of the PLC. One year later, he presented the idea for <i>along waves of gravity –a solidar y of holes:</i> a triangulation of holes strategically placed across the island that would gather and continuously echo the voices uttered into them. Inspired by theories of general relativity and topological properties of continuous deformation, Hussein’s design articulates, spatially as well as acoustically, an anti-monumentalist stance. Rather than asserting an univocal shape, the monument retreats into the ground as a series of interconnected and shapeshifting vessels which reverberate and transform sound waves throughout time. Hussein kept experimenting with these ideas until his death in 1989 but, due to its scale and technical complexity, his visionary project remained unbuilt. The surviving renderings and audio experiments of the unrealised monument are now displayed in The Vitrine. <br /><br />* Iljas Hussein is a fictional artist conceived by Kin Chui. The name is one of the many aliases used by Tan Malaka (1897 –1949), an influential revolutionary thinker and fighter in the political struggles for Indonesia’s independence. Specifically, this alias was used to pen Malaka’s magnum opus <i>Madilog</i> (1943), the Indonesian acronym for <i>Materialisme Dialektika Logika (Materialism Dialectics Logics)</i>.
<a href="/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=37&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Kin+Chui">Kin Chui</a>
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May Adadol Ingawanij
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Hyunjin Kim
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Erika Balsom
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Chris Berry
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Nicolas Helm-Grovas
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