Stagings. Soundings. Readings. Free Jazz II]]> Body]]> Performance]]> Identity]]> Institutional Critique]]> Stagings. Soundings. Readings. Free Jazz II reviews the performative format that marked NTU CCA Singapore’s inauguration in 2013. Free Jazz 2013 was a series of talks and performances where participants of various disciplines were invited to imagine and envision a new institution and its potential. On its five-year anniversary, the Centre continues advocating for free spaces, celebrating the practice of improvisation, as well as of collective and performative approaches. Discussing ethical values with an expanded sense of community, territorial, and environmental concerns, Stagings. Soundings. Readings. employs an open, multidisciplinary structure that challenges traditional modes of presentation and re-presentation through a range of artistic practices and formats.

Situated within a complex and contemporary understanding of the Centre’s current overarching research topic CLIMATES. HABITATS. ENVIRONMENTS., the featured works link theory and practice, emphasising collectiveness. Today, the planet is witnessing a moment of unprecedented loss of biodiversity, habitat destruction, and cultural transformations. In the face of such agitated times juxtaposed with advanced communicative tools, contemporary social and environmental issues require responses from a collective body, through establishing processes of instigation, negotiation, and collaboration.

Can we learn from what we see as opposed to being merely seduced by images, becoming active participants instead of only passive observers? Stagings. Soundings. Readings. is an enactment between the artists and the audience. The invited artists engage with a less prescribed environment, reflecting on history, collective action, and human interaction.

Located outside the Centre, Maria Loboda‘s sculptural installation is grounded in historical narratives as a reminder that things can change and be taken down overnight, especially by the invisible mechanisms of power. In the Centre’s foyer, Tyler Coburn addresses forms of labour and examines the notion of writing in the 21st century by engaging with complexities of our legal, technological, and geopolitical networks, while Heman Chong analyses motifs of exchange and its boundaries, embracing the space of inter-human connections.

Unfolding in the exhibition space, Cally Spooner brings to Singapore an exercise in building new vocabulary and knowledge through bodily means. Using the space as a laboratory, the work investigates new ways of organising and working together. Alexandra Pirici’s choreography explores the possibility of collectively assembling memories of human and non-human presence on the planet. Carlos Casas presents his long-term multi-format ethnographic research based on the human ecology and richness of one of the world’s highest inhabited villages, Hichigh, located in the Pamir mountain range in Tajikistan. Together with composer Phill Niblock, they will create an audio-visual experience, traversing landscape, soundscape, and contemporary music that changes with every iteration.

In response to the five-year anniversary and by taking the topic of its celebration Free Jazz literally, Ming Wong will stage an improvisational performance. Similarly, Boris Nieslony (Germany), Co-founder of the artist collective Black Market International, will engage with pioneering Singaporean artist Lee Wen with a discussion and performance.

Further probing conventional formats, the accompanying programmes include readings by curator Anca Rujoiu (Romania/Singapore) and poets Peter Sipeli and 1angrynative (both Fiji), as well as Behind the Scenes conversations with contributing artists. In The Single Screen, works by Anton Ginzburg (Russia/United States), Mariana Silva (Portugal/United States), Luke Fowler (United Kingdom), Justin Shoulder and Bhenji Ra (both Philippines/Australia), and others, will add a filmic perspective to the dialogue.

This multitude of celebratory events instigates an active engagement with the now, following a conscious desire to become truly present.

Curated by Ute Meta Bauer, Founding Director, NTU CCA Singapore, and Professor, School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University, and Magdalena Magiera, Curator, Outreach and Education, NTU CCA Singapore.]]>
Heman Chong]]> Maria Loboda]]> Cally Spooner]]> Maggie Segale]]> Jesper List Thomsen]]> Tyler Coburn]]> Richard Roe]]> Carlos Casas]]> Phill Niblock]]> Ming Wong]]> Alexandra Pirici]]> Ying Cai]]> Weixin Chong]]> Chloe Chotrani]]> Nina Djekic]]> Farid Fairuz]]> Adam Lau]]> Je Leung]]> Loo Zihan]]> Yue Ru Ma]]> Hanna Mikosch]]> Yulin Ng]]> Rachel Nip]]> Isabel Phua]]> Jamil Schulze]]> Performance]]> Sound]]> Installation]]> Asia]]>
Ulrike Ottinger: China. The Arts – The People, Photographs and Films from the 1980s and 1990s]]> Identity]]> Displacement]]> Regionalism]]> Archival Practice]]> Fiction]]> Politics]]> Race]]> China. The Arts – The People, Photographs and Films from the 1980s and 1990s 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.

Starting with China. The Arts – The People (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.

Taiga. A Journey to Northern Mongolia (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 Exile Shanghai (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 Johanna d’Arc of Mongolia (1989), Ottinger’s only feature fiction film presenting a cast starring Badema, Lydia Billiet, Inés Sastre, and Delphine Seyrig.

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.

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.

The exhibition is accompanied by an intensive public programme, starting with a Behind the Scenes 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.

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), Ulrike Ottinger (2012), Ulrike Ottinger: N.B.K. Ausstellungen Band 11 (2011), Floating Food (2011), and Image Archive (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.

Ulrike Ottinger: China. The Arts ­– The People, Photographs and Films from the 1980s and 1990s is curated by Ute Meta Bauer, Founding Director, and Khim Ong, Deputy Director, Exhibitions, Residencies and Public Programmes.]]>
Ulrike Ottinger]]> Ute Meta Bauer]]> Khim Ong]]> Photography]]> Film]]> Asia]]>
Interrogative Pattern – Text(ile) Weave by Regina (Maria) Möller]]> Materiality]]> Identity]]> Regina (Maria) Möller‘s research focus. Möller’s research in The Lab stems from her interest in the trademark headdress of Samsui women, and will elaborate with time through experimental, collaborative and participatory forms of research practice. During workshops, lectures or formats of story telling, new layers will be added to reflect upon each other and trigger next threads for an ever expanding weave.]]> Regina (Maria) Möller]]> Installation]]> Object]]> Southeast Asia]]> Wrong Indexing: Yeoseong Gukgeuk Archive by siren eun young jung]]> Identity]]> Yeoseong Gukgeuk reached the peak of popularity in the 1950s and 1960s, its success being tightly intertwined with the process of modernisation of South Korea. While today it lingers on the verge of extinction, in the post-colonial period Yeoseong Gukgeuk opened up a space for women to embody “other” identities and perform different subjectivities. Reinventing the traditional Korean theatre, they brought the process of gender-shifting to the limelight and subverted socially acceptable norms by blurring conventional gender binaries. Since 2008, siren eun young jung has investigated the public and private lives of Yeoseong Gukgeuk performers who, after the genre fell out of favour, went on to live disparate lives. This configuration of archival materials offers an insight into the artist’s research process and articulates the politics of recollecting, weaving together queer desires and patterns of resistance, affective matters and subversive subjectivities, gender fluidity and the performance of difference.

Wrong Indexing: Yeoseong Gukgeuk Archive is curated by Dr Anna Lovecchio, Curator, Residencies.]]>
siren eun young jung]]> Anna Lovecchio]]> Photography]]> Asia]]>
Journey of a Yellow Man. Selected Materials from the Independent Archive]]> Performance]]> Activism]]> Politics]]> Identity]]> Artistic Research]]> Archival Practice]]> Lee Wen (Singapore) in 2012. For the past six years, the IA captured the zeitgeist of performance art in Singapore and larger (South-)East Asia through artistic collaborations.

This presentation in The Lab is organised into five chapters —“Condition,” “Body,” “Formation / Gestalt,” “Absence,” and “Memory”—that look at the development of performance art as a new medium as well as its political conditions. Journey of a Yellow Man. takes visitors through the archive with photographs, videos, writings, sketchbooks, while simultaneously, introducing the digital archive. As of today, the Centre has digitalised 20,000 files from the IA.

The practice of Lee Wen is motivated by social investigations that use art to interrogate stereotypical perceptions of culture and society. He became famous for his performance series Journey of a Yellow Man (1992—), where he embodied his Chinese descent and its relationship to oppressive systems.

The presentation provides insight into a continuously expanding resource platform that highlights ephemeral moments in the history of performance art in Singapore. The project addresses the importance of providing historically significant source material for researchers and the wider public. The digitalised files will be integrated into NTU CCA Singapore’s Public Resource Platform and will be accessible at the Centre, the Independent Archive, and the Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong, a collaborative partner of this project.

With IA, a series of public programmes will take place in both The Lab at the NTU CCA Singapore and in the IA. The programme highlights IA as a “living archive” that not only serves as a reference library and archive focusing on time-based and event-specific art, but is also a gathering space that offers dynamic programmes in a vibrant network of artists, musicians, and the public.

Journey of a Yellow Man is curated by Sophie Goltz, Deputy Director, Research and Academic Programmes, NTU CCA Singapore, in collaboration with Lee Wen, artist and Founder, Independent Archive, Singapore, Bruce Quek, Research, Independent Archive, and Kamiliah Bahdar, Public Programmes, Independent Archive. Project Assistant: Ho See Wah, Young Professional Trainee, NTU CCA Singapore. Assistant to Lee Wen: Liu Wen Chao, Library, Independent Archive.

The NTU CCA Digital Resource Platform was initiated in 2016 by Ute Meta Bauer, Founding Director, NTU CCA Singapore, and Professor, NTU ADM Singapore and Lee Wen, in collaboration with Chương-Đài Võ, Researcher, Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong. Assistant to the project: Bruce Quek with the support of Samantha Leong Min Yu, Executive, Conferences, Workshops & Archive, NTU CCA Singapore (till May 2018), Corine Chan Li Ling, Executive Archive, NTU CCA Singapore (May to July 2018), and Pooja Paras Mehta (2017), Ho See Wah (2018), Young Professional Trainees, NTU CCA Singapore.]]>
Sophie Goltz]]> Lee Wen]]> Bruce Quek]]> Kamiliah Bahdar]]> Ho See Wah]]> Liu Wen Chao]]> Ute Meta Bauer]]> Chương-Đài Võ]]> Samantha Leong Min Yu]]> Corine Chan Li Ling]]> Pooja Paras Mehta]]> Chuong-Dai Vo]]> Chuong Dai Vo]]> Photography]]> Multimedia Installation]]> Print]]> Video]]> Sculpture]]> Southeast Asia]]>
Why are they so afraid of a lotus?]]> Feminism]]> Identity]]> Politics]]> Trinh T. Minh-ha. Films., this research presentation showcases the Wattis Institute’s year-long research season on Trinh’s multifaceted practice as a filmmaker, writer and theorist. What does the promise of “speaking nearby” rather than “speaking about” look like today? What are the politics of hospitality? What are the problematics of “post-feminism,” and how do we challenge the West as the authoritative subject of feminist knowledge? Expanding the discursive orbit of these questions, the presentation features projects by artists Hồng-Ân Trương (US) and Genevieve Quick (US), and is accompanied by the online convening Mother Always Has a Mother, a result of the ongoing research collaboration between NTU CCA Singapore, Rockbund Art Museum (Shanghai), and the Wattis Institute.

Conceived by Kim Nguyen (Canada/United States), Curator and Head of Programs, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts (Wattis), San Francisco.]]>
Hồng-Ân Trương]]> Genevieve Quick]]> Kim Nguyen]]> Rockbund Art Museum]]> CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts]]> Video]]> Installation]]> Print]]> North America]]>
Campur, Tolak, Kali, Bahagi, Sama Dengan (Add, Subtract, Multiply, Divide, Equals) Solo Project by Roslisham Ismail aka Ise]]> Politics]]> Identity]]> Artistic Research]]> Campur, Tolak, Kali, Bahagi, Sama Dengan (Add, Subtract, Multiply, Divide, Equals) is a solo project by late and cherished artist Roslisham Ismail aka Ise. In 2016 during a short trip in Germany, Ise jotted down in his notebook the title of a much-contemplated solo project: Campur, Tolak, Kali, Bahagi, Sama Dengan (Add, Subtract, Multiply, Divide, Equals), to which he returned two years later when eventually, such an exhibition became possible in Kuala Lumpur. Ise saw in basic arithmetic operations and their specific properties, a reflection of his artistic process Actions are performed differently; the results could be the same. “Painters 100 years ago—” explains Ise in an interview “—also went to the market to buy vegetables and put them in a still life painting. For me it was the same. I went to the market and put the food on display. It’s just another way of working.”

An exhibition that takes place a little more than one year since the artist’s passing rightfully carries deeper significance and responsibility. While this exhibition was not conceived as a survey of Ise’s broad practice, it is defined, as the title suggests, by a reflexive scope. Although produced four years apart, the two bodies of work that shape this project intimately interconnect. Seamlessly they capture Ise’s art-making process, his distinctive ways of navigating the world and embedding the serendipity of life and social encounters in artistic practice.

Aimed to foster connections between artists and a new context, to provide much-needed time and space for reflection and encounters, artist-in-residence programmes represented an important catalyst in the development of Ise’s artistic practice. Their nature suit Ise’s method of working, social flair, endless curiosity and conceivably offered a means to take distance from a familiar environment and reflect on it from afar. A ramification of his residency project at Bangkok University Gallery, Operation Bangkok (2014) maps Ise’s encounters with the city and its inhabitants. From the abandoned New World Mall, Thieves’ Market, Crocodile Temple (Wat Chakrawat) to anti-government protests in Lumpini Park, to name a few, Ise guides us to places and events meaningful to those for whom Bangkok is home. We discover through Ise’s eyes and interactions, Bangkok as a living city rather than a tourist destination on the global market.

Fictional characters have been recurrent in Ise’s drawings informed by the visual vernacular of comics. In 2018, he started a collaboration with the comic book artist Ibrahim Hamid (Pak Him), whose work Ise knew since primary school. In the vicissitudes of life, they first met at the hospital in Kota Bharu, where both were undergoing dialysis treatment. Ise commissioned Pak Him to execute, following his instructions and study drawings, a series of graphic novel illustrations. These comics, displayed in mobile lightboxes, employ strategies of self-narration situating Ise inside the story as protagonist. Checked for hours at Christchurch’s customs under the odd suspicion of being a “drug designer”; mugged in Barcelona at knifepoint; stopped by the police in Jakarta after Malaysia won a regional cup in a football match against Indonesia but backed by his peers, and so on, Ise revived his micro-narratives through a fictionalised persona and Pak Him’s craftsmanship. Portraying himself within a world with many others, friends and strangers alike, Ise affirmed his continuous interest in the virtues and intricacies of the social.

The publication of this exhibition takes the format of a special issue of SentAp!, the magazine founded by curator Nur Hanim Khairuddin and Ise in 2005. Dedicated to Ise, this issue is designed by Yan; and it includes a welcome note by Ute Meta Bauer, a series of interviews by writer Tan Zi Hao with the curators Ark Fongsmut, Nur Hanim Khairuddin, and Russell Storer; an essay and a conversation with ruangrupa by curator Anca Rujoiu.

Roslisham Ismail aka Ise’s solo project is realised in collaboration with Ise parkingproject Foundation with the support of A+ Works of Art and NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore. The exhibition is presented in The Lab at NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore between 16 January – 28 February 2021.]]>
Roslisham Ismail aka Ise]]> Ibrahim Hamid]]> Anca Rujoiu]]> Ise parkingproject Foundation]]> A+ Works of Art]]> Drawing]]> Installation]]> Southeast Asia]]> Oceania]]>
impasse to verbal by Luca Lum]]> Urbanism]]> Public Sphere]]> Identity]]> impasse to verbal comes out from her continued engagement with the neighbourhood and from her speculations on the slippage between what things are, how they look, and what they do—which the artist defines as the play between description and disposition.

The work is a visual assemblage that merges wall notices, official zoning maps, personal routes, and various extracts sampled from the urban landscape. Through an intricate interplay of stratifications and transparencies, it creates an imploded visual environment where information is simultaneously displayed and withdrawn, revealed and cloaked. Steeped in a pervasive blue glow reminiscent of the light of electronic devices, the signs are left to float and clash into leaky configurations that shatter conventional patterns of readability.]]>
Luca Lum]]> Installation]]> Mixed Media]]> Southeast Asia]]>
Vivarium (wii fl∞w w/ l4if but t4k£ ø forms, ♥) by Fyerool Darma]]> Urbanism]]> Public Sphere]]> Identity]]>
Vivarium (wii fl∞w w/ l4if but t4k£ ø f0rms,♥) is an exercise in four parts. Identified through keywords caches on internet-based community marketplaces and by skimming through nearby shops, the items are representations of the artist’s movements and encounters around Telok Blangah and of the possible future of the area: from its literal meaning of “cooking pot” to the forthcoming “Greater Southern Waterfront” development plan. Three items will be placed in The Vitrine, one at a time, with a monthly cadence and each accession will be captured in the Highlights section of the artist’s Instagram account (@fdarma).

Asking questions such as: What is Telok Blangah? And, more importantly if objects are to be taken as registers of the site: Where exactly is Telok Blangah?, Fyerool’s Vivarium (wii fl∞w w/ l4if but t4k£ ø f0rms,♥) encapsulates an object-based index of the area wherein the items slide like cursors along intricate trajectories and the realms of the physical and digital, the archive and the display, are merged.]]>
Fyerool Darma]]> Installation]]> Mixed Media]]> Southeast Asia]]>
Nature]]> Coexistence]]> Identity]]> Oceans & Seas]]> Cynthia Chou]]> Southeast Asia]]>