The Ring of Fire (2014 – ongoing) by Irwan Ahmett and Tita Salina]]> Geopolitics]]> Migration]]> Politics]]> Activism]]> Irwan Ahmett and Tita Salina, this geologically unstable territory demarcates a field of artist inquiry.

Since 2014, the Indonesian duo have embarked upon a journey that engages issues of social injustice, political struggles, colonial histories, and environmental crises encountered along erratic routes that stretch from Indonesia to New Zealand, from Taiwan and South Korea to Japan. The Ring of Fire (2014–ongoing) brings together for the first time the most significant works realised by the artists, either together or individually, since the inception of the project.]]>
Irwan Ahmett]]> Tita Salina]]> Video]]> Print]]> Object]]> Installation]]> Asia]]> Oceania]]>
Mary Otis Stevens. The i Press Series]]> Public Sphere]]> Urbanism]]> Geopolitics]]> Activism]]> Politics]]> Mary Otis Stevens (b.1928) is a pioneering American architect. Her architectural designs, along with the founding of i Press (1968-1978), an important publisher of books on architecture, urbanism, and social space, were linked to her ability to radically re-envision space and relationships. In the context of the Cold War and American political activism in the 1960s, her work, which were often in collaboration with her partner, fellow architect and i Press co-founder Thomas McNulty, revealed her foundational training in philosophy and her commitment to de-centralising hierarchies. Revisiting her work more than fifty years later, the themes of active citizen participation in government, integrated planning, and genuine risk-taking to make substantial change in people’s lives remain relevant and crucial means of incorporating a social context into the practice of architecture. On view is Mary’s sensitivity to variations, large and small, visible in her work as a publisher as well as her drawings and architectural designs. This research presentation also explores The Ideal Communist City, an i Press publication by Alexei Gutnov et al. from 1970 that offers a deep dive into a utopian proposition that “the new city is a world belonging to all and to each.”

In order to help introduce the i Press series on the human environment to a wide audience, NTU CCA Singapore, with series editors Ute Meta Bauer (Founding Director, NTU CCA and Professor, NTU ADM), James Graham (Director of Publications, Columbia University GSAPP), and Pelin Tan (2019-2020 Keith Haring Fellow in Art and Activism, Bard College), is currently working with i Press and Mary Otis Stevens to republish several original i Press books with revisions and commentary by contemporary theorists and practitioners.

Mary Otis Stevens. The i Press Series is curated by Dr Karin Oen, Deputy Director, Curatorial Programmes, NTU CCA Singapore]]>
Mary Otis Stevens]]> Karin Oen]]> Print]]> North America]]>
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]]>
Speed Reading by Sonya Lacey]]> Artistic Research]]> Politics]]> Sonya Lacey addresses the politics of communication by tampering with the concrete textures of language. Specifically conceived for The Vitrine, Speed Reading combines two bodies of work that put the sheer physicality of language to a test. Headlines from The Straits Times and Solar Print Tests (both 2017) result from a series of experiments, undertaken by the artist during her residency at NTU CCA Singapore, where she exposed newsprint paper to both sunlight and artificial light, while Dilutions, an earlier work from 2016, is a sculptural piece involving a movable metal typeface and the process of corrosion determined by lead oxide. Slowly warping over time, the material components entailed in the production and circulation of the written word, Speed Reading alters the boundaries of legibility and shakes the physical foundations of the transmission of knowledge.]]> Sonya Lacey ]]> Installation]]> Mixed Media]]> Southeast Asia]]> along waves of gravity –a solidar y of holes by Kin Chui]]> Postcolonialism]]> Politics]]> Fiction]]> along waves of gravity –a solidar y of holes 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.

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 along waves of gravity –a solidar y of holes: 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.

* 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 Madilog (1943), the Indonesian acronym for Materialisme Dialektika Logika (Materialism Dialectics Logics).]]>
Kin Chui]]> Multimedia Installation]]> Southeast Asia]]>
Mouthful (masked duet)]]> Politics]]> Activism]]> Embodiment]]> Body]]>
Let us return power and agency to the mouth and voice while still protecting ourselves and others. Let us express our emotions freely into the air that we all share. The Mouthful mask is both conceptual and practical. It exposes the breath and gives us an earful and eyeful of air. Mouthful projects a new sound which follows the guidelines of our time while it overcomes and embraces the obstacles we face with poetry and humor.

Mouthful is conceived by Ana Prvački, produced and manifested by Galina Mihaleva and activated by Reginald Jalleh and Zerlina Tan with original music by Joyce Bee Tuan Koh. A transdisciplinary, collaborative work, Mouthful is realized with two performative activations and as an installation and sound work in The Vitrine at NTU CCA Singapore, Block 43 Malan Road.]]>
Ana Prvački]]> Ana Prvacki]]> Joyce Bee Tuan Koh]]> Galina Mihaleva]]> Installation]]> Object]]> Southeast Asia]]>
Technology]]> Capitalism]]> Politics]]> Emily Chua Hui Ching]]> Asia]]> Southeast Asia]]> Technology]]> Identity]]> Politics]]> Genevieve Quick]]> North America]]> Fiction]]> History]]> Politics]]> Tan Pin Pin]]>