Coexistence]]> Supernatural]]> Ritual]]> Fiction]]>

Blk 38 Malan Road, The Single Screen
2020, HD video, colour, sound, 15 min 37 sec

Realised in collaboration with local residents, the first experimental video of the collective Rice Brewing Sisters Club weaves together oral histories, folk tales, poems, and agricultural wisdom harvested in Deokgeo-ri, a small rural community in the north-eastern region of Gangwon (South Korea). The work is structured in seven short chapters, with each chapter featuring enactments where villagers, sacred trees, and ritual objects perform simple choreographies to illustrate stories and practices of coexistence and interrelatedness between humans, the natural environment, and an otherworld teeming with spiritual entities. Imbued with a playful and whimsical sense of the communal, Cheopcheopdamdam Iyagigeuk / Mountain Storytellers, Storytelling Mountains: A Tale Theatre 첩첩담담 疊疊談談 이야기극 offers an insight into alternative worldviews made of sustainable practices and ecological belief systems.

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Rice Brewing Sisters Club]]> Asia]]>
Ritual]]> Performance]]> Nature]]> Blk 37, Malan Road, #01-04

To Burn, Forest, Fire takes place as a series of incense burning ceremonies that awaken our sensorium and elicit an intimate, intuitive relation to the natural world confronting us with the sensorial richness of forest ecologies and the prospect of extinctions caused by humanity. Stemming from collaborations with scientists across different disciplines, the work speculates on the olfactory qualities of the first and last forest on our planet. The earliest forest is believed to have formed in present-day Cairo (New York State, United States) about 385 million years ago; whereas the last forest before environmental collapse is identified with the Yasuni Biosphere Reserve, in the Ecuadorian Amazon, an ecosystem threatened by rampant deforestation and unsustainable agricultural practices. Katie Paterson’s interdisciplinary investigation resulted in the creation of incense sticks, blended by Japanese incense maker Shoyeido, that propagate the distinct fragrances of the two forests pushing our understanding
of reality beyond the domain of the visible.

This project was originally initiated by IHME Helsinki, a contemporary art organisation in Finland that situates its activities in a dialogue between art and science.

Part of Free Jazz IV. Geomancers

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Katie Paterson]]> Magdalena Magiera]]> Karin Oen]]> Ute Meta Bauer]]> Southeast Asia]]>
Identity]]> Mythology]]> Ritual]]> Mystic and Momok - in collaboration with fellow artist Bani Haykal - a short film about artist, healer, and mystic Mohammad Din Mohammed. Morton also delved into historical research about the Pulau Senang riots of 1963 that are inspiring the development of his first feature film.]]> Russell Morton]]> Video]]> Southeast Asia]]> Supernatural]]> Ritual]]> Indigenous Knowledge]]>

Kenneth Dean will confront questions like “What happens in the afterlife?” “Do ghosts get bored and lonely?” and “Can we plan what happens to our spirits when we die?” In the course of the (de)Tour, Dean will elaborate on how Chinese religion deals with ghosts through rituals and traditions.

This Exhibition (de)Tour is part of the Education and Public Programme of Joan Jonas: They Come to Us without a Word.]]>
Kenneth Dean ]]> Video]]> Southeast Asia]]>
Animism]]> Cultural Heritage]]> Decolonialism]]> History]]> Ritual]]> Embodiment]]> Performance]]> The Single Screen, Block 43 Malan Road

Therianthropy, the mythological ability of humans to metamorphose into other animals through shapeshifting, has marked myth and folklore across cultures and times, remaining one of the most common tropes in magical and otherworldly narratives. Drawing from concepts of the demonised and desired body, gender-based archetypes, and mythmaking, this lecture performance invokes family histories and revokes the lineages of colonisation in Southeast Asia. The event unfolds through the layering of personal memory, collective history, and fragments of ancestral and indigenous knowledge on healing and killing. Remembering the rites of the Wolf Spider and the Harimau Jadian (Were-Tiger) and exploring their multiple translations and adaptations, the performance looks at intergenerational and cross-cultural exchange through storytelling, rituals, gestures, and embodied movement.

This programme takes place on the occasion of Art After Dark x Gillman Barracks 5th Anniversary Celebrations.
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Zarina Muhammad]]> Video]]> Southeast Asia]]>
Supernatural]]> Mythology]]> Ritual]]> History]]>
On the occasion of the exhibition Ghost and Spectres – Shadows of History curated by Professor Ute Meta Bauer and Khim Ong, and the 4th anniversary of NTU CCA Singapore

10.00 – 10.10am Welcome address by Ute Meta Bauer, Founding Director, NTU CCA Singapore and Professor, School of Art, Design and Media (ADM)

10.10 – 11.10am Keynote Lecture: “The Art of Uncertainty” Dr May Adadol Ingawanij, curator and moving image theorist, University of Westminster, London

Focusing on artists' cinema and moving image installations in Southeast Asia, the keynote lecture addresses the relationship between contemporary moving image aesthetics, historical invocation, and the politics of enunciation. Dr Ingawanij will expamnd on how weveryday life, conflicts, violence, and historical erasures specific to places in Southeast Asia are sources of inspiration and motivation for many artists.]]>
May Adadol Ingawanij]]> Ute Meta Bauer]]> Video]]> Asia]]>
Mythology]]> Supernatural]]> Ritual]]> History]]>
On the occasion of the exhibition Ghost and Spectres – Shadows of History curated by Professor Ute Meta Bauer and Khim Ong, and the 4th anniversary of NTU CCA Singapore

SESSION II: GHOSTS AND SPECTRES 4.30 – 5.30pm Closing Keynote Lecture by Professor Kenneth Dean, Head, Department of Chinese Studies, NUS

Professor Dean will reflect on the day's discussions from the perspective of local historical research, and expand on them through referencing folkloric and vernancular practices.]]>
Kenneth Dean]]> Ute Meta Bauer]]> Video]]> Southeast Asia]]>
Ritual]]> Supernatural]]>
Claiming the role of the artist as “cultural ventriloquist” who lends multiple voices to spectral matters and speculative histories, for this talk Zarina Muhammad will weave together research threads and aesthetic strategies that underpin the main projects she developed in the past year: Talismans for Peculiar Habitats, Pharmacopeias for Accredited Agents of Poisoning and Apotropaic Texts, and Pragmatic Prayers for the Kala at the Threshold. The artist will unpack the polyphonic narratives embedded in her installations and expand upon her long-term engagement with Austronesian cosmologies, guardian spirits, non-conforming bodies, and memory lapses occurring in the cultural shifts from pre-colonial to post-colonial times.

* Penunggu refers to the spirit that guards, supervises, or protects a particular place, region, nation, age group, country, culture, or occupation. It is believed that it can be protective, benign or malevolent. Though not entirely synonymous with the Kala, the gate guardian in sacred architectures, the penunggu is also a guardian of spaces. The root word of ʻpenungguʼ is derived from the Malay word ʻtungguʼ, which means ʻto waitʼ.]]>
Zarina Muhammad]]> Video]]> Southeast Asia]]>
Beat the Blues – A manual for absurd times, 2021 Commissioned by NTU CCA Singapore]]> Ritual]]> Free Jazz III. Sound. Walks.

“Do you find it hard to concentrate these days? Perhaps the blues bug just keeps nipping away at your heels? Are you bored and feeling listless or always struggling to keep going? When was the last time you did something different, something a little adventurous, slightly odd or just for the fun of it? Can you spare 10 to 15 minutes for a simple creative ritual? “

Wang offers an instructional manual of self-therapy to perk up your spirit. Activate an appreciation for life, expression, awareness and presence through sound, vocalizing, movement and imagination.

*The poem quoted in exercise three is by Pauline Oliveros, “The Earth Worm Also Sings” (1992)]]>

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Vivian Wang]]> Audio]]> Part 1]]> Part 2]]> Part 3]]> Southeast Asia]]>
Feminism]]> Geopolitics]]> Ritual]]> Cultural Heritage]]> Body]]> Displacement]]> Race]]> Trinh T. Minh-ha’s approach to film has addressed a wide field of discussions—reaching from the ethics of representation in ethnographic film, to aspects of migration, debates on global socio-political developments, and different layers of feminist discourse. Her films are investigations into the question of the voice as well as the relationship between the visible and audible. This programme will present a selection of films that echo some of these discussions negotiated by Trinh in her filmic works as well as her writings, and create a dialogue with other filmmakers and scholars.

Co-curated by Dr Marc Glöde, Assistant Professor, NTU ADM, and Dr Ella Raidel, Assistant Professor, NTU ADM and WKWSCI.

1 – 14 November 2020
the time is now. (I+II), Heidrun Holzfeind, 2019
Colour, sound, 48 min
Rating: PG

Holzfeind is interested in architectural and social utopias that create an alternative living. She documents the shamanistic rituals of the Japanese improvisation/noise duo IRO, Toshio and Shizuko Orimo, in what they call “Punk Kagura”—in reference to Kagura, a ritual dance tradition and music for the gods. Holzfeind uses a visual language that adapts their mystical rituals: breaks in image; the colour and narrative corresponding with the soundscape; the modernist architecture of Takamasa Yosizaka; and the surrounding nature in which the duo performs a choreography for healing our damaged planet. The urgency is underlined in the title the time is now.

15 – 28 November 2020
Heaven’s Crossroad, Kimi Takesue, 2002
Video, colour, sound, 35 min
Rating: G

What does it mean to “look” cross-culturally? This film follows up on this question by creating a visual journey through Vietnam. Instead of following the established patterns of the classic documentary, Takesue creates an experimental experience that challenges the audience and invites us to reflect on what it means to “truly see another culture”. Within this beautiful visual travelogue, questions of desire, projection, and communication begin to appear, that are embedded in this idea of the cross-cultural encounter.

29 November – 10 December 2020
Naked Spaces—Living is Round, Trinh T. Minh-ha, 1985
16mm transferred to digital file, colour, sound, 135 min
Rating: PG13 (This film contains some nudity)

Six West African countries (Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Togo, Benin and Senegal) stand in the centre of this film. The work explores the life in the rural environments of these countries by taking a closer look at the everyday. With its nonlinear structure, the film steps away from the classical traditions of the documentary/ethnography tradition and offers a sensuous approach. It is a poetic journey to the African continent in which the interaction of the encountered people or the spaces in which they are living becomes relevant.

11 – 24 December 2020
A Song of Ceylon, Laleen Jayamanne, 1985
16mm film, colour, sound, 51 min
Rating: PG13 (This film contains mature content and some nudity)

This film is an intense study of the body, gender and the multiple aspects of colonialism. It addresses theatrical conventions by recreating classic film stills and presenting the body in striking tableaux. A remarkable film on which Trinh T Minh-Ha, in Discourse (1989), commented: “The anthropological text is performed both like a musical score and a theatrical ritual….The film engages the viewer in the cinematic body as spectacle…”.

25 December 2020 – 5 January 2021
Surname Viet Given Name Nam, Trinh T. Minh-ha, 1989
16mm film transferred to digital, colour, sound, 108 min
Rating: PG13 (This film contains some disturbing scenes from the archival footage of the Vietnam War)

This film is Trinh’s complex deep dive into the difficulties of translation, as well as themes of exile or dislocation. By using historic material, dance, printed texts, folk poetry and combining it with anecdotal narratives, she examines the status of Vietnamese women since the Vietnam War, as well as the status of images as evidence. It is a complex approach that invites the audience to reflect on the modes of perception and encourages a profound critique of audio-visual strategies.

6 – 19 January 2021
Nervous Translation, Shireen Seno, 2018
Colour, sound, 90 min
Rating: PG

This film follows the inner voice and play of an eight-year-old girl who cooks perfect miniature dishes, mimicking the world of adults. The perception of the child is translated through fragmentation and sounds that are written into words, such as the ring of the telephone, and the sound of the aircon, all forming together, an orchestra of the everyday. Waiting, boredom, and dead time pave the temporality of her imagination, while she is listening to cassette tapes recorded by her father, a migrant worker in Saudi Arabia. The personal phantasmagoric vision encounters the political dimension echoing the times of the People Power Revolution in the Philippines.

20 – 31 January 2021
Reassemblage, Trinh T. Minh-ha, 1982
16mm film transferred to digital, colour, sound, 40 min
Rating: PG13 (This film contains some nudity)

With her remarkable and widely discussed first film, Trinh brings the conventions of the documentary to our attention and asks how films in the field of documentary and ethnographic tradition have consecutively established a power to manipulate the way in which we perceive different cultures. By gathering filmic means and techniques that reject the traditional narrative forms, Trinh constantly alerts us to our own process of perception, furthermore reminding us that watching a movie is not a passive, but an active process.

1 – 14 February 2021
The Human Pyramid, Jean Rouch, 1961
DCP, colour, sound, 93 min
Rating: NC16 (This film contains mature content)

At the Lycée Français of Abidjan, Ivory Coast, Rouch worked with students there who willingly enacted a story about the arrival of a new white girl, Nadine, and her effect on the interactions of and interracial relationships between the white colonial French and Black African classmates, all non-actors. Fomenting a dramatic situation instead of repeating one, Rouch extended the experiments he had undertaken in Chronicle of a Summer, including having on-camera student participants view rushes of the film midway through the story. The docu-drama shows how working together to make the film changes their attitude towards each other.—Icarus Film

15 – 28 February 2021
95 and 6 to Go, Kimi Takesue, 2016
Digital, colour, sound, 85 min
Rating: G

While visiting her grandfather, a recent widower in his 90s in Hawai’i, Takesue begins to follow his everyday routines. When he shows interest in his granddaughter’s stalled romantic screenplay, an interesting discussion about her work, family, memories, and identity unfolds. Shot over six years, this film shows how personal aspects intertwine with a critical reflection of the documentary genre.

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Marc Glöde]]> Marc Glode]]> Ella Raidel]]> Heidrun Holzfeind]]> Kimi Takesue]]> Trinh T. Minh-ha]]> Laleen Jayamanne]]> Shireen Seno]]> Jean Rouch]]> Southeast Asia]]> Africa]]> North America]]>