The Migrant Ecologies Project by Lucy Davis]]> Biodiversity]]> Nature]]> Materiality]]> Railtrack Songmaps, a project exploring competing claims to nature and culture that resound along the former Malaysian railway tracks at Tanglin Halt. For at least five decades, birds, nature lovers, songbird clubs, tree shrines, kampung gardeners and foragers have roosted and seeded themselves along the tracks, nurturing a tangled patch of urban wild that is currently undergoing redevelopment. The particular constellation of elements on display – photographs, Malay pantuns, embroidery on paper, and delicate airborne assemblages of images, cut-outs and coconut sticks – weave in and out of memories of Lim Kim Seng, who together with his brother Lim Kim Chua, joined the Nature Society of Singapore (NSS) as teenager. Both are now senior members of the NSS Bird Group. Kim Seng assisted The Migrant Ecologies Project in the identification of 105 bird species around Tanglin Halt. In an accompanying soundtrack he recalls how an early encounter with a kingfisher first drew him into a bird zone.

The Migrant Ecologies Project was founded in 2010 by artist, art writer, and educator Lucy Davis. Investigating movements and migrations of nature and culture in Southeast Asia and beyond, the project unfolds through collaborations with sound artists, photographers, scientists, and designers.

Lucy Davis has been an Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore from April to June 2017.]]>
Lucy Davis]]> Lim Kim Seng]]> Lim Kim Chua]]> Installation]]> Mixed Media]]> Southeast Asia]]>
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]]> Creatif Compleks by Michael Lee]]> Spaces of the Curatorial]]> Labour]]> Fiction]]> Creatif Compleks (2018) is the culmination of Michael Lee’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.]]> Michael Lee ]]> Installation]]> Mixed Media]]> Southeast Asia]]> 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]]>
Semangat Kejiranan by Izat Arif]]> Nature]]> Urbanism]]> Botany]]> Izat Arif has conducted experiential and erratic fieldwork in various landscapes in Singapore observing plants, soil, insects, and traces of human presence. This investigation is presented in The Vitrine as a form of a provisional “cabinet of essential items,” which contains a selection of the artist’s notes and drawings, research tools, and findings.]]> Izat Arif ]]> Installation]]> Mixed Media]]> Southeast Asia]]> Landscape Series #1, 2013 by Nguyen Trinh Thi]]> Archival Practice]]> Geopolitics]]> Ecosystems]]> Environmental Crisis]]>
The land bearing witness to the volatile transitions in our geo-political, cultural, and social systems questions the extent of which unsustainable and environmentally-taxing practices effect the environment. Does a landscape harbour ill-feelings towards events and circumstances that have caused it harm? And if it were to break its silence, what forgotten stories would it reveal? Rather than disregarding the land, Nguyen’s photographs suggest these environments contain a plethora of unspoken histories.

Nguyen’s works are built upon and are often generative of one another. Parallel to this presentation, two of her films, Vietnam the Movie (2015) and Fifth Cinema (2018), will be on view in The Single Screen from 28 May – 9 June and 11 – 23 June respectively. This screening is part of the Centre’s Film Screening Programme: Faces of Histories, 14 May – 17 July 2019.]]>
Ngyuen Trinh Thi ]]> Installation]]> Photography]]> 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]]>
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]]>
Loose Leaves. Process, materials, sounds from Listen to my words by Dana Awartani]]> Feminism]]> Indigenous Knowledge]]> Tradition]]> Materiality]]> Loose Leaves offers an intimate foray into the process of making Listen to my words (2018). An immersive installation by Dana Awartani, Listen to my words combines hand-embroidered silk panels and recordings of Arabic poems recited by modern-day Saudi women to confront issues of silencing, invisibility, and gendered divisions of space deeply entrenched in the cultural fabric of the Middle East.

Drawn from the significant but scarcely documented tradition of female poets in the Arab world from the pre-Islamic era to the 12th century, the poems selected by the artist express feelings of love, yearning, and pride. They relay modes of awareness, stances of resistance, and acts of empowerment often centred on the female body.

The distinct visual language articulated by the geometric patterns—bearers of sacred values in Islamic culture—references the ornamental motifs found on jali (or mashrabiya), lattice screens used in traditional Islamic architecture to control the circulation of air and light as well as to shield women from the male gaze.

Presented alongside the original audio recording, Loose Leaves layers a selection of preparatory studies in the enclosed space of The Vitrine to provide a glimpse of the subtle negotiations that inform Awartani’s creative journey across different techniques and materials.
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Dana Awartani ]]> Installation]]> Africa]]>
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]]>