Artistic Research]]> Tradition]]> Theatre]]> 22 Feb 2017, Wed 07:30 PM - 09:00 PM
The Single Screen, Block 43 Malan Road

What is artistic research? Which are the material and immaterial aspects that constitute contemporary art practices? Within the context of The Making of an Institution, Artist-in-Residence siren eun young jung addresses the process of artistic research that lies behind her long-term project on Yeosung Gukgeuk, a form of Korean theatre featuring only female actors that flourished between the 1940s and the 1960s. Over almost a decade, jung has produced a multiplicity of works around this subject challenging the interpretation of tradition and gender politics in contemporary Korean society. The artist will introduce the screening of Act of Affect (2013) and I am not going to sing (2015), positioning Yeosung Gukgeuk at the intersection between issues of affect, gender structures, and performativity.

This talk is part of the public programme of The Making of an Institution.]]>
siren eun young jung ]]> Asia]]>
Activism]]> Politics]]> 7 Jun 2017, Wed 07:30 PM - 09:00 PM
Studio #01-05, Block 38 Malan Road

In the context of chi too’s ongoing research on activism and civil disobedience, this studio session present the screening of two documentary films: Penusah Tana (The Forgotten Struggle) (2008) by Hilary Chiew and chi too and Singapore Rebel (2004) by local filmmaker Martyn See. Both films documents episodes of resistance and are brought together because of the artist’s interest in understanding how protest and dissent take shape in Malaysia and Singapore. Penusah Tana (The Forgotten Struggle) addresses the struggles of the Penan, a forest-dwelling tribe in Sarawak, against logging corporations. Singapore Rebel recounts the political journey of Dr Chee Soon Juan, leader of the Singapore Democratic Party.

The screenings will be followed by a conversation between the artist and the filmmaker.

The talk will take place in the artist’s studio at Studio #01–05, Blk 38 Malan Road. Please note that Singapore Rebel is rated M18.]]>
chi too]]> Martyn See ]]> Southeast Asia]]>
An Experiment in Leisure Film Screening and Conversation with Manon de Boer (Netherlands/Belgium), Artist-in-Residence]]> Artistic Research]]> Cultural Production]]> 6 Sep 2017, Wed 07:30 PM - 09:00 PM
The Single Screen, Block 43 Malan Road

The latest film produced by Artist-in-Residence Manon de Boer, An Experiment in Leisure (2016, 35 min) whispers a collective reflection on the rhythms of creation and on the relationship between free time and creativity. Drawing on the theories of British psychoanalyst Marion Milner (1900-1998) about the dynamics of concentration, daydreaming, and open-ended time, de Boer collected the voices of several artists reflecting upon their creative processes and weaved them together with the sounds a Norwegian seascape. Capturing the images of the artists’ empty workspaces and those of the deserted marine landscape, the film slows down the process of perception and composes a lyrical essay on leisure as a condition for inspiration.

Held in The Single Screen, the screening will be introduced by a conversation between the artist and Dr Anna Lovecchio, Curator, Residencies.]]>
Manon de Boer ]]> Europe]]>
Geopolitics]]> Diaspora]]> 6 Oct 2017, Fri 07:30 PM - 09:00 PM
The Single Screen, Block 43 Malan Road

Huai Mo Village
, Thailand, 2012, 8 min 20 sec
Ruins of the intelligence bureau, Thailand, 2015, 13 min 30 sec
White Building – Sva Pul, Kong Nay, Sisters, Rooftop, Cambodia, 2016, 18 min

The artist will be present.

Chia-Wei Hsu’s ten-year long engagement with the moving image and the forgotten stories of the Cold War 
in Southeast Asia resulted in a complex body of works which address major historical events through the lens of minor narratives, often embedded in remote locations, that weave together reality and fiction, myth and history. Delving into the history of the Huai
Mo Village in northern Thailand, the artist collaborates with soldiers and children to trace the story of the exiled Chinese soldiers who settled at the Thai-Myanmar border and were never able to return home. In Cambodia, the artist looks at the White Building in Phnom Penh to reference the violent history of repression during the Khmer Rouge occupation, where 90 percent of performance artists were executed. After liberation, the surviving artists were assigned accommodation in the White Building. In the wake of its upcoming demolition, Hsu invited four second- generation performing groups to engage with the White Building, their former home.

This Screening is part of the public programme of Ghosts and Spectres – Shadows of History, as well as Archifest 2017: Building Agency.]]>
Chia-Wei Hsu]]> Southeast Asia]]> Asia]]>
Ways of Seeing]]> 1 Nov 2017, Wed 07:30 PM - 09:00 PM
The Single Screen, Block 43 Malan Road

Purfled Promises, Canada, 2009, 8 min
Leona Alone, Canada, 2009, 5 min
Parade, Canada, 2013, 11 min
Isla Santa Maria 3D, Canada, 2016, 18min

This programme of short films by Oliver Husain provides an insight into the artist’s deep-seated interest in the visual codes of cinematic language, the artifice of representation, and the politics of spectatorship. The selected films span a trajectory from central perspective to the optical illusionism of 3D technologies revealing, each time from a different angle, how they inexorably overlap. Deconstructing the framing devices of the moving image, Husain’s films tackle notions of simulation and theatricality, presence and representation, creating playful spatial disruptions that question the authority of perspective, the position of the spectator, and the material boundaries between on-screen and off-screen space.]]>
Oliver Husain]]> North America]]>
Ecology]]> Nature]]> Performance]]> 8 Jun 2018, Fri 07:30 PM - 09:00 PM
The Single Screen, Block 43 Malan Road

Inspired by Tarek Atoui’s current exhibition The Ground: From the Land to the Sea at NTU CCA Singapore, this screening series features artist videos, documentaries, and filmic essays that examine how the image and the sonic create immersive ways for multiple sensorial elements to come together and form a singular space. Maybe I hadn’t been paying attention is further guided by the Centre’s overarching research topic CLIMATES. HABITATS. ENVIRONMENTS. by focusing on artistic interpretations that reflect our present-day ecology, bringing attention to global issues we tend to overlook, and by observing how we navigate different environments, particularly through aural perception.

SELECTIONS

Night Soil — Nocturnal Gardening
Melanie Bonajo, 2016, 49 min 47 sec

Nocturnal Gardening portrays a group of women living by alternative norms who have each, on their own, established communities. The women stand for sensitivity, connection, and communication with other communities, plants, animals, and elements. They attune their energy to the ecosystem around them with an enhanced sensibility. They are friends with the Earth and dependent members of the community of Nature. They explore new ways of togetherness and do so in a pragmatic, personal way. This film is a conversion of human psychic content into an imagery that enhances our moral landscape for our own decision making, in terms of ecology and interdependent values, as well as in the care for ourselves, our neighbours, and our earth.

Sounds from Beneath 
Mikhail Karikis & Uriel Orlow, 2010–11, 6 min 41 sec

In Sounds from Beneath, a desolate disused colliery in East Kent, once populated with workers, machines, and the sounds of their activities, is brought back to life through song. The video centres around a choral piece for which Mikhail Karikis invites an ex-miners’ choir to recall and sing the subterranean sounds of a working coal mine. It transforms into an amphitheatre resonating sounds of explosions in the ground, machines cutting the coal-face, shovels scratching the earth, and the distant melody of the Miner’s Lament, all sung by Snowdown Colliery Welfare Male Voice Choir grouping in formations reminiscent of picket lines.

]]>
Melanie Bonajo]]> Mikhail Karikis]]> Uriel Orlow]]> Europe]]> North America]]>
Climate Crisis]]> Technology]]> Performance]]> Nature]]> 21 Sep 2018, Fri - 6 Nov 2018, Tue 12:00 PM - 07:00 PM
The Single Screen, Block 43 Malan Road

Videos will be shown on a continuous loop during opening hours over the course of Stagings. Soundings. Readings. Free Jazz II. 

21 – 30 September 2018
Mariana Silva, Digital Specimens: Pointcloudfallout, 2015, 10 min 35 sec

In Digital Specimens: Pointcloudfallout an offscreen dialogue, set in the near future, unfolds on the politics of scanning artefacts and monuments into 3-D. Amidst the consequences of climate change and war, the two characters discuss how digital copies unsettle repatriation claims and colonial tensions under the pretext of digital conservation.

2 – 7 October 2018
Justin Shoulder and Bhenji Ra, Deep Alamat, 2014, 4 min

Deep Alamat is a compelling narrative concerning two mythic figures, “OO” and “Beige Cantrell,” drawn from the artists’ collective imaginations. Shoulder’s OO is from his series of Fantastic Creaturesthat feature sculptural costumes and are animated in live performance, video, and photographic works. OO’s patterns are a form of Aposematism (warning colouration). OO performs a gestural dance drawing from animal signals and carnivalesque spectacle. Initially inspired by a one-hit-wonder pop star, Beige Cantrell derives from Ra’s obsession with digital failure, internet hype, software intelligence, and the online secondary experience. Ra’s understanding of movement, body control, and precision allows for his character to physically represent ideas of recognition software as he scans, detects, and aligns his body accordingly.

9 – 14 October 2018
Anton Ginzburg, Ultraviolet,  2015, 25 min

Ultraviolet explores the issues of perception and phenomenology at the intersection of nature and technology. The film is divided into three parts that correspond to the musical structure and composition. The film was conceived as an ongoing dialogue with its soundtrack composed by Michael Pisaro. The relationship between the cinematic image and the live sound is an experiment in a tradition of expanded cinema. It starts with very high frequencies in the first part, later working its way down into the guitar range. The film addresses the aura of representation through the video footage of various landscapes such as waterfalls, trees, and mountains, both in high- and low-res.

16 – 21 October 2018
Vladimir Erofeev, Pamir: Krysha mira (Pamir: Roof of the World), 1927, 49 min (original: 71 min)
Version with music by Carlos Casas

23 – 28 October 2018
Phill Niblock, The Magic Sun, 1966, 60 min

Shot in 1966, while the Sun Ra Arkestra was still based in New York City (before relocating to Philadelphia in 1968), the composer and filmmaker Phill Niblock’s The Magic Sun is an obscure artefact of profound beauty. It features frenetic black-and-white footage of the band playing, and an incredible soundtrack. Its existence displays an often understated relationship between two contemporary iterations of the New York avant-garde. Considering the neglect that free jazz usually suffers in the face of its peer, the film could be considered important for that alone, being also a wonderful journey through sight and sound.

30 October – 6 November 2018
Luke Fowler, Country Grammar (with Sue Tompkins), 2017, 18 min 29 sec

The film begins with Tompkins performing at Chem19 Recording Studio. The camera films from a multitude of perspectives, employing rhythmic pans, tilts, and opaque or reflective screens. These distorted views, combined with non-synchronised images of the performer, depart from a 70s “direct cinema” approach to filming musicians. After the ritualistic opening section, the film widens its view to locations outside of the studio. The repetition of actions (picking books from a shelf, re-arranging the contents of a fridge) suggest a searching for a threshold between the filmed image and Tompkins’ own spoken word acts. Taking cues from the performers’ hypnotic yet concrete play with words, the film creates a metaphoric, symbiotic language, where an open-ended approach to montage transcends both reductive imagery and straight documentation.

A public programme of Stagings. Soundings. Readings. Free Jazz II.

]]>
Mariana Silva]]> Justin Shoulder]]> Bhenji Ra]]> Anton Ginzburg]]> Vladimir Erofeev]]> Phill Niblock]]> Luke Fowler]]> Europe]]> North America]]> Oceania]]>
Labour]]> Nature]]> 21 Oct 2018, Sun 12:00 PM - 07:00 PM
The Exhibition Hall, Block 43 Malan Road

Live diffusion by Phill Niblock
6.00 – 7.00pm

Movement of People Working
Movement of People Working is a series of films by Phill Niblock that portray human labour in its most elementary form—construction work, harvesting, planting and fishing, physical exertion, with the help of basic tools. The films are scenes of people in nonindustrialised communities, doing continually repeated movements of manual labour, while their faces are often kept outside the frame. They pre-announce the contradictions and paradoxes of globalisation. Made between 1973–1991, it was filmed in locations including Peru, Mexico, Brazil, Hungary, Portugal, China, and Japan.

T H I R
T H I R (1992) is taken from Ten Hundred Inch Radii, the fourth and final instalment in his Environments series that started in 1968. From 1968 to 1972, Phill Niblock presented four distinct intermedia projects, titled Environments I, II, III, and IV, (some in multiple versions) within various venues in New York City. T H I R was from a performance event that incorporated over two hours of original 16mm nature footage from the Adirondack Mountains of northern New York State. This is a seminal work that incorporates a combination of multi-screen film projection, dance, 35mm colour slides, and original music (generally from tape or occasionally performed live). With T H I R, Niblock repeatedly experimented with the relationships, interactions, and hierarchies of seemingly discrete art forms in order to encourage intermedial encounters that were flexible, unstable, and structurally open.]]>
Phill Niblock]]> Asia]]> Europe]]> North America]]> South America]]>
Modernity]]> 11 Dec 2018, Tue 07:00 PM - 08:30 PM
The Single Screen, Block 43 Malan Road

NTU CCA Singapore is pleased to present the rough cut of A Certain Illness Difficult to Name (2018), a new film created by experimental filmmaker Taiki Sakpisit during his three-month residency at the Centre. Filmed entirely in Singapore, the work is a poetic meditation on states of transition, a spiritual quest imbued with a mysterious sense of malaise. Slowly panning over the landscape and pausing on enigmatic frames, the camera quietly leads the viewer on a visual and aural journey across different layers of emotional intensity. The preview of A Certain Illness Difficult to Name will be preceded by the screening of Trouble in Paradise, a short film realised in southern Thailand in 2017, shown in Singapore for the first time on this occasion.

A Certain Illness Difficult to Name, Singapore, 2018, 18min Trouble in Paradise, Thailand, 2017, 13min

The screening will be followed by a Q&A with the artist.]]>
Taiki Sakpisit]]> Southeast Asia]]>
Botany]]> Nature]]> Architecture]]> 2 Mar 2019, Sat 04:00 PM - 06:30 PM
The Single Screen, Block 43 Malan Road

Filmmaker Inge Godelaine (Belgium) will introduce her films and be available for Q&A.

Margaret Tait, Garden Pieces, 1998, 11 min 30 sec

Filmmaker-poet Margaret Tait’s last film Garden Pieces is a triptych of “film-poems” composed around the theme of the garden. Garden Pieces is a vibrant, experimental film that utilises live action shots and hand-painted elements to draw upon the wanderings of daily life and the search for fleeting moments of presence, dropping a myopic intensification of experience in favour of an exuberant engagement with the world.

Uriel Orlow, The Crown Against Mafavuke, 2016, 18 min 45 sec

The Crown Against Mafavuke is based on a South African trial from 1940. Mafavuke Ngcobo was a traditional herbalist who was accused by the local white medical establishment of “untraditional behaviour.” The film explores the ideological and commercial confrontation between two different yet intertwining medicinal traditions and their uses of plants, with slippages across gender and race that further questions notions of purity and origination. The re-imagined court case is filmed at the Palace of Justice in Pretoria, where the Rivonia trial was held that sent Mandela and his fellow accused to the Robben Island prison.

Jef Cornelis, Kunst Als Kritiek. Wanneer is Kunst Wel Kritiek? 4. Wanneer de Kunstenaar in alle Ernst Speelt. (Art as Criticism. When is Art Criticism? 4. When the artist is in all seriousness.), 1973, 4 min 47 sec

This film is part of a series of short sketches thematically focusing on the question, “When is Art Criticism?” developed for the BRT (Belgian Radio and Television) broadcast network. For this fourth episode, it proposes an answer: “When the artist is toying around in all seriousness.” It highlights the Belgian artist Jef Geys, whose approach is best described by the phrase “Many a true word is spoken in jest.” In Geys’s statement, framed as a public announcement, the artist uses the programme’s broadcasting time as a publicity stunt, revealing the mechanisms of the medium of television. In a lengthy word of thanks, the extensive media bureaucracy is stripped of its front, mentioning the relative cost of the programme and the broadcasting time.

Part of the BRT television series “Openbaar Kunstbezit” (“Public Art Heritage”). A second version was adapted for the NOS, a Dutch radio and television broadcast network.

Inge Godelaine, 7 x Jef Geys, 2014, 27 min

7 x Jef Geysis a documentary film by independent filmmaker Inge Godelaine, who worked for many years with Geys.

The film interviews seven people who each have a different relationship with the artist—Yves Gevaert, Mia Dammen, Hugo Criekemans, Greta Meert, curator Dirk Snauwaert, daughter Nina Geys, and Joris Note—creating a unique portrait of the artist through the people who knew him.

Inge GodelaineVilla Wintermans, 2009, 50 min

Inge Godelaine travelled to São Paulo 18 years after Jef Geys created his architectural intervention Villa Wintermans for the 1991 São Paulo Biennale. Replicating a Flemish modernist villa of the cigar manufacturer Wintermans from Balen that was later used as a school, Villa Wintermans was one of the most complex public projects Geys completed. In this film, Godelaine searches for the remnants of the Villa which have vanished or rotted away, and interviews some of the schoolchildren then about their experience with the donated building. The documentary is an echo of a forgotten artistic deed, and the eventual disappearance of art and architecture.


A public programme of Jef Geys Quadra Medicinale Singapore.]]>
Inge Godelaine ]]> Margaret Tait]]> Uriel Orlow]]> Jef Cornelis]]> Europe]]>