Ana Prvački]]> Performance]]> Body]]> Ana Prvački]]> Ana Prvacki]]> Performance]]> Video]]> Drawing]]> Southeast Asia]]> Public Sphere]]> Politics]]> Public Art]]> Siah Armajani]]> Sculpture]]> Drawing]]> Asia]]> 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]]>
Arus Balik: From below the wind to above the wind and back again]]> Oceans & Seas]]> Ecology]]> The Anthropocene]]> Politics]]> Geopolitics]]> Archipelagic State]]> Arus Balik – From below the wind to above the wind and back again, an exhibition project that initiated from a conversation between Belgian curator Philippe Pirotte and Jakarta-based artist Ade Darmawan. Reconsidering Indonesian author Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s epic book Arus Balik (1995), which could be translated into English as a “turning of the tide,” the eponymous exhibition takes the novel as a starting point to reflect on perspectival shifts in geopolitical, cultural, social, religious, and natural spheres.

In his fictional account, Pramoedya elaborates on the weakening of the maritime culture of Javanese kingdoms in the early 16th century, the progressive Islamisation, and the beginning of Portuguese occupation on parts of the now Malay and Indonesian peninsula and archipelago. Important is that Pramoeda’s reversal of perspective as a meta-geographical impulse is comparable to the notion of the “inverted telescope” Benedict Anderson advances in his seminal book Spectre of Comparisons (1998): as a non-Eurocentric method of comparison in which for example Portugal is viewed from the standpoint of Southeast Asia, as through an inverted telescope, which causes a kind of vertigo. Pramoedya suggests that the final decline of the Majapahit empire, and the “change from traditional independence to colonial possession,” was largely caused by the different Javanese kingdoms having gradually turned their backs to the sea.

The participating artists expand on this prompt through installations, sculptures, films, performances, and texts, both existing works as well as new commissions. Ade Darmawan re-read Arus Balik with a special focus on how protagonists use natural resources, and will create a distilling dispositive with alkaline water from the straits, recalling that all the scrambling for the control of the archipelago was about the extraction of ore and goods. ila questions what it means to be Boyanese, Buginese, Minangkabau, or Javanese through encounters with Singapore residents now conflated as Malay. Their testimonies will be written on her body and wither, while exposed to salty water and weather on reclaimed areas of Singapore island. Paradise Blueprint (2017), a wallpaper designed by Zac Langdon-Pole, based on a cyanotype photogram of the removed legs of a so-called “Bird of Paradise,” addresses the history of cultural exchange and mythology surrounding the birds native to Papua New Guinea. Lucy Raven creates silk paintings or monoprints, made by imprint of sedimentation in erosion tables, as scrim backdrops she uses for a forthcoming film-production, called Kongkreto, inspired by the 1991 eruption of Mt Pinatubo in the Philippines that finally chased off the Americans from Clark Airbase. Book-aficionado, artist, and writer Shubigi Rao delves into the stories related to the difficult conditions, but also extraordinary examples of solidarity Pramoedya faced on prison island Buru while writing Arus Balik. A new video-installation by Melati Suryodarmo, Dancing under the Black Sky (2019), traces the history behind Reog performances, an art form of resistance and criticism of Ponorogo people of East Java towards Bhre Kertabhumi, a Majapahit king who slowly lost his authority in the 15th century, before Islam became a major force in Demak and controlled the coastal region of Java.

The exhibition Arus Balik aims to imagine the implication of histories and politics in processes of transition, such as colonisation and decolonisation, or shifts in maritime power for people and ports below (the straits of Malacca, South China Sea, Java Sea, and further east) and above (the Indian Ocean and further West) the wind. Have the multiple colonisations in Southeast Asia alienated the people from the sea coast? Is it possible to attempt a return? The reversal of the colonial fact, the promise of reversal of a geo-political, -cultural, and social systems, initially embodied by the Bandung conference in 1955, caused Afro-American author Richard Wright to write that “it smacked of tidal waves, of natural forces.”

The accompanying public programmes further investigate the topics raised, including a conversation on Saturday, March 23, around the book Arus Balik and the reception of Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s oeuvre. On Saturday, May 25, another conversation will focus on living with the sea and the history of the straits.

Arus Balik – From below the wind to above the wind and back again is NTU CCA Singapore’s response and contribution to this year’s nation-wide bicentennial commemorations that reflect on Singapore’s history since the arrival of the British statesman Sir Stamford Raffles in 1819, considered the founder of modern Singapore.

Guest curated by Philippe Pirotte, Rector, Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste – Städelschule, and Director, Portikus, Frankfurt, and Visiting Professor (2018/19), MA Museum Studies and Curatorial Practices, School of Art, Design and Media, NTU.]]>
Ade Darmawan]]> ila]]> Zac Langdon-Pole]]> Lucy Raven]]> Shubigi Rao]]> Melati Surydarmo]]> Philippe Pirotte]]> Video]]> Film]]> Multimedia Installation]]> Drawing]]> Photography]]> Mixed Media]]> Southeast Asia]]>
They Come to Us Without a Word]]> Supernatural]]> Ecology]]> Ecosystems]]> Biodiversity]]> Coexistence]]> Environmental Crisis]]> They Come to Us without a Word, video and performance pioneer Joan Jonas’ first large-scale exhibition in Singapore and Southeast Asia. They Come to Us without a Word was organised for the U.S. Pavilion of the 56th Venice Biennale by the MIT List Visual Arts Center and co-curated by Paul C. Ha, Director of the MIT List Visual Arts Center and Ute Meta Bauer, Founding Director of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore. With this exhibition Jonas evokes the fragility of nature, using her own poetic language to address the irreversible impact of human interference on the environmental equilibrium of our planet.

Acknowledgements They Come to Us without a Word was organised for the U.S. Pavilion of the 56th Venice Biennale by the MIT List Visual Arts Center and co-curated by Paul C. Ha, Director of the MIT List Visual Arts Center and Ute Meta Bauer, Founding Director of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore. The exhibition was generously supported by U.S. Department of State, Cynthia and John Reed, the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Additional major support was provided by the Council for the Arts at MIT, Toby Devan Lewis, VIA Art Fund, Agnes Gund, Lambent Foundation.

The exhibition in Singapore is organised by the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, Nanyang Technological University with support by the Economic Development Board, Singapore. Additional support has also been provided by the U.S. Embassy Singapore.]]>
Paul C. Ha]]> Ute Meta Bauer]]> Joan Jonas]]> Film]]> Video]]> Multimedia Installation]]> Drawing]]> Mixed Media]]> Object]]> Southeast Asia]]> Europe]]> North America]]>