Politics]]> Munem Wasif]]> Photography]]> Video]]> Southeast Asia]]> Artistic Research]]> Márton Orosz]]> Marton Orosz]]> Film]]> Photography]]> Southeast Asia]]> Nature]]> Jamie North]]> Installation]]> Photography]]> Southeast Asia]]> Biodiversity]]> Botany]]> Ecology]]> Ecosystems]]> Topography]]> Nature]]> Against the developmental emphasis on order, cleanliness, and control, weeds are often singled out as plants that grow in the wrong place where they can flourish in spite of being unwanted. In their resistance against human impulses to control and manicure nature, weeds are regarded by the artist as a manifestation of the beauty and resilience of wilderness and chaos. By observing both the physiology and formal qualities of weeds, Chua plans to experiment with a variety of light-sensitive and other photographic techniques to capture their intricate beauty and frame their value for nature and society.]]> Chua Chye Teck]]> Photography]]> Southeast Asia]]> Urbanism]]> Environmental Crisis]]> As They Grow Older and Wiser (2016). Ang was fascinated by the legal loopholes that allowed for a massive transplanting of rare and exotic trees from the region of Chiang Mai to the fast-changing city of Bangkok for decorative purposes. Framed against Singapore’s nation-building narratives, the artist is interested in the manipulation of nature through state-driven initiatives and policies of environmental control, greening, and city-branding. Such endeavours include the Tree Planting campaign of 1963 and the government’s subsequent initiatives directed to fabricate a new understanding of nature and obliterate the country’s past of clearing forests to make way for plantation economy.]]> Ang Song Nian]]> Photography]]> Installation]]> Southeast Asia]]> Fish Story, to be continued]]> Capitalism]]> Decolonialism]]> Globalisation]]> Geopolitics]]> Technology]]> Oceans & Seas]]> Fish Story, to be continued presents an investigation of the global maritime industry, an extensive research of the late artist, theorist, photography historian and critic, Allan Sekula. Showing for the first time in Southeast Asia, NTU CCA Singapore will juxtapose chapters from Fish Story (1988 – 1993) alongside two film works, Lottery of the Sea (2006) and The Forgotten Space (2010) co-directed with Nöel Burch. With a focus on the core works of his explorations of the maritime world, this exhibition aims to emphasise Allan Sekula’s sustained argument that the sea is the “forgotten space” of the contemporary global economy. Fish Story, to be continued will include works from the collections of Fond Regional d’art contemporain Bretagne, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York and Thyssen Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA 21), Vienna.

An International Symposium is organised on the occasion of Fish Story, to be continued on Saturday 26 September 2015. Bringing together different researchers and artists who have collaborated or share common interests with Allan Sekula’s work, the symposium will focus on key themes of his practice including questions of critical realism in contemporary art and representation of labour.

This exhibition is part of NTU CCA Singapore’s curatorial programme PLACE.LABOUR.CAPITAL., a trandisciplinary research addressing the complexities of a world in flux and the network of connections that such underlying elements define at both local and global scale.]]>
Allan Sekula]]> Ute Meta Bauer]]> Anca Rujoiu]]> Photography]]> Film]]> Asia]]> Europe]]> North America]]>
Nature]]> In Depth (landmines) (2014-ongoing). So far she has conducted field research in Cambodia, Colombia, and Bosnia where she photographed several mine-contaminated areas. The artist plans to examine other sites where landmines and unexploded ordnance remain an active deadly threat. She is especially interested in the landmine situation in Angola, the most heavily mined country in the world as a result of decades of conflict and civil war. The process of gathering relevant materials and managing the complex logistics required by trips to such dangerous areas are all essential components of the work. The artist intends to use her studio to experiment with different spatial presentations of In Depth (landmines) and to initiate new lines of research around the subject of landscape, looking into areas affected by plagues and epidemics and exploring the possibilities involved in their photographic representation.]]> Alice Miceli]]> Photography]]> Film]]> Southeast Asia]]> South America]]> Ritual]]> Ecosystems]]> Alecia Neo]]> Photography]]> Video]]> Southeast Asia]]> Wrong Indexing: Yeoseong Gukgeuk Archive by siren eun young jung]]> Identity]]> Yeoseong Gukgeuk reached the peak of popularity in the 1950s and 1960s, its success being tightly intertwined with the process of modernisation of South Korea. While today it lingers on the verge of extinction, in the post-colonial period Yeoseong Gukgeuk opened up a space for women to embody “other” identities and perform different subjectivities. Reinventing the traditional Korean theatre, they brought the process of gender-shifting to the limelight and subverted socially acceptable norms by blurring conventional gender binaries. Since 2008, siren eun young jung has investigated the public and private lives of Yeoseong Gukgeuk performers who, after the genre fell out of favour, went on to live disparate lives. This configuration of archival materials offers an insight into the artist’s research process and articulates the politics of recollecting, weaving together queer desires and patterns of resistance, affective matters and subversive subjectivities, gender fluidity and the performance of difference.

Wrong Indexing: Yeoseong Gukgeuk Archive is curated by Dr Anna Lovecchio, Curator, Residencies.]]>
siren eun young jung]]> Anna Lovecchio]]> Photography]]> Asia]]>
Ulrike Ottinger: China. The Arts – The People, Photographs and Films from the 1980s and 1990s]]> Identity]]> Displacement]]> Regionalism]]> Archival Practice]]> Fiction]]> Politics]]> Race]]> China. The Arts – The People, Photographs and Films from the 1980s and 1990s by acclaimed filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger (b. 1942 in Constance, Germany) is the first large-scale exhibition by the award-winning filmmaker and artist in Asia. The selection of works focuses on Ottinger’s research and travels in China and Mongolia during the 1980s and 1990s, comprising four films and more than one hundred photographs. The photographs, created largely in parallel with the production of her films, will be unfolded along the artist’s leitmotifs.

Starting with China. The Arts – The People (1985), the exhibition leads a journey through the cultures and geographies of China, while also exploring the relationship between moving image and still life. The three acts of the documentary are presented on a three-screen installation, documenting everyday life in Beijing (February 1985), Sichuan Province (March 1985), and Yunnan Province (March 1985). While meeting the film director Ling Zifeng in one chapter, a Bamboo factory is visited in another, and in parallel the Sani people, a minority group, show their habitat, the Stone Forest.

Taiga. A Journey to Northern Mongolia (1992), a documentary over eight hours long that will be presented on multiple monitors throughout the exhibition space, looks into the everyday life of nomadic peoples in Mongolia. Furthermore, on view in the cinematic space of the Centre, The Single Screen, will be Exile Shanghai (1997), a film telling the six life stories of German, Austrian, and Russian Jews intersecting in Shanghai after their escape from Nazi Germany, as well as Johanna d’Arc of Mongolia (1989), Ottinger’s only feature fiction film presenting a cast starring Badema, Lydia Billiet, Inés Sastre, and Delphine Seyrig.

From 1962 to 1968, Ulrike Ottinger was living as an independent artist in Paris, where at the University of Paris-Sorbonne she attended lectures on ethnography and religion of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Louis Althusser, and Pierre Bourdieu. Over the decades, she has created an extensive image archive, including films, photographs of her own as well as collections of postcards, magazine illustrations, and other iconographic documents from times and places worldwide. Driven by her curiosity for people and places, the artist’s images alternate between documentary insight and theatrical extravagance, presenting encounters with everyday realities at the intersection of the contemporary, the traditional, and the ritual.

The extraordinary filmic and photographic oeuvre from China and Mongolia of the 1980s and 1990s prove her outstanding practice and beyond. Fighting for permission to travel and film in communist China, Ottinger’s interest in Asia also broke with the Cold War stereotype of that time. Her inimitable universe of provinces and regions of China is filled with rich imagery of various provinces in China and nomadic societies in Northern Mongolia and their history, paying attention to the presence of local details and reaching far beyond its described territory.

The exhibition is accompanied by an intensive public programme, starting with a Behind the Scenes discussion with the artist on her practice as photographer and filmmaker. The programmed talks and screenings will reflect on the notion of the documentary, the intersection of documentary and fiction, and the potential that artistic production can have for anthropology, cultural studies, and history.

Initially a painter, Ottinger came to filmmaking in the early 1970s. She furthermore produced operas, several theatre plays, and radio dramas. Her films have received numerous awards and have been shown at the world’s most important film festivals, as well as appreciated in multiple retrospectives, including Rio de Janeiro International Film Festival (2013), Centre Pompidou, Paris (2010), Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid (2004), The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2000), and Cinémathèque française, Paris (1982). Her work has been featured in major international exhibitions such as Documenta (2017, 2002), Gwangju Biennale (2014), Berlin Biennale (2010, 2004), and Shanghai Biennale (2008). Recent solo shows include, among others, Johanna Breede Photokunst, Berlin (2015, 2013), Sammlung Goetz, Munich (2012), Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2011), Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin (2011), and Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam (2004). Major monographs include Ulrike Ottinger: World Images (2013), Ulrike Ottinger (2012), Ulrike Ottinger: N.B.K. Ausstellungen Band 11 (2011), Floating Food (2011), and Image Archive (2005). In 2011, she was awarded the Hannah Höch Prize for her creative work, and in 2010 honoured with the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Ulrike Ottinger: China. The Arts ­– The People, Photographs and Films from the 1980s and 1990s is curated by Ute Meta Bauer, Founding Director, and Khim Ong, Deputy Director, Exhibitions, Residencies and Public Programmes.]]>
Ulrike Ottinger]]> Ute Meta Bauer]]> Khim Ong]]> Photography]]> Film]]> Asia]]>