Zarina Muhammad
<a href="/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=49&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Ritual">Ritual</a>
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For the past decade, Zarina Muhammad has embarked on a multidisciplinary research that explores magico-religious belief systems, ritual practices, and sacred sites. The various embodiments of her work, which engage broader contexts of myth-making, ritual magic, gender-based archetypes, and spirits of resistance, frame the cultural biographies of objects and the region’s provisional relationship to mysticism and the immaterial against the dynamics of global modernity. Her research project for the residency takes the trans-local figures of the penunggu (tutelary spirit) and the tuan/puan tanah (Lord of the Land) as points of departure to reconsider notions of territoriality and spectrality against the social production of rationality. During the residency, she will focus on mapping old and new ways to tell stories of unresolved memories, fragmented cosmologies, shapeshifting translations, and haunted histories.
1 April – 27 September 2019
<a href="/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=37&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Zarina+Muhammad">Zarina Muhammad</a>
<a href="/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=38&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Southeast+Asia">Southeast Asia</a>
Wei Leng Tay
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The practice of Wei Leng Tay probes the psychic, systemic, and geopolitical consequences of displacement through personal encounters and intimate conversations captured in photography, videos, and sound recordings. Having lived in Hong Kong for the past 15 years before moving back to Singapore in 2016, Tay plans to devote the time of the residency to re-rooting her artistic practice and transposing <i>Sightlines</i>—a collaborative project initiated with researcher Michelle Wong to explore the relationship of art, aesthetics, society, and politics in Hong Kong in the aftermath of the 2014 Umbrella Movement—in the context of her home country. Furthermore, she will initiate a long-term project which extends her preoccupations with forced movements and migrations by addressing notions of “return” through a series of interviews. The studio space will be used to experiment with materials, techniques, and installations to articulate new ways to present her work.
3 April – 27 September 2019
<a href="/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=37&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Wei+Leng+Tay">Wei Leng Tay</a>
<a href="/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=38&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Southeast+Asia">Southeast Asia</a>
Trevor Yeung
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Pursuing his sustained interest in natural bodies and biological mechanisms, Trevor Yeung intends to explore Singapore’s culture and politics of nature preservation and gardening. More specifically, he will investigate the history of Singapore Botanic Gardens, their role as a laboratory for exploiting natural resources, and the effect of the introduction of foreign plants on local ecosystems. Furthermore, having spent some time working in Singapore in 2011, the artist aims to track down and reconnect with his former colleagues and supervisors, whom he has since lost touch with, in order to gather stories of personal growth and professional development and reflect on the fleeting boundaries that define interpersonal relationships. Ultimately, the artist aims to produce a new series of works that muse on his own relationship with people, plants, and society in Singapore.
3 January – 27 March 2020
<a href="/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=37&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Trevor+Yeung">Trevor Yeung</a>
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Tanatchai Bandasak
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Throughout the residency, Tanatchai Bandasak will develop a project inspired by a specific trait of the Mekong Delta in southwest Vietnam. In this area, cycles of tides and floods accumulate layers upon layers of sediments turning the river delta in one of the most thriving agricultural land in the region. For the artist, the rich and porous stratification of the territory is reminiscent of the epithelium, the human or animal tissue that covers the outer surfaces of organs and bodies, a thin, protective, and nurturing border between the interior and the exterior where a constant exchange of substances takes place. Resorting to scientific research, onsite fieldwork, and the engagement of his own body, the artist aims to investigate the materiality and spatiality of this particular landscape through the sense of touch and to create a new work that can expand our sensorial and phenomenological understanding of the world.
1 April – 1 July 2019
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<a href="/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=38&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Southeast+Asia">Southeast Asia</a>
Tan Kai Syng
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Tan Kai Syng’s residency explores global issues through extended conversations with Singapore-based colleagues. In the first part of her residency, she developed the participatory project <i>PICTURING HAPPINESS?</i> with three other artists and two scientists from the School of Computer Science, Nanyang Technological University. Using commercially-available devices that read brain waves, the project explored the parameters that define our sense of well-being, critiquing the market-driven framing of happiness as a motionless, thought-free state of mind. This was the beginning of a cross-disciplinary investigation that the artist is currently pursuing together with several psychiatrists in London. For the second part of the residency, Tan will also examine notions of gender. Working together with pioneer feminist artist Amanda Heng and two other women arts professionals, they will convene a public programme to discuss how gender affects collaborative artistic practices in Singapore and beyond.
19 December 2018 – 31 March 2019
1 September – 30 September 2019
<a href="/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=37&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Tan+Kai+Syng">Tan Kai Syng</a>
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Sung Tieu
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<a href="/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=49&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Displacement">Displacement</a>
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Tangled with her own experience of migration, cultural collision, and displacement, the works of Sung Tieu often elicit a variety of sensorial engagements. During the residency, the artist plans to explore the sonic environment of Singapore guided by the following questions: What is the soundscape of a financial capital that trades mostly in abstract exchange rather than in material production? Who occupies public space and in what acoustic proportion? How do aural economies affect the multi-species inhabitants of the city on physical, psychological, and emotional levels? How does sound convey different political and environmental climates? Her investigation on the sounds of contemporary Singapore will also encompass instances of oral communication that operate in a multicultural context characterised by a large linguistic diversity. For this long-term project, Tieu intends to explore the acoustic ecology of several urban soundscapes, extending her research in Vietnam and, possibly, other Southeast Asian countries.
21 October – 4 December 2019
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Rossella Biscotti
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Sourcing oral histories and female accounts, delving into archives, and mapping sites associated with different forms of mining, exploitation, and confinement, Rossella Biscotti will deepen her research interest into colonial structures of power and management at the turn of the 20th century and the way in which these structures are interwoven with contemporary practices of production and distribution. Expanding on a recently produced body of works that explore the physical and aesthetic properties of rubber—notably its resistance and its resemblance to human skin—the artist aims to research its production process on site. She will conduct archival research on colonial trade, botanical imports, and intensive cultivations in preparation for her field trips to rubber and oil palm plantations in the region.
7 January – 27 March 2020
<a href="/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=37&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Rossella+Biscotti">Rossella Biscotti</a>
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Prapat Jiwarangsan
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In 2018, Prapat Jiwarangsan was awarded a fellowship from the Japan Foundation Asia Center to develop a project on migrant workers in Singapore. On occasion of a fieldtrip to the country, the artist chanced upon <i>Koi Glai Ban (Persons Far from Home)</i>, a compilation of short biographies—edited by the late scholar Pattana Kitiarsa—penned by Thai migrant workers. He took particular interest in the stories of oppression and resistance recounted by Ploy, a woman who was employed as a sex worker in a makeshift “jungle brothel” located in the scant forestry of the island city-state. Inspired by Ploy’s diary entry, the artist’s investigation aims to excavate underground stories of transnational labour and frame them within processes of land appropriation for cultural, economic, and leisure pursuits. During the residency, Jiwarangsan will expand his research on migrant workers’ relationship to woodlands with the goal of developing a medium-length documentary film and a new series of works.
3 January – 27 March 2020
<a href="/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=37&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Prapat+Jiwarangsan">Prapat Jiwarangsan</a>
<a href="/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=38&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Southeast+Asia">Southeast Asia</a>
Munem Wasif
<a href="/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=49&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Politics">Politics</a>
Prompted by recent shifts in the political climate of his own country, Munem Wasif is currently working on a film project titled Goom (forced disappearance, kidnapping in Bangla.) The work revolves around the increasing phenomenon of people gone missing, disappearances that often remain unexplained and unaccounted for. Less interested in excavating factual and political circumstances, the artist rather plans to focus on the human figures of the disappeared, tracing the emotional and psychological repercussions of their violent vanishment as an attempt to ultimately reinstate their visibility. Still at an initial stage of development, Goom is conceived as an experimental process which borrows from various techniques and methodologies to capture the affective landscape generated by loss. During the residency, Munem Wasif will try to hone his poetic visual language to convey memory and recollection of these violent losses.
2 April – 30 June 2019
<a href="/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=37&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Munem+Wasif">Munem Wasif</a>
<a href="/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=38&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Southeast+Asia">Southeast Asia</a>
Miya Yoshida
<a href="/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=49&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Curatorial+Practice">Curatorial Practice</a>
During the residency, Miya Yoshida will connect with local artists and institutions in Singapore. She will deliver a lecture <i>Re-framing “Measuring the World”</i> that reconsiders the hype of social engineering and the wide adoption of algorithm through conceptual and post-conceptual practices. Contemplating the equation of art and life as well as “statactivism” (i.e. the mobilization of statistics), Yoshida will draw lines of connections between imagination, affect, and current transformations in technologies of quantification.
2 April – 16 April 2019
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<a href="/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=38&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Asia">Asia</a>