past Exhibitions

Stagings. Soundings. Readings. Free Jazz II participating artists Heman Chong and Maria Loboda will discuss various facets of their practice based on their works in the exhibition. The artists will share their process, from the initial idea of the work through its development and installation, the way in which the context dictates aspects of display, to the challenges and variations the works undergo.

Moderated by Magdalena Magiera, Curator, Outreach & Education, NTU CCA Singapore

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BIOGRAPHIES

Heman Chong (Singapore) is an artist whose work is located at the intersection between image, performance, situations, and writing. He has held solo exhibitions at Swiss Institute, New York (Legal Bookshop (Shanghai), 2018; Rossi & Rossi, Hong Kong (Abstracts from the Straits Times, 2018); Calle Wright, Manila (Never is a Promise, 2018); 72-13, Singapore (Because, the Night, 2017); Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai (Ifs, Ands, Or Buts, 2016); South London Gallery (An Arm, A Leg and Other Stories, 2015); Art Sonje Center, Seoul (Never, A Dull Moment, 2015); P!, New York (Correspondence(s), 2014); FOST Gallery, Singapore (Of Indeterminate Time Or Occurrence, 2014); Amanda Wilkinson Gallery, London (Interview(s), 2012); NUS Museum, Singapore (Calendars (2020-2096), 2011); and Art in General, New York (Common People and other Stories, 2007). He is the Co-director and Founder (with Renée Staal) of The Library of Unread Books which was installed at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore; the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD), Manila; Casco Art Institute, Utrecht; and Kunstverein, Milan. Chong is currently working on the novel The Book of Drafts to be published by Polyparenthesis in 2019. He was an NTU CCA Singapore Artist-in-Residence from September 2016 to February 2017.

Maria Loboda (Poland/Germany) creates puzzling and enigmatic spaces that lead deep into layers of rich historical narratives, referring to current affairs. In her artistic approach she pursues the antagonism between form and content: the artist underlines the poetic effect of her sculptures and spatial installations with sober aesthetics and an economy of means. She channels historical and philosophical research into formal equations of language and materiality, examining how they act and interact, and what they can express beyond their common readings. Loboda graduated from the Städelschule in Frankfurt under the class of renowned British artist Mark Leckey, recognised for his collage art, music, and videos. Recent solo shows include Kunsthalle Basel; IAC Villeurbanne, Lyon; CAC Vilnius; The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto; and Vulcano Extravaganza, Stromboli. She has also exhibited at dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel; Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; Kunstverein Braunschweig; and Palais de Tokyo, Paris; among others. Loboda will have solo exhibitions at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt in November 2018, Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City; and Ujazdowski Castle Center for Contemporary Art, Warsaw, in 2019.

Magdalena Magiera (Germany/Singapore) is Curator, Outreach & Education at NTU CCA Singapore. She was an independent curator, Managing Editor of frieze d/e, and currently Editor of mono.kultur, a quarterly interview magazine. She co-curated Based in Berlin (2011) as well as exhibitions for The Building and SPLACE in Berlin. Magiera was Project Manager of The Maybe Education and Other Programs at dOCUMENTA(13), Kassel (2012) and UNITEDNATIONSPLAZA, Berlin (2006–08). Prior to joining NTU CCA Singapore, she worked for e-flux exhibitions and public programmes in New York City.

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

Image caption: Heman Chong, A Short Story About Geometry, 2009, durational performance involving a short story. Courtesy the artist and FOST Gallery.

Choreographer and artist Cally Spooner shares her fascination with language, politics, and philosophy and how societies’ orders and regimes are reflected in her work. She will elaborate on how subjectivity and its bodies are shaped by technological and performative conditions, where language undergoes damage. Together with her collaborators Maggie Segale and Jesper List Thomsen, they will discuss OFFSHORE, a philosophy school for embodied knowledge, its diverse aspects, forms, and the concept of the laboratory.

Moderated by Magdalena Magiera, Curator, Outreach & Education, NTU CCA Singapore

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BIOGRAPHIES

Maggie Segale (United States) is a dancer, artist, and teacher with a focus on performing and interdisciplinary, collaborative work. She graduated from the Juilliard School, where she received multiple awards and fellowships including the 2014 Entrepreneurship Fellowship for her writing on self-image and dance. Segale works with Helen Simoneau Danse, Bryan Arias, and artist Cally Spooner, having collaborated with A24 Films, Center for Innovation in the Arts, Roya Carreras in the upcoming Pussy Riot music video, composer Zubin Hensler, and Matilda Sakamoto. Segale choreographed the opera Role of Reason at the Interarts Festival 2018, and was an Artist-in-Residence at the New Jersey Dance Theatre Ensemble (2016).

Cally Spooner’s (United Kingdom/Greece) spatialisations are continuously evolving in accordance to temporal contexts to render society’s orders and social regimes visible. Her projects look at “language-making” and alternative compositions of communication and movement in today’s context, where speech and attention are automated, the body is hired technology, and subjectivity and communication are consistently outsourced. Addressing the damage chrono-normativity can cause, she works with duration and rehearsals as alternative spaces. Appropriating and referencing genres such as the musical, the novel, or the radio play, Spooner builds a new sonic, literary, and living language to trigger public reaction towards the rapidly changing digital communication and how our understanding of the world changes along. Spooner’s work has been widely exhibited since 2008. Recent solo shows include Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève (2018); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2017); New Museum, New York (2016); and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2016). Recent group shows include Serpentine Gallery, London (2017) and the Geneva Moving Image Biennial (2016–17). Upcoming shows include Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2018); Swiss Institute, New York (2018); and Art Institute Chicago (2019). Spooner’s book Scripts was published by Slimvolume in 2016, and her novel Collapsing In Parts was published by Mousse in 2012.

Jesper List Thomsen (Denmark/United Kingdom/Greece) is an artist and writer. Recent exhibitions and performances include Hollis and Money, ICA, London and Künstlerhaus, Stuttgart; Speak Through You, Hot Wheels Projects, Athens; A Social Body Event, Serpentine Gallery, London; Micro-Composition, Rozenstraat, Amsterdam; The body, the body, the tongue, Reading International; Hand and Mind, Grand Union, Birmingham; The boys the girls and the political, Lisson Gallery, London; and One Hour Exhibition, South London Gallery, London. A book-length collection of his texts will be published in Autumn 2018 by Juan de la Cosa (John of the Thing). He is also a part of the artist collective Am Nuden Da.

Magdalena Magiera (Germany/Singapore) is Curator, Outreach & Education at NTU CCA Singapore. She was an independent curator, Managing Editor of frieze d/e, and currently Editor of mono.kultur, a quarterly interview magazine. She co-curated Based in Berlin (2011) as well as exhibitions for The Building and SPLACE in Berlin. Magiera was Project Manager of The Maybe Education and Other Programs at dOCUMENTA(13), Kassel (2012) and UNITEDNATIONSPLAZA, Berlin (2006–08). Prior to joining NTU CCA Singapore, she worked for e-flux exhibitions and public programmes in New York City.

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*Kindly note that 1angrynative also planned on doing a reading for this programme, but due to unforeseen circumstances, will not be able to join. 

Maps to the Ancestors
by Peter Sipeli

Maps to the Ancestors is a poem by Peter Sipeli that leverages digital tools using sound, imagery, and spoken word. It is part of a solo performance exploring ways of connection with the ancestors premised on the belief that to be without language is to be caught in a state of being without maps, without the vehicle to allow one’s access to the knowledge of the ancestors. The idea that our DNA holds secret to our heritage implies that memory is inherited. We come to know that inside of us are all the memories of our ancestors and the return to the source becomes a spiritual process of an inwards journey into the self to unlock these secret connections. With this performative reading of Maps of the Ancestors, Sipeli hopes to map a journey into his past and across his different heritage and bloodlines (Fijian, Tongan, Samoan, Pacific Islander, Scottish, etc.) As a second generation, Pacific urbanite, and though he does not have language other than English, Sipeli believes he would be able to find lost parts of himself through his poetry and spoken word performances.

Peter Daniel Sipeli (Fiji) is passionate about storytelling because he believes that stories humanise people by showing that we all face the same choices, struggles, and triumphs. A well-known spoken word artist, he was instrumental in the revitalisation of the Fiji SLAM in Suva. He founded the Poetryshop Fiji to fill a development gap for new and emerging local writers, as well as the only online Pacific islands arts magazine ARTalk. Having worked for 10 years with NGOs as a human rights and LGBTQ activist, he has also worked in the Fiji Arts Council and in the Dean’s Office at the Fiji School of Medicine. Additionally, he managed the popularised ROC Sunday street market.

Please register via Peatix: https://tylercoburntohgarden.peatix.com/

During his 2017 residency at NTU CCA Singapore, Tyler Coburn developed a relationship with Singapore’s Toh Garden, which cultivates many orchid hybrids named after politicians and celebrities. In turn, Coburn legally named one of the Garden’s hybrids “Richard Roe,” a name used in American and British case law when the actual name of a person cannot be given. This session will start at NTU CCA Singapore, where Coburn will introduce his orchid hybrid and elaborate on the conventions of naming, then conclude at Toh Garden with a tour led by Zhuo Hongyi.

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BIOGRAPHIES

Tyler Coburn (United States) works with writing, installation, performance, and sound, addressing historical and emergent forms of labour: from the artist to the data miner, the factory worker to the cognitariat. Coburn works in a research-oriented, interdisciplinary, and occasionally collaborative manner, involving the participation of those working within the fields in question. No matter the focus of a given project, there are certain questions that drive Coburn’s practice at large: What does creative (or “uncreative”) writing look like in the 21st century? How can an artwork engage the complexities of our legal, technological, and geopolitical networks? Finally, what becomes of “subjectivity” and “the self” within post-human discourse? Coburn received a BA in Comparative Literature from Yale University and an MFA from the University of Southern California. He also served as a fellow in the Whitney Independent Study Program from 2014–15. His work has been presented at South London Gallery; Kunstverein Munich; Kunsthalle Wien; Western Front, Vancouver; Grazer Kunstverein; UCCA, Beijing; and Sculpture Center, New York. Coburn participated in the 11th Gwangju Biennale and the 10th Shanghai Biennale. His writing has appeared in e-flux journal, Frieze, Dis, Mousse, and Rhizome. Coburn was an NTU CCA Singapore Artist-in-Residence from June to July 2017.

Zhuo Hongyi (Singapore) is Project Manager at Toh Garden. Raised in a family of commercial orchid growers, Zhuo has a BSc in Life Sciences from National University Singapore. At Toh Garden, he is mainly responsible for the orchid projects, securing orchid supplies and designing orchidscapes for clients. Zhuo has managed projects with the National Orchid Garden, Gardens by the Bay, Orchid Country Club, and UBS AG, among others.

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

Image caption: Tyler Coburn, Richard Roe, 2018, orchid hybrid legally named “Richard Roe” by the artist, custom glass pots fabricated by Verreum, performance and related texts. Commissioned by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary. Courtesy the artist. 

Tyler Coburn will read from his forthcoming book, a fictional memoir of the legal person “Richard Roe” that accompanies his orchid hybrid of the same name. This text, a hybrid of an essay and stand-up comedy, describes a world populated by legal fictions that creep around the margins of selfhood—and increasingly dictate the terms of economic and political process. Coburn will read the first chapter of this book, which discusses everything from the ancient trials of objects to recent arguments for the legal personhood of rivers and other elements of the natural world.

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BIOGRAPHY

Tyler Coburn (United States) works with writing, installation, performance, and sound, addressing historical and emergent forms of labour: from the artist to the data miner, the factory worker to the cognitariat. Coburn works in a research-oriented, interdisciplinary, and occasionally collaborative manner, involving the participation of those working within the fields in question. No matter the focus of a given project, there are certain questions that drive Coburn’s practice at large: What does creative (or “uncreative”) writing look like in the 21st century? How can an artwork engage the complexities of our legal, technological, and geopolitical networks? Finally, what becomes of “subjectivity” and “the self” within post-human discourse? Coburn received a BA in Comparative Literature from Yale University and an MFA from the University of Southern California. He also served as a fellow in the Whitney Independent Study Program from 2014–15. His work has been presented at South London Gallery; Kunstverein Munich; Kunsthalle Wien; Western Front, Vancouver; Grazer Kunstverein; UCCA, Beijing; and Sculpture Center, New York. Coburn participated in the 11th Gwangju Biennale and the 10th Shanghai Biennale. His writing has appeared in e-flux journal, Frieze, Dis, Mousse, and Rhizome. Coburn was an NTU CCA Singapore Artist-in-Residence from June to July 2017.

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

Image caption: Tyler Coburn, Richard Roe (detail: drawing by Krisia Ayala), 2018, orchid hybrid legally named “Richard Roe” by the artist, custom glass pots fabricated by Verreum, performance and related texts. Commissioned by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary. Courtesy the artist. 

Registration is required via Peatix:

20 October — https://dailypractice.peatix.com/
3 November — https://dailypractice3nov.peatix.com/

Rooted in the varied modes of performance by artists within the exhibition Stagings. Soundings. Readings. Free Jazz II, this workshop explores activities and strategies to stretch our daily embodied and sensory awareness. It will facilitate participants in discovering and physicalising the building blocks utilised as material for the various performative modalities experienced. Moreover, through play and tuning in to somatic (bodily) knowledge, the over-riding exhibition theme of climate change can be proactively dialogued and questioned.

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BIOGRAPHIES

Kelly Reedy (United States/Singapore) has worked in Singapore for over 18 years as an artist and educator, holding an MA in Education, Hunter College, and an MA in Art Therapy, LASALLE College of the Arts. She has exhibited her artworks internationally in Paris, Chicago, and Berlin, as well as locally at Jendela Visual Arts Space, Esplanade, Singapore Tyler Print Institute, and Alliance Française. Reedy has developed educational resources for the National Gallery Singapore and trained teachers at the National Institute of Education, specialising in visual arts education in museums and galleries. Reedy is a long-term collaborator for NTU CCA Singapore’s workshop for teachers.

Susan Sentler (United States/United Kingdom/Singapore) is a choreographer, teacher, researcher, director, dramaturg, and performer. She was senior lecturer at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance for 18 years and has taught globally in the field of dance for over 30 years. Sentler performed with the Martha Graham Ensemble, and has recently returned to performing in works by artists such as Tino Sehgal, Xavier le Roy, and Jérôme Bel. Her multi-disciplinary practice is anchored by a honed somatic relationship to image, working in gallery and museum contexts to create “responses” or “activations” for specific visual artworks as well as generating personal durational installations. She is a lecturer at the School of Dance & Theatre at LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore.

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

Image caption: Irina Baldini in stroke/sky/stroke. Courtesy Susan Sentler.

Artist Carlos Casas together with eminent composer and filmmaker Phill Niblock will discuss their approaches to film, video, and soundscapes. Sharing their experience of collaborating on Avalanche—the project on view in Stagings. Soundings. Readings. Free Jazz II—Casas and Niblock will expand on notions of improvisation and site-specificity. 

The work Avalanche documents Hichigh, a village in Tajikistan and one of the highest located villages in the world. With each iteration and presentation, the work will change according to the context and space it’s being presented.

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BIOGRAPHIES 

Carlos Casas (Spain/France) works with film and the sonic. His last three films have been awarded in festivals around the world including Torino, Madrid, Buenos Aires, and Mexico City. He has recently concluded a trilogy of films, END, dedicated to the most extreme environments on the planet: Patagonia, Aral Sea, and Siberia. Avalanche is a lifelong project and site-specific film based on one of the highest inhabited villages in the Pamirs, a mountain range in Central Asia. His films have been shown in festivals such as the Venice Film Festival; Rotterdam Film Festival; FID Marseille; BAFICI Buenos Aires; Jeonju International Film Festival, South Korea; Documenta Madrid; FICCO Mexico; and others. His works have been presented at institutions including Tate Modern, London; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Hangar Bicocca, Milan; Bozar Bruxelles; Oi Futuro, Rio de Janeiro; MIS São Paulo; Centre Pompidou and Fondation Cartier, Paris; Centre Cultura Contemporanea, Barcelona; MALBA, Buenos Aires; and GAM, Torino. He was Creative Director of Colors Music and Films from 2005–08 where he developed audio-visual projects and music research in various regions around the world. He is Co-founder of Map Productions and the visual sound label Von Archives. Casas is Visiting Professor at Dartmouth College, United States, and ECAM, the Madrid film school. He was an NTU CCA Singapore Artist-in-Residence from December 2017 to February 2018.

Phill Niblock (United States) is an intermedia artist using music, film, photography, video, and computers. Since the mid-60s he has been making music and intermedia performances shown at numerous venues around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Wadsworth Atheneum, Connecticut; the Kitchen, New York; Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels; Institute of Contemporary Art, London; Akademie der Künste, Berlin; ZKM, Karlsruhe; Harvard University’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Cambridge; World Music Institute, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris and Metz; and the Maerzmusik Festival, Berlin. Since 1985, he is the Director of the Experimental Intermedia Foundation (EI) in New York, which he joined as member in 1968. He is the Producer of Music and Intermedia presentations at EI since 1973 (about 1,000 performances) and the curator of EI’s XI Records label. In 1993, he was part of the formation of an EI organisation in Gent, which supports artists-in-residence. Niblock’s music is available on the XI, Moikai, Mode, VonArchive, Touch, and Extreme labels. In 2014, he was the recipient of the John Cage Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in New York. Recently, he presented films and photographs from 1970 and ’71 at Tate Modern, London, with music from the past three years.

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BIOGRAPHIES

Alexandra Pirici (Romania) is a classically-trained dancer and choreographer who naturally transitioned into the art world as her works grew increasingly experimental. Her performative installations straddle contemporary dance, performance, body art, and sculpture, while acknowledging the dramatic shifts in contemporary understanding of labour and the body, revealing the influence of present geopolitical realities. With choreographed pieces that work undisciplined, spanning across mediums and spatial contexts, Pirici addresses ideas of history, collective body, the rise of technology’s agency over the “human,” and the invisible structures and hidden mechanisms of power. The artist’s use of the human living body as a medium is a reflection on and exploration of such ideas and their impact on the “human” subject. Pirici has exhibited widely, including at the decennial art exhibition Skulptur Projekte Münster 2017; the Romanian Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale; Tate Modern, London; New Museum, New York; the 9th Berlin Biennale; Manifesta 10; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum Ludwig Cologne; Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin; the 12th Swiss Sculpture Exhibition; the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin; and the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; among others. In 2015 she received the Excellency Award from the National Dance Centre, Bucharest. 

Ute Meta Bauer (Germany/Singapore) is Founding Director, NTU CCA Singapore and Professor, NTU ADM. Previously, she was Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, where she also served as Founding Director of the MIT Program in Art, Culture, and Technology. For more than three decades, Bauer has worked as curator of exhibitions and presentations, connecting contemporary art, film, video, and sound through transdisciplinary formats. She publishes regularly on artistic and curatorial practice. Bauer served as expedition leader of TBA21–Academy The Current 2015–18 exploring the Pacific Archipelago and littorals that are most impacted by climate change and human interventions in their environments.

Susan Sentler (United States/United Kingdom/Singapore) is a choreographer, teacher, researcher, director, dramaturg, and performer. She was senior lecturer at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance for 18 years and has taught globally in the field of dance for over 30 years. Sentler performed with the Martha Graham Ensemble, and has recently returned to performing in works by artists such as Tino Sehgal, Xavier le Roy, and Jérôme Bel. Her multi-disciplinary practice is anchored by a honed somatic relationship to image, working in gallery and museum contexts to create “responses” or “activations” for specific visual artworks as well as generating personal durational installations. She is a lecturer at the School of Dance & Theatre at LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore.

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

Image caption: Alexandra Pirici, Delicate Instruments of Engagement, 2017. Russian Museum St. Petersburg, within Access Point. Photo by Vadim Frolov. Courtesy the artist.

An artistic medium praised for its immediacy, performance art has relied on the mediated document for writing its history. Photographs and video recordings were the privileged access points to works defined by liveness and ephemerality. In this session, we will focus on forms of documentation produced by artists and intimately connected to their performance works. In an act of collective reading and listening, we will explore interviews, scores, and notebooks as performative means of artistic self-archiving. No prior reading is required for participants in this session.

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BIOGRAPHY

Anca Rujoiu (Romania/Singapore) is a curator and editor. Curator for exhibitions and later manager of publications, she was part of the founding team of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore contributing to numerous exhibitions, the public and publishing programme of the institution between October 2013 and January 2018. Together with Ute Meta Bauer and Lee Weng Choy, she co-curated the Centre’s inaugural programme Free Jazz (2013–14). She is the co-editor of Place.Labour.Capital (NTU CCA Singapore and Mousse Publishing, 2018), Becoming Palm (NTU CCA Singapore and Sternberg Press, 2017), and Theatrical Fields (NTU CCA Singapore and Koenig Books, 2016), amongst others. Since 2010, she joined FormContent, a curatorial initiative adopting a subjective attitude towards cultural production and experimenting with curatorial formats. She is currently teaching at LASALLE College of the Arts Singapore.

In this performative lecture, renowned performance artist Boris Nieslony will talk about the performance art archive the Black Kit in Cologne, which he started in 1981. Exploring how such an endeavour generates theoretical and practical knowledge, Nieslony will share about how the archive keeps growing, amassing documentation pertaining to over 4000 artists, theorists, groups, networks, non-profit organisation, and artist-run spaces, as well as specific local and international performance projects, including in public space. In response to the Independent Archive established in Singapore by Lee Wen, Nieslony will also touch upon the importance of creating networks worldwide to support each other’s efforts and exchange valuable information and knowledge.

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BIOGRAPHY

Boris Nieslony (Germany) has worked intensively as a performance artist, curator, archivist, and independent scholar, staging various installations, interventions, and artist projects since the 1970s. He is the Founder of Black Market International, a performance group that meets regularly in various configurations to realise group performance projects. And also the instigator of the ASA foundation, a platform for a self-organising rhizomatic network of performance artists and theorists. Nieslony is recognised as one of the most prolific and significant contributors to performance art. He creates unpredictable and unrepeatable improvisational performance works that manifest “an encounter and its effects.”

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

Image credit: Boris Nieslony and Black Market International (BMI), Action on Route, Mexico City, 2003. Photo by Antonio Juarez. Courtesy BMI.