OTHERS > NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (NTU CCA Singapore)

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OFFCUFF (Bani Haykal, Mohamad Riduan, Shahila Baharom and Wu Jun Han).

Photography credit: Wahid Subarmah

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OFFCUFF (Bani Haykal, Mohamad Riduan, Shahila Baharom and Wu Jun Han).

Photography credit: Wahid Subarmah

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OFFCUFF (Bani Haykal, Mohamad Riduan, Shahila Baharom and Wu Jun Han).

Photography credit: Wahid Subarmah

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“Free Jazz”, Lee Wen performing: “WE HERE SPEND TIME # 2”, Collaborative action conceived by Jason Wee and Lee Wen in

collaboration with Angie Seah, Karl Kerridge and Jordan Rais, October 2013. Photography credit: Wahid Subarmah

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“Free Jazz”, Lee Wen performing: “WE HERE SPEND TIME # 2”, Collaborative action conceived by Jason Wee and Lee Wen in

collaboration with Angie Seah, Karl Kerridge and Jordan Rais, October 2013. Photography credit: Wahid Subarmah

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“Free Jazz”, Lee Wen performing: “WE HERE SPEND TIME # 2”, Collaborative action conceived by Jason Wee and Lee Wen in

collaboration with Angie Seah, Karl Kerridge and Jordan Rais, October 2013. Photography credit: Wahid Subarmah

Talk Event
Free Jazz
29 Nov 2013 - 14 Dec 2013  (7.30pm - 9pm )

“Free Jazz”, the CCA’s inaugural programme continues with a series of talks, presentations and screenings bringing together artists, curators, art critics and scholars to imagine and contribute to the thinking and envisioning of the potentials for this new Centre for Contemporary Art in Singapore. As the title suggests, “Free Jazz” is about improvisation, the ability to listen, to respond and engage into a less prescribed and controlled environment.  Improvisation stands for a form of inquiry that can become an active tool to generate new possibilities for conceptualising and programming art institutions. “Free Jazz” at the CCA presents a series ofpaired presentations and juxtaposes different approaches into a single platform as a playful way to encourage conversational and performative interactions that can take spontaneous, fluid, unplanned moves.
 

All "Free Jazz" events take place at CCA, Block 43, Malan Road, Gillman Barracks starting at 7.30pm (except on 10 Dec). Everyone is welcome; entrance is free.
 

Friday 29 November, 7.30-9pm

Introducing the CCA curatorial team – A panel of presentations by Ute Meta Bauer, Lee Weng Choy and Anca Rujoiu that gives an overview of the curators’ previous projects and areas of interest.

Ute Meta Bauer is the CCA’s newly appointed Founding Director.  Bauer comes to Singapore from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA, where she was an Associate Professor for Visual Art, the founding director of the Programme in Art, Culture, and Technology (ACT) and director of the MIT Visual Arts Programme. For over 25 years Bauer has worked as a curator of exhibitions and presentations on contemporary art, film, video, and sound, with a focus on transdisciplinary formats. For over 25 years Bauer has worked as a curator of exhibitions and presentations on contemporary art, film, video, and sound, with a focus on transdisciplinary formats. Most recently she was co-director with Hou Hanru of the World Biennial Forum No. 1, Gwangju, South Korea, and in the last academic year she served as Dean of Fine Art at the Royal College of Art, London. Previously, Bauer served as the Founding Director of the OCA – Office for Contemporary Art, Norway, was the Artistic Director of the 3rd Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art and a Co-curator of Documenta 11, Kassel.

Lee Weng Choy is the designated Senior Curator and Deputy Director for Exhibitions and Residency Programme of CCA. He is a well-known art critic, curator and author who has published widely on contemporary art and culture. He was the Artistic Co-Director of The Substation from 2000-2009 and has taught or lectured at many arts institutions, including the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and the Sotheby’s Institute, Singapore. He currently is the president of the Singapore Section of AICA, the International Association of Art Critics, and serves on the academic advisory board of the Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong.

Anca Rujoiu is CCA’s Curator for Exhibitions. She is a Romanian curator who holds a MFA in Curatorial Studies at Goldsmiths College, London. Most recently she coordinated the public programme of the School of Fine Art at the Royal College of Art, London. She was also co-director of FormContent, a curatorial project currently running a nomadic programme and testing formats of curatorial production and distribution. She was also one of the curators of Collective Fictions, part of Nouvelles Vagues – Young Curators’ season at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris. She has lectured at various universities including Goldsmiths College and Saint Martins University, London.

Wednesday 4 December, 7.30-9pm

Curatorial Exchanges – A paired presentation with Cosmin Costinas and Ade Darmawan on the local specificities and challenges in working in the region.

Ade Darmawan lives and works in Jakarta as an artist, curator and Director of ruangrupa. Established in 2000, ruangrupa is an artists’ initiative that focuses on visual arts and its social cultural contexts and its urban environments. As an artist and curator, Darmawan participated in many art projects and exhibitions in Indonesia and internationally. His works range from installations, objects, digital print, video and public art. With ruangrupa as a collaborative platform, he has also participated in the Gwangju Biennale 2002, the Istanbul Biennale 2005, and the Asia Pacific Triennial 2012. From 2006-2009 he was a member of the Jakarta Arts Council, and in 2009 he became the artistic director of the Jakarta Biennale XIII-ARENA; currently he is the executive director of Jakarta Biennale 2013.

Cosmin Costinas lives and works in Hong Kong as the Executive Director and Curator of Para/Site Art Space. His curated exhibitions at Para/Site include: A Journal of the Plague Year. Fear, ghosts, rebels. SARS, Leslie and the Hong Kong story (with Inti Guerrero, 2013); It May Be That Beauty Has Strengthened Our Resolve (2013); About Films. Deimantas Narkevicius (2012); Taiping Tianguo: A History of Possible Encounters: Ai Weiwei, Frog King Kwok, Tehching Hsieh, and Martin Wong in New York (with Doryun Chong, 2012); rites, thoughts, notes, sparks, swings, strikes. a hong kong spring (with Venus Lau, 2012); Two Thousand Eleven (2011). He was the Curator of BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, Netherlands (2008-2011), co-curator (with Ekaterina Degot and David Riff) of the 1st Ural Industrial Biennial: Shockworkers of the Mobile Image, Ekaterinburg, 2010, and editor of documenta 12 Magazines, Kassel/Vienna (2005–2007).  He co-authored the novel Philip (2007) and has contributed his writing to numerous magazines, books, and exhibition catalogs across the world. Cosmin has taught and lectured at different universities and art academies in Europe and Asia.

Friday 6 December, 7.30-9pm

Screen & Space and Performance & Place – A talk by Mark Nash in conjunction with a screening of excerpts from artist Zai Kuning’s work-in-progress documentary project on the Mak Yong.

Mark Nash is an independent curator and writer and, until recently, Head of Department of Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art London. He collaborated with Okwui Enwezor on The Short Century (2002), and worked again with Enwezor and with Ute Meta Bauer on documenta XI (2002). With Bauer he worked on the 3rd Berlin Biennial (2004). He has extensively curated and written on artists who work with the moving image – including Experiments with Truth (Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philaelphia 2004-5) and One Sixth of the Earth, ecologies of image at ZKM, Karlsruhe and MUSAC Leon. The latter exhibition continued to explore the artistic legacy of the formerly socialist countries that was first explored in Reimagining October at Calvert 22 (2009, curated with Isaac Julien).

Zai Kuning is one of the pioneering experimental artists in Singapore who has redefined what it means to engage in multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary art forms. Zai's artistic work in the last two decades has shifted between sculpture, drawing, installation, performance, movement, music and sound. In 2000, he began researching the lives of the Orang Laut, the sea gypsies of the Riau Archipelago in Indonesia, near Singapore. His research culminated in an internationally acclaimed documentary film RIAU (2003). He recently returned to further explore this theme, and he is currently working on a new documentary film project focused on the Mak Yong Mantang, an important form of Malay performing arts as it pre-dates Islam influence in the 14th century. Mak Yong has been declared by UNESCO as a “Masterpiece Of The Oral And Intangible Heritage Of Humanity”, one with roots in animist and Hindu-Buddhist beliefs and mythology. His project on the Mak Yong is supported by the National Arts Council Singapore.

Tuesday 10 December, 6.30-8pm

This event starts exceptionally at 6.30pm

The Bienniale Intervention – What do Bienniales do, and what they can do? A conversation between Bige Örer and Ute Meta Bauer.

Bige Örer is the Director of the Istanbul Biennial. She has worked on the coordination of cultural and artistic projects for the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts since 2003. Örer also works as an independent expert in the European Union’s department, which evaluates cultural funds. She has acted as a consultant and a jury member for several cultural and artistic projects, is a member of the project Capacity Building for Cultural Policy in Turkey and a member of the team writing the alternative Cultural Policy Compendium of Turkey. Bige currently teaches at Istanbul Bilgi University.

Wednesday 11 December, 7.30-9pm

Digital Publishing – A talk by Geert Lovink followed by the launch of a new issue of Article: the Singapore Biennale Review 2013 (publication of the International Association of Art Critics, AICA Singapore) followed by a conversation with Lee Weng Choy, CCA's designated Senior Curator and President of AICA Singapore.

Geert Lovink is a media theorist, internet critic and author of Zero Comments (2007) and Networks Without a Cause (2012). Since 2004 he has been a researcher in the School for Communication and Media Design at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA) where he is the Founding Director of the Institute of Network Cultures. From 2004–2013 he taught in the New Media Master’s Programme at Mediastudies, University of Amsterdam, which has organised conferences and research networks around topics such as the politics and aesthetics of online video, urban screens, Wikipedia, the culture of search, internet revenue models, digital publishing strategies and alternatives in social media. He is a Media Theory Professor at the European Graduate School (Saas-Fee) and Associated Member of the Centre for Digital Cultures at the Leuphana University (Lueneburg/D).

Wednesday 18 December, 7.30-9pm

Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism – A talk by Nikos Papastergiadis (Professor at the School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne) with a focus on contemporary art as a form of the cosmopolitan imaginary, followed by with a free improvisation of music and movement performance by the Bani Haykal trio.

Nikos Papastergiadis is Professor at the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. His current research focuses on the investigation of the historical transformation of contemporary art and cultural institutions by digital technology. His writings include “Modernity as Exile” (1993), “Dialogues in the Diaspora” (1998), “The Turbulence of Migration” (2000), “Metaphor and Tension” (2004), “Spatial Aesthetics: Art Place and the Everyday” (2006) and “Cosmopolitanism and Culture” (2012). His essays have been translated widely and in addition to academic publications, have appeared in art journals and exhibition catalogues, including those of the biennales of Sydney, Liverpool, Istanbul, Gwangju, Taipei, Lyon, Thessaloniki and documenta 13.

Bani Haykal writes/experiments with music and fiction, spanning various mediums, informed by his interest in sociocultural and political shifts.

NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (NTU CCA Singapore)
Exhibitions: Block 43 Malan Road, Gillman Barracks, Singapore 109443. Research Centre and Office:+65 64600 300 Block 6 Lock Road, #01-09/10, Gillman Barracks, Singapore 108934

The NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore is a research centre of Nanyang Technological University, developed with support from the Economic Development Board, Singapore. Located in Gillman Barracks alongside a cluster of international galleries, the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore Singapore is led by Founding Director Professor Ute Meta Bauer. The NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore takes a holistic approach towards art and culture, intertwining its three platforms: Exhibitions, Residencies and Research & Education.

The NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore positions itself as a centre for critical discourse and experimental practices for Singapore, the region and beyond. It aims to play an active role within the local art scene, as well as being a part of the development of regional and international art infrastructures.

Exhibition Hours
Tue - Sun: 12 - 7pm
Fri: 12 - 9pm
Mon: Closed
Open on Public Holidays 
Free Admission

NTU CCA Singapore Exhibitions: +65 6339 6503
Block 43 Malan Road, Gillman Barracks, Singapore 109443

Block 43 Malan Road: Exhibitions: +65 6339 6503; Block 6 Lock Road: Research Centre and Office: +65 6460 0300
www.ntu.ccasingapore.org
[email protected]