Thursday 30 Jan: Closed
Friday 31 Jan: Closed
Saturday 1 Feb: Closed
We look forward to seeing you when we reopen on Sunday 2 February. Please note that we are closed on Mondays and will resume usual opening hours (found on our about page) on Tuesday 4 February. Wishing you a prosperous year of the horse!
Paradise Lost, Public Programme
January — March 2014
All events held at CCA exhibition space, Block 43, Malan Road unless otherwise stated
Friday 17.01.2014, 4-6pm — Paradise Lost Forum with presentations by Mustafa Shabbir Hussain (Curator, National Art Gallery, Singapore) and Ann Demeester (Director De Appel Arts Centre, Netherlands)
Friday 24.01.2014, 7.30-9pm — Curatorial Tour with Ute Meta Bauer (CCA Director) and Lee Weng Choy (CCA Deputy Director and Senior Curator)
Friday 14.02.2014, 7.30-9pm — Exhibition Tour with Khim Ong (CCA Project Manager) and Ho Tzu Nyen (Artist)
Saturday 15.02.2014, 3-5pm — Reading Group with Anca Rujoiu (CCA Curator)
Thursday 20.02.2014, 6.30-9pm—Workshop by Trinh T. Minh-ha (registration required. Please contact ccaevents@ntu.edu.sg)
Friday 21.02.1014, 7.30-9pm — Artist’s talk Trinh T. Minh-ha
Friday 28.02.2014, 7.30-9pm — Exhibition Tour with David Teh (Director Future Perfect) and Anca Rujoiu (CCA Curator)
Friday 7.03.2014, 7.30-9pm — Stefano Harney (Professor of Strategic Management Education, Singapore Management University) in conversation with Ute Meta Bauer (CCA Director)
Saturday 8.03.2014, 3-5pm — Contemporary Fiction, Special session with Books Actually
Friday 28.03.2014, 7.30-9pm — Exhibition Tour with Vera Mey (CCA Curator) and Mustafa Shabbir Hussain (Curator, National Art Gallery, Singapore)
Public talk: The production of (CCA) space: Apolonija Šušteršič and Jesko Fezer
Tuesday 28 January 2014, 7.30 – 9pm
CCA – NTU Centre for Contemporary Art
Block 43, Malan Road, Gillman Barracks, Singapore 109443
+65-66840998
Jesko Fezer, Exhibition design for Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin: The Whole Earth Kooperative für Darstellungspolitik, 2013
CCA – NTU Centre for Contemporary Art is a new institution positioning itself as a contemporary art research centre as well as active exhibition space. CCA has overlapping positions as a research centre, exhibition space and artist in residence/research fellowship programme. How do we physically realise these various functions? How do we build an institution and space which marries our different functions the forward thinking and ambition of what the CCA will become with the historical site it is based on Gillman Barracks? Looking at two practitioners Apolonija Šušteršič and Jesko Fezer whose work have used ideas of spatial and social transformation in their practice, this talk will look at the role of designing spaces that aim to contribute and challenge sites of knowledge production.
SOCIAL WEAVER
SOCIAL WEAVER is like a species of bird…with the most spectacular structures built as their nests. However in the case of her presentation at CCA, Apolonija Šušteršič will talk about the role of the artist and art institution as a “social weaver” as somebody that creates and enables a place for critical reflection, communication, and discussion on urgent subjects that are often dismissed and overlooked in the rest of the society. She will be presenting the process of the “social weaving” through her own practice situated in-between architecture and design, sociology and urban studies. An emphasis on personal involvement and subjective observations which utilise and transform methods from these disciplines along with new inventions are strategies used to build a specific situation for a specific context.
Robustness and Openness for Negotiations and Conflicts in Design
Jesko Fezer will discuss and present several projects created for cultural institutions in diverse cooperations. These projects are based on the assumption that design is not able to produce any homogenizing, settling, durable, optimal or even just satisfying solutions. Design is not able to solve problems produced by political and social misrelations of desires, practices and actualities. Perhaps a more interesting dimension of design is its potential to articulate and transform these conflicts. Architecture, planning and design – even or especially in the cultural field – have the capacity to enable social-spatial negotiations. The talk will argue that vague openness as well as explicit robustness can support this.
Apolonija Šušteršič is an architect and visual artist. She usually makes extensive researches into specific situations found on location, which she uses as a starting point of her project. She pursues new possibilities and makes proposals from a hybrid point of view that ranges beyond art and architecture, making socially committed works naturally taking the form of everyday life activity. Her practice is embedded within interdisciplinary discourse and usually includes collaborations with other professionals such as architects, urban planners, curators, sociologists, and local population. Together with architect and a professor, Meike Schalk she formed an operative unit, which occasionally produces research, projects, actions and discussions. Apolonija Šušteršič has a PhD from University of Lund, Malmö Art Academy, Sweden; and runs her own art / architecture studio practice in Amsterdam, the Netherlands and in Ljubljana, Slovenia. As a former professor at Royal University College of Fine Arts she established a Department of Permanent Transformation; a mobile unit; a parasite that could be plugged into any institution that performs an educational function. Apolonija Šušteršič participated in a number of exhibitions within and beyond the international contemporary art institutions including Berlin Biennale; 12th Architecture Biennale, Venice; Artes Mundi 5, among others.
Jesko Fezer works as Designer and Author. In cooperation with ifau he realized several architecture projects, he co-founded the thematic bookshop Pro qm and he participates in the exhibition design studio Kooperative für Darstellungspolitik. Jesko Fezer is professor for experimental design at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg. His latest publication is: Civic City Cahier 6: Design in and Against the Neoliberal City, London 2013.
CCA Talks at Art Stage
Saturday 18 Jan 2014, 1—6pm
Marina Bay Sands Expo and Convention Centre, Level 3
Entrance to CCA Talks is free, but a ticket is required to view the Art Stage Singapore Art Fair.
CCA Talks are convened by Lee Weng Choy during the 2014 edition of Art Stage. Under the format of panel discussions, CCA Talks address the overall theme of the fair: “We are Asia” with a focus on the particularities and challenges of the art landscape in the region.
1—2.15pm Hong Kong vs Singapore
Matthias Arndt (Director Arndt Gallery, Berlin & Singapore)
Savita Apte (Founding Director Platform, Singapore)
“Junior” Laksamana Tirtadji (ROH Projects, Indonesia)
2.30pm—3.45pm Art & Knowledge
Professor Adèle Naudé Santos (Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning, MIT, Cambridge, USA)
4—6pm Local Art Institutions: New Horizons
Eugene Tan (Director, National Art Gallery Singapore)
Susie Lingham (Director, Singapore Art Museum)
Bala Starr (Director, ICAS, Lasalle, Singapore)
Ute Meta Bauer (Director, CCA Singapore)
Paradise Lost
January 18 – March 30, 2014
Trinh T. Minh-ha, Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989)
Zarina Bhimji, Yellow Patch (2011)
Fiona Tan, Disorient (2009)
Exhibition Opening Hours: Tue.–Sun. 12–7 pm; Fri. 12–9 pm
Forum with presentations by:
Ann Demeester (Director De Appel, Netherlands) and Mustafa Shabbir Hussain (Curator, National Art Gallery, Singapore)
Friday January 17, 4-6pm
The newly established Centre for Contemporary Art in Singapore is pleased to announce its first exhibition, Paradise Lost. Conceived as a constellation of three artistic productions that together explore narratives of travel and migration, place and displacement, the personal intertwined with colonial history, Paradise Lost introduces an imaginary Asia — Asia as a space of projections and desires stemming from an experience of dislocation and asynchronicity. Curated by CCA Founding Director, Ute Meta Bauer and Anca Rujoiu, CCA Curator Exhibitions the show juxtaposes trans-generational perspectives, bringing together three major installations of moving image: Surname Viet Given Name Nam by Trinh T. Minh-ha, Yellow Patch by Zarina Bhimji and Disorient by Fiona Tan. While all three artists are of Asian descent, their education and artistic practice unfolded in Europe and the US, and gained international exposure from there. This is the first time these works are shown in Asia in an exhibition context.
CCA Founding Director, Ute Meta Bauer said: “ We are very pleased to inaugurate CCA’s exhibition programme with seminal works by Zarina Bhimji, Trinh T. Minh-ha and Fiona Tan. This is the first time these works are shown in Asia in an exhibition context. With reflections on migration, diaspora, old and new trade routes and how they determine colonial and postcolonial spaces, this exhibition sets out the frame for CCA’s future areas of investigation and research.”
In Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989), Trinh T. Minh-ha questions the norms of representation and filmic documentation, as she examines the lives of women in Vietnam and the US through themes of dislocation, exile and resistance. A filmmaker, composer, anthropologist and post-colonial theorist, Trinh has advocated in her art and writings for a continual readjustment of our understandings of what is “other” and “otherness”.
In Yellow Patch (2011), Zarina Bhimji traces her father’s migration from India to East Africa, revisiting an array of buildings and landscapes in Bombay and Gujurat through a disembodied, almost ghostly viewing experience that isolates images from any contextual information. Refraining from facts and references, Bhimji allows stories to manifest in the physical structures of abandoned buildings — archeological palimpsests that evoke a phantomatic presence, the spectre of a land of emotion.
Inspired by Marco Polo’s travels, Fiona Tan’s Disorient was conceived for the Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2009. This project questions stereotypical representations of the East as constructed by Western historical narratives and orientalist imaginations. The work disorients our patterns of looking by contrasting hoards of exotic and aesthetically loaded objects with incongruous images of violence, pollution and poverty.
Paradise Lost complements current explorations on the region, from the 2013 Singapore Biennale to the 2014 Art Stage Singapore art fair, bringing to the fore a perspective of Asia and its colonial history as perceived from near and afar. The exhibition investigates fictions of Asia by complicating them with more fictionalities. While Trinh T. Minh-ha articulates a cinematic dialectic, Fiona Tan and Zarina Bhimji work through an immersive visual language. Wrapped up in allegory and fiction, each work maintains a tight connection with the artists’ personal experiences of navigating cultural identity and homeland, migration and crossing borders.
A series of talks, reading groups and workshops will further explore the conceptual framework of the exhibition.
Paradise Lost will also serve as a catalyst for a long-term collaborative research project that will investigate the asynchronisities of diasporic spaces connected to the political and economical histories of migration along old and new trade routes.
CCA – NTU Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore
The Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA) is the national art centre of Nanyang Technological University, with support from the Economic Development Board, Singapore. Located in Gillman Barracks alongside a cluster of international galleries, the CCA takes a holistic approach towards art and culture, intertwining its various platforms: exhibitions, public programmes, research and residencies.
Under the leadership of CCA Founding Director, Ute Meta Bauer the centre officially opened in October 2013 with Free Jazz, an open-format series that brought together cultural producers such as Lee Wen, Lucy Davis, Grieve Perspective, OffCuff, Cosmin Costinas, Ade Darmawan, Mark Nash, Zai Kuning, Bige Örer, Geert Lovink, Nikos Papastergiadis, Bani Haykal, Ila and Syv Bruzeau, to imagine and envision the potentials of this new institution.
CCA – Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore 