15 August 2014 (Friday) 19:00-21:00
Artists talks with Sam Durant and Ana Prvacki
The CCA is pleased to present two artists talks by our current artists in residence Sam Durant and Ana Prvacki.
Sam Durant is a multimedia artist whose works engage a variety of social, political, and cultural issues. Often referencing American history, his work explores the varying relationships between culture and politics, engaging subjects as diverse as the civil rights movement, southern rock music, and modernism. His work has been widely exhibited internationally and in the United States. He has had solo museum exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Dusseldorf, S.M.A.K., Ghent, Belgium and the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Zealand. His work has been included in the Panamá, Sydney, Venice and Whitney Biennales. Durant shows with several galleries including Blum and Poe in Los Angeles, Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, Praz-Delavallade in Paris and Sadie Coles Gallery in London. In 2006 he compiled and edited a comprehensive monograph of Black Panther artist Emory Douglas’ work. His recent curatorial credits include Eat the Market at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Black Panther: the Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the New Museum in New York. He was a finalist for the 2008 Hugo Boss Prize.
In her videos, services, concoctions and drawings, Ana Prvacki uses a gently pedagogical and comedic approach in an attempt to reconcile etiquette and erotics. Her work has been included in many international exhibitions including dOCUMENTA 13, Sydney Biennial 2007, Singapore Biennial 2006, and the Turin Triennale 2005. She has developed projects for venues and institutions such as the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea (Turin), Smart Museum of Art (Chicago), Bloomberg HQ (NYC), Art in General (NYC), Artists Space (NYC), Umoca (Salt Lake City) and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (Boston). Her website can be found here http://www.anaprvacki.com/
16 August 2014 (Saturday) 15:30-17:00
More than [show] business: Talk 8: Do Din (Two days): An experiment in co-producing urban knowledge
Do Din (Two days): An experiment in co-producing urban knowledge
In the month of December 2013, a community arts event titled Do Din unfolded in the city of Hyderabad, India. Do Din, literally meaning Two Days, was a multiplex event – with art installations, film screenings, talks, workshops, exhibits and theatrical performances. What was unique about this event was the fact that it occasioned a number of unlikely encounters – cartographers with environmental activists, artists with slum residents, architects and planners with residents of historic neighborhoods and scrap dealers with economists. If thematically, Do Din was about engaging with circulation of images, memories, materials and exploring the nooks and crannies of the collective consciousness, the event was also conceived so as to performatively shift several imagined centres of gravity of the city.
This talk will draw on the work of a group of urban researchers who made this possible: a group which under the banner of Hyderabad Urban Lab has been attempting to put their academic research skills at the service of urban communities. Hyderabad is a four hundred year old city which was a princely state until 1948 when it became a part of independent India. After nearly five decades of slow and incremental growth, the city sprang into global IT labour markets in the late 1990s. In the last two decades, the city witnessed a rapid growth which put tremendous pressure on its infrastructure. Hyderabad Urban Lab is an attempt to rebuild a sense of embeddedness and belonging at the same time as reformulating questions of equity for the city’s multifarious communities. The talk will be illustrated with examples of the kind of research that takes collective resources of the city as its starting point.
About the Speaker
Anant Maringanti is the director of Hyderabad Urban Lab. After obtaining PhD in geography from the University of Minnesota, he spent two years in Singapore at the National University of Singapore as a postdoctoral fellow. During the two years, he was a familiar face to many at the Post Museum, where he anchored the Rowell Road Reading Group. A long time resident of Hyderabad, Anant Maringanti brings together an urban sensibility forged over three decades through education in technology, design, and social sciences and lived experience of working alongside artists, film makers, activists and academic scholars. He is widely published in academic and non academic journals. His current research and teaching interests include the law and the city in the global south.
16 August 2014 (Wednesday) 19:00-22:00
Living with Myths: SESSION 2: SILENT SPACES OF HISTORY
Myths II enters the silent spaces of The Singapore Story and brings to light fragments of other pasts. Thum Ping Tjin deconstructs three myths: Singapore’s vulnerability, the government’s role in economic development and the meritocratic system. Ho Chi Tim uncovers traces of social welfare policy in our history. Wong Chee Meng argues that our seemingly ancient cultural heritage is actually shaped by colonial and postcolonial engineering.
22-31 August 2014
Trace-Displace by Lu Huijun
A sound installation.
23 August 2014 (Saturday) 13:00-15:00
Continuum (Automatic Itineraries) by Yen Phang
A performance installation. The whole project consists of 250 tiles, which are oil paintings on birchwood panel. Each panel is roughly postcard-sized (4″x6″, 6″x6″, 6″x8″). These pieces were borne out of a daily routine of meditation and painting to explore my feelings of dislocation and physical discomfort while I was living in Montreal during a particularly long winter. It was a concerted effort to reconnect with my own physical sensations on the one hand, as well as my painting practice on the other.
23 August 2014 (Saturday) 16:00 – 18:00
More than [show] business: Talk 9: Towards Many Worlds: How to Create Imaginative Spaces with Role-Playing Games – A Talk by Tan Shao Han
In this talk, Shao Han will share his plans of using games to foster a new culture of learning in Singapore. He will present some of his experiences with creating imaginary situations with his co-players of tabletop role-playing games (TRPGs) such as Dungeons and Dragons. He will also discuss how TRPG players can learn and reflect on various matters as they play together, and become better acquainted with perspectives and situations different from those in their everyday lives.
Shao Han observes these gaming experiences can be used to nurture and hone the imaginations of the players, and he believes these games can be used by individuals to improve their awareness of themselves, deepen their empathy towards others, as well as increase their knowledge and understanding of the world. He believes these qualities are very hard to teach in a more conventionally pedagogical fashion, and believes it is is instead more conducive for individuals to learn such traits through experience, reflection, and discussion. Hence, in pursuit of this goal, he uses TRPGs to create imaginary worlds which players can explore.
Shao Han also understands there are many obstacles which await him in his goal, and will also discuss these challenges and some of his plans for overcoming them. In spite of these difficulties, Shao Han remains optimistic that he can help to make things change for the better.
Shao Han tutors Southeast Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore, and also used to teach History and Literature at the secondary school level. He has also worked as a researcher and project manager at the Learning Sciences Laboratory in the Nanyang Technological University, and has taught private tuition. He thinks this wide range of experiences in different aspects of education has helped to broaden his perspective, and believes that he is better prepared for the tasks ahead. Shao Han is also an avid player of different games, and he shamelessly and voraciously consumes vast quanitites of popular culture about giant robots and ridiculously melodramatic superheroes.
27 August 2014 (Wednesday) 19:30 – 21:00
More than [show] business: Talk 10: Seeing in the Dark: Lenses for a Post-PRISM Landscape – A Talk by Honor Harger
The recent scandals relating to the NSA, the revelation of the PRISM surveillance programme, and the treatment of whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning, have revealed how fundamentally intertwined our civil liberties are with our technological infrastructures. These systems can both enable, and threaten, both our privacy and our security. Ubiquitous networked infrastructures create radical new creative opportunities for a coming generation of makers and users, whilst also presenting us with major social dilemmas.
This talk will show why this matters to anyone working within culture today, and will specifically look at how artists working with technology, and technologists working creatively, are some of the best and most useful guides we have to navigate what I refer to as “the post-PRISM Landscape”.
27 August 2014 (Wednesday) 21:00 – 23:30
CCA Party
