Pathways of Performativity in Contemporary Southeast Asian Art, 27-28 June 2019
The international symposium “Pathways of Performativity in Contemporary Southeast Asian Art” casts a spotlight on the fascinating histories of performance practices which speak to the postcolonial, Cold War and politico-economic forces that have shaped Southeast Asia after the Second World War. It brings together renowned scholars and curators from the disciplines of art history, film and theatre studies, whose work explores the central role of performance in bridging the visual arts, theatre, dance, music and political activism in the region from the 1960s to the present.
On this page, you will find abstracts to the conversations, lectures and performances of the symposium, as well as the biographies of all contributors.
Abstracts:
Panel 1: Aesthetics and Politics of ‘Publicness’
"Performance as Picture: Performativity and Photography in Cambodia"
Dr Pamela Corey
In Phnom Penh, Cambodia, acclaimed performance practices emerged within the context of a popular engagement with urban change and architectural heritage that occurred at the end of the first decade of the new millennium. The timing of such events heightened their disparity with the real violence occurring within the city limits and beyond. Photographed performances by various artists drew from and acted upon these currents, using the lens and the body and siting spaces of imminent urban renewal to channel the moment into a form of documentation and action both lyrical and visceral. In this presentation, I look at works by Khvay Samnang and discuss the ways in which the spatial narratives of Khvay’s performed sites may have developed his artistic voice from an environment close at hand, that of the city in Phnom Penh at that specific time. Revisiting the ontological relationship between photography and performance, I discuss the ways in which these works reveal a continuity rather than a break from photography, stemming from the medium’s broader impact on conceptual practice in Phnom Penh in the new millennium. Drawing from Ariella Azoulay, I consider Khvay’s photographic series from that period as events engendering similar conditions of contingent relations and transformative encounters as those of performance.
"No Intersection: Where Theatre, Protest and Performance Art in Myanmar Meet"
Nathalie Johnston
There is no public space in Myanmar. The public is the body, often exposed, sometimes controlled, occasionally considered beyond suspicion. The body occupies space but it does not own it. It exists in spite of it.
How do non-public/public spaces, staged dramas, and marching activists interact with performance art in society? They extract from each other, share movements and history, but they resist the narrative of connection. In Myanmar, performance art, vernacular theatre, and protest coexist. This paper highlights the historical connections between all three, in order to engage with the last twenty years of contemporary art practice in Myanmar, specifically Yangon, where most documented performance pieces occurred between 1990 and 2015. Performance art thrived in Myanmar in the 2000s but has experienced some shift during Myanmar’s recent political transition. It is not yet clear whether the young generation of artists will embrace it as their predecessors did.
If we honored the wishes of the contemporary, we would divorce performance art completely from traditional uses of theatre. If we focus on the art, we neglect the politics and once we start in on politics, the art becomes something else entirely. But to investigate the drama of protest, the performance of theatre, the theatrical politics of performance art is to encompass the context. In a country where theatre was historically held on the street, where protest has been a way of life for over 150 years, and where the performance art scene was embraced with such vigor, such spirit of understanding, when it debuted in its contemporary form in the 1990s and remains one of Myanmar artists’ strongest mediums - what use is the separation of categories? This talk explores the relation between the three by investigating selected artworks and performing movements of the last thirty years in Myanmar, including the work of artists such as Htein Lin, Po Po, Phyu Mon and Zoncy.
"Wagering Performativity among Sites and Selves: Two Cases of Fraught Critical Gestures in Philippine Institutions"
Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez
This presentation engages with the precarious relationship between contingency and performativity which underpin much of the history of performance art in the Philippines. By invoking two cases (the first, Off-Site, Out of Sight done at the University of the Philippines, and the second, Criticism is Hard Work done at the Cultural Center of the Philippines) the problematics of engagement surface a tension, between breaking step with the present (and what is given) and casting toward a vision (with attendant risks of failure). In both cases (one launched in a site bearing the territorial strains of a state university and informal settlers living around campus; and the other, in a state cultural space otherwise unwelcoming of rowdy street children) artists attempt to enter into contested spaces. Undertaken at two different junctures, 2014 and 2007 respectively, post-project hindsight will be brought to bear on how artists’ selves and ‘participant’ selves inevitably play off with and against each other amidst the charged sites in which these encounters were posed. Artists, organizers, and cultural workers are often confounded with having to keep keenly grounded when attempting to emplace themselves in such touted public spheres, how does performativity figure in the push and pull between anchoring upon community dynamics and the artistic desire to flex and stay nimble?
Panel 2: Expanding Intermedial Histories
"Performing Epistemic Disobediences in Manila and Southeast Asia? Decolonial Possibilities in José Maceda’s Udlot-udlot and Ugnayan"
Dr meLê Yamomo
My theoretical reflections inquire into the decolonial possibilities of sound and performance studies as acts of what Mignolo calls ‘epistemic disobedience.’ Investigating Southeast Asian sound and performance practices, thus, is both a de-westernization of body- and geopolitics and an investigation into sound and performance’s interdisciplinary and emergent possibilities in rethinking more democratic and postcolonial aesthetic practices. This thinking which parallels contemporary art history’s turn towards visual studies methodologically expands beyond the conventional organization, standardization, and canonization of repertoires, canons, and artist biographies. In my project, I look into how performance, visual, and sound studies turn their analyses towards modes of perception and production as part of bigger social and cultural processes beyond the ‘art institutions.’ Such a framework for me allows for an epistemic turn to reframe cultural processes outside the colonial hegemony that previous artistic canons and institutions prioritized. In this paper, I will examine José Maceda’s Udlot-udlot and Ugnayan and their context in Manila and Southeast Asia. How did Maceda’s musical and artistic trajectory intersect with the burgeoning postcolonial thinking of the late twentieth century in the region? What new paradigms arose from the intersection of ethnomusicology and twentieth-century aesthetics?
"Pathways of Performance and Performance Art in Indonesia – ‘When was performance, performance art in Indonesia?’"
Dr Thomas Berghuis
In 2006, I published my book Performance Art in China. Part of this book is an art historical treatise mapping the potential history of ‘performance art’. Other parts contain notions of performance art and its remediation in contemporary art. There is a particular urgency in discourses and practices of performance art in China as well, which connect to the role of ‘publicness’ and situate performance as direct action, and the act of performance as the right to perform as well. When considering writing a history of performance art in Indonesia, I quickly became confronted with the theoretical and methodological challenges of art history. Art history is a field steeped in making distinctions – between cultures and traditions, fine art and crafts, objects and live art traditions. How can art history be suitable for writing performance art histories, except through documentation?
Performative and performativity are concepts that consider language and linguistic terms used for describing the role of action in relation to artistic form, my current research examines the position of art in relation to action, and hence chooses to relate performance to the deliberate and conscious action and the act of performance (i.e. to perform). The question ‘When was performance, performance art in Indonesia?’ is a way of considering multiple pathways in exploring a history of contemporary performance art Indonesia, through a series of case studies linking performance practices into potential notions of contemporary performance art in Indonesia. The paper will consider performances in the early 1980s, which follow earlier performance actions in the 1970s and that focus on reclaiming cultural traditions and identity in contemporary Indonesia. Artists whose work will be discussed, include Hardi, Bonyong Munny Ardhi, Semsar Siahaan - leading additional considerations for thinking about early performance actions in the 1980s, including by Arahmaini, Heri Dono and Eddie Hara.
"Unpacking Indonesian ‘Performance Art’ as Transdisciplinary Collaborations in the 1980s and 1990s"
Dr Amanda Rath
The ‘generation of the 80’s’ is retrospectively referred to as the start of contemporary performance in visual art in Indonesia. Performance art in Indonesia since at least the 1980s blurred the boundaries across various fields and performative traditions, particularly traditional performance and experimental theatre, music and literature, and practitioners who do not have an academic training in the visual arts. This presentation examines the emergence of key elements of the debate over attempts to situate and define performance in visual art, and installation art as an environment and space for performance and performative enactment. Crucial to this discussion were questions of sites of cultural quotation and citation, in critical juxtaposition to appropriation in the production of contemporary performance and installation art as new media.
My paper departs from the ‘generation of the 80’s’ and traces in particular performance-based art groups in Bandung between the 1980s and mid-1990s, including Studiklub Teater Bandung, Sumber Waras, Perengkel Jahé, Jeprut, Gerbong Bawah Tanah, and Blah Blah Wer. Among the case studies include works by artists Andar Manik, Marintain Sirait, Isa Perkasa, Nandang Gawe, Tisna Sanjaya, Wawan Husin, and Yoyo Yogasmana. This paper concerns the conceptual evolution of contemporary performance art across these groups – a shift from issues specific to visual art problems to a larger, more sustainable movement of critical engagement and cultural practice aimed to counter the pathologies of state programmes of modernization. Important to the present discussion is especially the intermedial and transdisciplinary collaborative nature of these groups and their durational projects, and the possible sociocultural implications of the related processes. Some methodologies included concentrated spiritual practices, and to a certain extent Augusto Boal’s work on ‘raising consciousness’ through theatre, aimed to liberate the body and the performing self from normative systems, the ways in which it is expected to act and move in order to be legible to society, in order to imagine a differently impactful way of being in the world, and the potentiality of non-linear creative intervention.
Keynote lecture 1:
"Sedimented Acts: Southeast Asian Artists’ Engagements with History Through Performance"
Prof Nora A. Taylor
In her book Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment, Rebecca Schneider wrote, in reference to time based works, that "history is a set of sedimented acts which are not the historical acts themselves but the act of securing any incident backward." The word sediment conjures a substance that has fallen to the bottom of a river bed, a once moving source that has now been kept still. In studying performance art, one must suspend temporality and simultaneously consider the act itself and its afterlife, its past and its present through photographs or images. This talk will examine time based works by artists from Vietnam, Myanmar and Singapore and consider both their historical moment and their future by looking at their current existence as a fragment, a relic, a document or a memory. Performance art practices in Southeast Asia offer a view onto the processes of historicization that is, how works of art come to be remembered in spite of the hostile environments, in the aftermath of war and political turmoil, that gave birth to them. These are not gestures of nostalgia, but rather meta-narratives that challenge the temporalities of contemporary art.
Keynote lecture 2:
"Animistic Medium: Genealogy of Performativity and Southeast Asian Contemporary Art"
Dr May Adadol-Ingawanij
Thinking ontologically in film, media and art entails thinking with an emblematic scene, figure, or myth of origin. In the intellectual history of western film theory, for instance, such established figures have included the cave, the disembodied gaze in the dark, and the spectators fleeing the screen. If we were to experiment with this kind of thinking by setting forth from Southeast Asia, what would be those exemplary scenes, figures, and myths with which to ask questions of ontology? How might we proceed from a practice, a history, a fragment, a genealogy of medium or aesthetic practice located somewhere in or across Southeast Asia, in order to ask foundational questions in art, film and media theory such as: What is image? How are images and objects animate? How do expressive forms address and enunciate?
This talk takes up the scene of animistic offering rituals as that emblematic scene with which to theorise the question of performativity of address and enunciation. I will explore the question of artistic address and enunciation in Southeast Asian contemporary art in constellation with this emblematic scene of human-nonhuman communication: itinerant film projection rituals performed as an offering addressed to powerful nonhuman presence in and around Thailand during the Cold War. The talk approaches ritualistic practices and repertoires of making offerings to spirits and powerful nonhuman beings as a site for thinking the potentiality of an expressive and performative praxis whereby powerless and precarious humans make utterances and gestures entwining bodily, material, installative, and technological practices and tools, as enunciations addressing powerful nonhuman forces and beings. Approaching the moving image practices of such artists as Korakrit Arunanondchai (No History in a Room Filled with People with Funny Names 5), Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook (An Artist Is Trying to Return to ‘Being a Writer’), Ho Tzu Nyen (The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia), Lav Diaz (A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery), Anocha Suwichakornpong (By the Time it Gets Dark), and Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Fireworks (Archives)) in proximity with animistic projection rituals opens up generative ways of thinking about the obliqueness and idiosyncrasies of touch, illumination, scale, duration, and utterance that make these artists’ handling of questions of social violence, historical destruction, and collective experiences of dislocation so strikingly challenging to description and interpretation. The talk identifies the following tendencies among this group of artistic practices: preoccupation with unknowability, form as germination and life, and intensity of scalar shifts and sensations playing on the limit of human perceptual capacity.
Panel 3: Performing Identities
"Things Happen When We Remember: Memory and the Archive in FX Harsono’s Works"
Dr Wulan Dirgantoro
Indonesia’s post-New Order era that began in 1998 ushered in a revival of Chinese Indonesian identity politics. After the abolition of the New Order’s assimilation laws, Chinese Indonesians were once again able to express their culture and identity, as well as revisit their history in ways previously prohibited or limited. Taking advantage of these newfound freedoms, a number of Chinese Indonesian visual artists began exploring themes of trauma, memory and history in their works. Drawing on both personal and collective memories about past anti-Chinese discrimination and violence, Chinese Indonesian artists ‘remember’ and explore alternative views of Chinese Indonesian history. The paper will examine the works of FX Harsono (b.1949), in particular how his performance works engage with the archive and ‘the impulse to collect’, to remember and perform history and trauma of Chinese Indonesians in the post-New Order era. The paper seeks to establish that the works of Chinese Indonesian artists need to be understood within the contexts of both the Indonesian contemporary arts scene and attempts to revisit historical ‘truths’ in the post-New Order era.
"Rebuilding Space, Body and Self: Alienation and Appropriation in Marintan Sirait’s Performative Practice"
Sally Oey
This presentation will focus on Indonesian artist Marintan Sirait’s performative practice in the 1990s and how it is based on a thorough awareness of the body in motion within structured space. Informed by her training as a classical dancer and by a profound interest in experimental body movements and music since the 1980s, Sirait’s practice stands for a multidisciplinary approach in which awareness for bodily engagement with motion, space, materials and sound merge into an intimate multi-sensory practice. In particular, the presentation examines her performance/installation piece Kami Sedang Membangun Rumah (Building a House) that centers around questions of the alienated body and Self, and the transformative quality that lies in a ritualistic informed practice.
Similar to other Indonesian artists of her generation, Sirait’s piece speaks to the repressive situation during the New Order Regime (1966-98), however, from a rarely articulated personal and existential point of view. The regime initiated regulations that were meant to penetrate the most intimate space, the home, which is, according to Sirait, inseparably connected to the body and the Self. This talk asks, how does the artist engage with the body as a site of power struggles and the process of estrangement within a ruptured Self and “home”? In what way does her performative practice rebuild the shattered relation that connects the Self, not only to its body, but to the world?
"Artist Talk: Unchartered Distance: Performing In-Between Here and There"
Anida Yoeu Ali
Artist, scholar and global agitator Anida Yoeu Ali will present a hybrid performance/talk and visual experience on the themes of transnationalism, otherness and exiled bodies. Her latest work, The Red Chador (2015-2017), unapologetically steps directly into the face of Islamophobia, whether it is on the streets of Paris after the Charlie Hebdo killings, or on the collegiate U.S. playgrounds of wealthy Trump voters. Unfortunately, in 2017, the original garment of The Red Chador was confiscated by Israeli airline officials, marking the death of the performance project. No stranger to controversy, Ali’s artworks have agitated against the White House (My Asian Americana, 2011 & Return to Sender, 2012), have been attacked by anonymous vandals (1700% Project, 2010), and even censored by Vietnam’s ‘culture’ police (Pushing Thru Borders, 2003). In light of her activities with her media lab, Studio Revolt, Ali will also discuss her works and ideas about contemporary justice and its residual effects on the Cambodian-American experience. Through performance and video works, she will present a body of work that provocatively considers the diasporic past and present contours of hybrid identities. Her work upholds her lifelong belief that art is a critical tool for individual and societal transformation. She also believes that performance work can trigger raw emotions, responses and actions from both performer and unsuspecting audience members. Ali discusses the challenges of creating work as a diasporic artist whose experiences and privileges allow for perspectives that shift constantly between “insider/outsider” identities. Additionally, she speaks to the difficulties of a collaborative practice with the goals of engaging the public in social justice issues. From The Buddhist Bug (2009-15) series, to her work with exiled voices in the films Cambodian Son (2014) and Verses in Exile (2015), her interest in Otherness and displacement continues to inform her art and praxis. Ali presents work actively engaged in international dialogues, community activism, and artistic resistance to multiple sites of oppression.
Panel 4: Archiving Performativity
"Form and Process"
Chương-Đài Võ
This talk considers the relationship between the performative and archives. In the reciprocal relationship between documentation and performance, there is a porous line between art and archive, form and process. The first case study will be the Lee Wen Archive—his documentation of his performances, and his notebooks and sketchbooks as a site of performance. The second case study will be Ho Tzu Nyen’s The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia as a model for thinking of archives as open narrative structures.
"Performativity Without Performance? Reflections and Questions on Medium in Post-Conceptual Contemporary Art"
Dr Roger Nelson
Does performance - art made with bodies in time - hold a special position within “Southeast Asian contemporary art”? Is performance privileged as a medium within post-conceptual practices? Or does the tendency for contemporary artists to work with diverse media and techniques—building on the transmedial nature of much modern art in the region—mean that performance is just another one among many strategies adopted by artists? Might performativity be invoked or implied, without the necessary presence of performance?
In this paper, I reflect on an exhibition I curated, titled And in the Chapel and in the Temples: Research in Progress by Buddhist Archive of Photography and Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho, held from 1 December 2018 to 10 February 2019 at NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore’s Lab. The exhibition featured a mural, by artists Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho, which took another mural as its point of conceptual departure: Alfonso Ossorio’s “Angry Christ,” painted in 1950 in a chapel in Negros Occidental, the Philippines. Lien and Camacho’s mural was painted in the exhibition space, within a few days, before the exhibition opened. This process was not open to the public. Yet did the appearance of the mural, and its temporary nature, together function to imply the performative action of it being painted? Alongside the mural, the exhibition featured images selected from an archive of photographs that were taken and/or collected by Buddhist monks in Luang Prabang. The original function of these photographs was as monastic pedagogical tools. That is, the image-objects in the Buddhist Archive of Photography were originally “performed” by monks in a manner similar to that which Nora A. Taylor describes as artist-archivist Koh Nguang How “animating” and “performing” his Singapore Art Archive Project. Exhibited far from the temple in which the photographic originals are archived, do these images also imply a performative storytelling of their narration? These reflections form questions about performance’s status as a medium within post-conceptual contemporary art in Southeast Asia.
"Performance Lecture: Conspiracy of Files"
Ho Rui An
Could the moment of the opening of an archive also be one of its foreclosure? In Conspiracy of Files, a peculiar historical episode in Singapore, the so-called Marxist conspiracy of 1987, becomes a point of departure for an investigation into the relationship between state power, the archive and the files that comprise it. In this close viewing, what is examined is less the files themselves than the act of filing: a performative gesture that lends power to the invocation, "it's in the files".
Biographies:
Anida Yoeu Ali is an artist whose works span performance, installation, video, images, public encounters, and political agitation. She is a first generation Muslim Khmer woman born in Cambodia and raised in Chicago. She is a founding collaborative partner of Studio Revolt, an independent artist run media lab in Phnom Penh. Her multidisciplinary work, The Buddhist Bug, has been exhibited in Phnom Penh galleries, Singapore International Photography Festival, Malaysia Heritage Centre Singapore, Southeast Asia ArtsFest London, and at the 5th Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale.
Dr Eva Bentcheva is currently the Goethe-Institut Postdoctoral Fellow at Haus der Kunst. Her research and curatorial work focus on performance and conceptual art from South and Southeast Asia and their diasporas. She was formerly Adjunct Researcher for the Tate Research Centre: Asia, and Senior Teaching Fellow at SOAS University of London.
Dr Thomas J. Berghuis is an independent curator and art historian based in the Netherlands. Berghuis was recently appointed the position of City Curator of Leiden by the Lucas van Leyden Fund in the Netherlands. He is the author of Performance Art in China (2006), and has recently been researching performance art in Indonesia, 1970s-present.
Dr Pamela Nguyen Corey is lecturer in South East Asian Art at SOAS University of London. She is currently completing her book manuscript The City in Time: Contemporary Art and Urban Form in Vietnam and Cambodia, and co-editing a special issue of Oxford Art Journal on voice as form, scheduled to appear in 2020.
Dr Wulan Dirgantoro is a McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. Her research interests are gender and feminism, and trauma and memory in Indonesian modern and contemporary art. Her publications include Feminisms and Indonesian Contemporary Art: Defining Experiences (2017).
Dr May Adadol Ingawanij is Reader in Visual Culture at the University of Westminster where she co-directs the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM). She is writing a book titled Contemporary Art and Animistic Cinematic Medium in Southeast Asia, with support from a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship (2018-19). Recent curatorial projects include Animistic Apparatus (ongoing), Lav Diaz Journeys (London, 2017), On Attachments and Unknowns (Phnom Penh, 2017) and Comparing Experimental Cinemas (Bangalore, 2014).
Nathalie Johnston is the founder and director of Myanm/art, an exhibition space and resource centre supporting emerging Myanmar artists in Yangon and abroad.
Annie Jael Kwan is an independent curator and researcher. Her curatorial initiative, Something Human, has since 2012 delivered exhibitions and live art in the UK and internationally to explore movement across borders, including the 2017 M.A.P. (Movement x Archive x Performance) project at the Diaspora Pavilion in Venice; and the pioneering Southeast Asia Performance Collection at the Live Art Development Agency in London that offers researchers, artists and curators access to performance art materials from the region. She is a founding core member of Asia-Art-Activism, which is in residence at Raven Row till August 2019.
Dr Damian Lentini is a curator at Haus der Kunst, Munich. After receiving his doctorate at the University of Melbourne (2009), he relocated to Germany in 2014. He has worked on projects with El Anatsui, Sarah Sze, Harun Farocki, Raqs Media Collective, and Forensic Architecture, among others. In 2018, he curated Khvay Samang’s Popil for Haus der Kunst’s Capsule exhibition series.
Roger Nelson is an art historian, and curator at National Gallery Singapore. He completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Nanyang Technological University, and holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne, on modern and contemporary “Cambodian Arts.” He is co-founding co-editor of the journal, Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia.
Sally Oey studied art history, intercultural communication and psychology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University and Leiden University. As a PhD candidate at LMU, her research interest lies in contemporary artistic practices from Indonesia that deploy performative strategies and relate to questions of otherness. Her research is supported by doctoral scholarships from the German Academic Exchange Service and the Bavarian Equality Grant.
Eileen Legaspi Ramirez is a writer-researcher and critic who teaches at the University of the Philippines (UP) Department of Art Studies. Moving forward with degrees in Journalism and Art History from UP, she is currently doing long-term research on site-specific community art initiatives across the Philippines, and is particularly interested in questions relating to affect, efficacy, and agency.
Dr Amanda Katherine Rath is a lecturer of modern and contemporary art of Southeast Asia in the Department of Southeast Asian Studies and the Institute of Art History at the Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main.
Ho Rui An is an artist and writer working in the intersections of contemporary art, cinema, performance and theory. Working primarily across the mediums of lecture, essay and film, he probes into the ways by which images are produced, circulate and disappear within contexts of globalism and governance. In 2018, he was a fellow of the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm.
Prof Nora A. Taylor is the Alsdorf Professor of South and Southeast Asian art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the author of Painters in Hanoi: An Ethnography of Vietnamese Art (Hawaii 2004 and NUS Press 2009) and co-editor of Modern and Contemporary Art: An Anthology (Cornell SEAP 2012) as well as numerous articles and two edited volumes on modern and contemporary Vietnamese and Southeast Asian art. She recently co-edited an upcoming special issue of Art Journal on History as Figure in the work of Contemporary South and Southeast Asian artists.
Chương-Đài Võ is a Researcher at Asia Art Archive, specializing in modern and contemporary art in Southeast Asia. Her writing can be found in Afterall Journal, Revues culturelles (forthcoming), Southern Constellations: The Poetics of the Non-Aligned, Taipei Fine Arts Museum’s Modern Quarterly, and Journal of Vietnamese Studies.
Dr Mechtild Widrich researches at the intersection of performance and the built environment. She has published on re-performance, feminist Actionism, monuments, as well as Singapore’s recent museum landscape, which is part of a broader study on site specificity and national identity. She teaches at the Art Institute of Chicago and is a board member of Art Journal.
Dr meLê Yamomo is Assistant Professor of Theatre and Sound Studies (University of Amsterdam), the author of Sounding Modernities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), and laureate of the »Veni Innovation Grant« (2017-2021) for his project »Sonic Entanglements«. He is also a scholar-in-residence at the Interweaving Performance Center and artist-in-residence at Theater Ballhaus Naunynstrasse-Berlin.
