PER°FORM FELLOWSHIP
Knowledge Production, Contextualised Research,
Situated Practices:
The Translocal
Decoloniality
By T:>Works
"Anibal Quijano defined coloniality of power as the structures of power, control, and hegemony in all dimensions of social life, including sexuality, authority, subjectivity, and labour. In Per°Form 2024, we invite global south strategies on Quijano's proposal for a socialisation of power or distribution of power which privileges local communities’ collective forms of authority, a shared power that rejects hierarchy, control, and subjectivation, as well as a form of democratisation from bottom up."
Dr. Ong Keng Sen, Artistic Director
ABOUT Per℉orm
Led by Artistic Director Dr. Ong Keng Sen, T:>Works continues to expand its mission of pioneering thought leadership in the arts, and providing educational perspectives through situated research and discourse.
Moving beyond the art world and collaborating with Arts Network Asia, T:>Works introduces a fellowship platform from 2021 to 2024 that cuts across silos, disciplines, and fields, to support contextualised research, situated practices, and translocal knowledge production as a shared resource for the future. In particular, Per°Form focuses on the arts practitioner as a thought leader engaged in care and repair, actively bridging histories, the precarious present, and world-creating.
T:>Works has named this fellowship platform, Per℉orm , which is centred around the idea of leaving nobody and nothing behind. Per℉orm harnesses the contexts of multiple ‘locals’, honouring a local which is simultaneous and interdependent on other locals, and emphasising that all localities are dependent on each other, even though they may be physically very distant. The Fellow may be based in another localised context; knowledge and research produced there will be digitally shared with publics in Singapore and internationally.
Per℉orm fellowship is open to collaborative ventures between artists, scientists, writers, curators, activators, and creative communities, amongst others.
“Per℉orm brings the audience of this fellowship programme back to the basics of acting in our personal capacities and performing our personal responsibilities to create liveable societies.”
Dr. Ong Keng Sen, Artistic Director
Open Academy
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Per°Form Open Acadmey of Arts and Activations 2023
Per°Form Open Academy of Arts and Activations is the inaugural live gathering of 15 Per°Form Fellows from the Global South – Africa, Arab World, Asia-Pacific, the Caribbean, South America – and its diaspora. These Fellows, intersectional practitioners across diverse disciplines of curation, research, education, visual culture, performance, will present their strategies for activating contexts and communities.
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Per°Form Open Acadmey of Arts and Activations 2024
In Per°Form 2024, we invite global south strategies on Quijano's proposal for a socialisation of power or distribution of power which privileges local communities’ collective forms of authority, a shared power that rejects hierarchy, control, and subjectivation, as well as a form of active democratisation from bottom up.
CoThink Lab
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Per°Form Inaugural Digital Lecture: Shubigi Rao
In this inaugural digital lecture, Shubigi Rao draws from her curatorial experiences in a pandemic-affected world, and examines the position of artist-curator within a potentially fraught biennale-model, and the forms of knowledge generation that could potentially be sustained through such curatorial research and practice.
A Per℉orm inaugural digital lecture examining connections on three main areas of Shubigi’s practice – as a writer, an artist, and as an artist-curator and the overlaps and tensions between them.
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Speaker: Shubigi Rao
Moderator: Dr. Ong Keng Sen -
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From Crisis to Value*
Ho Rui An’s digital keynote discusses his recent and ongoing bodies of work exploring the material networks and geopolitical imaginaries that have animated the regions of East and Southeast Asia.
A Per℉orm digital lecture investigating the effects of globalism on Asian financial capitals.
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Speaker: Ho Rui An
Moderator: Noorlinah Mohamed -
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Per℉orm Exhibition: Ho Rui An & Shubigi Rao
Ho Rui An’s video installation Asia the Unmiraculous and Shubigi Rao film The Pelagic Tract will be exhibited together at 72-13.
A Per℉orm exhibition features the two works for the first time in Singapore.
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Image, Data, Actor: Unpacking Images of Muslim Women
Researcher-writer Nurul Huda Rashid, digital lecture introduces and plots Nurul’s photographic, annotative, and participatory research that engages with the representation of Muslim women in the processes of image-making.
A Per℉orm digital lecture engaging with representations of Muslim women from the daguerreotype to data.
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Speaker: Nurul Huda Rashid
Moderator: Dr. Ong Keng Sen -
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A World of Lines: From Third World Solidarities to Postsocialist Globalism
Through a series of presentations, workshops and focused conversations, invited speakers will share their research in this one-day discursive programme.
A Per℉orm discursive programme led by artist, writer and Per°Form Fellow Ho Rui An.
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Curator: Ho Rui An
Speakers: Zian Chen, Kathleen Ditzig, Sooyoung Leam, Carlos Quijon, Jr., Taomo Zhou -
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A Land Imagined: A Transnational Framework on Land Reclamation and Labour
Using Saidiya Hartman’s work on fungibility as a lens, and Lisa Lowe’s writing on immigration and citizenship, Dr Jerrine Tan considers the modern-day “coolie” in Yeo Siew Hua’s film “A Land Imagined”.
A Per℉orm digital lecture examining transnational movement of labour and land reclamation.
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Speaker: Dr Jerrine Tan
Moderator: Dr. Ong Keng Sen
Dr. Ong Keng Sen, Artistic Director
“In this new decade and over the next three years, T:>Works seeks to develop knowledge production in hopes of sustaining futures on a planetary level, beyond cultural, geographical, ideological and national borders. To this end, T:>Works is particularly attuned to the making of potential futures that speak to the ethical interconnections between cultures, humans, species, and other forces that animate our physical world.
As humans, we produce knowledge on a daily basis. But how often do we think about the implications of our knowledge production? Knowledge can be used to connect and bridge. It has also been used to divide and conquer.
By threading ethics throughout T:>Works’ journey from the ’90s till today, T:>Works, as an independent arts organisation and a thought leader, brings with us a new way of being and acting – guided by care and, hopefully, repair – into this new decade.”