Art Pals

Curated by Noorlinah Mohamed. The Art Pal is inspired by the Festival In-Transit that Ong Keng Sen created for House of World Cultures in Berlin in 2002. The Art Pal is a buddy from the plethora of host cultures that the Open Academy is embedded. The Art Pal becomes a personal conduit to connect Fellows to an-other locality. Meeting first digitally and then individually face-to-face, the Art Pals and Fellows journey In The Commune together. They engage in small and individual ways, away from the institutional focus that has dominated the arts in recent years.

  • Aki Hassan

    Aki Hassan is a visual artist, whose work is concerned by the varying forms of dependencies evolved within fictive kinships. Through their sculptural installations and experimental comics, Aki speculates on trans embodiment and bodily (con)sequences. They currently live and work in Singapore.

  • Alfian Sa'at

    Alfian Sa’at is the Resident Playwright of Wild Rice. His published works include three collections of poetry, two collections of prose and three collections of plays.

  • Becca D'Bus

    Becca D'Bus is a drag queen interested in garments, entertainment, activism and pleasure. She produces and hosts RIOT! Singapore's only regular drag revue. She’s been known to stir some shit.

  • Berny Tan

    Berny Tan is an artist, independent curator, and writer who explores the tensions that arise when she applies systems to – and unearths systems in – her subjective experiences. Her curatorial approach is built on principles of empathy, sensitivity, and close collaboration with artists.

  • Hasyimah Harith

    Hasyimah Harith is one of the founding members of P7:1SMA, a dance company that creates in the intersections of tradition and contemporary. Using her body as the starting point, Hasyimah works with the Malay identity and female sexuality, as a way to reclaim the agency over her body. Her working method involves strategies such as vulnerability, pleasure and confession. She believes in the power of the body to confront and overcome the conditioned shame that is often attached to Malay-Muslim female sexuality.

  • Helios Singh Bajwa

    Helios Singh Bajwa is a writer and curator working at the intersections of contemporary art and philosophy. He organises Bras Basah Open, a para-academic forum for the arts and humanities in Singapore.

  • Isabelle Desjeux

    Isabelle Desjeux is a molecular-biology trained artist who uses her lab experience to create new kinds of scientific method-based artworks. Her work often takes place in and with the community.

  • Jevon Chandra

    Jevon Chandra is a transdisciplinary artist exploring the interplays between notions of belief and doubt. He is presently co-lead of Singapore-based socially-engaged art collective Brack, and is interested in creating spaces of thoughtful interactivity, enchantment, and pause.

  • Kamiliah Bahdar

    Kamiliah Bahdar has worked across numerous exhibitions, programmes and projects as curator, organiser, collaborator, researcher and writer. She is in a new cycle of her curatorial practice, focusing on the role of art in education.

  • Nabilah Said

    Nabilah Said is a Singapore-based playwright, editor and artist who works with text as material. She is a trained journalist and editor, an educator, a published essayist and poet.

  • Objectifs

    Objectifs is a visual arts space in Singapore that is dedicated to film and photography. Established in 2003, their goal is to cultivate original voices in visual storytelling, and to inspire and broaden perspectives through the power of images. They do this by presenting a year round programme of exhibitions, screenings, workshops, talks, mentorships and residencies, aimed at fostering dialogue about visual culture, and advancing the practice and appreciation of photography and film.

  • Seelan Palay

    Seelan Palay (aka Balasubrahmaniam Val Sees The Future Palay), of the Absolute Singular and Absolute Multitude, is the post-contemporary artist whose practice involves time, ideology, the human condition, and the Most Glorious Divine Comedy. Born in Singapore, Earth, of Sri Lankan Tamil descent, Val often works with mixed media, installation, performance, film, text, and sound.

  • Sonny Liew

    Sonny Liew is the author of the multi-Eisner winning The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye, a New York Times and Amazon bestseller, and the first graphic novel to win the Singapore Literature Prize. Other works include The Shadow Hero (with Gene Luen Yang), Doctor Fate (with Paul Levitz), Red Lines (with Cherian George), The Pandemic Cookbook (with Dr. Hsu Li Yang) and Malinky Robot, as well as titles for Marvel Comics, DC Comics, DC Vertigo, Boom Studios and Disney Press.

  • Robert Zhao Renhui

    Robert Zhao Renhui is a multi-disciplinary artist and the founder of the Institute of Critical Zoologists. His artistic practice addresses humanity’s relationship with nature, and is characterised by a longstanding interest in investigating sites defined by the conflation of wilderness and urbanisation. Arising from a research-oriented process, his artistic output spans and blurs the boundaries between the mediums of photography, video, mixed-media installations, and publications. In doing so, he realises stories and narratives that re-focus attention on the planet’s ecological imbalance in palpable ways.

  • Zarina Muhammad

    Zarina Muhammad works at the intersections of performance, text, installation, ritual, sound, moving image and participatory practice. Her practice is interested in the critical re-examination of ecocultural and ecological histories, myth-making, haunted historiographies, water cosmologies and chthonic realms.