Keynote Lecture by Wong Binghao (Bing)

Following the intuitions of their essayistic approach to art, Per°Form CoThink Lab Fellow Wong Binghao (Bing) will read composited excerpts from research essays that they have written in the past decade. This material will sediment into its primary object: 5G Bing, an Internet grimoire that compiles wayward and extravagant ideas, writing, aesthetics, and cultural criticism, edited and creative directed by Bing. Part magazine, mood board, PR campaign, journal, research dossier, and archive, 5G Bing is a growing network of collaborations and conversations that have been jointly enabled by digital and curatorial technologies. The project accrues from and further annotates 7 years of discursive projects by Bing that locate the stakes of the curatorial in non-exhibitionary forms.

Media Release: What's Coming Up at T:>Works: Explore Nature & Ecologies with Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez and 5G Hotspot with Wong Binghao!

Open Conversations

How can we imagine accountability processes to look like within our communities?

What are our hopes and visions for the future of the queer community in Singapore?

How can we belong while holding room for differences?

Per°Form CoThink Lab Fellow Bussy Temple invites Bussy Temple's community members and fellow rave organisers to Open Conversations: On Future Hopes for Queer Community & Accountability. Come co-reflect with us on rave organising, accountability, and hopes for the queer community.

This event intends to be a non-hierarchical and collaborative environment, rooted in mutual exploration and open dialogue. Together, we will explore ideas and solutions through shared insights and experiences.

The session will include a Build-A-Rave workshop, where we want to hear how you would approach different problems that rave organisers face; space to process the last party together; and a larger co-reflection on hopes for our community.

Performance Seminar

This seminar asks — how do we love nature? To what extent does a love for nature inspire action? Drawing on historical research on religion and ecology in maritime Southeast Asia, assistant professor in Southeast Asian Studies and Malay Studies Faizah Zakaria (NUS) explores love for nature as fascinated enchantment, as acts of care, as protective impulses, as patient forbearance, and as motivation for the renovation of self and others. Moving across time, we will trace how our interactions with non-human beings have been mediated by religion, and later, by secularisation. Through elephants in the Malay peninsula, songbirds in postwar Singapore, and bio-remediation plants in the Lorong Halus wetlands, Zakaria aims to bring religion to what philosopher Lauren Berlant calls “a properly political concept of love” and explore its possibilities for galvanising action — or conversely, for entrenching inertia.

Pecha Kucha Micro-Presentations

Since May, Per°Form CoThink Lab Fellow Opens has invited artists, academics, and activists invested in spiritual knowledges and practices to participate in Critical Spirituality, a programme series examining the place(s) of the spiritual in the contemporary world.

Opens was happy to gather some of its collaborators together once again for Postcritical Spirituality, an evening of Pecha Kucha micro-presentations followed by a free-and-easy community mixer.

Pecha Kucha Micro-Presentations

My Journey into Buddhism as a Non-binary Girl
Micro-Presentation by An Ding

This micro-presentation was an intimate, heartfelt sharing of An Ding’s unusual, winding journey into Buddhism by way of Christian Evangelicalism, atheism, and interfaith exploration. Through a mix of anecdotes drawn from her spiritual journey and personal meditations on Buddhist scriptures and practices, she offered an inspiring tale about finding queer affirmation through spiritual practice, and a glimpse into the work that could be (and is being) done to transform traditionally conservative communities and environments.

Threshold, Frontline, Frontier: Biodynamics in Struggle & The Power of Witness
Micro-Presentation by Meli Chan Lee

How can body-centered healing practices attuned to our original embodied being-states also nourish political action and enable collective repair? Through personal anecdotes gathered from her experiences in activism, performance, and therapeutic practice, Meli Chan Lee’s micro-presentation encouraged us to tap into our bodies’ potentials to better awaken and amplify consciousness, offering strategies for expanding our thresholds to receive the vibrant life-forces within and around us.

Cow, Union Buster!
Micro-Presentation by Parashar Kulkarni

Did the spread of the cow protection movement in colonial and postcolonial India encourage identitarianism and erode working class solidarity? Reviewing the situation in and around industrial cotton mills from the onset of the industrial revolution in India to the 1990s, Parashar Kulkarni’s micro-presentation discussed how the cow, a sacred symbol in Hinduism, was appropriated and weaponised in the anti-labour strategies of mill owners, political leaders, and pro-capitalist governments, becoming symbolic of new collusions between religion, politics and capital.

A Study of Redness: the Scarlet Woman & the Red Man
Micro-Presentation by Jireh Koh

In this micro-presentation, Jireh Koh discussed findings from his interdisciplinary research on mythology, theology, and meaning-making practices, focusing on a pair of enigmatic red-hued figures: the Scarlet Woman and the Red Man. Tracing the controversial, ambivalent roles played by these recurring figures across different religious/spiritual traditions, from Christianity and modern western esotericism to Hinduism and (Greco-)Buddhist thought, Jireh took the motif of redness as an entry point towards reflecting on a range of pressing themes, including gender roles, the abject, and the use of subversion and transgression as means for reclaiming power and agency.

Convergent Shamanism Through A Diasporic Lens
Micro-Presentation by Arunditha Emmanuel

Shamanism is arguably the most ancient and universal form of human spirituality, with multiple shamanisms arising around the world and throughout (pre)history in a kind of convergent evolution. Drawing on ethnographic materials and personal insights and experiences, Arunditha Emmanuel’s micro-presentation discussed some of the techniques and principles that guide her own neo-shamanic practice, offering a glimpse into the cosmological schema of one shamanic being.

Spectro-Commodities: A Very Brief Introduction
Micro-Presentation by Joshua Comaroff

It might seem curious that ghosts and spirits in Singapore are widely believed to be covetous, up-to-date consumers. Whereas “spectral theory” in the West often associates the ghost with the immaterial, the historical, and with lack, a rich and wildly diverse economy of offerings and other goods, including effigies modeled after luxury cars, designer clothes, gourmet foods, and the latest tech (not to mention absurdly exorbitant sums of hell money), has evolved to cater to the needs of the non-living here. In this micro-presentation, Joshua Comaroff shared some of his research into past and present conventions for ancestral gift-giving, and explored the questions that emerge around this medium of popular religious aesthetics.

Workshop-Presentation with Performance-Demonstration

Sound is an essential element of the shamanisms practiced in indigenous cultures around the world, and continues to be an indispensable tool for neo-shamanic practitioners today. For the shaman, sonic techniques and technologies can open a multitude of dimensions within the self and the other, helping practitioners access altered states of consciousness, facilitate methods of healing and divination, and enable translocal and interspecies forms of communication.

In this workshop-presentation, Arunditha Emmanuel discussed the role of sound in shamanism and its possible intersections with contemporary music-making and creative processes. The evening concluded with an intuitive sound performance-demonstration by Arunditha and collaborating artist-musician Anise.

Digital Keynote by Dr Jerrine Tan

Hosted and Moderated by Dr. Ong Keng Sen 

Zoom Webinar
8pm (SGT/HKT) / 8am (EDT) / 2pm (CEST)

Yeo Siew Hua’s “A Land Imagined” is interspersed with long scenes at a work site. The camera often rests on the droning work of machines and workers carting and sorting gravel. But for all the movement that is displayed, no change has taken place. Piles of gravel are demolished and moved to make new piles. The persons in the film appear similarly fungible: an injured labourer can become a driver, a corpse may or may not explain a disappearance. Ultimately, the site is revealed to be a land reclamation site which reveals that movement of gravel is not a closed innocuous system, but is part of a zero-sum game, in which one country grows bigger by cannibalising those around it. Using Saidiya Hartman’s work on fungibility as a lens through which Dr Jerrine Tan considers the modern-day “coolie” in the film, and Lisa Lowe’s writing on immigration and citizenship, her Per°Form keynote allegorises the movement of and across bodies of water for the similar movement of indentured labourers.

Media Release: Per°Form presents Digital Keynote by Dr Jerrine Tan — A Land Imagined: A Transnational Framework on Land Reclamation and Labour

One-Day Discursive Programme

Curated by Ho Rui An

In 1971, a big-character poster put up by a frustrated worker at a factory manufacturing computers in Maoist-era China read: “The management follows the line of experts instead of the mass line; to build a computer one must know not only how to connect the lines but also where to draw the line!” About a year later, S. Rajaratnam, the Singapore foreign minister, vividly invoked in a now-historic speech the “tentacles of technology” that connected a global “chain of cities” which included the then rapidly developing city-state. Reading these two moments against the contemporary context of a globally integrated Chinese economy, the observation by the Singaporean statesman appears to have anticipated the displacement of Cold War-era ideological lines by the network of “lines” that would enable China to “open up” its economy to global capitalist markets during its Reform era.

Organised by artist, writer and Per°Form Fellow Ho Rui An, A World of Lines: From Third World Solidarities to Postsocialist Globalism explores the shifting geopolitical imaginaries within what was known as the Third World during the historical period that began with the end of empire and culminated in the late seventies with the foreclosure of socialism as a mass political project. In pursuing this periodisation, this one-day discursive programme seeks to map a historical trajectory distinct from Eurocentric narratives that situate the neoliberal triumph over international socialism in the late eighties. Contesting the enduring image of the fall of the Berlin wall as a liberation of the people into the free and unbounded space of the market, it considers instead what new lines are drawn to secure the market and how the persistence of socialist legacies amidst postsocialist globalism complicates the penetration of global capital into national markets across the world.

Through a series of presentations, workshops and focused conversations, invited speakers will share their research in response to these themes while facilitating a collective process of thinking with the various visual and literary sources that they have gathered from both public archives and private collections. This source-based and open-ended format reflects the ongoing and speculative nature of the inquiry amidst the intensification of unresolved Cold War-era tensions, resurgent ethnonationalisms and widening socioeconomic inequalities that have come to disrupt the lines of labour, technology and capital in the prevailing global order.

Presentations & Workshops

Factories, Tables, Revolution, Economy
Workshop with Ho Rui An and Zian Chen

Drawing upon their research into the political economy of Reform-era China, Ho Rui An and Zian Chen will share a selection of historical material sourced from official archives, informal networks and popular culture with which they seek to map the emergence of “the economy” as a distinct subject of governance in China beginning in the 1970s. Moving from cinematic scenes of factory workers pressuring their managers to adhere to the principles of socialist management to photographs of Chinese and Singaporean technocrats seated at massive meeting tables discussing techniques for managing society, this workshop invites participants to think through the set of separations—the party-state from the masses, information from ideology, the political from the economic—that underwrote the displacement of the revolutionary mass line by the lines of labour, technology and capital that connect everything within the global economy. Such a process preceded the official launch of China’s economic reforms by several years and was best observable at such liminal sites as the Canton Fair (China Import and Export Fair) where the capitalist and socialist worlds converged in a time when the ideological lines of the Cold War were being redrawn.

To A Faraway Friend: Letters Written with Fire 
Workshop with Kathleen Ditzig, Sooyoung Leam and Carlos Quijon, Jr.

Based on research that has grown out of their Afro-Southeast Asian Affinities exhibitionary project, participants will explore the complex negotiation of neocolonial struggles for sovereignty under strongmen-led “democracies” across East and Southeast Asia during the Cold War. Participants will be encouraged to study historical material that illustrate demonstrations and uprisings in the region. They will also be asked to consider how neocolonial entanglements have mediated discourses of sovereignty, self-sufficiency, and self-interest. Participants will be invited to write fictional letters to a faraway friend to reconstruct their own “history” of these events. By leaning into the historical and the fictive as productive political gestures and questioning the responsibilities of marshalling these gestures, participants will not only reflect upon lesser known aspects of the evolving relationship that exists between postcolonial countries and world powers, but also consider how contemporary geopolitics and ideologies have coloured and framed the lens with which we can read histories of postcolonial solidarities and the futures that they set aflame.

Shekou, Jurong: Industrial Zone, Developmental State and Global Neoliberalism
Presentation by Taomo Zhou

Located on the western coast of Shenzhen, China’s first and most successful special economic zone, Shekou is an enclave just a little more than 2-square-kilometres that is even more experimental than Shenzhen itself. Established in January 1979, more than one year before the official launch of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, Shekou was the first “test tube” in socialist China that accepted foreign investment. Shekou’s design and development was partially inspired by Jurong, a district located in the western part of Singapore which transformed from a swamp land to an industrial hub in the 1970s. In this presentation, Taomo Zhou, who grew up in Shekou and has spent the past seven years living and working in Jurong, will share her memories and observations about the two industrial zones. Through this process, she seeks to explore larger questions about the international history of industrialisation and deindustrialisation and the global emergence of neoliberalism.

Digital Lecture by Nurul Huda Rashid

Hosted by Dr. Ong Keng Sen

Zoom Webinar
8pm (SGT) / 2pm (CEST) / 8am (EDT)

T:>Works’ Per°Form continues with its third Fellow, researcher-writer Nurul Huda Rashid, currently pursuing her PhD in Cultural Studies. Her research focuses on images and narratives, visual and sentient bodies, feminisms, and the intersections between them. Her digital lecture, Image, Data, Actor: Unpacking Images of Muslim Women will be moderated by T:>Works’ Artistic Director Dr. Ong Keng Sen.

The Muslim woman has been a consistent subject of representation across regimes of historical colonialism and Orientalism, in events such as the Arab Spring and post-9/11, and mediated widely via news and social media. These have included variegated representations from the odalisque to the ‘oppressed’ which have converged the identity of the Muslim woman to the single image and symbol of the hijab (veil). Spanning across different bodies of work, this lecture will introduce and plot Nurul’s photographic, annotative, and participatory research that has engaged with representations of Muslim women from the daguerreotype to data. These projects will be discussed alongside the medium of photography and the data shift, which transforms the self into data, rendering those in the margins as ‘absent data’. Through self-reflexive means and methods, the context of ‘absent data’ will become the site for artistic explorations and aspire towards a recalibration of Muslim women identities via the role of the Muslim woman as ‘actor’ in rethinking processes of image-making.

Media Release: Per°Form presents Digital Lecture by Nurul Huda Rashid — Image, Data, Actor: Unpacking Images of Muslim Women

Digital Keynote by Ho Rui An

Zoom Webinar
8pm (SGT) / 1pm (CET) / 7pm (ET) / 3.30pm (IRST)

After a successful inaugural keynote in May 2021 by Per°Form Fellow Shubigi Rao, T:>Works Per°Form returns with a second Fellow, artist and writer Ho Rui An. He will deliver a two-part programme that began with the digital keynote, From Crisis to Value*. The keynote draws from his in-situ research in multiple Asian countries investigating the effects of globalism on Asian financial capitals. Following the keynote is his video installation, Asia the Unmiraculous, which opened in artspace 72-13, Singapore.

In the digital keynote From Crisis to Value*, Ho 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. He will guide us through his research trajectory that began with his investigation of the so-called Asian financial crisis of the late nineties, to the political economy of post-reform China, and is now focused on the impact of the pandemic and the new socioeconomic realities it presents us with. Spanning the mediums of performance, film, and installation, the works produced from this research have variously examined the relationship between race and financial capitalism, the student as a figure of capitalist modernity and radical culture, the displacement of class politics by a discourse of anti-corruption amidst the systemic crises of late capitalism, and, most recently, the textile industry and its many afterlives within the Greater China region.

Digital Lecture by Shubigi Rao

Hosted by Dr. Ong Keng Sen.

Zoom Webinar
8pm (SGT) / 2pm (CET) / 8am (EDT)

Per°Form begins with the inaugural digital lecture by artist Shubigi Rao on 6 May 2021. The lecture will focus on three main areas of Shubigi’s practice – as a writer, an artist, and as an artist-curator for the 5th edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2021, and the overlaps and tensions between them.

Shubigi will discuss the connections between on-site artistic production and her work as artist-curator, as well as the ways in which artistic strategies inform curatorial research. Drawing from her curatorial experiences in a pandemic-affected world, she will also examine 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.