
Alexandra Pirici, Aggregate, 2017, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, exhibition view. Courtesy Neuer Berliner Kunstverein.
How can a research centre dedicated to presenting an international perspective of contemporary art simultaneously engage with the artistic, the social, and geopolitical discourses of its community? Stagings. Soundings. Readings. rethinks formats and modes of display, regimes of attention, temporality and rhythm of performative works, exploring and expanding the in-between.
Starting from 21 September, audiences will see Maria Loboda’s installation of potted trees, This Work is Dedicated to an Emperor (2012), presented outside the Centre. Over the course of the exhibition, the arrangement and site of the installation changes, similar to an army line formation. Inside the foyer of the Centre, Heman Chong’s A Short Story About Geometry (2009), a participatory work between a member of the public and an instructor, has a participant memorising a 499-word short story written by the artist in 2013, taught verbally by the instructor. Tyler Coburn’s multi-part work Richard Roe (2018) comprises an orchid hybrid legally named by the artist himself, and a reading of Roe’s “memoir,” which describes a world populated by legal fictions.
As Stagings. Soundings. Readings. unfolds over the next few months, a series of performative situations are presented in The Exhibition Hall. Cally Spooner brings to Singapore an exercise in building vocabulary and knowledge through bodily means. Carlos Casas’s Avalanche XIV (2018) will present an audio-visual experience, composed together with Phill Niblock, that transverses landscape, soundscape, and contemporary music to highlight Hichigh—located in the Pamir mountain range (Tajikistan)—one of the world’s highest inhabited villages and one of the world’s most unknown and unexplored regions. Alexandra Pirici’s Re-Collection (2018) is a week-long performative exercise within the exhibition space of NTU CCA Singapore involving local performers. The action explores the possibility of collectively assembled memories of human and non-human presences on the planet, which guide the choreography of the performers.
Opening: Friday, 21 September 2018, 7.00 – 11.00pm
Venue: NTU CCA Singapore, Block 43 Malan Road, Singapore 109443
When: 21 Sep - 6 Nov 2018,
By: NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (NTU CCA Singapore)