Per°Form Open Academy Programme Booklet

Per°Form Global South Fellows 2023

Aouefa Amoussouvi (Berlin); Art Labor (Ho Chi Minh City); Chidumaga Uzoma Orji (Abuja); Giuliana Kiersz (Berlin/Buenos Aires); Helia Hamedani (Rome/Tehran); Keren Lasme (Abidjan); Ladji Kone (Ouagadougou); Martha Luisa Hernández Cadenas (Havana); Mona Benyamin (Haifa); Nirlyn Seijas (Salvador Bahia); Rah Naqvi (Amsterdam/India); Renan Laru-an (Berlin/Sultan Kudarat); Rola Khayat (Doha); Soukaina Aboulaoula (Marrakesh); Tara Fatehi (London/Tehran)

Patrons

Foreword

Per°Form Open Academy of Arts and Activations is conceptualised and curated by T:>Works Artistic Director, Dr. Ong Keng Sen.

The inaugural Per°Form Open Academy of Arts and Activations: a porous space bridging solidarities and knowledges in the precarious present.

Per°Form Open Academy of Arts and Activations is the inaugural live gathering of 14 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.

With Per°Form, T:>Works aims to cut across silos, disciplines, and fields to support contextualised research, situated practices, and translocal knowledge production as shared resources for the future.

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.

For Per°Form Open Academy of Arts and Activations, we draw inspiration from our seminal work investigating nomadic alternative universities and world-creating in the arts: The Flying Circus Project (1996–2013), as well as the Curator’s Academy (2018-2022) including the Berlin collaboration with Maxim Gorki Theater.

Image courtesy of Jeannie Ho

Why an Open Academy? The Academy can be traced to the Greek classical centre of learning dedicated to wisdom and skill. Today, the Academy has developed into institutes of secondary and tertiary higher learning, generally with research or honorary membership, concerned about “the accumulation, development, and transmission of knowledge across generations, as well as its practitioners and transmitters.”¹

The Open Academy embraces alternatives, implying an openness which opposes hierarchical learning, refuses elite membership, and ultimately unpacks the institution into a porous space.

The Per°Form Open Academy aspires towards planetary consciousness as propounded by Achille Mbembe, the Cameroonian public intellectual.2 I believe “the idea of openness and porosity is even more important when we evaluate and redefine how we sustain liveability on Earth. We have arrived at a complex fusion of life and the Earth, rather than a separation of human and non-human. In particular, the planetary refers explicitly to the artefacts, things, and tools which the human has invented such as notations, writings, books, objects, stills, moving image recordings and the digital. There is also a connection made between animism and metaphysics, bringing in a spiritual, irrational realm which the human and non-human do not necessarily rationally include. Our emphasis in Per°Form is living, multiplicity, and transformation on this geological magma-filled rock.”

Central to the Per°Form Open Academy of Arts and Activations is a marathon format on 15 April stretching from 11am to 1am the next day, where the audience is encouraged to visit for an hour or two, or stay for as long as they desire. This marathon format has its precedents in the legacy of T:>Works’ The Flying Circus Project (1996 – 2013).

1 Wikipedia.

2Achille Mbembe, “How To Develop A Planetary Consciousness,” Interview with Nils Gilman and Jonathan S. Blake, Noema Magazine, Berggruen Institute, accessed 10 February 2023,https://www.noemamag.com/how-to-develop-a-planetary-consciousness/.

Hammock Cafe at "South by South-East, A Further Surface" At Times Museum, Guangdong, China. Courtesy of Art Labor.

Keynote by Art Labor

The vibrations of forms of water - molecules of hydrogen - can shift both a terrain and a social structure and thus the politics of the local. In the folklore of the Jrai people, one of the ethnic minority groups living in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, whom we have been collaborating with, the water movement into “in-between” forms – the "trans" – indicates the landscape and the environment's changes, from rivers and underground spring streams, dew drops, summer breezes, to natural disasters.

In this keynote, Art Labor will immersively recreate JUA - a state/field of water moving in the air and will share thoughts, activities, and resonances of this “water thought” in the village community, including human and all living beings, revealing the relationships, imaginativeness, and challenges.

From top to bottom: Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran, Thao Nguyen Phan, Truong Cong Tung

Hammock Cafe at "Cosmopolis-Collective Intelligence", Center Pomidou, Paris, France. Courtesy of Art Labor.

Marathon Schedule

Renan Laru-an

Aouefa Amoussouvi

Rola Khayyat

Soukaina Aboulaoula

Helia Hamedani

Keren Lasme

Uzoma Orji

Mona Benyamin

Ladji Kone

Rah Naqvi

Martha Luisa Hernández Cadenas

Giuliana Kiersz

Tara Fatehi

Nirlyn Seijas

The Commune Banquet / Q & A

End of Marathon

A relaxed and casual urban picnic set in a hammock cafe. Here, 14 Fellows tell narratives of situated practices. Each is a window to 14 different worlds. 14 inventive and riotous ways to activate possible futures.

Stretching over 14 hours, audience may come and go. Stay as long as you desire. Leave and return again. The urban picnic ends with The Commune Banquet - convivial conversations over a feast.

Renan Laru-an The First Exhibitions | 11am

In recent years, the standard of exhibition-making in contemporary visual art as well as in creative platforms has “streamed” subjectivities and contexts in an unprecedented speed that turns art into data, information, and facts. Such well-intentioned commitments to communication and accessibility have seemingly prioritised content production and discourse management through works of art. With these conditions, how does the artistic resist the agency of “standard” exhibitions, and how does the curatorial facilitate the normalisation of new content regimes with or without art? Renan will return to the memories of his “first” exhibitions in order to engage with these questions. He will immerse himself in the fragility of his recollection, the deception of nostalgia, and the vigour of daydreaming to disarrange his imagination of art, artists, curator, curating, and exhibitions.

Aouefa Amoussouvi

“207 Years Ago I Would Have Been Standing In The Amphitheater” And Other Attempts To Decolonize “Digital” Technologies | 11.50am

This lecture is a multi-sensory meditation bridging intersectional feminism, decoloniality, crafts, and digital technologies. Central questions are: Who writes History? How biased is scientific research? And which parts of the history of science have been erased to polish the image of some scientists or render others invisible? Traveling in time and space, Aouefa will touch upon digital colonialism, the story of Sara Baartman, personal narratives, and the chemistry, ritualism, and planetary history of cacao. Aouefa will further present some of her recent collaborative projects, which attempt to decolonise “digital” technologies and to explore the blurry boundaries between art and craft, rituals and technologies, body and mind, human and non-human, History and microhistory, institutional and self-organised.

Rola Khayyat

Noise of Time | 12.40pm

“Noise of Time” speculates upon the afterlives of “empire” entangled in family histories, tangible and intangible landscapes, and unspoken memories. Considering retrospection as the place beyond time, the structure whereby disparate temporalities may be re-collected in one familiar place, Rola attempts to reimagine the relationship between the present moment and the traces of lost people, as well as lost places, offering possible worlds. This project is a continuum of a sisterly endeavour ‘Pieces of Us; The Intimate as Imperial Archive’ which, through a feminist re-ordering and rereading of our familial archives across disciplines, plumbs the affective and intimate spaces of empire by way of our mother’s memoir, and our maternal grandfather’s vast personal photographic archive of Aramco (formerly Arabian-American Oil Company).

Soukaina Aboulaoula

The Black Sun of Renewal | 1.30pm

In this talk, Soukaina will discuss her current research The Black Sun of Renewal which takes as a point of departure Toni Maraini’s description of the trademark covers of Souffles (a cultural and poetry journal that served as a venue for experimental poetry and popular theatre, film, and debates) from 1966 to 1969. The latter displayed an intense black sun symbolising the rebellion against the artistic status quo and a manifesto for new aesthetics. Soukaina will present her line of investigation, which initially looked at the various narratives of modern art in Morocco through the developments of the Black Sun, and that is currently gravitating towards the question of how to think of a metaphor as a method of study. Leaving the rise and fall/visibility and invisibility narration behind, this research is now focusing on the image of The Black Sun as an archive and a device to narrate a historical moment.

Helia Hamedani

Performing freedom: when WOMEN’S attitudes become form | 2.20pm

A marginalised body is not just an individual body as it can become the witness to make visible connections/ intersections between all historical and systematic discriminations. This piece is about women in different stories that intertwine. This story is about re-invention of creative strategies, it’s about voices, silences, images, dreams, gestures, fires and actions towards life, love and nonviolent support. It’s about collective mourning. It’s about joyful militancy. It’s also about us, here and now, everywhere and every day, hand in hand cuddled in the sisterhood circle; dancing and singing: woman, life, freedom.

Keren Lasme

Saving the Life That is Your Own | 3.10pm

From discussing mythopoetic identity formation, personal attachment to formative texts, reading as a practice for freedom and the necessity for spaces of collective learning and community building, Keren engages in a personal reflection on the healing, redemptive and transformative power of art especially literature, how it served and still serves as an emancipatory tool in her journey as a being in constant search of ways to fully appreciate life in all its aspects.

Chidumaga Uzoma Orji

Intentional dreaming: a strategy for worldmaking | 4pm

How can a consistent, intentional practice of dreaming help us birth communities, towns and cities that reflect our highest hopes? In this interactive presentation we will explore how collective hope can be cultivated by deliberately defining the futures we desire. With the phrase “you cannot actualise what you cannot visualise” as its mantra, this session unveils an ethos of worldmaking that helps us reject realities that do not serve progressive futures. The goal is to regain ownership of dreaming, too often maligned as an idle waste of time, as a potent force to aid in our quest for liberation.

Mona Benyamin

The sea’s wound cannot wither | 4.50pm

The process of writing and gaining control over history, over archives is the most important step in creating a colonial hegemony. How do we narrate a history made mute? The way Mona learned orally and visually was through folklore, music, idioms, jokes, fragmented stories, and even pop culture. In this presentation, she will present an experimental, horizontal, audio-visual collage consisting of these elements, which narrates a history of hope, and the power and will of a people fighting for their freedom.

Ladji Kone

Going green upside down

(Allant vert a l´envers) | 5.40pm

A choreographic project, “Going Green Upside Down” is a laboratory about the synergy and proximity of humans and nature. By questioning how the energy of performing art could be fused with the art of nature, Ladji and his creative collaborators would like to share the experience of the existing Pocket Park in Ouagadougou as well as the joy and positive impacts of nature to everyone regardless of social class, age, religion or gender.

Rah Naqvi

how many songs from a single note | 6.30pm

In this immersive and interactive presentation using poetry, text and song, Rah guides the audience through their multidisciplinary practice. In the process, Rah invites the audience to experience and engage with a body of work situated in the belief that art mediates change through accessibility.

Martha Luisa Hernández Cadenas

NO SOY UNICORNIO

(I’m not a unicorn) | 7.20pm

“No soy unicornio” is a lecture performance that takes the image of this mythical animal for a ‘performance-art conference’ that explores the relationship between biography, power and freedom. Using records of how the masses in Havana speak, as well as public interventions, poems, and an eccentric collection of objects, the unicorn is harnessed.

Giuliana Kiersz

Your language is lying to you, poetry as a territory for action | 8.10pm

Your language is lying to you, poetry as a territory for action is a provocation to explore the ideas, structures, and beliefs that inhabit our words. It is a poem-essay on the languages that we have inherited, the ones that we forgot, and the ones we decided to create to transform our history, name our feelings, and invent other forms of living. It reflects on embodied, contextualised, and alive writing opening questions on transformation and collectivisation, inviting us to think of poetry as an intersectional practice to intervene in our societies.

Tara Fatehi

What to do with this politicised body? And with all these bodies on the street? | 9pm

In this lecture performance, Tara Fatehi will talk, walk, dance and sing through some of her recent performance projects, asking: what does it mean to mishandle an archive, to repeat an action for 365 days, to dance a not-dance, to poesy a non-poem, to find a home in homelessness, to live with uncertainty and trust disjunction, to question, to question the question.

Nirlyn Seijas

Collective Dancing to Stay Alive | 9.50pm

In her public talk, Nirlyn will share her research on the Latin American context through the eyes of women artists and intellectuals. Here, relationships between patriarchy, coloniality, female loneliness, and violence will be discussed to offer counter-colonial strategies to unpack such issues.

The Commune Banquet / Q & A

15 Apr | 10.40pm16 Apr | 1am

Per°Form Open Academy of Arts and Activations ends a glorious 14hour marathon, with a rewarding feast. A meal welcomes us as our first and only intermission for the day. It is a final release. We re-gather, nourished by the meal, and we talk.

Workshops

The Latinas Grandmas Oracle

This workshop is an on-going engagement with Nirlyn’s curatorial research on 11 Latin American female artists. Working with tarot cards as a strategy, Nirlyn invites you to learn more about each artist, each card of the oracle, and the meaning and interpretation of each card to translocal contexts and experiences of women and art history.

By Nirlyn Seijas 14 Apr |

7.30pm

Images courtesy of Nirlyn Seijas

‘Then she stood on the table and …’: A Collective

(Mis)Remembering

How do we activate forces of remembering as tools for global solidarity? How do we connect distant points on the map through sharing our experiences? What remains from a taste, a home, a passion, a dance, a togetherness? Through different modes of remembering using words, movement and feelings, we activate recalling and sharing of different personal experiences or memories, and Finding joyfulness, global connections and resonances, as humans and citizens of the world.

By Tara Fatehi & Helia Hamedani

14 Apr | 7.30pm

Image courtesy of Tara Fatehi and Helia Hamedani

Writing Gathering

What words do we use to describe the world? What ideas, structures, and beliefs inhabit these words? How could we, collectively, re-write our societies? Establishing writing as a social and communal practice, Giuliana invites you to re-think and re-write the narratives that you may have inherited, and create new landscapes of thoughts, feelings, and relationships.

By Giuliana Kiersz

15 Apr | 2pm

Images courtesy of 1. Lorène Blanche Goesele, 2. Alice Kahei, 3. Maxim Gorki Theater

Reading Photographs

Both personal archives and personal histories help us better understand the complex forces that shape our world. Working with photographs and objects, we explore how each of these archives inflect intentions, thoughts, and choices, as well as how to combine them while creating a personal body of work, and speak to the larger framework of collective histories.

Note: You are invited to bring your family photo albums and other personal archival or historical artefacts that may include letters, documents and objects to work with in the workshop.

By Rola Khayyat

15 Apr | 5pm

courtesy of Rola Khayyat

A curated sacred and imaginative space for collective study that sparks new conversations about the richness and breadth of African literatures, literary arts and heritage. By tapping into the ancient technology of knowledge sharing and storytelling, we will gather in a circle to engagewith a selection of provided texts from Kokoba’s library in order to activate their archived knowledge.

By Keren Lasme

15 Apr | 7.30pm

Activating [Archived] Knowledge: Kokoba, a study session

Image courtesy of Keren Lasme

Art Pals of the Fellows

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

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 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 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 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 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 (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 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 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-

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.

Credits

Per°Form Open Academy

Founding Director

Creative Producer

Media & Partner Relations

Technical Director

Stage Manager

Assistant Stage Manager

Technical Team

Essayist

Photo documentation

Video documentation

Hospitality Crew

T:>Works

Artistic Director

Executive Director

Communications & Engagement

Project Associate Interns Administrator (Volunteer)

Board Members

Heman Chong

Kathy Lai

Noorlinah Mohamed

Ong Keng Sen

- Dr. Ong Keng Sen

- Noorlinah Mohamed

- Sarah Bagharib

- Andy Lim/Art Factory

- Carolene Liew/The Backstage Affair

- Melissa Peh

- Yap Seok Hui, Abner Quek

Ed-Linddi, ..., Joel Fernandez, Raz Alcatraz

- Rebecca Goh

- Don Wong

- Eric Lee & Grace Baey

- Irish Alcantara

- Ong Keng Sen

- Traslin Ong

- Deirdre Chang

- Jeffrey Kang

- Arissa Hon, Camilo Achmad

- Ong Soo Mei

Acknowledgements

T:>Works would like to thank the Fellows and the Art Pals for their generous presence, Objectifs and Bras Basah Open for co-organising the workshops, Tanamera Caterer and The Black Hole Group for F&B support, Cornerstone Wines for wine sponsorship, the Front-of-House volunteers as well as our friends and colleagues from the arts communities and various media for their solidarity.

About T:>Works

Established in 1985, T:>Works is an independent and international arts company based in Singapore at its space, 72-13. It is currently led by Artistic Director, Ong Keng Sen.

T:>Works’ mission and vision are the pioneering of thought leadership in the arts focused on transdisciplinary, transcultural, and inclusive processes.

To this end, there is a strong educational perspective with research and discourse contextualising histories, contemporary experiences, and situated art practices of the global south.

T:>Works also serves to investigate the current urgencies of being located in Singapore, and larger Asia, through different creative expressions in the public sphere.

T:>Works is a recipient of the National Arts Council Major Company Grant from 1 April 2022 until 31 March 2025. T:>Works is an Institute of Public Character with charity status.

Per°Form Open Academy of Arts and Activations is supported by the Cultural Matching Fund.

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