• “How do we, as common custodians of this planet, continue life for everyone and everything?”

  (Inspired by Achille Mbembe)

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. T:>Works has named this Fellowship platform, Per°Form, which is centred around the idea of leaving nobody and nothing behind.

Per°Form harnesses the contexts of multiple ‘locals’, such as situated knowledge, local practices, or a Fellow’s sustained engagement with local communities around the world. It honours a local who is simultaneous and interdependent on other locals, and emphasises that all localities are dependent on each other, even though they may be physically very distant, to collaborate together. The Fellow may be based in another localised context, and knowledge and research produced there will be digitally shared with publics in Singapore and internationally. The Fellowship is open to collaborative ventures between artists, scientists, writers, curators, activators, and creative communities, amongst others.

Per°Form 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.

“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.”

– Dr. Ong Keng Sen

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.

The first group of Fellows of Per°Form 2021/2022 are: Ho Rui An, Jerrine Tan, Nurul Huda Rashid, Shubigi Rao, and Wong Bing Hao. More Fellows from the Global South¹ will be released later.

1Generally, definitions of the Global North include the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, all member states of the European Union, Russia, Israel, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand. Global South includes all countries outside of the Global North.