T:>Works continues to expand its mission of pioneering thought leadership in the arts in 2021. Moving beyond the art world, T:>Works will introduce a fellowship platform that cuts across silos, disciplines and fields. Supported by a seed fund, T:>Works is committing one million dollars over three years to kickstart a fellowship programme Per°Form, which will support knowledge production, research, and contextualised practice from April 2021 to March 2024. Further funds will be progressively raised in these three years to sustain the fellowship programme.
Initiated by Dr. Ong Keng Sen, Artistic Director of T:>Works, 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. 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.
The Fellows of Per°Form 2021/2022 are: Ho Rui An, Jerrine Tan, Nurul Huda Rashid, Shubigi Rao, and Wong Bing Hao.
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.
Hosted by Dr. Ong, this digital lecture is free admission by registration.
About Shubigi Rao: Artist and writer Shubigi Rao’s interests include archival systems, histories, lies and ecologies. Her works examine displacement of people, cultures, or knowledge bodies. Her current project on book destruction and knowledge, “Pulp: A Short Biography of the Banished Book” has garnered numerous awards from AIGA, APB Foundation, D&AD, and the Singapore Literature Prize. Shubigi has also been featured in various international exhibitions and is currently the Curator for the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2021. Learn more at shubigi.com.
Details are as follows:
Date: 6 May 2021
Time: 8pm (Singapore) / 4.30pm (Tehran) / 2pm (Berlin) / 11am (Cape Verde) / 8am (New York)
Registration has closed.
Established arts administrator Traslin Ong will also assume the role of Executive Director, while acclaimed multimedia artist Brian Gothong Tan will join T:>Works for the next three years. With a re-calibrated team working towards a futures-oriented vision for everyone and everything, T:>Works will continue to harness thought leadership, as a path forward into the new decade.
“Possible futures are already happening close to home or in diverse contexts in the Global South. It may involve knowledge which has been forgotten, left behind, or even repressed. We need to listen differently to other voices, not just speak differently. Per°Form zooms into these local, situated projects, and posits the question: How do we, as common custodians of this planet, continue life for everyone and everything? Using knowledge production as a vehicle at Per°Form, T:>Works seizes upon the same ethical urge, felt in both the ‘90s and in the new millennium, to transform the world, and to perform our responsibility to sustain the planet. It is imperative that we perform differently from just making art. We need to learn and figure out how to live together, once again.”
– Dr. Ong Keng Sen, Artistic Director (T:>Works)
Learn more below:
Press release: T:>Works in 2021 [PDF]
Virtual Engagement Session PDF [PDF]
T:>Works – Responding To The Future – Virtual Engagement Session Deck
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