Familiar Spaces Untold Stories: Encounters with Ipoh

 

Date: 22 July 2012 to 26 August 2012

Venue: NUS Museum

This exhibition arises from a two week long trip to the West Malaysian town of Ipoh by twenty students from the University of Malaya (UM) and the National University of Singapore (NUS). They conducted studies of the city’s heritage, assessed its current state of development, and carried out detailed investigations on four shophouses – a trade house, a Sinhalese bar, a charcoal vendor’s shop and a seamstress’ modern shophouse. The cultural and social fabric of this former ‘Tin Capital of the World’ and its architectural heritage are exhibited in the form of sketches, drawings, photographs and models. 

This is a project from the UM-NUS Joint Studio Programme started in 2005 in conjunction with the centenary celebrations of the two Universities. The first exhibition entitled ‘Re:Claiming Heritage’ was presented at NUS Museum in 2009. This was followed by ‘Tracing Taiping’ (2010) and ‘Narrating Muar’ (2011).

Since its inception, the programme has been funded by the Tan Chin Tuan Foundation.

See previous exhibitions in the series:

• Re:claiming Heritage: Shophouses and Historic Districts in Kuching and Kuala Terengganu (2009)
• Tracing Taiping (2010)
• Narrating Muar (2011)

Recap - Sites of Practice: Here & Elsewhere | Artists' Dialogues on Performance Art

Sites of Practice: Here & Elsewhere | Artists' Dialogues on Performance Art

Introductory Remarks: TK Sabapathy

Speakers: Amanda Heng, Jose Tence Ruiz and Lee Wen and moderated by Kwok Kian Woon

Date: 04 November 2011, Friday

Venue: NUS Museum

Sites of Practice: Here & Elsewhere features Amanda Heng, Jose Tence Ruiz and Lee Wen coming together to detail themes, strategies and problematics of performance art and encounters with its ‘publics’ in Singapore during the late 1980s and 1990s. For Ruiz, a Filipino whose practice is rooted in the social struggles of the Marcos period, his residence in Singapore necessitated an investment into newer strategies, negotiating perspectives of audience, values and artistic activism. Affiliated to the Artist Village, Amanda Heng and Lee Wen pioneered performance art as a principle device in connecting with emerging perspectives on the alternative, responding to institutions and their hierarchies, and widening reception of contemporary as global practice. What were the emerging conceptual propositions? How and where were these articulated? What limits? What implications to contemporary practice today?

Sites of Practice was part of the Philippine Art Trek 2011, and was co-organized by the Embassy of the Philippines (Singapore) and NUS Museum.

Curating Lab 2012: Curatorial Roundtable 01

Date: 01 August 2012, Wednesday

Time: 7.00pm - 9.00pm

Venue: Meeting Room 2, Block B, Goodman Arts Centre

To RSVP, please email museum@nus.edu.sg or call 6516 8817 / 8428

Limited to only 40 seats.

::: THE CURATORIAL ROUNDTABLE SERIES

Presented in conjunction with Curating Lab 2012, the Curatorial Roundtable series is a public talk series that gathers together curatorial and industry pratitioners across different spectrums, to discuss their latest exhibitions and projects. Although presented primarily for the participants of Curating Lab 2012, this series is an opportunity to bridge the gap between the curator and the audience, providing opportunities for interaction and stimulating discussions on curatorial practices and process.

Diary of an NUS Museum Intern: Ng Bi Ru (2)

Note: Diary of an NUS Museum Intern is a series of blog posts written by our interns about their experiences during the course of their internships. Besides working hard and fast in their cubicles, our interns have travelled to Bandung and Malacca, organised symposiums, waded through tons of historical research and pitched in during exhibition installations. It was definitely no ordinary internship for them! If you would like to become our next intern, visit our internship page for more information!

Ng Bi Ru is a 2nd-year Economics Major from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at NUS. She joined NUS Museum as an Outreach Intern, focusing on in-campus and student life outreach projects. You can read more about her first month at the museum here.

One of my major tasks for the month of June was to create a 45 minutes self-guided itinerary for visitors. This self-guided itinerary is meant to help visitors navigate their way through the museum and provide an overview of the museum and its exhibitions.

I initially envisioned that the itinerary would use tables to organize the contents and directions so it will look neat and systematic. However, as I progressed, this did not seem to be feasible. I began researching about user experience through other msueums’ brochures and activity booklets. Using these materials as references, I learnt that a clear map and proper directional markings are essential for easy navigation. As I began to create the itinerary, I found it challenging to present the exhibition concepts in manner that would be “digest-able” for museum audiences.

From Picturing to Constructing the Topics: Barracks and Hospitals in Colonial Singapore, 1860s to 1930s

Reproduced with the permission of Royal Engineers Library, Chatham

Date: 25 July 2012, Wednesday
Time: 7.00 - 9.00pm
Venue: NUS Museum

Free Admission. Seating is limited to 60 pax.
To register, please email babahouse@nus.edu.sg

The colonial representation of the tropical landscape pictorially is a well-research area. Scholars have argued that colonial landscape paintings and postcards are not just faithful documentation of the physical surroundings at a particular moment in time, they also represent ways of seeing, knowing and controlling these very physical surroundings that are inextricably linked to the social, cultural and political conditions of colonialism. However, could the same insights be applied to not just the pictorial representation of the colonial landscape but also to the construction, in the literal sense, of the very landscape itself, including both the natural and built environment? In other words, how did the socially, culturally and politically inflected ways of perceiving the tropical landscape in the colonial era shape the material production and transformation of the landscape?

Recap - Between Text, Icon and Archetype: Narratives of Malaysian Art, post-1990s

Held in conjunction with the exhibition opening of Writing Power | Zulkifli Yusoff

15 October 2011, Saturday

Panelists:

Mr. Zainol Abidin Shariff

Assoc. Prof. Goh Beng Lan,

Ms. Zanita Anuar,

Mr. Ahmad Mashadi

Moderator: Assoc. Prof.TK Sabapathy

WATCH THE ENTIRE DISCUSSION HERE



Semblance/Presence: Renato Habulan and Alfredo Esquillo Jr.

Renato Habulan and Alfredo Esquillo Jr., Mga Hinirang (Chosen People), film still, 2012

CLICK HERE TO ACCESS PRESS RELEASE

CLICK HERE TO VIEW GALLERY IMPRESSIONS

Date: 29 June 2012 till 13 January 2013

Venue: NX Gallery, NUS Museum

Combining Jose Rizal's "Quiapo Fair" (first published 1891) and artworks produced by artists Renato Habulan and Alfredo Esquillo Jr., the exhibition traces the life-worlds of Plaza Miranda, which fronts the Minor Basilica of the Black Nazarene (Quiapo Church), one of the main churches of the City of Manila. Considering how Plaza Miranda acts as a site for numerous interests, ranging from political and cultural discourse to established traditions of fortune telling, the exhibition connects both artists and their materials to not just as something being observed, but also to the conditions of their observations, where the very act of observation becomes an end that at once implicates but also detaches. By some oblique process, presence also becomes semblance, leading to question, if any act of observation can ever remain unmediated.

The exhibition is co-organized by NUS Museum and Artesan Gallery + Studio. It is also supported by Tin-aw Art Management Inc.