Lynn Lu and Melinda Lauw. Raisins in the Audience Dough: Opening Movement, 2021. Image co-created by Lynn Lu and Manuel Vason. Photo credit: Manuel Vason.
Artist talk at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh USA.
Date: Tuesday 27th April, 2021
Venue: Online
Invited by: Prof Bob Bingham
Photo credit: Sukayu Onsen
This roundtable explores lesser discussed alternative infrastructural systems of living, relations, labour, learning – that these contributors have explored and reflected on in their work. The intention is to engage together in reimagining better ways to survive and thrive.
Chaired by Anca Rujoiu with Annie Jael Kwan, Lynn Lu, Zarina Muhammad and Jia Qi Quek.
28th March, Sunday
3.30 – 4.45PM SGT
7.30 – 8.45AM BST
Registration via Eventbrite.
A New Season of Care is curated by Annie Jael Kwan, and made possible with the support of the National Arts Council Singapore.
Photo credit: Baron Raimund von Stillfried, Kusakabe Kimbei, c 1870s -1890s
A digital programme presented by Asia Art Activism:
Following on from last year’s extreme events of the global pandemic and political ruptures, and November’s programme of longing, connecting and collectivity, Till We Meet Again IRL, we have been holding on, holding our breath, waiting, while adapting continuously to ongoing changing conditions of health, work and life.
With this new year and this fresh season’s optimism, artists continue to reflect on the importance of attending carefully to our needs for healing and rest, and finding ways of connecting in mutually nourishing ways that can sustain us.
Lynn Lu presents a new performance: Skinship: A Communal Bath
We have bathed communally for most of human history, and across most cultures of the world. Today, the act of collective bathing is still practiced in a handful of countries ranging from Japan to Chile, and from Morocco to Tibet. For the most part, however, cleaning our body is a solitary and functional task we perform with efficiency and haste.
After a solid year of pandemic-precipitated social distancing, the alienation that traditionally plagued lonely city-dwellers is now shared by most of us. We are painfully deprived of opportunities to share intimate time with people beyond our households, through endless lockdowns and other restrictions that will likely persist into the foreseeable future.
Technology enables us to stay connected, however it reduces us – for the most part – to talking heads. To combat our collective Zoom disembodiment, I propose that communal virtual bathing could help bring corporeality back into our social interactions, strengthen our fleshly connection to each other, and improve our mental and physical health in the process. Crucially, the virtual format of this hadaka no tsukiai (‘naked association’) or ‘skinship’ gives participants the freedom to decide how they wish to position themselves before their device’s camera. The bashful may choose to frame only their faces, or perhaps use filters that transform their appearance.
Participants will need access to a tub/vessel in which they can comfortably immerse their body, feet, or hands in warm water. Prior to the communal bath, participants will be sent an etiquette list, bath recipes, tips on prepping their bathroom, readings, and some prompts.
Bath #1: 17 March 2021, Wednesday 10AM GMT / 6PM SGT (SOLD OUT)
Bath #2: 27 March 2021, Saturday 1PM GMT / 9PM SGT (SOLD OUT)
Bath #3: 30 March 2021, Tuesday 12NOON / 7PM SGT (SOLD OUT)
A New Season of Care is curated by Annie Jael Kwan, and made possible with the support of the National Arts Council Singapore.
Lynn Lu. a(t)tribute, 2021. A durational performance for a single audience, commissioned by performingborders. Photo credit: Lynn Lu
Artist talk at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh USA.
Date: Wednesday 4th November, 2020
Venue: Online
Invited by: Prof Bob Bingham
OH! presents The distance between us, a unique point-and-click game featuring art and stories. DESKTOP ONLY EXPERIENCE / LIMITED TIME ONLY!
About this Event
The distance between us is the second season of OH!’s three-part digital art walk on the effects of COVID-19 on Singapore. The season investigates how we now experience ‘distance’ has changed, for example how we maintain and find new relationships in a pandemic. Seven local artists respond to the way distance manifests in our current reality.
In this experience, audiences will continue to explore the story in the Sleeping Man (first shown in Season 1)’s bedroom over four episodes. Each episode will feature new objects in the Sleeping Man’s bedroom that reveal new artworks and narratives. Each episode will also be available only for a week at certain times to enhance the viewing experience.
DESKTOP ONLY EXPERIENCE. Available from 6PM, Friday, 19 February 2021 onwards at ohopenhouse.online.
E1: Reality & Rest
19 Feb - 25 Feb, 6pm - 12am (all time zones) daily
Features works from Denise Yap and Lynn Lu
Estimated experience length is 2 hours
In this episode, the Sleeping Man is faced with a sobering reality. This pandemic is just one of many in human history. He escapes this reality by playing video games.
E2: Home Alone
26 Feb - 4 Mar, 12pm - 6pm daily
Features work from Ezzam Rahman
Estimated experience length is 1 hour
The Sleeping Man ruminates on how his home feels bigger but lonelier during such times. A text message from a friend sharing an artwork relieves some of the loneliness.
E3: Distance Kept, Distance Bridged
5 Mar - 11 Mar, 6am - 12pm daily
Featuring work from Berny Tan and a collaborative work from Churen Li, Hell Low, Subhas Nair, Tim De Cotta, and Weish
Estimated experience length is 2 hours
The Sleeping Man negotiates where he draws the line in such times. He stresses on keeping physical distance, but continues to reach out virtually to find love and companionship.
E4: Working Do, Making Through
12 Mar - 18 Mar, 12am - 6am daily
Featuring a collaborative work from Bailey Wait, Lim Shi-An, Robert Wait, Tan Kheng Hua and a work from Yen Phang
Estimated experience length is 2 hours
The Sleeping Man discovers that relationships are held together by various rituals people perform. And that maybe, that’s how he can overcome the pandemic.
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Days — and counting is an on-going portrait of COVID-19 that captures the surreal and strange times we live in through the lens of art and artists. The programme unfolds in three seasons each taking the form of an immersive digital experience that explores our new reality under the pandemic.
The digital art walk takes the metaphor of a dream. The seasons mirror Singapore slowly awakening and having to adapt to new measures and an inescapable reality. These experiences unpack the effects of COVID-19 on a personal and collective level.
From 29 October to 29 November 2020, AAA presents Till We Meet Again IRL, a programme curated with hopeful longing and through a process of emergent collective dreaming about how we might re-invent globalized and capitalist-driven relational structures that have proven dysfunctional and untenable.
6 Oct 2020 | ENGAGE - Performance and the Maternal
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The Palace of Ritual
Palazzo Donà Brusa, Campo San Polo 2177, Venezia
9-11 May 2019, 2 – 6pm
An Arts Territory Initiative
Co-Curated by Annie Jael Kwan, Denis Maksimov, Michał Murawski and Kasia Sobucka
Featuring Isadorino Gore, Enam Gbewonyo, Florence Keith-Roach, Alena Ledeneva, Karolina Łebek, Lynn Lu, Nissa Nishikawa, Sabina Sallis, Zorka Wollny, Khadija Von Zinnenburg Carroll and Mengting Zhuo
The Palace of Ritual is a programme of immersive, intimate performances, screenings and discursive workshops that aims to activate heterodox knowledges and practices of healing, sourced from myths, ritual and cosmology. Participants are invited to awake from the artificial psychological coma of the accelerating and verticalizing present, via healing rituals of care, levelling, perversion and futuring.
The programme explores why a return to ‘nature’ is an increasingly pressing need for many people today. Does our ‘post-contemporary’ (or metamodern) world, mediated as it is by unprecedented layerings of artificially intelligent technologies, paradoxically make so-called ‘traditional’ practices and rituals more desirable? What do the concepts of attachment to ritual, spirituality and nature mean today? We will revisit older, more divisive rituals, investigating what can be learned and appropriated from their obsolete and hierarchical but seductive styles, shapes and rhythms; and we will explore how rituals have been invented, reinvented and adapted today.
Ritual brings together aesthetic creation and a mythos-reinforcing re-enactment of collective histories; it caters to our primeval need to belong; it consolidates but also – in liminal moments – perverts established social norms and hierarchies. The typology of the Palace – whether a Venetian Palazzo, a Qing dynasty summer residence looted by Lord Elgin or a socialist-era “people’s palace” – provides a grandiose and spectacular backdrop for rituals of every kind. The Palace of Ritual – and its interregional, intersectional programme – will explore some winding paths for forging new ritual bodies, ritual aesthetics and ritual politics: perverted, progressive and planetary.
The Palace of Ritual is initiated by Arts Territory and it launches its new pathway of nomadic, fluid and open agency: offering new models of arts commissioning and curating, supporting radical artistic experimentation, research and collaboration, alongside testing the new forms of curation.
The programme is devised by Arts Territory together with PASAR (Post-Asian School of Alternative Rites), a new practice-based research project curated by Annie Jael Kwan; Perverting the Power Vertical, a research and arts initiative led by Maria Mileeva, Denis Maksimov and Michał Murawski; by the FRINGE Centre at University College London and Avenir Institute.
The Palace of Ritual is supported by Adam Mickiewicz Institute, The School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, The FRINGE Centre for the Study of Social and Cultural Complexity and Istituto Polacco in Rome. PASAR (Post-Asian School of Alternative Rites) is presented in collaboration with Something Human and Asia-Art-Activism and additionally supported by Arts Council England and Diverse Actions.