Moderators: Bernice Lee, Marc Glöde and Daisuke Takeya
Conveners: Anmari Van Nieuwenhove
Artists: Bernice Lee, Faye Lim, Susie Wong, Kemi& Niko, Dr Irina Aristarkhova, Bani Haykal & ila, Dr Wang Ruobing & Chen Sai Hua Kuan, Chan Sze Wei, Sookoon Ang, Zhiyi Cao, Chong Lii, Dr Marc Glöde, Lim Kok Boon, Alexander Koch, Jun Jie "JJ" Ng, Cheryl Capelli, Daisuke Takeya, Thomas Ragnar, Woon Tien Wei, Andreas Ribbung, Emelie Chhangur, Dr June Yap, Norberto Roldan, Baben Shin
IN SUSPENSION
21 — 23 Jan 2022
It’s not just the pandemic that made us pause and ponder the conditions of artistic practice. The mindspace of practice in the arts inhabits our everyday lives: from expectations to the ecosystems we dwell in, we see art being contested time and time again, where it often begets the uncertainty of temporality and permanence — a suspension.
What makes artistic practice healthy, resilient or sustainable?
In Suspension is a 3-day virtual symposium broadcast by Hothouse that engages the boundaries of art and life. Dwelling in suspended yet productive spaces of delays, temporary stoppages and hiatus, signs of vitality, persistence and adaptable living conditions are uncovered.
Each day focuses on conditions that affect artistic practice — as an individual, as part of a family and living within a community. Titled Gestations, Dormancy and Substrates, the 3 days describe elements and occurrences that would be of concern within ecological metaphors such as the ‘arts ecology’ and the growth of the ‘arts landscape’.
The 3-day broadcast programme is streamed live on the h0t.house landing page and will run from afternoon till night. Switching between keynote lectures, performances, dialogues and screenings, In Suspension is an international and multi-generational convening of people from various places of practice within and no longer in the arts. The three intersecting frames are moderated by Bernice Lee, Dr Marc Gloede and Daisuke Takeya, offering insight through their personal research and networks in art, academia and collectivity.
What results are programmes that catalyse insight and discussions surrounding each day’s themes by Anmari Van Nieuwenhove, Faye Lim, Live Creatives Show, Sookoon Ang, Post-Museum and Thomas Ragnar.
Panellists include academics, curators, fair organisers and gallerists as well as artists who run collectives, independent art spaces and/or once dabbled into film, performance and visual arts — all of whom gather as people with their individual concerns, as well as their partners and their community. Day 1: Gestations focuses on the concept of the ‘significant other’ with Faye Lim, Susie Wong, Kemi & Niko, ila & Bani Haykal, Dr Wang Ruobing & Chen Sai Hua Kuan (Comma Space), Chan Sze-Wei; Day 2: Dormancy reflects on the self with Lim Kok Boon, Jun Jie “JJ” Ng, Alexander Koch (KOW Gallery); Day 3: Substrates focuses on collectivity with Andreas Ribbung (Stockholm Independent Art Fair), Emelie Chhangur, Dr June Yap (Singapore Art Museum), Norberto Roldan (Green Papaya Art Projects).
This event is organised by Hothouse as an expansion of its Mindspace presentation programme — a conversation-based working history of media art in Singapore. As technology posits advancement and progress, we reflect on the quintessential conditions of art and life through a nexus of dialogues that fall through the cracks.
All panel discussions will also include a question and answer session in the last 30 minutes of the programme with Anmari Van Nieuwenhove.
IN SUSPENSION Q&A
All panel discussions will be streamed LIVE with a question and answer session for audiences in the last 30 minutes. This is led by convener for the 3 day virtual symposium, Anmari Van Nieuwenhove. How do you send a question or response? Simply send them over via Q&A and polling platform Slido.
IN SUSPENSION Event Guide
Not sure when to stream what? The IN SUSPENSION Event Guide is a simple cheat sheet containing all the programmes from the 3 day event, GESTATIONS, DORMANCY and SUBSTRATES. Download and plan what you want to watch.
Comes in S, M, L. $38 per tee.
IN SUSPENSION Official Merchandise
In conjunction with IN SUSPENSION, h0thouse is doing a limited 2-colour silk screen print on 100% cotton t-shirt going at $38. Do enquire with your preferred size and information.
Supported By
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Featuring: Bernice Lee, Bani Haykal, Bernice Lee, Chan Sze-Wei, Chen Sai Hua Kuan, Dr Irina Aristarkhova, Faye Lim, Kemi & Nico, Mdm Data, Shahila Bte Baharom (ila), Susie Wong, (Dr) Wang Ruobing, Anmari Van Nieuwenhove
GESTATIONS
21 Jan 2022, 14:00 – 21:00
What changes when you need to sustain not just your own life but also someone else's? GESTATIONS takes time to work through these questions with a diverse group of practitioners and their experiences of nurturing their children alongside their own creative practices in a productivist environment. Panellists include mothers, grandmothers and couples in the arts from multiple disciplines, who convene in a much-needed discussion.
Schedule
Artists: Bernice Lee with Faye Lim
Minding and Making in Matrescence and Motherhood
In this session, Bernice will share a collection of things from her ongoing practice of delving into the entanglements between making art and living life. In the midst of playing with her new role as mother, she has also been diving into and amassing personal dance histories, and contemplating NuWa the Mother Goddess. Her friend and longtime collaborator, dance artist Faye Lim, will also be sharing a project made during the pandemic, where she contemplates the intertwining of her and her son’s art-making. Bernice and Faye have been in conversation as artists (and later on as parents) since 2011, and they started a company together in 2018.
14:00-14:30 Not Not A Paleontologist (2021) by Bernice Lee
Multi-channel video installation, repurposed for broadcasting
Duration: 4:22mins; 4:17mins; 4:10mins, looped
From within a changing, maternal body, the artist simultaneously performs the work of artist and parent, willing future realities into existence on loop.
14:30-15:00 Innermost ghost hosts almost post dance (2020) by Faye Lim
Short Film
Duration: 8:01, looped
This is an artefact of my feelings, thoughts and movement, between the months of April to June 2020. It exists for me as a paradox, bringing to mind (thank you, Jill) the notion of the “structure of feelings” (Raymond Williams). I conflate structure, reason, feelings and mess, and present them through this film, with pseudo-logic, bringing in references to abstractionism, post-modern dance aesthetics, my collaborative art-making practice with my young son, my propensity/ability to cry in public, Orientalism and autoexoticisation. It also reflects my deep-seated need to engage with hierarchy and fold it, cut it, poke holes in it, dance with it and be with it. These are fueled by past conversations (such as a digital discussion organised by Critical Path Sydney), and multiple readings, including Yutian Wang’s “Choreographing Asian America.” This film is dedicated to Justine Shih Pearson, for seeing the clarity of and sensing the weight in my tears. This film is made possible with the support of Dance Nucleus and Critical Path. Thanks to Ollie C for sharing your wonderful paper people practice with me, and for Alice Cheah for your artistry, fervour and trust.
Commissioned by Critical Path for the digital Interchange Festival 2019-20. All rights belong to the artist and Critical Path.
15:00-15:30 Wo Bu Hui Zuo Ren 我不会做人 / I won't be human (2021) by Bernice Lee
Duration: 12:30, looped
After being pregnant for 9 months, Bernice was confronted by her wonderful, demanding, newborn, alongside the fact that she had no idea how to be a mother. Her body and her baby had gone through this powerful process, but the psychological and emotional weight of it felt almost too much to bear. To cope, she moulded little clay humans with her unskilled hands, trying to become NuWa, the primordial mother goddess mythologised as the creator of humanity. The title in Chinese is a friend's pun* (thanks Cui!), and Google Translate added a new layer of meaning to this meditation on motherhood.
*做人 (zuò rén) is generally used to talk about being a virtuous person, sometimes used as a euphemism for making babies, but it can also mean to make/mould a person.
Bernice Lee (Singapore)
Bernice is a contemporary dance artist whose practice extends beyond her field. She sees art-making as a form of social activism and roots her labours in improvisation, driven by spontaneity and eccentricity, vulnerability and grace. Her solo works, collaborations and commissions have shown locally and internationally. Her online life as @bleelly on Instagram dialogues with her live works - she began to dance domestically as part of her online movement practice #ghosting. It was her way of remaking her roles as “wife” and “working artist”. Now a new mother, she has recast herself as MAMAMILKMACHINE™.
From 2011-2017, she performed and created with Maya Dance Theatre and Frontier Danceland. Bernice directs Derring-Do Dance/Rolypoly Family with Faye Lim, and has a joint practice with Chong Gua Khee, manifest as Tactility Studies. An Associate Member of Dance Nucleus (2017-2020), Bernice holds a B.F.A. (Hons) in Dance from The Ohio State University.
Faye Lim Min Li (Singapore)
Faye makes, mothers, dances, choreographs, facilitates, improvises, and performs.
Her artistic practice is rooted in movement improvisation and in the examination of how power, agency and care affect the ways one experiences freedom while dancing. In her recent performative works, she explores questions about the "personal persona" - how does she show up as herself, performing her desires, fears, unknowing, and personal history in improvised performances?
Faye makes works alone and collaboratively. Her choreography and direction (for performance and for camera), collaborations and commissions have been presented in schools, community places, public spaces, stages, galleries, and exhibitions in Singapore, internationally and online.
As co-director of Derring-Do Dance, Faye makes body-based artworks and programmes, eg. Body Smarts Through Movement Arts and Rolypoly Family, for diverse children and their families. She has facilitated and taught dance improvisation and contact improvisation to adults, children, families and college students in Singapore and regionally.
Faye holds a B.A. in World Arts and Cultures (Dance) from UCLA and an M.F.A in Dance (Performance & Choreography) from Tisch School of the Arts. Her training and experience span the fields of the arts, inclusive education, sexuality education, and non-profit impact research.
Moderated by: Bernice Lee
Panelists: Faye Lim, Kemi & Niko, Susie Wong
Convened by: Anmari Van Nieuwenhove
Panel 1: How has parenting shifted the way that you think about the practices of the future?
Panel Discussion
In the two panel discussions for the day, the artists are also bringing their roles as parents (and grandparent) to the discussion. We consider how they navigate three basic human activities — caring, playing, and working — and seek to rethink art practices of the future. If the pandemic has forced humans and societies to “slow down” and recalibrate our ways of living, does it count as a kind of gestation period? How have these artists dealt with gestation in their artistic practices and lives? What are the emotional states in a gestational period? What are we sensing could be birthed at the end of all this time, co-existing with a highly-transmissable virus?
The live broadcast will also include a question and answer session in the last 30 minutes of the programme with Anmari Van Nieuwenhove.
Kemi Whitwell (New Zealand Pakeha) & Niko Leyden (Maori)
Kemi & Niko are a multi disciplinary artist duo working across art and design in their socially engaged, values based practice. Graduates of Massey University (BFA & BDes, respectively) their projects connect the public to the environment and each other, often utilising salvaged materials. They have run multiple widely successful public art projects, including Urban Hut Club (2019/20) for the New Zealand Festival of the Arts. They have worked with art, community and educational groups installing new public works, running workshops and curating exhibits. In 2018 they attended an artists’ residency camp run by Artshouse Melbourne in Victoria exploring adaptive practice with 30 international artists. Kemi and Niko have a young family and are based in the Waikato where they are building a custom tiny house and working on future projects.
W: keminiko.com
Susie Wong (Singapore)
Susie Wong is artist, curator, educator and art writer in Singapore. She studied painting at the former LASALLE College of the Arts (St. Patrick’s Fine Arts) in the mid-1980s, and pursued her Master of Fine Arts at LASALLE in 2007. She was artist-resident at NTU-CCA Singapore in 2018. Wong explores the theme of presence/absence, memory, through landscapes, still lifes, portraiture, a recurring subject in her early oil paintings. Since 1980s, Wong has curated, co-organised and/or participated in several solo and group exhibitions, More recently, her work contemplates mass media and the circulation and consumption of images, the mistrust of representation, appropriating images or visual references for much of her work, extending to romantic tropes in media.
Wong has also written for numerous publications and monographs on art since the late 1980s.
W: susiewongart.wixsite.com/suwong/home
Faye Lim Min Li (Singapore)
Faye makes, mothers, dances, choreographs, facilitates, improvises, and performs.
Her artistic practice is rooted in movement improvisation and in the examination of how power, agency and care affect the ways one experiences freedom while dancing. In her recent performative works, she explores questions about the "personal persona" - how does she show up as herself, performing her desires, fears, unknowing, and personal history in improvised performances?
Faye makes works alone and collaboratively. Her choreography and direction (for performance and for camera), collaborations and commissions have been presented in schools, community places, public spaces, stages, galleries, and exhibitions in Singapore, internationally and online.
As co-director of Derring-Do Dance, Faye makes body-based artworks and programmes, eg. Body Smarts Through Movement Arts and Rolypoly Family, for diverse children and their families. She has facilitated and taught dance improvisation and contact improvisation to adults, children, families and college students in Singapore and regionally.
Faye holds a B.A. in World Arts and Cultures (Dance) from UCLA and an M.F.A in Dance (Performance & Choreography) from Tisch School of the Arts. Her training and experience span the fields of the arts, inclusive education, sexuality education, and non-profit impact research.
Anmari Van Nieuwenhove (Singapore)
A content marketer and event programmer with a special focus and interest in contemporary art, Anmari's background in art led to a natural inclination for artistic pursuits, having her own creative projects as well as an understanding and love for contemporary art. A keen aesthetic and knack for personable copywriting led her to grow the Singapore Art Museum's social media following to 30, 000 in 2013. These same skills led her to be the voice and sometimes face of Singaporean brand Telok Ayer Arts Club; applying her creativity to styling and photoshoots for their menus, as well as their robust art programme which gained the attention of many, having the spotlight many a time in the local dailies and magazines.
Bernice Lee
A Mother Prepares (2022)
Bernice Lee (Singapore)
Bernice is a contemporary dance artist whose practice extends beyond her field. She sees art-making as a form of social activism and roots her labours in improvisation, driven by spontaneity and eccentricity, vulnerability and grace. Her solo works, collaborations and commissions have shown locally and internationally. Her online life as @bleelly on Instagram dialogues with her live works - she began to dance domestically as part of her online movement practice #ghosting. It was her way of remaking her roles as “wife” and “working artist”. Now a new mother, she has recast herself as MAMAMILKMACHINE™.
From 2011-2017, she performed and created with Maya Dance Theatre and Frontier Danceland. Bernice directs Derring-Do Dance/Rolypoly Family with Faye Lim, and has a joint practice with Chong Gua Khee, manifest as Tactility Studies. An Associate Member of Dance Nucleus (2017-2020), Bernice holds a B.F.A. (Hons) in Dance from The Ohio State University.
Moderated by: Bernice Lee
Panelists: Chen Sai Hua Kuan, (Dr) Wang Ruobing, Chan Sze-Wei, Shahila Bte Baharom (ila), Bani Haykal
Convened by: Anmari Van Nieuwenhove
Panel 2: How has parenting shifted the way that you think about the practices of the future?
Panel Discussion
In the two panel discussions for the day, the artists are also bringing their roles as parents (and grandparent) to the discussion. We consider how they’ve navigate three basic human activities — caring, playing, and working — and seek to rethink art practices of the future. If the pandemic has forced humans and societies to “slow down” and recalibrate our ways of living, does it count as a kind of gestation period? How have these artists dealt with gestation in their artistic practices and lives? What are the emotional states in a gestational period? What are we sensing could be birthed at the end of all this time, co-existing dealing with a new life living with a highly-transmissable new virus?
The live broadcast will also include a question and answer session in the last 30 minutes of the programme with Anmari Van Nieuwenhove.
Shahila Bte Baharom (ila) (Singapore)
The intimate works of visual and performance artist ila (b.1985, Singapore) incorporate objects, moving images and live performance. Through weaving imagined narratives into existing realities, she seeks to create alternative nodes of experience and entry points into the peripheries of the unspoken, the tacit and the silenced. Using her body as a space of tension, negotiation and confrontation, her works generate discussion about gender, history and identity in relation to pressing contemporary issues. She has shown at DECK (2021), National Gallery Singapore (2020), The Substation; NTU Centre for Contemporary Art among others.
Bani Haykal (Singapore)
bani haykal experiments with text + music.
As an artist, composer and musician, bani considers music (making / processes) as material and his projects investigate modes of interfacing and interaction with feedback / feedforward mechanisms. He is a member of b-quartet.
Manifestations of his research culminate into works of various forms encompassing installation, poetry and performance. In his capacity as a collaborator and a soloist, bani has participated in festivals including MeCA Festival (Japan), Wiener Festwochen (Vienna), Media/Art Kitchen (Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines and Japan), Liquid Architecture and Singapore International Festival of Arts (Singapore) among others.
His current work frames encryption as a process and basis for human-machine intimacy by navigating interfaces such as a QWERTY keyboard as mediums of interactivity.
Chen Sai Hua Kuan (Singapore)
Sai is an artist. His practice includes sculpture, installation, sound, film and drawing, all of which encircle the notion of play, uneventful and overlooked everyday experience. Sai often transforms and de-constructs the ordinary things/everyday situations to open up a fresh interpretation surrounding them as a way of challenging the habituated eye. He sees his works as the outcomes of conditional activities determined and enabled by site and context, which go beyond object making and studio practice.
Sai graduated from the LASALLE College of the Arts in 1997. In 2007, he received a Master in Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. He has received numerous awards including Artist-in-residency Award at Yale-NUS (2020), Knstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin Germany (2015-2016), and Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan (2013); The People’s Choice Award, ‘Mostyn Open 18’, Wales, United Kingdom (2013); The Visiting Artist Program of Earth Observatory Singapore, Singapore (2012); Best of WRO, 14th Media Art Biennale WRO 2011 - Alternative Now, Wroclaw, Poland (2011); Ar1st-in-residency Award, Aberystwyth Arts Centre, Aberystwyth, United Kingdom (2011); Best film of FAFF2010, Fundada Ar1sts’ Film Fes1val, Wakefield, United Kingdom (2010); Winner of International Compe11on, “Tower Kronprinz: Second Advent”, National Centre for Contemporary Art, Kaliningrad, Russia (2009).
Sai’s artworks have been widely collected by institutions in Singapore and abroad, including Singapore Art Museum (Singapore), He Xiangning Art Museum (China), Chengdu EcoGarden (China), VehbiKoc Foundation (Turkey) and Museum of Contemporary Art Busan (South Korea).
(Dr) Wang Ruobing (Singapore)
Wang Ruobing is an artist, independent curator and academic based in Singapore. She received her Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Oxford, United Kingdom. She was previously a curator at the National Gallery Singapore. At present, she works as a lecturer at LASALLE College of the Arts. As an independent curator, her recent curated exhibitions include "Artist as Collector" (2021), “12 SOLO” (2020 -2021); “Arts in Your Neighbourhood” (Public Art Trust 2018 and 2019); “Happens When Nothing Happens” (The Esplanade, 2019); “Of Other Places” (The Substation, 2019); and “Beneath Tide, Running Forest” (Singapore Botanic Gardens, 2018).
As an academic, her research concentrates on identity, hybridity and transcultural discourses, particularly on contemporary art in China and Southeast Asia. Her writings have appeared in publications such as Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art (JCCA), Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Nanyang Art and a range of exhibition catalogues. Wang’s artistic work spans across a variety of methods and approaches, including drawing, film, photography, sculpture and installation. Concerned with challenging and exploring different ways of seeing everyday objects and urban landscapes in relation to the rapidly changing world of today, Wang creates artworks that actively disrupt perception and spotlight on the anthropological nature of objects. Wang has exhibited extensively, with solo and group shows showcased both locally and abroad.
Chan Sze-Wei (Singapore)
Sze-Wei is a dance maker, filmmaker, troublemaker, arts journalist and parent. Their practice for the stage and screen is focused on perception, sensation and the politics of the body. Since 2016 their films have screened internationally at festivals including the Singapore International Festival of the Arts, Screen.dance Scotland, the London International Screendance Festival, Danca em Foco (Rio de Janeiro), and Signes de Nuit (Paris). Currently a member of the Cinemovement collective and an Associate Member of Dance Nucleus (Singapore) from 2017-2020.
Anmari Van Nieuwenhove (Singapore)
A content marketer and event programmer with a special focus and interest in contemporary art, Anmari's background in art led to a natural inclination for artistic pursuits, having her own creative projects as well as an understanding and love for contemporary art. A keen aesthetic and knack for personable copywriting led her to grow the Singapore Art Museum's social media following to 30, 000 in 2013. These same skills led her to be the voice and sometimes face of Singaporean brand Telok Ayer Arts Club; applying her creativity to styling and photoshoots for their menus, as well as their robust art programme which gained the attention of many, having the spotlight many a time in the local dailies and magazines.
Keynote Speaker: Dr Irina Aristarkhova
Mothering the Future
Keynote Lecture
In this lecture, Irina Aristarkhova will present her vision of mothering the future, where technology and embodiment will figure through her exploration of hospitality and aesthetics (taking from her most recent book Arrested Welcome: Hospitality in Contemporary Art). In addition to hospitality, and building on her previous work in technology and culture, Aristarkhova will consider various futures of cultural and embodied reproduction, discussing where concepts of the post-human and biotechnological embodiment are taking us. Her key examples will come from well known cyber feminist art works and new creative projects in art and design futures.
Irina Aristarkhova (Russia)
Irina Aristarkhova was born in Moscow, Russia, in 1969. She is Professor at the Stamps School of Art & Design and the Digital Studies Institute (College of Literature, Science and the Arts), where she serves as the Director of Graduate Studies, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She has published widely on the intersection of gender, technology and culture. In her monographs Hospitality of the Matrix: Philosophy, Biomedicine and Culture (Columbia University Press, 2012, Russian translation 2017) and Arrested Welcome: Hospitality in Contemporary Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), Aristarkhova has developed novel feminist approaches to theories and practices of hospitality. Prior to her move to the USA in 2005, she founded and directed the Cyberarts and Cyberculture Research Initiative at the National University of Singapore.
Notes
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Hothouse is a site for exchange between artists, creatives, businesses, and local-international audiences. External to institutional frameworks, the humid ecologies of the greenhouse foster productive encounters for the deployment and reinforcement of critical and longform creative practices. We do not shy away from speculation, excess, ambivalence, redundancy, ambiguity, inefficiency, etc.
Today, it maintains a technological transdisciplinary focus with an international and intergenerational perspective through its signature programme of residencies, events, and publications.
Research Topics
Socials
What's On
Mindspace and #17: Margaret Tan
Johann Yamin and Samantha Yap converse with Margaret Tan about her works from the late 1990s to 2000s, examining her practice and its relationships to feminist thought, cyberfeminism, and technology. This interview transcript has been edited for length and clarity, and a PDF version of the text is available here.
Presentations
Margaret Tan
Zhiyi Cao
Martin Constable
Subletvis & Kenneth Loe
Chris Fussner & Jorge J. B.
Jeannine Tang
Arjon Dunnewind
Joel Spring
Tini Aliman
Thomas Ragnar
Jake Tan & Ernest Wu
Irina Aristarkhova
Tan Kai Syng
Rafi Abdullah
Cecile Chagnaud
Yeyoon Avis Ann
