Thoughts from NTU CCA Singapore
Karin G. Oen

'My Own Words' is a monthly series which features personal essays by practitioners in the Southeast Asian art community. They deliberate on their locality's present circumstances, articulating observations and challenges in their respective roles.

Fyerool Darma, ‘Vivarium (wii fl∞w w/ l4if but t4k£ ø forms,♥)’ (detail), 7 Dec 2019 – 29 Mar 2020, at The Vitrine, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore. Image courtesy NTU CCA Singapore.

Cosmopolitanism, succinctly and thoughtfully described by Kwame Anthony Appiah as “universality plus difference”, has been on my mind since I moved from San Francisco to Singapore just about a year ago to join the team at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (NTU CCA Singapore). It is a condition that the art world collectively aspires to – much more nuanced than more common terms like international, global, diverse, or inclusive. To be a cosmopolitan is to recognise the subtler aspects of culture, to appreciate the interrelationships between the macro, the micro, and the personal. Fashion, food, language, music, and art that draw from far-flung cultural sources and recombine them in different ways – these factors all contribute to the relative cosmopolitanism of a given place, but so do other factors tied to economics and politics. Cosmopolitanism in the realm of philosophy, after all, is a moral proposition based on the concept that human beings are or should be considered equal members of a single community. To be a truly cosmopolitan “citizen of the world” is not about benefitting from the education, travel, and cultural access that comes wealth and privilege, but to commit to and care about the idea of a universal community, and to embed compassion and open-heartedness for others, for difference, in one’s worldview.

In moving to Singapore, I was casting my vote for the kind of cosmopolitanism that I have been personally and professionally aspiring to for more than twenty years, working as an art historian and curator as well as a witness to the art world’s growth and transformation during a time of conscious de-centring and a purposeful interrogation of the canon. The work that I have been proud to be a part of at NTU CCA Singapore speaks to cosmopolitanism in the art world at its best, bringing together the promise of artistic research as a meaningful aspect of knowledge production with thoughtful gatherings of practitioners that cut across disciplinary distinctions and exhibitions organised around the principle that artworks in dialogue with one another do not offer a definitive conclusion about a topic or process, but rather spark further discussions and inquiries. At this moment when it seems that restrictions on gathering and social interaction here in Singapore might soon ease, and when a profound interest in experiencing art and connection can begin to shift back to include more analogue, on-site experiences, I’ll share two instances of the inspiration and encouragement I’ve enjoyed over the past year that make me hopeful for a collective, cosmopolitan future despite the myriad challenges that we have faced in the art world, in the region, and around the globe.

Animali Domestici, ‘Bangkok Opportunistic Ecologies’, 2019. Image courtesy of the artists.

‘Bangkok Opportunistic Ecologies’ (2019), featured in the exhibition ‘The Posthuman City. Climates. Habitats. Environments.’, offered the research of the Bangkok-based design practice Animali Domestici, as an alluring fusion of technology, history, culture, and imagery. A partnership between two Italian architects, Antonio Bernacchi and Alicia Lazzaroni, and the many collaborators who work with them on questions around the built environment and the interaction between species, Animali Domestici presented the research embedded in ‘Bangkok Opportunistic Ecologies’ as part of a trans-disciplinary symposium, ‘Bio-Diver-city and Urban Futures’, held in January 2020 at NTU CCA Singapore, as well as in a hands-on workshop the following day that explored representing different species with visual mapping techniques. As these various engagements with the artists and their work unfolded over the course of the exhibition and programming, I was consistently impressed with the elasticity of the work and its easy precipitation of conversations that interwove care for pythons in urban environments like Bangkok, their human neighbours, the use of axonometric mapping as a visual convention, and lustrous embroidered embellishment applied to the mundane subjects of plastic bags.

Fyerool Darma, ‘Vivarium (wii fl∞w w/ l4if but t4k£ ø forms,♥)’, 7 Dec 2019 – 29 Mar 2020, exhibition installation view at The Vitrine, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore. Image courtesy NTU CCA Singapore.

Fyerool Darma, an Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore from October 2019 through July 2020, began his residency by looking into the layered history of the Telok Blangah neighbourhood through such diverse sources as historical Malay philosophical literature and the contemporary online marketplace Carousell. Like most Artists-in-Residence, Darma approached his research as a project in and of itself. Despite the open-ended nature of his research, it gave rise to a concrete project – an installation in The Vitrine entitled ‘Vivarium (wii fl∞w w/ l4if but t4k£ ø f0rms,♥)’. In this artistic exercise, Darma treated the shop-window-like space of The Vitrine with the artificial background imagery that often adorns tropical fish tanks, surrounding a central niche space that was augmented with objects related to Telok Blangah, installed in four iterations over the course of the project. While the objects, both individually and as a group, did not create a particular narrative or serve to explain the history of the neighbourhood in a precise way, the intriguing assemblage created a focal point. Each aspect of the presentation offered a glimpse into the artist’s process, his understanding of histories of consumption, display, and interpretation, while also eluding any form of straightforward communication. The title and accompanying text, incorporating nonstandard syntax and characters, likewise served to both reveal and obscure aspects of the project, contributing to an environment of questions and speculations rather than answers and definitive statements.

These two projects embody a kind of cosmopolitanism that incorporates intriguing and visually complex approaches to art, empowering the public to occupy the space of active citizenship and to take up underlying issues related to the climate crisis, cultural loss, and our collective future. The diverse curatorial team and approaches here at NTU CCA Singapore create space for moments of contemplation, humour, sublimity, and above all, for the informed exploration of multiple, meaningful questions. Our present moment, with the foregrounded crises of a global health pandemic and economic uncertainty, combined with individuals’ anxiety and isolation, might seem an unlikely time to highlight the utopian goal of a future defined by universal global citizenship. For me, however, it has provided a re-affirmation that the types of experiences that I was able to enjoy, and witness in others’ participation, in connection to ‘Bangkok Opportunistic Ecologies’ and ‘Vivarium (wii fl∞w w/ l4if but t4k£ ø f0rms,♥)’ could happen here in Singapore precisely because of the cosmopolitan nature of the city. This is the art of constructive dialogue and active engagement, a pro-active response to any crisis.

Animali Domestici, ‘Bangkok Opportunistic Ecologies’, 2019, exhibition installation view at ‘The Posthuman City. Climates. Habitats. Environments.’ 2019, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore. Image courtesy of NTU CCA Singapore.

As a historian, I feel compelled to mention the fact that the concept of cosmopolitanism is not modern. For example, in 10th century Islamic Spain, the city of Cordoba was an intellectual cosmopolitan refuge from Europe’s Dark Ages. It was home to a University within the Great Mosque that attracted students and scholars from Asia and around the Mediterranean basin, as well as seventy libraries for its 500,000 inhabitants. During the 7th and 8th centuries, at the time of the Tang dynasty in China, the cosmopolitan character of the Silk Road and its attendant economic, educational, and social exchanges resulted in cultural, religious, and culinary fusions that reached from Dunhuang to Istanbul. Both of these examples, drawn from any number of similar historical moments, involve the peaceful and compassionate intersection of cultures, with true tolerance as the basis for individual social interactions. In Singapore in 2020, like in much of the world, we find ourselves at an uncertain crossroads, where our own futures, our relationship to each other, to technology, and to the natural world are being revisited and renegotiated. Tenuous though the future may seem, I believe that the pandemic and these necessary renegotiations have created the conditions for lived contemporary cosmopolitanism. I am inspired to continue to contribute to space for art and artistic conversations here in Singapore, inflected with curiosity, compassion, a view toward universality and an appreciation of difference.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of A&M.
Read all My Own Words essays here.

Dr. Karin Oen is the Deputy Director of NTU Centre for Contemporary Art (NTU CCA) Singapore, which is currently raising funds through its Online Benefit Art Auction, featuring works donated by 26 artists, including Alecia Neo, Jeremy Sharma and Tay Wei Leng.

The proceeds will go towards two projects: the NTU CCA Singapore’s Digital Archive, which will give the public access to its work since its launch in 2013, as well as the publication ‘Climates. Habitats. Environments’, which will present the findings of the Centre’s research on the impact of globalisation and the climate crisis at the intersection of art and culture.

Bidding starts today, 1 October 2020, and ends on 18 October 2020. Do visit ntuccabenefit.org to browse the lots, and consider placing a bid to support a worthy cause!

A&M is proud to be the media partner for the NTU CCA Online Benefit Art Auction.