Ute Meta Bauer

"'Joan Jonas: They Come to Us without a Word' documents Jonas's project for the United States Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale, an expansive installation that incrporates multiple components, included projected videos, drawings, and objects. Each section of the pavilion represents a particular creature (bees, fish), object (mirror), force (wind), or place (homeroom). Recited fragments of ghost stories sourced from the oral tradition of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, form a continuous narrative linking one room to the next. As Jonas says, 'We are haunted, the rooms are haunted.' Designed with Jonas's close collaboration, this fully illustrated book features an extensive collection of images selected by the artist, including stills, drawings, and photographs, that not only document this ambitious and important new work but form an integral part of the presentation and experience of 'They Come to Us without a Word'. Also included are Jonas's poetic notes on her process and major new texts from ann Reynolds and Marina Warner as well as an interview with the artist by Ingrid Schaffner." -- Publisher.

They Come to Us Without a WordUnited States Pavilion 56th International Art Exhibition, Venice

Joan Jonas

Hanru Hou

The rise in biennials worldwide over the past three decades--and most notably in Asia--provokes a shift away from the traditional centers of contemporary art and signifies a new cultural phenomenon that changes the way we understand the relationship between artistic creation, institutions, localities, and social relations. Biennials provide a platform for presenting contemporary art from the world over to a traveling group of art professionals, but more importantly to a wide public. Initiated by the Biennial Foundation and hosted by the Gwangju Biennale Foundation in South Korea, the inaugural World Biennial Forum investigated this multiplicity of new centers and gravities along with the heterogeneous practices in large-scale art shows today. This publication collects the presentations and discussions developed during the forum. Keynotes by eminent intellectuals on democracy, aesthetic representation, and cosmopolitanism help us conceive of biennials as an alternative space of political imagination. Case studies with a focus on Asia examine innovative and contextually relevant models of presentations of this kind in the Asia Pacific region. The contributions look back to the history of biennials, or investigate contemporary art's relationship with other disciplines. Biennials featured (selection):Anyang Public Art Project, Biennale of Sydney, Chobi Mela, Emergency Biennale, Istanbul Biennial, Mediacity Seoul, Shanghai Biennale, Taipei Biennial, Tbilisi Triennial, Yokohama Triennial

Shifting Gravity

Artists and writers go beyond disciplinary boundaries and linear histories to address the fight for environmental justice, uniting the Asia-Pacific vantage point with international discourse. Modeling the curatorial as a method for uniting cultural production and science, Climates. Habitats. Environments. weaves together image and text to address the global climate crisis. Through exhibitions, artworks, and essays, artists and writers transcend disciplinary boundaries and linear histories to bring their knowledge and experience to bear on the fight for environmental justice. In doing so, they draw on the rich cultural heritage of the Asia-Pacific, in conversation with international discourse, to demonstrate transdisciplinary solution-seeking. Experimental in form as well as in method, Climates. Habitats. Environments. features an inventive book design by mono.studio that puts word and image on equal footing, offering a multiplicity of media, interpretations, and manifestations of interdisciplinary research. For example, botanist Matthew Hall draws on Ovid’s Metamorphoses to discuss human-plant interpenetration; curator and writer Venus Lau considers how spectrality consumes—and is consumed—in animation and film, literature, music, and cuisine; and critical theorist and filmmaker Elizabeth Povinelli proposes “Water Sense” as a geontological approach to “the question of our connected and differentiated existence,” informed by the “ancestral catastrophe of colonialism.” Artists excavate the natural and cultural DNA of indigo, lacquer, rattan, and mulberry; works at the intersection of art, design, and architecture explore “The Posthuman City”; an ongoing research project investigates the ecological urgencies of Pacific archipelagos. The works of art, the projects, and the majority of the texts featured in the book were commissioned by NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore. Copublished with NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore

Climates. Habitats. Environments.

Sophie Goltz

Khim Ong

A much-needed resource on the practice of public art commissions and community engagement through the arts in urban Asia. Distributed for the NTU Centre for Co ntemporary Art Public art integrates landscape architecture, urban planning, and cultural management to create a sense of place. This book, dstributed for the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art, documents a major public art commission in Singapore, featuring works by artists Dan Graham, Zul Mahmod, Tomás Saraceno, and Yinka Shonibare, and represents a unique collaboration between Nanyang Technology University Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore and Mapletree Investments--a Singaporean state-owned property developer with global operations. Essays and interviews with the artists tell the story of the regional histories, urban politics, and collaboration that went into the successful creation of a public space. Culture City. Culture Scape. is a much-needed resource on the role that art can play in public education and social corporate investment in urban Asia.

Culture Scape

Culture City

Puay Khim Ong

Roger Nelson

Following the lifework (1960s to 2010) of visionary Singaporean architect William S. W. Lim, The Impossibility of Mapping (Urban Asia) is a compelling compilation of case studies and historical projects. This multifaceted publication takes Lim's ideas to a future Asia: a region defined by an irreducibly complex urban topography under constant flux. Looking from Singapore to Southeast Asia, and from this region to Asia more expansively (and beyond), it presents a diverse range of activities which may be productively framed through the notion of critical spatial practice.The book has three interconnected points of departure: Lim's lifework; the interdisciplinary exhibition 'Incomplete Urbanism: Attempts at Critical Spatial Practice' at NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, and the related conference, 'The Impossibility of Mapping (Urban Asia)'; and the cross-cultural and urban festival 'CITIES FOR PEOPLE, NTU CCA Ideas Fest 2016/17', held at venues around Gillman Barracks, Singapore. The multiple links are emphasised in three key ways: through editorial texts, through design concepts, and through selected projects inserted as 'intermissions' between each of the book's sections.Artists, planners, activists, architects, scholars get together in this volume to respond to Lim's critical spatial practice. Research essays, artworks, visual and textual documentation, spatio-temporal maps grapple with the diversity of Southeast Asia, offering unexpected responses to planning, building, and living cities and urban spaces, but also put forward the question, 'Who owns the city?'. This key collection offers a path into spatial questions in Asia and beyond, and serves as a teaching and research tool.

Ute Meta Bauer

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