Perspectives​

Performance art is often defined by its ephemerality – existing in time, space, and memory. Acclaimed Indonesian performance artist Melati Suryodarmo joins UBS Art Collection’s Elaine Choi to reflect on her practice and the recurring themes that run through her work – endurance and repetition, love and vulnerability, emotional labour, and the politics of the body. Referencing her performance, I Love You (2007) – the video documentation of which is part of the UBS Art Collection and is presented at the UBS Art Studio during ART SG – the conversation will also consider how performance art is documented and collected, and what it means for a work to persist beyond the live moment.

Speaker:
Melati Suryodarmo – Artist, Indonesia

Moderated by:
Elaine Choi – UBS Art Collection Manager (APAC), UBS AG

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Artists Atul Bhalla and Robert Zhao will be joined by Meera Curam, Director of Hampi Art Labs (HAL), to share their experiences at this recently-launched initiative. Comprising an arts centre and residency programme located near the UNESCO World Heritage site in South India, Hampi Art Labs was founded on an ethos of building an interdisciplinary institution to cultivate cultural links globally, inspired by the unique confluence of art, heritage and nature in its environs. This conversation will discuss the potential for this landmark residency programme — a partnership between JSW Foundation (India) and The Institutum (Singapore) — and how collaborative models can chart new pathways in the global art ecosystem.

Speakers:
Atul Bhalla – Artist, India
Robert Zhao – Artist, Singapore
Meera Curam – Director, Hampi Art Labs, India

Moderated by:
Alessio Antoniolli – Director, Triangle Network

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This keynote conversation with acclaimed artist Jitish Kallat traces how his work moves across historical, planetary, and cosmological scales. Drawing equally on archival data and material processes, the discussion reflects on perception, language, and uncertainty.

Speaker:
Jitish Kallat – Artist, India

Moderated by:
Srinivas Aditya Mopidevi – Founder, Studio Public Memory, and Curator, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art

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A conversation with Bhenji Ra, Brian Fuata and Joshua Serafin, moderated by X Zhu-Nowell.

An art fair is already a kind of involuntary stage: hyper-visible, transactional, crowded with competing temporalities and attention economies. So why stage performance here? And what other economies might performance produce beyond the logics of the marketplace?

This conversation brings together three artists whose practices move through Wan Hai Hotel: Singapore Strait and ART SG’s inaugural Performance Art sector to examine how performance operates across radically different economies of value, exchange, and circulation. Joshua Serafin’s Relics confronts the colonial erasure of Indigenous warrior identities through embodied memory and transoceanic kinship. Bhenji Ra’s Sissy in the Straits transforms The Warehouse Hotel through sirenic navigation, drawing on the site’s histories of maritime labor and red-light district intimacies. Brian Fuata’s improvisatory appearances drift through the fair like weather, sometimes present, sometimes withdrawing, questioning the very terms of visibility and presence.

Together, these artists offer a provocation: What if performance doesn’t simply adapt to commercial contexts but exposes the structures of attention, desire, and power already at work? From Indigenous cosmologies that refuse colonial time, to the informal economies that have long accompanied port cities, to the staging of vulnerability within spaces designed for transaction—this conversation asks what alternative models of value, duration, and relation performance might engender. What economies are we rehearsing when we perform?

Speakers:
Bhenji Ra – Artist, Australia
Brian Fuata – Artist, Australia
Joshua Serafin – Artist, Philippines/Belgium

Moderated by:
X Zhu-Nowell – Executive Director and Chief Curator, Rockbund Art Museum

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In this panel, Vogue Singapore explores how different forms of craft and technique applied in fashion can be seen as an expression of art, and how fashion and art are deeply intertwined. In this conversation, artist Anne Samat, textile artist Tiffany Loy and independent curator Deborah Lim dissect how this connection is reflected in our daily lives, and how one art form can be an extension of the other.

Speakers:
Anne Samat – Artist, Malaysia
Tiffany Loy – Textile Artist, Singapore

Moderated by:
Deborah Lim – Independent Curator

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The idea of “soft power” has gained increasing resonance, describing the capacity to influence
behaviour, shape agendas, and guide outcomes through culture. Those who steward cultural
institutions therefore occupy a unique position of influence: they inform public taste, frame
narratives, and determine what enters the cultural conversation.

Behind the scenes of the world’s leading museums, art centres, and biennales, this influence is
matched by responsibility. To lead, program, or curate such spaces involves navigating complex
decisions, balancing competing perspectives, and considering the far-reaching impacts—both
visible and subtle—of each choice.

Join Susie Ferrell, curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Purat
Osathanugrah, founder of the newly launched private museum Dib Bangkok, and Victor Wang,
director of Artspace Sydney, as they reflect on how cultural leadership today can be both a
challenge and an opportunity—and how thoughtful stewardship can help culture move forward.

Speakers:
Susie Ferrell –  Associate Curator of Chinese Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
Purat Osathanugrah – Founder and Chairman, Dib Bangkok
Victor Wang – Executive Director of Artspace Sydney

Moderated by:
Tan Siuli  – Independent Curator, ART SG Contributing Editor

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In artistic production and presentation, audiences encounter an artist’s vision only after it has been translated into physical reality. Yet long before a work takes form, it depends upon those with the foresight to recognize its potential and the commitment to help bring it into being.

Join a panel of speakers whose work is dedicated to enabling artistic visions—particularly in complex and resource-intensive mediums such as film and time-based media, performance, and installation. The panel features Han Nefkens, founder of the eponymous foundation supporting grants and commissions for video art, with a special focus on Southeast and South Asia; Gridthiya Gaweewong, Artistic Director of the Jim Thompson Art Foundation and Co-Artistic Director of the Thailand Biennale 2023; and Tay Tong, Director, Visual Arts at Singapore’s National Arts Council, which has commissioned numerous projects across Singapore Art Week. Moderated by Zoe Butt, Artistic Director, deCentral and Founder, in-tangible institute.

Speakers:
Han Nefkens – Founder, Han Nefkens Foundation
Gridthiya Gaweewong – Artistic Director, Jim Thompson Art Centre
Tay Tong – Director (Arts Ecosystem Group) Visual Arts, NAC

Moderated by:
Zoe Butt – Artistic Director, deCentral and Founder, in-tangible institute

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“I use crisis and failure as the primary material in my work to be able to produce and develop new language and aesthetics.” – Ibrahim Mahama

Join acclaimed artist Ibrahim Mahama – ranked first on ArtReview’s Power 100 (2025) – and Dean Kymberly Pinder, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Dean of the Yale School of Art, for a compelling conversation exploring the central themes of Mahama’s practice and how this interfaces with craft. Rising to international prominence through politically charged, large-scale installations, Mahama is known for using recycled materials such as jute sacks, carrying references to global transactions and capitalist structures, draped over architectural edifices. 

This discussion will examine questions of urban renewal, social responsibility, and collaboration, as well as the new independence of West African nations and other post-colonial territories. It will also consider the creative diversity and political significance of craft, materiality, and hierarchies of labor that shape global production.

Speakers:
Ibrahim Mahama  – Artist, Ghana
Dr. Kymberly Pinder –  Stavros Niarchos Foundation Dean of the Yale School of Art

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Staying with the Trouble takes its title from Donna Haraway’s 2016 book, which calls for a reconfiguration of our relationship to the Earth and its many inhabitants. The phrase also emphasises the potential of individual and collective agency, of sitting with the discomfort and lesser known, as gestures towards more hopeful futures. In this panel, we bring together artists Arahmaiani, Shubigi Rao and Kristian-Marc James Paul to explore how they navigate these tensions in their various roles and expansive practices, and consider what forms of agency can be activated through artistic, curatorial, and collective practices.

Speakers:
Arahmaiani – Artist, Indonesia
Shubigi Rao – Artist, Writer, Curator, Singapore
Kristian-Marc James Paul – Activist, Writer, Singapore

Moderated by:
Zoe Butt – Artistic Director, deCentral and Founder, in-tangible institute

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Responding to the growing discourse on futurisms and speculative frameworks, this panel brings together three practitioners whose work is rooted not only in imagining futures, but in organising, building, and shaping them to being. Working across artistic practice, organising, curating, and more, Chris John Fussner, Jo Ho, and Lawrence Lek, share how abstract ideas and critical frameworks are translated into worlds, structures, actions, and sustained initiatives in their hands.

Speakers:
Lawrence Lek – Artist, United Kingdom / Malaysia
Chris John Fussner – Founder and Creative Director, Tropical Futures Institute, United States of America / Philippines
Jo Ho – Artist, Singapore

Moderated by:
Clara Che Wei Peh – Independent Curator

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