PerForm Open Academy of Arts and Activations

PerForm​ Open Academy of Arts and Activations—a porous space bridging solidarities, knowledges, and futurities in the precarious present.

PerForm Open Academy of Arts and Activations is the live gathering of 14 PerForm Fellows from the Global South—Africa, Arab World, Asia, and South America. These fellows, intersectional practitioners across diverse disciplines of activism, film, design, curation, research, education, visual culture, spoken word, performance, will present their strategies for activating contexts and communities. The 15th PerForm Fellow from Singapore is Endless Return, a visceral platform of ravers—performance, dance, sound, and conceptual artists—known for their raw, irreverent, unexpected, and migratory pop-up parties.

The 14 Global South Fellows are Aziz Sohail (Karachi/Melbourne); Chathuri Nissansala (Colombo); Diamantina Arcoiris (Bogatá); Etcétera (Buenos Aires/Santiago); Hira Nabi (Lahore/Amsterdam); Marianne Fahmy (Alexandria); Radhika Hettiarachchi (Colombo); Saodat Ismailova (Tashkent/Paris); Selma & Sofiane Ouissi (Tunis/Paris); Sharareh Bajracharya (Kathmandu); Sunday Obiajulu Ozegbe (Lagos); Ujjwala Maharjan (Kathmandu), YoNoFui (Buenos Aires). 

The theme of PerForm this year is ”Decoloniality”. Coloniality of power being defined as “the structures of power, control, and hegemony in all dimensions of social life including sexuality, authority, subjectivity, and labour.” A big part of exploring ‘Decoloniality’ is understanding it in relation to lived experiences and contexts of the different Fellows.

On April 17, there will be the two Opening keynotes: How to Love a Tree by Hira Nabi (Lahore/Amsterdam) and Redesign Ourselves by Diamantina Arcoiris (Bogatá). Following this, there will be numerous public workshops by the different fellows. Central to the PerForm Open Academy of Arts and Activations is a 15-hour Marathon format on April 20 stretching from 10am to 1am the next day. The Closing Keynote will be given by Saodat Ismailova on April 25. Saodat will embark on unpacking her most recent film archives continuously over five nights in the PerForm Open Academy Studio. There will be numerous screenings as Saodat articulates her trajectories of ecology, tradition, living with the non-human, colonialism, and the female universe through the lens of a key film, The Haunted.

PerForm is conceptualised and led by T:>Works Artistic Director, Dr. Keng Sen Ong. With PerForm, T:>Works aims to cut across silos, disciplines, and fields to support translocal knowledge production, situated practices, and contextualised research as shared resources for the future. In particular, PerForm focuses on the arts practitioner as a thought leader engaged in care and repair, actively engaging histories, the precarious present, and world-creating. 

For PerForm Open Academy of Arts and Activations, Dr. Ong draws inspiration from his seminal work investigating nomadic alternative universities and world-creating in the arts: The Flying Circus Project (1996–2013), as well as the Curator’s Academy (2018–22).

PerForm Open Academy redefines an academy by embracing an openness which opposes hierarchical learning, refuses elite membership, and ultimately unpacks the institution into a porous space. It aspires towards planetary consciousness. Dr. Ong elaborates, “the idea of openness and porosity is even more important when we evaluate and redefine how we sustain liveability on Earth. Our emphasis in PerForm is living, multiplicity, and transformation on this geological magma-filled rock.”

PerForm Open Academy of Arts and Activations is presented by T:>Works, an independent and international arts company based in Singapore at its space, 72-13.

Events
Rave 4LLEN by Endless Return: April 13, 9:30pm to April 14, 2am
Opening keynotes: April 17, 7:30–9:30pm
Workshops: April 18–20
Marathon: April 20, 10am to April 21, 1am
Closing keynote: April 25, 7:30–9:30pm
Studio: April 26–30