life bestowing cadaverous soooooooooooooooooooot
Audio About Index
Social Assembly as a (Research) Method with Sophia Yadong Hao and Rae-Yen Song 宋瑞渊
Rae-Yen Song Sophia Yadong Hao
One force to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them
XinRan Liu
The Spiritual Imagination in Everyday World-Making
Dr Terence Heng
Singaporean Chinese Spirit Medium in a Trance, Singapore
Dr Terence Heng
Unearthing Ancestral Bones, Bukit Brown Cemetery, Singapore
Dr Terence Heng
Remnants of a Burial at Sea, Singapore
Dr Terence Heng
Mycelium and woodchip composite
ASCUS Art & Science Dilan Ozkan HBBE
Mandible fragment of cattle with two teeth, left side
Dr Jonny Geber
Basalt
XinRan Liu
Dried agar with bacterial staining
ASCUS Art & Science Keira Tucker
Mycelium composite
ASCUS Art & Science HBBE Kumar Debnath
Mycelium and snake bedding composite
ASCUS Art & Science Keira Tucker
Eye of the Large Hadron Collider
XinRan Liu
Woven textile made from leek fibres
ASCUS Art & Science HBBE Iulianiya Grigoryeva
Fragment of cattle skull and right horncore
Dr Jonny Geber
Merchild (Crab)
Aniara Omann
The Courtship of Giants Canticle III
Emii Alrai
Womb Gloop
Clarinda Tse 雍記
(T_T)
Rae-Yen Song
Fermenting Wild Geographies (part 2)
Dr Kaajal Modi
Fermenting Wild Geographies (part 1)
Dr Kaajal Modi
Womb Gloop – Act 2 Tails
Clarinda Tse 雍記
Womb Gloop – Act 3 Toes
Clarinda Tse 雍記
Costume for Song
Divya Osbon Rae-Yen Song
Awakening Ceremony
Kara Chin
Buddy
Kara Chin
Lucky
Kara Chin
○ squigoda song cycle ● water~land~air ○
○ squigoda song cycle ● water~land~air ○
Rae-Yen Song Tommy Perman
○ squigoda song cycle ● water~land~air ○
Rae-Yen Song Tommy Perman
Honey
Hazel Brill
Digestion of the Silent Earth
Asli Hatipoglu
Sap
Hazel Brill
Ziggy and the Starfish
Anne Duk Hee Jordan
Womb Gloop – Act 1
Clarinda Tse 雍記
Songs from the Dark Forest
Choy Ka Fai
Dance Inside Me
Choy Ka Fai
Fido
Kara Chin
Bate
Kara Chin
Merchild (Shell)
Aniara Omann
Merchild (Pipefish)
Aniara Omann
Merchild (Prawn)
Aniara Omann
for those who wish to crawl through my { } body
April Lin 林森
Me a Thousand Years Ago, You a Thousand Years from now
Aniara Omann
Me a Thousand Years Ago, You a Thousand Years from now
Aniara Omann
Me a Thousand Years Ago, You a Thousand Years from now
Aniara Omann
Æblet/The Apple (basket), 2022
Aniara Omann
Fragment of the Moon
XinRan Liu
Fragment of the Moon
XinRan Liu

Aniara Omann

Anne Duk Hee Jordan

April Lin 林森

ASCUS Art & Science

Asli Hatipoglu

Choy Ka Fai

Clarinda Tse 雍記

Dilan Ozkan

Divya Osbon

Dr Jonny Geber

Dr Kaajal Modi

Dr Terence Heng

Emii Alrai

Hazel Brill

HBBE

Iulianiya Grigoryeva

Kara Chin

Keira Tucker

Kumar Debnath

Rae-Yen Song

Sophia Yadong Hao

Tommy Perman

XinRan Liu

Social Assembly as a (Research) Method with Sophia Yadong Hao and Rae-Yen Song 宋瑞渊

Rae-Yen Song Sophia Yadong Hao

Reconsidering research as a process of searching towards rather than a quest for definitive answers, Sophia Yadong Hao, Director and Principal Curator of Cooper Gallery and Rae-Yen Song will journey through the exhibition space and think through its use of social assembly as a method of creating and curating contemporary art. Together they will explore the exhibition’s potential as an experimental laboratory for shaping future politics and how collaboration and collective engagements can be key components of this approach.

One force to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them

XinRan Liu

What if everything you could see; touch or feel was only the tip of an iceberg? Ever since the late 1800s, starting with Lord Kelvin, people have postulated that there’s more to the universe than that the most powerful tools of science can detect. Over the last hundred years, there has been a growing body of evidence to strongly indicate that our universe and most of the matter in it is indeed Dark. Come and explore what scientists know we don’t know and how this mysterious matter holds our universe together against forces pulling it apart.

The Spiritual Imagination in Everyday World-Making

Dr Terence Heng

How, and to what extent do individual and collective imaginations play a part in our seeing and constructing of spiritual worlds in physical spaces? In this talk, Terence will illustrate and visualize the social and material processes that individuals use in order to see their everyday lives and spaces in a spiritual way. Starting in Singapore, we will examine various death, afterlife and religious rituals that can enchant one’s worldview of an otherwise mundane environment, performed in the context of state policy and diasporic memories – resulting in “flowscapes” around regulations and infrastructure. We will then move closer to home, and see how the concept of a “spiritual imagination” is equally at play in England, where different communities make use of place-making, aesthetic juxtapositions and bodily discourse to construct worlds of past/home, present/presence or health/wellness. The talk will conclude about what having and exercising a spiritual imagination means in our everyday lives – how this can be seen as an act of political resistance and everyday sacralisation.

Singaporean Chinese Spirit Medium in a Trance, Singapore

Dr Terence Heng

Digital print on Hahnemule Photorag Bright White 310gsm

Unearthing Ancestral Bones, Bukit Brown Cemetery, Singapore

Dr Terence Heng

Digital print on Hahnemule Photorag Bright White 310gsm

Remnants of a Burial at Sea, Singapore

Dr Terence Heng

Digital print on Hahnemule Photorag Bright White 310gsm

Mycelium and woodchip composite

ASCUS Art & Science Dilan Ozkan HBBE

Mycelium and woodchip composite, with mushroom growth.

Dilan Ozkan, HBBE, courtesy of Dilan Ozkan and ASCUS

Mandible fragment of cattle with two teeth, left side

Dr Jonny Geber

Medieval period

Courtesy of Jonny Geber, University of Edinburgh

Basalt

XinRan Liu

Courtesy of XinRan Liu, UNDO

Dried agar with bacterial staining

ASCUS Art & Science Keira Tucker

Dried agar with bacterial staining (Serratia marcescens)

Kiera Tucker, courtesy of ASCUS

Mycelium composite

ASCUS Art & Science HBBE Kumar Debnath

Mycelium composite (G. lucidum and sawdust)

Kumar Debnath, HBBE, courtesy of ASCUS

Mycelium and snake bedding composite

ASCUS Art & Science Keira Tucker

Eye of the Large Hadron Collider

XinRan Liu

Courtesy of XinRan Liu, University of Edinburgh

 

Woven textile made from leek fibres

ASCUS Art & Science HBBE Iulianiya Grigoryeva

Iulianiya Grigoryeva, HBBE, courtesy of ASCUS

Fragment of cattle skull and right horncore

Dr Jonny Geber

Medieval period

Courtesy of Jonny Geber, University of Edinburgh

Merchild (Crab)

Aniara Omann

Materials: Resin coated seaweed; glazed porcelain

The Courtship of Giants Canticle III

Emii Alrai

Materials: Steel, polystyrene, copper, plaster, pigment, patinates, sand, rushes, terracotta.

 

Womb Gloop

Clarinda Tse 雍記

Materials: Glazed ceramic vessel (as part of performance). Seaweed, steel, alginate and calcium fluids, fennel stem, rod lights,trolley, skin tape, glycerine, plastic packaging, rice paper, boxes, probiotics spray.

(T_T)

Rae-Yen Song

“This drawing is a plotting of dreams, imaginings, questions and desires about the building of different worlds for future~extended kin, taking the form of a migratory beast amongst speculated topographies and whispered words. Drawn as a map~blueprint, it has been used as a tool of connection and conversation, as a way for me to approach and share entangled thoughts with thinkers across many different disciplines – from particle physics to visual sociology to osteoarchaeology. I share (T_T) with others as an invitation to them to navigate and pick at complex ideas with me in visual, sensual, imaginative ways. It is simultaneously a nebulous dreaming, and a honed research instrument.”

Materials: Drawing (ink and my father’s marker pens on my father’s paper).
297 x 420mm

Fermenting Wild Geographies (part 2)

Dr Kaajal Modi

In this two part event we will consider microbes as heirlooms that are passed down intergenerationally from our ancestors. This can take the form of both vertical genetic inheritance, and the stories, foods and cultural practices that we inherit through which we can trace the ways humans have been entangled with microorganisms. Human bodies are holobionts composed of a host and trillions of microorganisms whose collective functioning keeps the whole alive. As ancestors, allies, and symbiotes, microbes have lived alongside us as long as we have lived. Human symbioses with microorganisms are an important adaptation and survival strategy that have shaped us and the world around us in important and meaningful ways. Yet, like many forms of biodiversity, global microbial biodiversity is under threat from climate change and an increasingly industrialised food system and a loss of land-based knowledge about heritage food practices.

Part 2: Dinner and Tasting

In the second event, you will be invited to taste the fermented drink and porridge whilst led in a discussion about what fermentation means to you, and how you understand microbes in your own daily encounters. We will also discuss other similar lactic wild ferments, and how they differ from other types of fermentation.

 

Recommended Reading:
The Scots Kitchen by F. Marian McNeill

Fermenting Wild Geographies (part 1)

Dr Kaajal Modi

Fermenting wild geographies: exploring microbial inheritance through the senses
In this two part event we will consider microbes as heirlooms that are passed down intergenerationally from our ancestors. This can take the form of both vertical genetic inheritance, and the stories, foods and cultural practices that we inherit through which we can trace the ways humans have been entangled with microorganisms. Human bodies are holobionts composed of a host and trillions of microorganisms whose collective functioning keeps the whole alive. As ancestors, allies, and symbiotes, microbes have lived alongside us as long as we have lived. Human symbioses with microorganisms are an important adaptation and survival strategy that have shaped us and the world around us in important and meaningful ways. Yet, like many forms of biodiversity, global microbial biodiversity is under threat from climate change and an increasingly industrialised food system and a loss of land-based knowledge about heritage food practices.

Part 1: Fermenting
In the first workshop, you will learn how to make sowans, a traditional Scottish probiotic porridge and oat drink that is made through a process of wild lactic fermentation. Lactic fermentation is a process used in cuisines around the world. It works by creating an environment in which lactic bacteria, necessary for human health and digestion, can thrive. We will create an acidic mixture and then add some spices and seasonings from other parts of the world to see how this affects the fermentation process.

Recommended Reading:
The Scots Kitchen by F. Marian McNeill

Womb Gloop – Act 2 Tails

Clarinda Tse 雍記

Leaning into the lunar observation, “womb gloop” is an amphibian algae womb who clarifies, gathers, rubs, ruptures, stations, half-closes, senses, traces, wraps, unwinds in the synergy of heat and humidity.

They collect hearts, wear them across their bodies. These hearts are ready for birthing. In the weight of the hearts, bursted are leaking jellies. Reenact the evolving of this being, wagging weighted tail. Balancing bacterial colonies. Growing patchy. Reach by the thread, sharpened handles as picks. Breathing through the skin.

The performance features foraged seaweed from Kintyre – Ellary and Carsaig  (from a bright summer day and pre-storm autumn day), plastic packaging, and a scallop-edge dish and soldered holder made by fionn duffy. The clay of the dish is foraged from Bragar, Lewis which is mixed with reclaimed stoneware, the glaze is goat milk with some splashes of pine roisin.Act

Womb Gloop – Act 3 Toes

Clarinda Tse 雍記

Leaning into the lunar observation, “womb gloop” is an amphibian algae womb who clarifies, gathers, rubs, ruptures, stations, half-closes, senses, traces, wraps, unwinds in the synergy of heat and humidity.

They collect hearts, wear them across their bodies. These hearts are ready for birthing. In the weight of the hearts, bursted are leaking jellies. Reenact the evolving of this being, wagging weighted tail. Balancing bacterial colonies. Growing patchy. Reach by the thread, sharpened handles as picks. Breathing through the skin.

The performance features foraged seaweed from Kintyre – Ellary and Carsaig  (from a bright summer day and pre-storm autumn day), plastic packaging, and a scallop-edge dish and soldered holder made by fionn duffy. The clay of the dish is foraged from Bragar, Lewis which is mixed with reclaimed stoneware, the glaze is goat milk with some splashes of pine roisin.

Costume for Song

Divya Osbon Rae-Yen Song

In making this costume, Divya took as a starting point Rae-Yen’s thinking around imagined futures and worlds that centre multispecies collaboration, and ancestral mythologies~knowledges. These ideas were channelled through Rae-Yen’s and Divya’s shared references to ceremonial garments, talismans, and ancient cartographies of the sacred body, common across Asian cultures. The costume – made from fabrics inherited from Rae-Yen’s grandmother, canvas repurposed from the body of Rae-Yen’s installation ▷▥◉▻ (2021), and embellished with metal and earth jewels crafted by Divya with her mother, Vibha – has emerged as a kind of soft suit of armour. Protected by ancestors, it is intended for a peaceful and curious observer of alternative and distant worlds, in search of kin. For the duration of this exhibition, the costume will either hang or be worn by Rae-Yen in the space.

Materials: A range of Rae-Yen Song’s inherited and repurposed fabrics (canvas, cotton, silk, polyester), brass, glazed ceramic.

Awakening Ceremony

Kara Chin

Buddy

Kara Chin

110x93x64cm

Materials: Timber, felt, polymer clay, varnish, leds, Perspex, digital print, dollhouse items, carpet underlay, tap pipe fixtures (I don’t know what these are called), glazed ceramic, paper, cabinet feet

Lucky

Kara Chin

Materials: Timber; felt; polymer clay; varnish; LED lighting; acrylic; digital print; dollhouse items; carpet underlay; tap pipe fixtures; glazed ceramic; paper; cabinet feet

○ squigoda song cycle ● water~land~air ○

A unique auditory experience where a pool of tea fungus, equipped with contact microphones, a hydrophone, and various sensors, undergoes fermentation. The evolving biological process produces fluctuating signals and audio inputs that shape three dynamic live soundscapes, each flowing through a different space of the exhibition. This creative endeavour represents a collaboration between sound artist Tommy Perman and the very processes of the tea fungus itself, blurring the lines between organic and orchestrated sound.

The album on bandcamp – all proceeds go to UNICEF.

○ squigoda song cycle ● water~land~air ○

Rae-Yen Song Tommy Perman

○ squigoda song cycle ● water~land~air ○ is a complex environment – animated, shifting, and multivalent. It is also the living organ at the centre of the wider exhibition and live programme that I have collated, life bestowing cadaverous sooooooooooooooooooot.

Its earthen surface shrinks and cracks as it dries over time, and houses three slowly revolving ceramic vessels – which also serve as architectural models. A fourth ceramic being hovers overhead: it doubles as a light fitting, and trebles as a set of flutes. ○ squigoda song cycle ● water~land~air ○ is also an experiment in multispecies collaboration. It incorporates a pool of tea fungus which is connected to contact mics, a hydrophone and other sensors. As it slowly ferments, the tea fungus generates changing signals and audio inputs. These inputs feed into and orchestrate three ever-changing live soundscapes, which flow through the three spaces of the exhibition. This becomes a collaboration not only with human sound artist Tommy Perman, but with the tea fungus itself.

Materials: Glazed ceramics, motorised turntables, cob, basalt, fermenting tea fungus, microphones and other sensors, live evolving soundscapes. 190cm x 172cm x 250cm.

Honey

Hazel Brill

Materials: Card; bacterial cellulose; polymer clay; pendulum clock mechanism

Digestion of the Silent Earth

Asli Hatipoglu

Most decomposers such as insects are never noticed. Today, we hardly know how the ecosystem functions with the absence of insects. Over 75% of insects have declined in abundance since the last 50 years, threatening human well-being. From being a highly priced delicacy in many countries, insects are also investigated for their potential medical uses for human health. Artist and researcher Asli Hatipoğlu dives into this subject through a performative dinner where she aims to alter perceptions on a species that are primarily seen as pests and unwelcome guests. By incorporating humor, Asli challenges social norms around eating, while informing the guests on dynamics of the soil we live on. Inspired by the film of artists Anne Duk Hee Jordan and Pauline Doutreluingne’s ‘Brakfesten-Le Grand Bouffe’, Asli prepares a delicious meal for guests to digest.

Sap

Hazel Brill

Materials: Laser cut steel; bacterial cellulose; latex; blown glass; metal wire; polymer clay; motor; LED lights.

Ziggy and the Starfish

Anne Duk Hee Jordan

Single channel HD video with sound. 16 mins 28 seconds

Womb Gloop – Act 1

Clarinda Tse 雍記

Songs from the Dark Forest

Choy Ka Fai

Dance Inside Me

Choy Ka Fai

A Video Essay by Choy Ka Fai on the Resonance of Vietnamese Diaspore in Germnay through the concept of Dance Ritual, remenering the 3 generation of Vietnamese Immigrants and the practise of the folk religion of the Mother Goddess – Dao Mau

Fido

Kara Chin

Materials: Timber, felt, polymer clay, varnish, LED lighting, acrylic, digital print, dollhouse items, foam, shower hose, glazed ceramic, paper, cabinet feet, tarpaulin, plastic dog.

Bate

Kara Chin

Materials: Wax, aluminium, copper pipe, water, pump, silicone, packing peanuts, trainers and socks, waste pipe and plug, catering tray

Merchild (Shell)

Aniara Omann

“Merchild is a series of small sculptures in recycled plastic, seaweed, silicone, ceramic and felted wool. The sculptures are inspired by mermaid myths and take the form of fictional futuristic sea creatures, which as a result of the drastic rise of the world’s oceans are in the process of evolving “back” to sea animals and therefore exist in an evolutionary intermediate stage between humans and animals.

Installed on walls, floors, and vertical hangings, the installation suggests that the viewer is walking on the seafloor between these various creatures from the future. These merfolk are half human, half shrimp, mussel, crab, and squid, and refer aesthetically to both cute children’s book illustrations and grotesque Nordic sea monsters.” – Aniara Omann

Materials: Recycled and cast HDPE plastic; cast silicone; glazed stoneware.

Merchild (Pipefish)

Aniara Omann

Materials: Recycled wool jumper; silicone; ecoresin; glazed porcelain.

Merchild (Prawn)

Aniara Omann

Materials: Cast ecoresin, lichen.

for those who wish to crawl through my { } body

April Lin 林森

Me a Thousand Years Ago, You a Thousand Years from now

Aniara Omann

  1. Cast ecoresin.
  2. Bioplastic (tapioca starch, vinegar, glycerine, woodchip, agar agar).
  3. Cast silicone, found crabshell.

Æblet/The Apple (basket), 2022

Aniara Omann

Materials: Woven recycled paper, Cast silicone, Recycled wool jumper

Fragment of the Moon

XinRan Liu

Courtesy of XinRan Liu, University of Edinburgh.

Aniara Omann

Aniara Omann (b. 1987, Denmark) graduated from the MFA programme at the Glasgow School of Art in 2014 and works across sculpture, video, text and performance. Recent exhibitions include Cross-Feed with Gary Zhexi Zhang, Market Gallery, as part of Glasgow International’s supported programme, Glasgow (2018), Final Incarnation, VoidoidARCHIVE, Glasgow (2016), 3016, Project Room, Trongate, Glasgow (2016), Aniara Omann / Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys, Celine Gallery, Glasgow (2015). Selected group shows include iwillmedievalfutureyou6, Kunsthal Aarhus, Aarhus (2018) GMO Scarecrow, Age of Aquarius, Copenhagen (2017),  Transformationer, ULYS Art Centre, Odense (2017), í drögum, Akureyri Art Museum, Akureyri, Iceland (2016), Yosemite, VoidoidARCHIVE, Glasgow (2015). She has been selected for 2017 Autumn Residency at Hospitalfield, UK.

 

Recommended Reading
City by Clifford D Simak

Artwork
Merchild (Crab)
Aniara Omann
Artwork
Merchild (Shell)
Aniara Omann
Artwork
Merchild (Pipefish)
Aniara Omann
Artwork
Merchild (Prawn)
Aniara Omann
Artwork
Me a Thousand Years Ago, You a Thousand Years from now
Aniara Omann
Artwork
Æblet/The Apple (basket), 2022
Aniara Omann

Anne Duk Hee Jordan

Anne Duk Hee Jordan considers transience and transformation as central themes in her work. Through movement and performance, Jordan gives materiality another dimension – she builds motorised sculptures and creates edible landscapes. Her sculptures are intended to draw the viewer into the present and open a dialogue between natural phenomena, philosophy and art. She asks questions about an “agency” and encourages a change of perspective. She shifts the focus away from humans towards the entire ecology.

Artwork Video
Ziggy and the Starfish
Anne Duk Hee Jordan

April Lin 林森

April Lin 林森 (b. 1996, Stockholm — they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist and independent curator investigating image-making and world-building as sites for the construction, sustenance, and dissemination of co-existent yet conflicting truths. Working across moving image, performance, creative computing and installation, they dream & explore & critique & fret & catastrophise & imagine & play — for a collective remembering of forgotten pasts, for a critical examination of normalised presents, and for a visualising of freer futures as, of course, imagined from the periphery. Interweaving strands of auto-biography, documentary, queer ecology, and new media, April Lin 林森’s works are topped off with an inevitable garnish consisting of the other matters dialoguing with their brain and heart during the making process of each piece. Uniting their genre-fluid body of work is a commitment to centring oppressed knowledges, building an ethics of collaboration around reciprocal care, and exploring the linkages between history, memory, and interpersonal and structural trauma.

 

Recommended Reading
Pearls From Their Mouth by Pear Nuallak

Commissioned Text
for those who wish to crawl through my { } body
April Lin 林森

ASCUS Art & Science

ASCUS Art & Science is a non-profit organisation dedicated to bringing together art, science and beyond in the name of creativity, play, curiosity and experimentation. ASCUS catalyses collaborations across disciplines through project management, facilitates creative projects, public engagement events and provides a publicly accessible science lab and genetic modification facility for curious minds to delve into the techniques of microbiology, microscopy and DNA analysis. ASCUS has facilitated projects at the intersection of art and science by both UK and international artists including Oron Catts, Marta de Menezes, Susan Aldworth, Hannah Imlach and Aurelie Fontan.

Artefact
Mycelium and woodchip composite
ASCUS Art & Science Dilan Ozkan HBBE
Artefact
Dried agar with bacterial staining
ASCUS Art & Science Keira Tucker
Artefact
Mycelium composite
ASCUS Art & Science HBBE Kumar Debnath
Artefact Artwork
Mycelium and snake bedding composite
ASCUS Art & Science Keira Tucker
Artefact
Woven textile made from leek fibres
ASCUS Art & Science HBBE Iulianiya Grigoryeva

Asli Hatipoglu

Asli Hatipoğlu’s interdisciplinary social practice focuses on curating participatory dinners and installations that shed light on how culinary history and agricultural politics are changing our relationship to food. From working with micro-scale bacteria and yeasts to insects such as the domesticated silkworm, Hatipoğlu critically investigates ways of relating to our environment and ourselves. She researches production supply chains through performative acts to shed light to how humans influence other living organisms. After working several years as a self-taught chef, Asli deepened her knowledge with fermentation during her residency at the Food Lab Jan van Eyck Academie 2020-2021, along participating in several festivals such as Food Art Film Festival JVE (NL), Taking Root- Food Art Film Festival CCA Glasgow (UK), Foodculture Days Vevey (CH), Oerol Festival Terschelling (NL), Japanese Knotweed Festival at Mediamatic (NL) and Zamus Theaterhaus Cologne (DE).

 

Recommended Reading
Insect Apocalypse by Julia Janicki, Gloria Dickie, Simon Scarr and Jitesh Chowdhury, Illustrations by Catherine Tai
Silent Earth by Dave Goulson

Artwork
Digestion of the Silent Earth
Asli Hatipoglu

Choy Ka Fai

Choy Ka Fai is a Berlin-based Singaporean artist. His multidisciplinary art practice situates itself at the intersection of dance, media art and performance. He appropriates technologies and narratives to imagine new futures of the human body. Ka Fai’s projects have been presented in major institutions worldwide, including Tanz Im August (Berlin), ImPulsTanz Festival (Vienna) and Taipei Arts Festival (Taiwan). Ka Fai graduated with a M.A. in Design Interaction from the Royal College of Art, London, United Kingdom.

 

Recommended Reading
Spirits without Borders: Vietnamese Spirit Mediums in a Transnational Age by Nguyễn Thị Hiền and Karen Fjelstad
What Is a Refugee Religion? Exile, Exodus, and Emigration in the Vietnamese Diaspora by Janet Alison Hoskins

Artwork Film
Songs from the Dark Forest
Choy Ka Fai
Artwork Film
Dance Inside Me
Choy Ka Fai

Clarinda Tse 雍記

Clarinda Tse 雍記 is an interdisciplinary performance maker, bodyworker and facilitator, Hong Kong-born and Glasgow-based. Their work explores emergent compositions of material ecologies and bodies as agency for worlding. Their habitat is sensual, slippery, more-than-human, transitional, drawn from everyday experience, multiplicities of selves, play and cellular reconciliation. Recent works have been shown and supported by Take Me Somewhere Festival 2023, Deveron Projects, Huntly (2022), The Work Room, Glasgow (2022), BUZZCUT Double Thrills (2022), P////ARKT, Amsterdam (2021), Ekso Space, Cyprus (2021), Unfix Festival (2021), Present Futures (2021), Transmission Gallery, Glasgow (2020), Bothy Project, Edinburgh (2020), Market Gallery, Glasgow (2019).

 

Recommended Reading
Conversations across place Vol . 1, Reckoning With An Entangled World edited by Nicola Brandt and Frances Whorrall-Campbell
The Kelp Congress, 2020 by Cecilia Åsberg, Janna Holmstedt, Marietta Radomska
Altered States by edited by Sarah Shin and Ben Vickers
Craniosacral Chi Kung : Integrating Body and Emotion in the Cosmic Flow by Mantak Chia, Joyce Thom

Artwork Performance
Womb Gloop
Clarinda Tse 雍記
Performance
Womb Gloop – Act 2 Tails
Clarinda Tse 雍記
Performance
Womb Gloop – Act 3 Toes
Clarinda Tse 雍記
Artwork Performance
Womb Gloop – Act 1
Clarinda Tse 雍記

Dilan Ozkan

Artefact
Mycelium and woodchip composite
ASCUS Art & Science Dilan Ozkan HBBE

Divya Osbon

Divya Osbon is a self-taught maker based in London. She most often works in cloth, making textile works and costumes, and likes to collaborate with others from different disciplines. Throughout all of her work is a commitment to minimising waste and using materials that do not cause environmental or spiritual harm, as well as a curiosity around diasporic identity and aesthetics. She has an MA in Art and Politics from Goldsmiths, and combines her practice with working as the Deputy Director of Mimosa House, a non-profit art space in London supporting women and queer artists.

 

Recommended Reading
Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy

Artwork
Costume for Song
Divya Osbon Rae-Yen Song

Dr Jonny Geber

Jonny Geber is originally from Sweden and moved to Ireland in 2003 working for Irish and British archaeological consultancies as an osteoarchaeologist and zooarchaeologist before moving into academia. He completed his PhD at Queen’s University Belfast in 2012, and was appointed as Docent (UK equivalent of Reader) in Archaeology at Uppsala University, Sweden in April 2018. Jonny has received funding from the Leverhulme Trust, Irish Research Council, the Royal Irish Academy, the Johan and Jakob Söderberg’s Foundation, the Gunvor and Josef Anér Foundation, the Magnus Bergvall’s Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, the University of Otago, the Emily Sarah Montgomery Scholarship (Queen’s University Belfast), Kilkenny County Council, MacDonagh Junction Developments, and Margaret Gowen & Co. Ltd.

 

Recommended Reading:
Inside the Neolothic Mind by David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce

Artefact
Mandible fragment of cattle with two teeth, left side
Dr Jonny Geber
Artefact
Fragment of cattle skull and right horncore
Dr Jonny Geber

Dr Kaajal Modi

Kaajal Modi (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher working through creative practices that explore how making in collaboration with diverse communities (human, microbial and otherwise) can be a way to open up new speculations on how we might create more resilient climate futures. Their practice is rooted in co-creation, and incorporates fermenting, cooking, image making, live art, sound, video and creative interactions to create lively and situated encounters between people, organisms and ecosystems in ways that invite critical reflection and action.

 

Recommended Reading:

Fermentation as an ‘art of noticing’ by Kaajal Modi
Against Purity by Alexis Shotwell
A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None by Kathryn Yusoff
Fermentation as Metaphor by Sandor Ellix Katz
Bodies of Water by Astrida Neimanis
Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis by Katherine McKittrick
Staying with the Trouble by Donna Haraway
Pleasure Activism by Adrienne Maree Brown
Fervent Manifesto by Mercedes Villalba
Fermenting Feminism by Lauren Fournier
Musings: Food, Feminism, Fermentation by Maya Hey
Kitchen Cultures: Fermenting (with) the Trouble by Kaajal Modi

 

Workshop
Fermenting Wild Geographies (part 2)
Dr Kaajal Modi
Workshop
Fermenting Wild Geographies (part 1)
Dr Kaajal Modi

Dr Terence Heng

Terence Heng is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Liverpool. Working on the intersections between creative practice, cultural geographies and visual sociology, he investigates the making of sacred space, spirit mediumship and diasporic identities. Terence is the author of four books, including Of Gods, Gifts and Ghosts: Spiritual Places in Urban Spaces
– a visual sociological take on Chinese religious practices in Singapore. He is currently a British Academy Mid-Career Fellow, photographing overlooked spiritual spaces in the North of England.

Recommended Reading:
Death and the Afterlife: Multidisciplinary Perspectives from a Global City edited by Kit Ying Lye and Terence Heng
Of Gods, Gifts and Ghosts by Terence Heng

Lecture
The Spiritual Imagination in Everyday World-Making
Dr Terence Heng
Artwork
Singaporean Chinese Spirit Medium in a Trance, Singapore
Dr Terence Heng
Artwork
Unearthing Ancestral Bones, Bukit Brown Cemetery, Singapore
Dr Terence Heng
Artwork
Remnants of a Burial at Sea, Singapore
Dr Terence Heng

Emii Alrai

Emii Alrai is an artist and trained museum registrar whose work spans material investigation in relation to memory, critique of the western museological structure and the complexity of ruins. Working primarily in sculpture and installation, her work operates as large-scale realms built in relation to bodies of research which concern archaeology and the natural environments objects are excavated from. Weaving in oral histories, inherited
nostalgia and the details of language to question the rigidity of Empire and the power of hierarchy to interpolate the static presence of history. Clay vessels, gypsum forms and steel armatures punctuate the labyrinth-like spaces Alrai creates, mimicking museum dioramas and romanticised visions of the past.

 

Recommended Reading:
The Dark Abyss of Time by Laurent Olivier
Absent Presence by Mahmoud Darwish
The Slow Grind: Practising Hope and Imagination by Georgina Johnson

Artwork
The Courtship of Giants Canticle III
Emii Alrai

Hazel Brill

Hazel Brill (b. 1991, London, UK) lives and works in London and Newcastle UK. Brill is currently studying for her PhD at Newcastle University, and received her MFA in Fine Art Media from the Slade School of Art London (2017). Selected solo presentations include, Pincer, Workplace Foundation, Newcastle (2023); Pup & Blubber, Block 336, Brixton (2019); Shonisaurus Popularis, Turf Projects (2018). Group exhibitions include Night Station, Whitechapel Open, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2022); Greetings, NWR Forum, Dusseldorf, Germany (2021); A Commitment, MIT film screening,
USA (2021); Realm, Collaborative installation, Southwark Park Galleries, London; I Made a Show For You, Artagon III Awards Exhibition, Artagon, Paris (2017). Awards and fellowships include, Fellow at Film London Artist Moving Image Network (2019-2020), Boise Travel Scholarship Award (2017), Connect 2016 Mentor Award with Bedwyr Williams (2016), The Hatton Art Prize (2014).

Artwork
Honey
Hazel Brill
Artwork
Sap
Hazel Brill

HBBE

More about HBBE here.

 

 

Artefact
Mycelium and woodchip composite
ASCUS Art & Science Dilan Ozkan HBBE
Artefact
Mycelium composite
ASCUS Art & Science HBBE Kumar Debnath
Artefact
Woven textile made from leek fibres
ASCUS Art & Science HBBE Iulianiya Grigoryeva

Iulianiya Grigoryeva

Artefact
Woven textile made from leek fibres
ASCUS Art & Science HBBE Iulianiya Grigoryeva

Kara Chin

Kara Chin is a British-Singaporean artist working across animation, ceramics, sculpture and installation. She uses playful materials and strange scales in works that come to life as hybrid creatures, constantly shape shifting between object, being and setting. Reflecting on our day to day relationship to fast evolving technologies and ecologies, works often suggest quasi-religious ceremonies, devices or artefacts set in a temporal void of fragmented references. Chin lives and works in Newcastle, UK. She holds a BA in Fine Art from The Slade School of Fine Art (2018). She was featured in Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2018, and has been awarded the Woon Foundation Painting and Sculpture Prize (2018); The Duveen Travel Scholarship, UCL (2018); The Alfred W Rich Prize, Slade (2017); Max Werner Drawing Prize, Slade (2015).

 

Recommended Reading:
Neighbor George by Victoria Nelson
Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban

 

Artwork Film
Awakening Ceremony
Kara Chin
Artwork
Buddy
Kara Chin
Artwork
Lucky
Kara Chin
Artwork
Fido
Kara Chin
Artwork
Bate
Kara Chin

Keira Tucker

Artefact
Dried agar with bacterial staining
ASCUS Art & Science Keira Tucker
Artefact Artwork
Mycelium and snake bedding composite
ASCUS Art & Science Keira Tucker

Kumar Debnath

Artefact
Mycelium composite
ASCUS Art & Science HBBE Kumar Debnath

Rae-Yen Song

Rae-Yen Song (b. 1993, Edinburgh; based in Glasgow) explores self-mythologising as a survival tactic, using fantasy and fabulation to establish a richly visual world-building practice informed by diasporic~ancestral mythology, Daoist philosophy, family ritual, ecology, more-than-human politics, and science fiction. Song’s world-building practice visions alternative social spaces untethered from linear conceptions of space and time, and which jettison colonial, patriarchal logics and power structures. Instead, the twin foundations of these alternative spaces are the logics of Rae-Yen’s own human family, and those of beyond-human communities – particularly in relation to notions of symbiosis and multi-species interdependency. Through drawing, sculpture, installation, textile, video, sound and performance, Song builds worlds which manifest themselves as speculative and sensory environments. These spaces serve as offerings and proposals for alternative cultures, and as multidimensional personal records that speak broadly and politically about foreignness, identity, ecological power, survival, and what it means to belong ― or not.

 

Recommended Reading:
Vampyroteuthis infernalis by Vilém Flusser and Louis Bec
Enfleshed by Koskentola and Marjolein van der Loo
I Ching by Richard Wilhelm translation
Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra
Cheek by Jowl by Ursula K Le Guin
The Slow Grind edited by Georgina Johnson
The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

Discussion
Social Assembly as a (Research) Method with Sophia Yadong Hao and Rae-Yen Song 宋瑞渊
Rae-Yen Song Sophia Yadong Hao
Artwork
(T_T)
Rae-Yen Song
Artwork
Costume for Song
Divya Osbon Rae-Yen Song
Artwork
○ squigoda song cycle ● water~land~air ○
Rae-Yen Song Tommy Perman

Sophia Yadong Hao

Sophia Yadong Hao is a curator, writer and editor. Working internationally, Hao’s practice utilises a rhizomatic approach to situate the curatorial as a mode of critical inquiry directly engaging with culture and ‘the political’ as an open question. Notable curatorial projects include NOTES on a return (2009), a re-contextualisation of performance art from 1980s Britain; Studio Jamming: Artists’ Collaborations in Scotland (2014), Of Other Spaces: Where Does Gesture Become Event? (2016-2017) which evoked the ethos of feminism for an alternative politics in culture and society; and The Ignorant Art School: Five Sit-ins Towards Creative Emancipation (2021-2025) a five-phase exhibition programme examining histories and future possibilities of creative pedagogy as a radical emancipatory praxis. Hao is currently Director and Principal Curator of Cooper Gallery, University of Dundee and a Visiting Professor at the University of Sunderland.

 

Recommended Reading:
The Classic Mountains and Seas (Shanhai Jing)
Notes on Deconstructing the Popular by Stuart Hall
The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

Discussion
Social Assembly as a (Research) Method with Sophia Yadong Hao and Rae-Yen Song 宋瑞渊
Rae-Yen Song Sophia Yadong Hao

Tommy Perman

Born in Edinburgh in 1980, Tommy Perman is an artist, designer and musician who blurs the boundaries between these disciplines through collaboration. Tommy has released over 50 albums, EPs and singles since his debut in 2002. He won a BAFTA for co-creating an ‘emotional robot band’ called Cybraphon which is now part of the permanent collection in the National Museum of Scotland. His visual design work has been seen across numerous high profile books, websites, record sleeves, and even projected onto the Sydney Opera House. Recent projects include: ‘The Resonant Viaduct’ – a sound installation for the National Trust’s Castlefield Viaduct community ‘sky garden’ in Manchester; ‘STACKS’ – an audiovisual exploration of the past, present and futures of three peatlands: Bodmin Moor, Dartmoor and Exmoor with Rob St John and Rose Ferraby; and ‘Echo in the Dark’ – joyous rave music made from bat echolocation recordings in collaboration with Hanna Tuulikki.

 

Recommended Reading
Quantum Listening by Pauline Oliveros
Tiger Work by Ben Okri
Positive Interactions by Tommy Perman

Artwork
○ squigoda song cycle ● water~land~air ○
Rae-Yen Song Tommy Perman

XinRan Liu

XinRan Liu is currently a Research Fellow at the School of Physics and Astronomy working on the LUX-ZEPLIN dark matter search experiment. The experiment is located at Sanford Mine, South Dakota, and has recently produced world leading exclusion limits for dark matter. XinRan specialises in ultra-low background radiation detection and has several leadership roles within the LUX-ZEPLIN experiment including on-site cleanliness during the critically important final construction phase. XinRan is also currently the lead scientist for Boulby XIA, a world-leading surface radiation detector. Outside of his research, XinRan has huge enthusiasm for public engagement. To date, his most remarkable outreach activity is the ‘Remote3’ project which he conceived and currently leads the delivery of. This project enables pupils from schools in the most remote parts of Scotland, otherwise underserved in STEM opportunities, to build, program and operate miniature Mars Rovers in the STFC Mars Yard at the Boulby Underground Laboratory.

 

Recommended Reading:
Dune by Frank Herbert
His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman

Workshop
One force to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them
XinRan Liu
Artefact
Basalt
XinRan Liu
Artefact
Eye of the Large Hadron Collider
XinRan Liu
Artefact
Fragment of the Moon
XinRan Liu