PUBLIC LECTURES & MODULES
Sheelasha Rajbhandari
Sheelasha Rajbhandari is an artist and curator based out of Kathmandu. Her works draw upon an embodied and speculative lineage of femininities to question the positioning of women and fluid beings across time, landscapes, and cosmologies. Her practice is a provocation to reflect beyond neo-liberal conception of time in order to decentre patriarchal structures that perpetuate cycles of industrial extraction and individual exhaustion.
Hit Man Gurung
Hit Man Gurung is an artist and curator based in Kathmandu by way of Lamjung. His diverse practice concerns itself with the fabric of human mobilities, frictions of history, and failures of revolutions. While rooted in the recent history of Nepal, his works unravel a complex web of kinships and extraction across geographies that underscore the exploitative nature of capitalism.
Sharareh Bajracharya / Srijanalaya
Sharareh Bajracharya is a Kathmandu-based arts educator who believes in the power of the arts to make the earth tremble, loosen up for change, change that begins with expressing and listening. She is one of the founders of Srijanalaya, a nonprofit organisation in Nepal, which creates safe spaces of learning through the arts.
Ujjwala Maharjan
Ujjwala Maharjan is a Kathmandu-based poet, performer and educator. She is one of the co-founders of Word Warriors, a poetry group leading the spoken word movement in Nepal. Post her Masters in Education from the University of Pennsylvania, she has been exploring arts activism and community-based education programmes focusing on storytelling through varied creative mediums.
Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez
Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez is the founder and director of the Green Art Lab Alliance (established in 2012); a network comprising sixty art organizations across Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean and Asia. The mission of the alliance is to foster relationships that contribute to social and environmental justice, akin to the interconnected nature of mycelium.
Fadescha
Vidisha-Fadescha (they/them) is an artist, curator and cultural critic. Holding their lived experience of a radical gender, caste, race and disability, Fadescha suggests centering one’s own body and desire towards liberation. Their artistic work includes video, sound installations, text, and performance. They direct collective practices as a norm-critical pedagogy to queer hegemony.
m7red
m7red is an independent network of socially engaged architects and spatial planners. They work with citizens, especially under-represented communities, to counteract developments that impact negatively on communal spaces.
Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez
Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez is the founder and director of the Green Art Lab Alliance (established in 2012); a network comprising sixty art organizations across Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean and Asia. The mission of the alliance is to foster relationships that contribute to social and environmental justice, akin to the interconnected nature of mycelium.
Fadescha
Vidisha-Fadescha (they/them) is an artist, curator and cultural critic. Holding their lived experience of a radical gender, caste, race and disability, Fadescha suggests centering one’s own body and desire towards liberation. Their artistic work includes video, sound installations, text, and performance. They direct collective practices as a norm-critical pedagogy to queer hegemony.
m7red
m7red is an independent network of socially engaged architects and spatial planners. They work with citizens, especially under-represented communities, to counteract developments that impact negatively on communal spaces.
Artistic Directors Academy (ADA), led by T:>Works Artistic Director Ong Keng Sen, is a research laboratory to develop Artistic Directors, harnessing international cultural innovators to helm Modules, as well as individual mentoring to sharpen and intensify skillsets.
ADA focuses on giving perspectives to existing and potential Artistic Directors who wish to facilitate creative platforms, collectives, engagement projects, companies, venues, and festivals. ADA is a curriculum-based capacity development project where T:>Works will share its immense skills in the international field, translating international developments to artistic positions in the local context, and therefore opening up creative avenues internationally whilst being based locally.
Who is Artistic Directors Academy (ADA) for?
ADA is open to aspiring and existing individuals facilitating the content of, producing for, curating, or dramaturging, any of the following:
- creative platforms, collectives (including visual arts), performance groups, arts education, archives (including film/moving image), discourse networks;
community engagement projects; and - exhibition spaces, interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary arts centres;
- also those who are potentially interested in becoming curators, directors, producers, dramaturgs, and programmers of festivals – literary, film, visual culture, sound & music, traditional arts, design & architecture, or digital (small & large scale, live & virtual, outdoors & indoors, local & international).
Please contact ada@tworksasia.org, for more details.
“When we think about a ‘National Theatre’, we think about a building."
This has been the Singapore approach to National Theatre: build the hardware, build the Victoria Theatre, build the Esplanade. In 1992, when I was on the consultative body of users for the proposed Esplanade (it was not so named yet), that was overtly said to us: there will be no budget that will be allocated for building the software. We are only building the shell, the hardware. We’re not going to have a National Music Company, National Dance Company, National Theatre Company. I found that very interesting because how can we think about a national theatre without thinking about the people in the national theatre.
Conversely, how can we imagine a national theatre, without a building? Because that has always been a distraction for Singapore. The distraction is to build a beautiful, iconic building, but what do we put inside that iconic building? It doesn’t matter as long as we have the iconic building. I think in the National Theatre Project proposed for the Artistic Directors Academy, we need to re-angle it to talk about who are the peoples of such a national theatre?
We look at conversations with the different publics. We look at collaboration with all the different arts groups first, because they have different peoples and different publics that they cater to. We can’t forget collaboration, we need to collaborate, because it is not about a National Theatre Company, it’s not about a National Theatre, but it’s a whole network, a kind of ever-evolving, ever-expanding network. It’s a tentacular project, which requires us to collaborate with different sectors of the arts and further beyond with different parts of the community.
We want to think about the theatre as a space where people come together to discuss, to negotiate each other, maybe it’s a creative community centre, where we come together and this can be a way in which we can rethink what is a national theatre which does not make theatre per se. A national theatre as a place where people gather, where people come together to seek each other out, to meet the like-minded, to discuss important issues that face us.
It’s about how we build a liveable society together, not just in the arts. I would say that it’s a kind of platform for living in the 21st century.
Dr. Ong Keng Sen
Artistic Director, T:>Works
Dr. Ong Keng Sen
Artistic Director, T:>Works
