Artistic Directors Academy (ADA) Research Day
Details
Sat, 2 August 2025, 3–9pm
@ 72-13, Home of T:>Works
This event has concluded.
Hot off a thrilling July, we’re revving up for August with Artistic Directors Academy (ADA) Research Day!
On 2 August, from 3–9pm, join us for ADA Research Day, a sharing of provocations and propositions from the 2024-2025 ADA Fellows. This day marks the end of a year-long capacity development programme designed to rethink, reframe, and reimagine artistic directorship.
3.15pm
Work in Progress: Architecture as a Performative by Akai Chew
Architecture as an art for the public: as a catalyst object, a still performance, an intervention and a vessel for rituals, performatives, and practices.
3.30pm
A Second Life: Restaging Singapore Plays As Archival Turn by Adeeb Fazah
Is restaging an act of archival? By looking at other examples in the Singapore theatre context, is there a strong case to be made for the restaging of Singapore plays? On the other hand, is archival simply about restaging a play?
4pm
The Annual Banquet: Suspension, Experimentation, & Social Possibilities by Kamiliah Bahdar
Festivals of the past had served a potent function for addressing social imbalances, from debt forgiveness to restoring social order—which are still in practice in some religious festivals of today. Through a series of case studies, Kamiliah suggests how art festivals can return to being those imaginative spaces.
4.15pm
Failure Tastes Like Pang Susi by Brendon Fernandez
Work creation as a series of encounters: geography, ethnicity, identity, and privilege.
4.30pm
Discourse as Method, Medium, Milieu… by Helios Singh Bajwa
How do discourse and discursivity figure in the contemporary milieu, and why do they matter for the arts today? This presentation traces some of the ways that discourse participates in and manifests as artistic production, and introduces the work of the Opens, a Singapore-based para-academic forum fostering transdisciplinary exchanges and discursive experimentation in and through the arts.
5pm
Spaces For Unstable/Uncertain Futures by Elizabeth Mak
Interdisciplinary artist Elizabeth Mak shares a framework for climate-engaged artistic practice. She reflects on the complexities of making climate work within the Singaporean context and shares a vision of building an independent arts space dedicated to climate action in Southeast Asia. Her sharing invites critical reflection on the role of cultural institutions in times of planetary crisis and asks: how can we make space artistic, institutional, and collectively for imagination, agency, and transformation?
5–7pm (Six Performances)
A Festival-In-Progress: Conceptualising City | As Festival Site by Shaifulbahri Mohamad
What would a festival look like if the city were a canvas, taking place anywhere and everywhere, sometimes at any time? A Festival of Encounters focuses on finding multi-modal ways where multi-medium activations occur in the public, private, liminal and unconventional, encouraging people to encounter themselves, others and each other.
5.15pm
How do Boundaries Remember? by Randy Chan
This conversation is part of the evolving dispositif – a framework of enquiry and exchange – aimed at critically and creatively rethinking spatiality in our city. Often cited as a miracle success story, limited by its size, Singapore as a island city state continue to transform and reimagined as city in nature. With its 60 years of centralised planning policies, the city has gone through land intensification, reclamation and displacement which resulted in boundaries redefined, man-made, as well as natural landmarks being erased, re-drawn and re-established as a new datum over again…
5.30pm
The Heart Of Failure: A Reimagined South Asian Led Theatre by Dhinesha Karthigesu
What is failure and how does one define what is failure in their life? How do we talk about failure as theatremakers? Do we employ different strategies upon experiencing failure? The Heart of Failure reimagines leadership with failure as a starting point. What if we were finally given permission to fail?
6pm
Soft Rehearsals for a Fugitive Gathering by He Jin Jang
A soft rehearsal drawn from research on Eunhyeongbeop (은형법)—a Korean ancestral method of becoming invisible. Through embodied prompts, quiet song, and collective sensing, this presentation offers a glimpse into a future gathering-as-exhibition exploring surveillance, grief, and resistance, while reimagining the director as a sensorial steward.
6.15pm
Foom as Radical Emergence by Melvin Tan
Foom represents the sound and feeling of second birth—sudden, when the self catches up with itself — a raw, disorienting clarity after rupture. It captures compressed, irreversible shifts, holding tension between collapse and breakthrough, asking what must break for growth and new presence. A curatorial approach to designing and recognising radical transitions, internally and externally. Foom is not just gestational onomatopoeia; it becomes a framework to articulate the tension between reckoning and rebuilding, making invisible thresholds tangible through forms and spaces that hold affective passage.
6.30pm
Hao Gong Ming by Chen Jiexiao
Civics as school subject has been mandatory since 1959 in Singapore, albeit having seen various reiterations and repackages.
As an early Millenial going to school in the 90s thru the early 2000s, I sat through the CME and NE bundles. I must reflect on national identity and civic consciousness. I must have strong moral character, and social-emotional skills.I must contribute to society and nation. I sat, therefore I am.
7pm
Right Here, Right Now: Specificity as Artistic Approach by Nicholas Tee
Right Here, Right Now is a micro-performance intervention that explores specificity as an artistic and curatorial approach. Specificity is a dialogue between bodies and their entanglements with time, space and contexts that demands an approach to performance-making that is rooted in presence and urgency.
7.15pm
Reframing Programming In Cross-Sector Arts Practice: Moving Beyond The Vendor Model by Md Muazzam (Zam)
This presentation reflects on programming challenges in cross-sector arts work, where artists are often treated as vendors. Drawing on practice across community, health, and social sectors, I advocate for transdisciplinary partnerships, capacity-building, and a shift towards valuing relational, process-based engagement that honours the social and expressive potential of the arts.
7.30pm
hard-Where, soft-Why: repatterning relationships In The culture sphere by Natalia Tan
What if an arts ecosystem were woven, rather than built, through care, slowness, and collaboration? Artist Natalia Tan shares her transdisciplinary practice rooted in tactility, process, and collective authorship, exploring how weaving as method and metaphor can reshape arts leadership through feminist, embodied, and participatory approaches.
8–9pm
Discussion, followed by supper gathering
The Fellows’ research journeys spanned:
- Urban (Re)Development with m7red: Investigating agency, sociological imagination, and trans-scalar storytelling
- Queer Labour with Fadescha: Exploring lived experiences, burnout, and collective care as resistance
- Nature and Ecologies with Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez: Drawing inspiration from mycelium to rethink collaboration and transformation
- ADA in Nepal: Learning from Nepalase artists through place-based pedagogies and intersectional practice
- ADA in The Mentor Series: Talks and workshops by global cultural leaders offering decades of insight on cultural representation, public engagement, and what’s possible in artistic leadership today
