Residency

Jee Chan is an artist and choreographer whose ancestors traveled southward by sea from present-day southern China and Malaysia to Singapore during the European colonial incursion throughout the region known today as Southeast Asia. approaching language as an act of translating the unspeakable, the unknowable and the forgotten, their work is concerned with themes of violence, displacement, grief, ritual and transformation. Their practice is characterized by hybridity, flux and syncretism, moving across and between performance, film, installation, voice and song. In their work, the sea acts as a site of longing, terror, ambivalent beauty and deep historical violence, particularly within the context of island southeast asia. Jee lives between Singapore and berlin.

Stefan Pente, born in Zurich, Switzerland 1964, currently based in Berlin, Germany, is an artist and art education facilitator. Using film, sculpture, installation, image-making and performance in his art practice, he is interested in how embodied and inherited memories shape perception and movement—create possible prejudices and patterns of emotional and social behavior. His aim is to create non-figurative works that first encounter the viewer non-linguistically, but invite them to approach things as they are and not as we think we know them to be. Works that first evoke irrational and emotional reactions before they can be verbalized. He is part-time lecturer at the University of the Arts Bremen, Germany where he teaches sculpture as a method of world-shaping, and facilitates workshops at HZT, University of the Arts Berlin. He has worked as a dramaturg and film editor, as well as made one feature length and several short films.

LEI Yuan Bin is a founding member of the film collective 13 Little Pictures. He was conferred the Young Artist Award in 2012 by the National Arts Council, Singapore’s highest award for young arts practitioners. His directorial debut, White Days, has been praised by film scholar Professor Gilbert Yeoh to be “one of the rare films in Singapore cinema that invites the viewer to rethink the aesthetics of cinema.” 03-Flats, his sophomore feature was a collaboration with the National University of Singapore’s Architecture department. It was selected for documentary competition at the prestigious Busan International Film Festival and won the Best ASEAN Documentary prize at the Salaya International Documentary Film Festival. Fundamentally Happy, his third feature, was co-directed with Tan Bee Thiam. An adaptation of the acclaimed play by Haresh Sharma and Alvin Tan, it premiered at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival 2015.

Sara Tan, a native of Singapore, is a contemporary dancer living and working in Europe. After receiving her Bachelor’s degree in Dance from the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point (UWSP) in the United States of America, she went on to attend the contemporary dance school in Brussels- Performing Arts Research and Training Studios (P.A.R.T.S). She has since then been working with the French company, Kubilai Khan Investigations for several years, as well as been in works with Eszter Salamon, Thierry de Mey, Isabella Soupart and t.r.a.n.s.i.t.c.a.p.e. She is now currently involved in new creations with Compagnie Michele Noiret and Anne-Linn Akselsen.