Date: Saturday, 7 February 2026
Time: 4.00PM – 5.15PM
Location: New Bahru School Hall (Mezzanine, Level 3)
The public programmes for Rituals of Perception, TAF’s inaugural exhibition curated by Artistic Director Xiaoyu Weng, will elaborate on the exhibiting artists’ practices and artworks. In this talk, art historian, curator, and educator Dr. Roger Nelson will discuss his ongoing research on exhibiting artist Sriwhana Spong. Dr. Nelson will share his insights on Spong’s practice from his forthcoming book, focusing in particular on the role of collaboration in Spong’s practice and her complex relationship with Southeast Asia and Bali.
This will be followed by a discussion between Dr. Nelson and TAF’s associate curator Wong Binghao on Instrument I (Sevgi and Bengisu) (2022), Spong’s exhibited artwork, and Bau-bau besom cling-clang (From out the sounding cells), a performance that activates Instrument I and has been specially conceived by Spong and musician Vivian Wang for this exhibition.
About TAF Conversation Series
Developed to manifest the foundation’s process-based and research-driven programming, TAF Conversation Series engages artists and their collaborators to respond, reflect, and shape TAF’s research concerns. Intently blurring the line between the work-in-progress and its finished form, TAF Conversation Series highlights the process and flux of artistic practice, where transformation is constant. TAF’s 2025 / 2026 research rubric is Materiality.
About the Artist
Sriwhana Spong
Sriwhana Spong explores modalities of following (how to approach a subject) and framing (how to understand it). Different bodies of work are sparked by an encounter—a rat nesting outside her bedroom window; a newly discovered species of snake; a painting by her grandfather, the Balinese painter, I Gusi Made Rundu; and a twelfth-century Javanese poem—whose traces, imprints, and scent are followed through different processes of (un)knowing—experiential, scientific—to allow for a changing and changeable perspective that critically examines her own particular and situated position and how this might contribute to a collective, collaborative, and feminist objectivity or understanding of an entangled cosmos. Stopped in her tracks by these encounters, which she then circumambulates, her practice traces a nonlinear course through films, sculptures, and performances to open up reorientations to notions of time and human and non-human life.
Recent solo and group exhibitions, performances, and screenings include: Seeing in the Dark, Busan Biennale, 2024; To Commune, 69th Flaherty Film Seminar, 2024; Spring Time is Heart-break: Contemporary Art in Aotearoa, Christchurch Art Gallery, 2023; 17th Istanbul Biennial, 2022; The Poem is a Temple, RIA Live Art Commissions, The Roberts Institute of Art, London, 2021; castle-crystal, Edinburgh Arts Festival, 2019; Ida-Ida Spike Island, Bristol, 2019; A hook but no fish, Govett-Brewster Gallery, New Plymouth, 2018.
Speaker bio
Roger Nelson
Roger Nelson is an art historian and curator, and currently Assistant Professor of Art History in the School of Humanities at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He researches and publishes widely on the modern and contemporary art of Southeast Asia. His forthcoming book, Artistic Art Histories in Southeast Asia: Modernisms in Contemporary Practices, discusses Sriwhana Spong’s work in dialogue with artists from across the region, and will be published in mid-2026 by Cornell University Press. Roger’s recent curatorial projects include Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook: The Bouquet and the Wreath, presented in 2025–26 at MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum (Chiang Mai) and Jameel Arts Centre (Dubai). He is co-founding co-editor of Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, a journal published by NUS Press.
