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Nina bell F. House Museum

Netherlands, Korea, Republic of

Nina bell F. House Museum Featuring works by Donghwan Kam, Nuraini Juliastuti, Sophia Park, Ying Que with others in and around Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, 2022
Names of Water, 2022
Fermentation House, 2022

The collective figure of Nina bell Federici (Nina bell F.) stems from the Casco Art Institute team’s shared admiration for the artistic, black, feminist and political engagements of Nina Simone, bell hooks and Silvia Federici. Nina was born in the context of the Site for Unlearning (Art Organisation) project, convened by the Dutch artists Annette Krauss and Casco, and lives on through ongoing studies and projects at the Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons.

Under this framework, Donghwan Kam, Nuraini Juliastuti, Sophia Park, Ying Que and others in and around Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons come together to present Nina bell F. House Museum. The project consists of two multi-site installations, an archival project and a series of workshops.

Donghwan Kam presents Fermentation House, a series of miniature house sculptures installed across several Biennale venues, including the Tanjong Pagar Distripark, the Southern Islands and 22 Orchard Road. The work was developed based on Kam’s interest in exploring how domestic acts—such as cooking, distilling and fermenting—are inherently related to time. Kam also presents Names of Water, an installation with audio elements that explores the correlation between branding and the taste of commodified water.

Presented as a mixed media installation, which uses refrigerators, tables and chairs to emulate a familiar home environment, the archival project chronicles the development of Nina bell F. and presents contributions from various artists and curators including Sophia Park and Nuraini Juliastuti. This archival project is led by Ying Que, an educator, facilitator and cultural worker currently living and working in the Netherlands.

The project also questions social norms and structures. A series of unlearning workshops taking place in the second half of the Biennale expound on the process of unlearning oppressive institutional habits in favour of practices for the commons. These workshops aim to inspire participants to think beyond institutional frameworks.



RESOURCES

Educational Resource | Artist Folio



INFORMATION

  • Nina bell F. House Museum Featuring works by Donghwan Kam, Nuraini Juliastuti, Sophia Park, Ying Que with others in and around Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons. 2022. Mixed media installation, second-hand refrigerators, tables and chairs, and archival items. Dimensions variable. Singapore Biennale 2022 Commission.
  • Names of Water. 2022. Water dispensers, posters, sound. Dimensions variable. Singapore Biennale 2022 Commission.
  • Fermentation House. 2022. 21 wooden houses, pottery jars, fermented soybean, salt, drinking water, pepper and charcoal. Wooden houses: 25 × 25 × 25 cm (set of 7); 35 × 35 × 35 cm (set of 7); 45 × 45 × 45 cm (set of 7). Singapore Biennale 2022 Commission.

Nina bell F. House Museum’s Programmes & Events

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A tasty gathering with Nina bell and friends
A tasty gathering with Nina bell and friends
  • Nina bell F. House Museum

A tasty gathering with Nina bell and friends
Date: 15 March 2023, Wednesday
Time: 7 – 10pm
Venue: Level 3, Singapore Art Museum at Tanjong Pagar Distripark
Free, by registration.

Donghwan Kam, Sophia Park and Ying Que will be joined by Asia Art Archive and KUNCI Study Forum and Collective to host a tasteful gathering with Nina bell and friends. Guests are invited to a gathering where they will be served dumplings with soy sauce, in particular the one that has been fermented during Singapore Biennale 2022 named Natasha at various locations by Kam and many other human and non-human collaborators. Kam’s fermentation process has been an important metaphor for understanding the workings of the archive presented in the Nina bell F. House Museum. Taking cues from intuitive ways of cooking without a fixed recipe and the joys of mixing “ingredients”, fermentation can take place with a lens of understanding diverse archival practices. A Taste of Nina bell F. House Museum will prepare the workshop participants for the Nina spirit.

This workshop will be held on Level 3, Singapore Art Museum at Tanjong Pagar Distripark.

SAM at Tanjong Pagar Distripark Wed, 15 Mar 2023 - 07:00 pm
Nina Copy Shop, Archival Contamination and Companionship
Nina Copy Shop, Archival Contamination and Companionship
  • Nina bell F. House Museum

Nina Copy Shop, Archival Contamination and Companionship
Date: 16 March 2023, Thursday
Time: Anytime between 11am – 6pm
Venue: Level 5, Singapore Art Museum at Tanjong Pagar Distripark
Free, by registration.

Register here

Nina bell F. and friends invite you to exchange knowledge and experiences about community archiving practices. They will facilitate a conversation to explore questions posed for the Nina bell F. House Museum. Archiving practices contain a diversity of values and principles dependent on questioning what matters or what is worth collecting.

Various forms of documentation narrate the discrepancy between state-based archiving institutions and independent archival initiatives. In the Nina bell F. House Museum archival practices consider ways of being and knowing in common, whereby fragility, fragmentation and fermentation are embraced. Here, archives as incomplete as they are, can serve as the glue and structure for relationality. An important question arises, what kind of spaces, practices, perspectives and resources do independent art and cultural organizations need to be sustainable?

The team has planned the following flow of events:
11am - 1pm: Conversation between Jason Wee (Grey Projects), Berny Tan, G (wares not warehouses), Jennifer Teo (POST-MUSEUM) Rifki Akbar Pratama (KUNCI Study Forum & Collective), Sam Yi Yao Chao (Asia Art Archive), facilitated by Ying Que and Sophia Park
1pm - 2pm: Break
2pm - 3pm: Presentation by Rifki Akbar Pratama from KUNCI Study Forum & Collective and Sam Yi Yao Chao from Asia Art Archive
3pm - 6pm: Zine-making

Event for the Zine-making are invited to bring materials from their personal or community archives to feed imaginations about independent forms of archiving practice as well as institutional building. The harvest of these discussions will become the base of an informal, hand-made publication-companion, to be put together, copied and bound on the spot to be distributed further beyond the room.

Presented as part of Singapore Biennale 2022 named Natasha, organised by the Singapore Art Museum. The Biennale is commissioned by the National Arts Council, Singapore and supported by the Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth, Singapore.

SAM at Tanjong Pagar Distripark Thu, 16 Mar 2023 - 11:00 am
Building Nina bell F. House Museum: Why and how to build this home?
Building Nina bell F. House Museum: Why and how to build this home?
  • Nina bell F. House Museum

Building Nina bell F. House Museum: Why and how to build this home
Date: 10 March 2023, Friday
Time: 5 – 7pm
Venue: Online
Free, by registration.

Register here

We invite you to a presentation of Nina bell F. House Museum, where artist Annette Krauss and researcher Nuraini Juliastuti will lay the conceptual ground for the questions, learnings and doings that are guiding the Nina bell F. House Museum. This session will be moderated by Co-Artistic Director, Binna Choi.

Nina bell F. as a collective figure first appeared at the Site for Unlearning: Art Organization (2013). A long-term collaboration between artist Annette Krauss and the Casco team, the collaboration centres on institutional habits that are practised in the commons. The project explored the relationship between an art institution's vision with its cultural production and day-to-day workings that inform administrative and managerial ethos. Out of a discussion about collective authorship and shared admiration for the artistic, Black, feminist, and political engagements of Nina Simone, bell hooks, and Silvia Federici, Nina bell F. (pronouns she/they) manifested. This spirit lives on and the unlearning research became a core reference point for Casco's Unlearning Centre. In this presentation, Krauss will elaborate on the theoretical and artistic underpinnings of unlearning, drawing from her research around Sites for Unlearning on the material, artistic and political dimensions of unlearning processes.

Nuraini Juliastuti will help understand the archiving practice of creative institutions as a living heritage, drawing from her ongoing research project on Commons Museums (ICI Berlin Press, 2023). She will discuss the significance of a growing platform to gather archives of independent cultural institutions from multiple contexts and elaborate on the infrastructural aspect of archiving.

Online ProgrammesFri, 10 Mar 2023 - 05:00 pm