About Singapore Biennale 2022

Ala Younis is an artist with research, curatorial, film, and publishing projects. She is co-Head of Berlinale’s Forum Expanded, member of the Akademie der Künste der Welt, Cologne, and co-founder of the
independent publishing initiative, Kayfa ta. She co-initiated and codirected a national group for researching and developing cultural policy in Jordan (2012–18). Younis seeks instances where historical and
political events collapse into personal ones. Her artworks were featured in major exhibitions, including solo shows in New York, Seville, London,
Prague, Cairo, Amman, Sharjah, and Dubai, and in the Istanbul,
Gwangju, Orléans and Ural biennales. Her project Plan for Greater Baghdad (2015) premiered at All the World’s Futures, 56th Venice Biennale.

In 2013, Younis curated Kuwait’s first pavilion at the Venice Biennale. She curated Museum of Manufactured Response to Absence, collection and interventions in Kuwait, Algiers and Ramallah (2012–14).
She also co-curated How to find meaning in dead time in Berlin and Hands in Cologne (both 2021); How to Reappear: Through the quivering leaves of independent publishing in Beirut and Amman and How to Maneuver: Shapeshifting texts and other publishing tactics in Abu Dhabi (both 2019–20); and Out of Place at Tate Modern and Darat al Funun (2011). Younis edited an extensive monograph on late Palestinian artist Abdul Hay Mosallam and co-edited The Time Is Out Of Joint published by Sharjah Art Foundation in 2020 and 2016 respectively. She co-edited and published over 18 publications through Kayfa ta initiative.

Nida Ghouse is a writer and curator. She is Visiting Lecturer at the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities at Princeton University for Spring 2022. With Vic Brooks, she received the 2021 Andy Warhol Foundation curatorial fellowship for the exhibition Shifting Center at EMPAC, upcoming in 2023. She curated A Slightly Curving Place at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2020), in the framework of An Archaeology of Sound, a collaborative project responding to the acoustic archaeologist Umashankar Manthravadi. The project travels to Alserkal Arts Foundation (2021-22) and encompasses ‘Coming to Know,’ a discursive programme with Brooke Holmes; ‘A Supplementary Country Called Cinema,’ a film programme with Surabhi Sharma; and An Archaeology of listening, a publication series with Archive Books. She previously co-curated La presencia del sonido at Botín Foundation (2012), was part of the exhibition Anarchéologie at Centre Pompidou (2017) and has a collection of writing on listening. Ghouse has co-curated Parapolitics: Cultural Freedom and the Cold War (2017) at Haus der Kulturen der Welt and co-edited its accompanying publication (Sternberg Press, 2021). Her work ‘Lotus Notes’ which started with Mada Masr has since appeared in multiple text and talk formats. Her engagement with Hassan Khan’s practice has taken shape in a two-week event ‘14 Proper Nouns,’ as well as artist seminars, writing workshops, conversations and essays like ‘The Loss of Tokyo.’ Ghouse’s collaborative projects include Emotional
Architecture with Malak Helmy, and Take to the Sea with Lina Attalah and Laura Cugusi, first presented at Manifesta 8 (2010) and later nominated by Bassam El Baroni for the Vera List Center Prize (2014). The question of what an exhibition can be is a preoccupation manifest in her curatorial projects, such as Untitled Exhibition #1 with Padmini Chettur, Desert of Images with Melik Ohanian, Bartered Collections with
CONA Foundation, and Rehearsing the Witness with Zuleikha Chaudhari. She began her practice through a curatorial programme at Townhouse Gallery in Cairo, and once served as director of an experimental exhibition space Mumbai Art Room. Her writing has been featured in numerous periodicals, as well as in the publications of MuKHA, New Museum, Palazzo Grassi, the 56th and 58th Venice Biennale, Van Abbemuseum, among others. Her text ‘From the Resistance to the Clouds: on panning to the sky’ is forthcoming with Ashkal Alwan’s publishing platform Perpetual Postponement.

Binna Choi is the Director at Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, Utrecht since 2008, where she engages with both its artistic programming and the organisational cultural practice as part of the curatorial. This practice follows the path marked by mostly longterm, trans-disciplinary, and collaborative projects like Composing the Commons (2013–16) with the extended team of Casco consisting project-exhibitions such as Site for Unlearning (Art Organization) (2014–18) with Annette Krauss, We Are the Time Machines: Time and Tools for Commoning (2016), and New Habits (2014) with commissions for new works, research groups, publishing and networks like Arts Collaboratory and Cluster, and The Grand Domestic Revolution (2010–12) with Maiko Tanaka, Yolande van der Heide and many others. The latest programmes under her directorship and co-curatorship include Parasite Lottery by Wok the Rock, The Library of Unread Books by Heman Chong and Rene Staal, Army of Love by Ingo Niermann and Dora Garcia, four solo exhibitions in one (Babi Badalov, Ansuya Blom, Ama Josephine Budge, Mire Lee), Het is of de stenen spreken (silence is a commons). Longterm, collective projects such as Travelling Farm Museum of Forgotten Skills with the Outsiders, Unmapping Eurasia with You Mi, and the annual Assembly for commoning art institutions, and the infrastructural project under development Commons.art with Yin Aiwen, are amongst the ways to de/re instituting at Casco in light of the commons.

Choi also works for Dutch Art Institute and Islands Culture Diversity Network. As a member of Akademie der Künste der Welt, Köln, she curated Gwangju
Lessons over the 18 May Democratic Uprising with Christian Nyampeta and took it to Asia Culture Center as part of the MaytoDay by the Gwangju Biennale
Foundation (2020). Choi was a curator for the 11th Gwangju Biennale: The Eighth Climate (What Does Art Do?)

June Yap is the Director of Curatorial & Collections at Singapore Art Museum, where she oversees the museum’s exhibitions and curatorial programmes. Her prior roles include Guggenheim UBS MAP Curator (South and Southeast Asia), Deputy Director and Curator at the Institute
of Contemporary Arts Singapore, LASALLE, and curator at the Singapore Art Museum. Amongst exhibitions she has curated are: The Gift for Singapore Art Museum presented at National Gallery Singapore (2021) as part of the transregional curatorial collaboration, Collecting Entanglements and Embodied Histories; They Do Not Understand Each Other co-curated with Yuka Uematsu from National Museum of Art, Osaka, at Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2020); No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia as part of the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2013), Asia Society, Hong Kong (2013) and NTU Centre for
Contemporary Art Singapore (2014); The Cloud of Unknowing for the Singapore Pavilion, 54th Venice Biennale with artist Ho Tzu Nyen (2011); The Future of Exhibition: It Feels Like I’ve Been Here Before at
the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, LASALLE (2010); Paradise is Elsewhere at Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Stuttgart and Berlin (2009); media art exhibitions Twilight Tomorrow and Interrupt at the Singapore Art Museum (2004 and 2003, respectively).
Yap is the author of Retrospective: A Historiographical Aesthetic in
Contemporary Singapore and Malaysia (SIRD, 2016).