2022 - ONGOING
“ITBA Festival”
Performance, Live Art
Islands Time-Based Art (ITBA) is an artists-initiated multidisciplinary platform for ‘live’ art presentation and ephemeral art practices that are transitory in nature. The ITBA Festival will be presenting a diverse range of time-based artistic practices including; performance art, sound art, live improvisations, and collaborative works that are engaged with time, space, and materiality within the context of the human condition and social-cultural environment. We encourage artistic explorations that are practice-based; incubating art projects that are open-ended and investigative through unconventional art processes.
The ITBA Festival, although unconventional in its presentation of an array of live performances, is embedded in the contemporaneous mindset of independent artistic practices. The first edition in 2022 was co-initiated by artists anGie seah and Kai Lam, who had taken the multiple roles as artist facilitators, curators, and publishers; in their attempts to bring back a certain ‘normalcy’ for ‘live’ art appreciation during this present time of an unfolding endemic era. In such challenging times, the concern for continual artistic practices is emphasised as an enduring development where human connections and well-being mechanisms are explored and utilised in the endemic laden society.
Visit the ITBA Youtube Channel︎︎︎
FESTIVAL IMAGES
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Living in a complex society, my multidisciplinary art practice is the result of my desire to pursue a multifaceted community, like a body made of various parts with different functions to balance the system.
I see an island 岛 of artistic practices fulfilling this analogy, bringing the symbiosis of the various art forms to the fore.
Does a space always have to be built? Can you simply hum a door? Clap a corridor?
Dancing barefoot
What defines an artist in a cosmopolitan city like Singapore? Art is not about providing solutions: I think art exists to ask questions. Prosperity means that a lot of people have the opportunity to reflect, and that is one of the most important functions of art.
Lived experiences define us,
where the intervention of all sorts in life is necessary; a living aid
Performing is an attempt to remember and pass on our experiences;
a sensory kit
There are moments in life when the interval, the time that one needs to get from one place to another, wraps itself around your soul like a veil and protects you against the cold senselessness of the everyday. Those moments when nothing needs to be done, because you are waiting for a new important moment.
Just in time
PERFORMANCES BY anGie seah + collaborators
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FESTIVAL BOOKLETS
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The upcoming ITBA festival (2025) will be presenting a showcase of artists who expand across three generations of local artists; a cohort made up of emerging artists, mid-career artists, and established artists who are from a spectrum of art disciplines and cultural perspectives. As such, the ITBA initiative hopes to promote inclusiveness and collaborations among artists and gain new perspectives from its presentations and related events.
The festival program will consist of the ‘Islands’ theme; the popular saying “No man is an island’ – signifies the inevitable inter-relations and collaborations amongst practitioners and the connections between art practitioners and the general public audiences; which is essential in the flourishing of diverse cultural practices and a heightened appreciation of ‘live’ art practices in Singapore.
The festival artists will be presenting the following works;
Materiality + Presence which are solo and collaborative performances by artists in response to a specific sized table (Island table) and a specific-sized bag that contains limited objects and materials. The challenge is to present a performance within a minimal setting that unfolds into an inter-related performed narrative between body, time, and materials.
‘Open Improvisation’ sessions consist of performance art, sound art and media technology that are ‘Live’ improvisations presented through various collaborations between the festival artists.
Individual and collaborative sound art performance and performance art presented by the festival artists.
Artists talks, art panel discussions and an all new segment this year offering workshops by the festival artists and invited cultural writers, independent curators, and medical professionals.
