[spectre] Call for Papers: focas 6 Regional Animalities, Singapore

[tien_dm]

focas
Forum On Contemporary Art & Society
365D Serangoon Rd. Singapore 218112


focas, Forum On Contemporary Art & Society, is a not-for-profit 
dialogue and publishing initiative
that engages issues of contemporary art, politics and social 
change—primarily but not
exclusively—in Southeast Asia. focas is dedicated to interdisciplinary critical
exchange among scholars, activists and practitioners.


Call for Papers:
focas, Forum On Contemporary Art & Society 6:
Regional Animalities: Humans & Animal Relations in Southeast Asia


focas is back!
focas is back with our sixth volume, Regional Animalities: Humans & 
Animal Relations in Southeast Asia. For this volume, we are 
collaborating with Documenta 12, the international contemporary art 
event based in Kassel, Germany. Both the publication as a whole and 
selected articles from the forthcoming issue will be featured in 
documenta 12 magazines, the online editorial project bringing 
together independent publishing initiatives on art and culture from 
around the globe. (For more information on Documenta, refer to 
http://www.documenta.de.)

In this context we are sending out a call for visual or textual 
responses from practitioners, scholars, writers and activists, to the 
themed sections detailed below:

Please send a maximum 500-word proposal or a file with maximum 5 
low-resolution images to focas at pacific.net.sg.
Deadline for submissions: 15th November 06.
Deadline for final input: 1st March 07.

I. Main Themed Section: Regional Animalities

The main theme for this sixth issue in the focas publication series 
concerns ways in which human animal exchanges and relationships are 
imagined, represented and performed in a range of different artistic 
and cultural political contexts—primarily, but not exclusively, in 
Singapore and Southeast Asia.

We encourage input from art writers, practitioners and activists, as 
well as writers from the social and natural sciences.

Proposals may choose to respond to, reject or transcend the following:

•	How do a multiplicity of real and imagined beasts brush, 
buzz, slink, stink and scuttle in and out of the everyday fantasies 
and signifying practices of contemporary Southeast Asian societies?

•	How are these phantoms and presences projected through 
human-human exchanges?

•	How do human-animal and animal-animal exchanges subvert, 
rupture, invade and expand upon human symbolic orders and signifying 
practices?

•	Which animals are eaten? Which are adored? Which animals are 
feared? Which animals are expelled? Which animals are sacred? Which 
profane? Which animals persist? Which animals are lost?

•	What historical/“indigenous” assumptions, representations, 
embodiments of other living creatures exist in human cultiures in the 
region? How do these relate to contemporary animal rights discourses?

•	How do vernacular attitudes to animals bleed into “shark 
tales”, “Hello Kitties” and other animated icons?

•	How have various creatures been represented and received in 
global and vernacular, experimentary and commercial cultural 
production, such as visual art, film, television, animation, 
advertising and fashion?

•	How do animals remap/reinvent human territories, spaces and 
places, waters and skies, cities and kampungs, skyscrapers and 
rubbish mountains?

•	How have recent outbreaks and invocations of SARS, bird flu 
and dengue fever recast human animal relations in the region?




II. Art & Activism in Singapore 2004–6:
Artists, Animals, Transients & The Death Penalty

In the past two years in Singapore, three civil society movements 
have gained considerable visibility in an otherwise infamously 
disciplined social, political and media arena:
•	The animal welfare movement, buoyed by the public outcry over 
the Singapore Government’s culling of stray cats during the SARS 
outbreak in 2003.
•	A movement to lobby for basic labour and health rights for 
transient workers.
•	Artist and activist mobilisations against the mandatory death 
penalty for drug trafficking in Singapore—a hitherto no-go area for 
activist groups as it was considered just too difficult an issue to 
tackle.
A number of the same actors, musicians, artists, are active in all three camps.

In this section we are soliciting and commissioning reports on 
artist/activist involvement in all three issues. 

There are indeed links between the treatment of migrant workers, 
hoarded onto open trucks like livestock, and a 
dehumanisation/animalisation process in the ways in which death row 
prisoners (a number of whom are migrant drug peddlers) are impounded 
and eventually hanged.

But what is also immediately apparent with these juxtapositions is 
how juicy, pleasurable, rich and evocative the writing and making of 
art about animals, conservation  and animal welfare is, in contrast 
to a tired greyness of writing on labour and the absolute authority 
of (human) death, which overshadows attempts to respond to the death 
penalty in Singapore in art or theory.

Indeed, there have been discussions in the editorial as to whether we 
even should be speaking of the death penalty in an art context. 
However reflexively and sensitively we handle this, are we inevitably 
just going to fuel the ravenous hunger of contemporary art and theory 
for the latest trauma of the human Other.


III. focas on Censorship
focas will be continuing to debate and document instances of 
censorship in the art and writing in Southeast Asia. This section 
will be compiled in collaboration with the international organisation 
Reporters Without Borders.


focas review process
After initial selection, papers for focas are reviewed via a process 
of transparent communication between writers, the focas editorial 
board and guest editors for specific themed issues.


The focas editorial board consists of:
Rustom Bharucha, independent writer, director and dramaturge, 
Calcutta; Kevin Chua, assistant
professor of art history, Texas Tech University, USA; Arun Mahiznan, 
deputy director, Institute of Policy Studies, Singapore; Laksmi 
Pamuntjak, poet, independent writer, Singapore/Indonesia; Goenawan 
Mohamad, writer and journalist, founding editor of Tempo, Indonesia; 
Paul Rae, theatre director of spell#7, adjunct assistant professor of 
theatre studies, National University of Singapore; TK Sabapathy, Art 
historian, director of the Contemporary Asian Art Centre, Singapore; 
Chew Kheng Chuan, director of the Development Office at the National 
University of Singapore and chairman of The Substation arts centre, 
Singapore; Chua Beng Huat, professor of sociology at the National 
University of Singapore; Lucy Davis, visual artist, writer, editor of 
focas and assistant professor at the School of Art Design and Media, 
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore; Ray Langenbach, 
independent artist and theorist, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Lee Weng 
Choy, art critic, artistic co-director of The Substation arts centre, 
Singapore; Susie Lingham, interdisciplinary artist and writer, UK; 
Marian Pastor Roces, independent art writer, Philippines: Nirmala 
Purushotam, sociologist, activist, writer, Singapore; Tan Tarn How, 
journalist, playwright, researcher at the Institute of Policy 
Studies, Singapore; Wan-ling Wee, associate professor of English 
Literature, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.



Lucy Davis,
Assistant Professor,  Art, Design & Media (ADM)
Editor, Forum on Contemporary Art & Society (FOCAS)




Office
Nanyang Technological  University
31 Nanyang Link, #04-19
Singapore 637718
Office Tel +65 63168850

Home
365D Serangoon Road
Singapore 218117

Cell
  +65 92760796

Email
NTU:  lucydavis at ntu.edu.sg
FOCAS: focas at pacific.net.sg


FOCAS, Forum on Contemporary Art & Society, is a not-for-profit 
dialogue and publishing initiative
that engages issues of contemporary art, politics and social 
change--primarily but not
exclusively--in Singapore and Southeast Asia. FOCAS is dedicated to 
interdisciplinary, critical
exchange among scholars, activists and practitioners.