Monday 02 October, 2023

This lecture is open to the public and will be held at the ACM Ngee Ann Auditorium at 11am (SGT).

The Hungry City: A History of Singapore's Food Fishes and the Scientists Who Studied Them

From trade flows to cultural exchanges, historians have long explored how the seas, straits, and rivers of Singapore connected—if not also partly made—the world we know today. Often drawing on primary sources and published records, this important scholarship has narrated Singapore’s watery past as urban and circulatory, revealing the industrial and itinerant ways in which an island port became a global city. In contrast, this lecture charts a different kind of story, one anchored not in the surface of the sea but in the richness of the archive—the biological archive to be more precise. It centers a history of ecological and economic life through Singapore’s food fishes and the scientists who studied them. More than any other animal protein, fish fed the island’s demographic transition from kampung to town, and from crown colony to city-state. In thinking with fish across generations, this lecture recovers a Singapore story that speaks as much to changes in the land as it does to changes in the water. In doing so, it shows how local scientists such as Ishak bin Ahmad (1887-1969) and Tham Aw Kow (1913-1987) were central to provisioning the hungry city in the past and why their scientific contributions remain relevant to feeding Singapore in the present.

About the speaker:

Anthony D. Medrano is the National University of Singapore (NUS) Presidential Young Professor of Environmental Studies at Yale-NUS College and a member of NUS Department of History. He's also a Research Affiliate at the Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum, a Research Associate at the Asia Research Institute, and PI of the MOE-funded (SSRTG) project titled "Linking the Digital Humanities to Biodiversity History in Singapore and Southeast Asia." His teaching and scholarship focus on the histories and intersections of economic life and biodiversity change in Southeast Asia. Prior to moving to Singapore, Dr Medrano was a Ziff Environmental Fellow at Harvard University. He's completing his first book, The Edible Ocean: Science, Industry, and the Rise of Urban Southeast Asia, which is under contract with Yale University Press.

Monday 09 October, 2023

This is an FOM member-only event. The lecture will be held on-line 11am-12 pm (SGT).  To register for the event please click here.

Stories that write us: Autofictions

Chen Yanyun will be sharing about her works, in particular "Scars that Write Us" (2018) and "Stories of a Woman and her Dowry" (2019-2022), and the third volume of family stories which she is currently researching at NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, under curator Ute Meta Bauer.  These works tap into intergenerational conversations and conflicts, and through the threads connecting personal, social, cultural and state which bound and shape us as people, Yanyun weaves new narratives.  Stories write us just as we write them - through palimpsestic remembering and unconscious imprints and staining. It is these stains infused as patina on material, that carry our stories to the future: teaching us how to live.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Dr. Yanyun Chen (b. 1986, Singapore) is a visual artist who works across drawings, new media, and installation. Her artistic practice unravels fictional and philosophical notions of embodiment exploring how heritage and legacies are grounded in the physicality of human and botanical forms. Her solo exhibitions include Stories of a Woman and Her Dowry, Grey Projects, Singapore (2019) and Scars that write us, part of the President’s Young Talents 2018, Singapore Art Museum (2018). She has participated in group exhibitions such as While She Quivers, Objectifs – Centre for Photography and Film, Singapore (2021); Thailand Biennale, Korat 2021 (2021); Clouds: The 6th International Exhibition on New Media Art 2020, CICA Museum, South Korea (2020); Fiction Non Fiction, Cultural Affairs Bureau, Macau (2019); 2291: Futures Imagined, Art Science Museum, Singapore (2019) among others. Yanyun has received the Young Artist Award in 2020 and the IMPART Art Prize in 2019. Her works were also awarded the Prague International Indie Film Festival Q3 Best Animation Award (2020), National Youth Film Awards Best Art Direction Award (2019), and Singapore Art Museum President’s Young Talents People’s Choice Award (2018). She is currently a Professor of the Practice at SMFA Tufts University, Boston USA.