Returning for its second edition, T:Works once again hosts Per°Form Open Academy of Arts and Activations (POA) this April, and features the live gathering of 15 Per°Form Fellows from the Global South—Africa, Arab world, Asia, and South America. These fellows, intersectional practitioners across diverse disciplines of activism, film, fashion, design, curation, research, education, visual culture, spoken word, performance, will present their strategies for activating contexts and communities.

The theme of Per°Form this year is ‘Decoloniality’. Coloniality of power being defined as “the structures of power, control, and hegemony in all dimensions of social life including sexuality, authority, subjectivity, and labour.” A big part of exploring ‘Decoloniality’ is understanding it in relation to lived experiences and contexts of the different Fellows.

In this second iteration, POA is bigger and bolder, expanding beyond the keynotes, workshops and marathon that anchored the programme in 2023, featuring two new platforms: POA Rave and POA Studio. The first 14 Global South Fellows are Aziz Sohail (Karachi/Melbourne); Chathuri Nissansala (Colombo); Diamantina Arcoiris (Bogatá); Etcétera (Buenos Aires/Santiago); Hira Nabi (Lahore/Amsterdam); Marianne Fahmy (Alexandria); Radhika Hettiarachchi (Colombo); Saodat Ismailova (Tashkent/Paris); Selma & Sofiane Ouissi (Tunis/Paris); Sharareh Bajracharya (Kathmandu); Sunday Obiajulu Ozegbe (Lagos); Ujjwala Maharjan (Kathmandu), YoNoFui (Buenos Aires). The 15th Per°Form Fellow from Singapore is Endless Return, a visceral platform of ravers – performance, dance, sound, and conceptual artists – known for their raw, irreverent, unexpected, and migratory pop-up parties.

Beginning 13 April, POA amps it up with a durational rave theatre 4LLEN led by Endless Return, butoh dance artist Xue and electronic music producer Mervin Wong. Together they lead an immersive sonic experience with Singapore gamelan musician, sound artist and vocalist Rosemainy Buang and two of the edgiest underground club and electronic musicians from the Philippines, obese.dogma777 and Teya Logos. Want to be part of the sonic co-creation? Audiences are invited to contribute their music in a speculative sonic environment throughout the course of the evening.

On 17 April, there will be two Opening Keynotes focusing on self-care and our sustainable relationship with nature – Redesign Lives with fashion designer Diamantina Arcoiris (Bogatá) and How to Love a Tree by filmmaker and visual artist Hira Nabi (Lahore/Amsterdam). Drawing on therapeutic aspects of creativity and creative production, fashion designer Diamantina Arcoiris empowers marginalised communities to explore alternative possibilities and ‘redesign’ their lives. For her keynote, 72-13 is transformed into a fashion atelier. Leaving the atelier, the audience enters the cinematic world of Hira Nabi. Engaging in environments of former colonial hill stations in and around the towns and villages of Pakistan, How to Love a Tree is an investigation into the disappearance of ecosystems and environments rich in flora and fauna.

On 25 April, the Closing Keynote will be given by award-winning Uzbek filmmaker and artist Saodat Ismailova who has dominated major exhibitions in Europe in recent years. Saodat is an important voice within the first generation of Central Asian artists to come of age in the post-Soviet era. She will embark on unpacking her most recent film archives, continuously over the next five days, in the Per°Form Open Academy Studio. There will be numerous screenings as Saodat articulates her trajectories of ecology, tradition, living with the non-human, colonialism, and the female universe through the lens of her key film, The Haunted.

Saodat interweaves myths, rituals and dreams with everyday life. She calls our attention, in a nuanced way, to social issues such as the drying up of rivers and women’s right to decide whether to wear the veil. Women’s identities and emancipation is a recurring theme in her work. Women play an important role in keeping Central Asian cultural and spiritual heritage alive – for example by passing on stories and customs from mother to daughter, generation after generation.

Per°Form is conceptualised and led by T:>Works Artistic Director, Dr. Ong Keng Sen. With Per°Form, T:>Works aims to cut across silos, disciplines, and fields to support translocal knowledge production, situated practices, and contextualised research as shared resources for the future. In particular, Per°Form focuses on the arts practitioner as a thought leader engaged in care and repair, actively engaging histories, the precarious present, and world-creating.

For Per°Form Open Academy of Arts and Activations, Dr. Ong draws inspiration from his seminal work investigating nomadic alternative universities and world-creating in the arts: The Flying Circus Project (1996–2013), as well as the Curator’s Academy (2018–22), a collaboration between Singapore and Berlin.

Per°Form Open Academy of Arts and Activations runs from 13th to 30th April 2024 at 72-13. Full programme and tickets available here