Raffles Restitution: Artistic Responses to Singapore's 1819
Ng Yi-Sheng
Moderated by Simon Soon

5 November 2020 (Thu)
7.30pm - 9pm
Digital Talk on Zoom: https://zoom.us/j/92689648894

The year 1819 represents an incredibly charged moment in the Singaporean imagination: it marks the birth of our modern city-state, but also signals the beginning of British colonial dominance over our island. Writer and researcher Ng Yi-Sheng surveys two centuries of artistic interpretations of this event, including multilingual works of poetry, fiction, drama, memoir, film, visual art and song, created before, during and after the Singapore Bicentennial. What patterns of colonial, neocolonial, anticolonial and decolonial agendas can we trace?

About the Speakers

Ng Yi-Sheng is a Singaporean poet, playwright, fictionist, researcher and LGBT+ activist. His books include the short story collection Lion City and the poetry collection last boy (both winners of the Singapore Literature Prize), SQ21: Singapore Queers in the 21st Century, A Book of Hims, Loud Poems for a Very Obliging Audience and Black Waters, Pink Sands. He has recently begun crafting lecture performances, such as Painted Shadows: a Queer Haunting of the National Gallery, Ayer Hitam: a Black History of Singapore and Desert Blooms: the Dawn of Queer Singapore Theatre. He tweets and Instagrams at @yishkabob.

Simon Soon is a senior lecturer at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur. He researches across 19th-20th century modern and contemporary art and architecture in the Malay archipelago. Simon is co-editor of Narratives of Malaysian Vol. 4 (2019) and a member of the editorial collective of the journal Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, published by NUS Press. He is also a team member of Malaysia Design Archive. Occasionally, he also curates and makes art.

This lecture is a part of The Substation’s Arts Education Programme.