Concerned Citizens Programme
(Class of 2019)
The Concerned Citizens Programme is a mentorship programme aimed at cultivating arts and non-arts projects initiated by concerned citizens, who are thoughtful and engaged members of the community. Participants are first selected from an open call process and subsequently undergo mentoring by established industry practitioners to bring their project proposals to fruition.
First launched in 2017 as part of Discipline the City, the inaugural edition invited participants to propose meaningful interventions of the city while considering questions and issues of social control and diversity within urban structures and architectural design. The focus was very specific—to open up questions and unfold conversations from within the physical landscape of the city. To see Class of 2017, see here.
The second iteration of the Concerned Citizens Programme relaunched in 2019 with the year-long programme A Public Square, seeking participants who are interested in issues or topics that deal with the social mobility of the everyday citizen.
Originally intended for five participants, the programme eventually accepted a total of six participants due to the outstanding quality of the applications received from the open call process.
Blog Contributions
To find out more about our Concerned Citizens’ projects and their reflections, read their blog contributions here.
About the Concerned Citizens
Amanda Lim and Jocelyn Chng
Amanda Lim and Jocelyn Chng joined the programme as a pair of collaborators.
Jocelyn is a freelance practitioner, writer and educator in dance and theatre, with a keen interest in issues of culture and history, both personal and in wider societal/national contexts.
Amanda is a visual artist at heart, an educator by day and a musician on weekends. Her art practice is concerned with time, form and indeterminacy, often using speculative narratives to explore paradoxes of the human condition. She has a keen interest in building communities of authenticity, inclusivity and kindness; and in using the arts as a vehicle for connecting people, ideas and for personal growth through meaningful encounters.
Blog Posts
Coming soon!
ila
ila is a visual and performance artist who works with found objects, moving images and live performance. She seeks to create alternative nodes of experience and entry points into the peripheries of the unspoken, the tacit, and the silenced. With light as her medium of choice, ila weaves imagined narratives into existing realities. Using her body as a space of tension, negotiation, and confrontation, ila creates work that generates discussion about gender, history, and identity in relation to pressing contemporary issues.
Blog Posts
Coming soon!
Jacyln Chong
Jaclyn Chong is a freelance performance-maker. She is a recent graduate from the Theatre Studies programme at the National University of Singapore. As a Southeast Asian studies minor, Jaclyn believes engaging with the arts is a necessary form of social consciousness. Her works explore the boundaries between moving image and performance, probing into representations of the body.
Blog Posts
Coming soon!
Kristian-Marc James Paul
Kristian-Marc James Paul is a recent graduate of Yale-NUS College. He majored in Anthropology with a focus in Gender Studies and minored in Arts & Humanities with a focus in creative writing. He won the Bernard Bate Prize for Outstanding Anthropology Capstone Thesis for his undergraduate thesis. In college, Kristian was the inaugural Director of Diversity & Inclusion for the Yale-NUS Student Government, a Sexual Wellness Peer Educator, and a Residential College Advisor, mentoring and providing guidance to incoming first-year students. He has also written several creative nonfiction essays for various publications. Kristian is also currently a part of the climate advocacy collective, Singapore Climate Rally.
Blog Posts
Mumtaz Md Kadir
Mumtaz Md Kadir is curious about the unique narratives epitomised by every individual. This curiosity has shaped her career in Singapore’s social sector, attempting to shed light on the less popular causes left stranded on the margins of our economic success story. Her search for alternative narratives has compelled her to traverse beautiful but conflicted lands—including that of Palestine, Kashmir, and Iran. Since completing her Bachelor’s in Economics and Political Science, she has been contemplating on ways to foster her intellectual curiosity and develop methods of self-expression.
Blog Posts
Coming soon!
Mysara Aljaru
Mysara Aljaru is a freelance journalist and producer currently pursuing her Masters in Malay Studies at the National University of Singapore. She was previously a TV producer with the local mainstream media. A lens-based practitioner, she is currently researching on mainstream media discourse on Malay development. Her works revolve around politics of space, class, race and gender. Her writings have also been published on Beyond The Hijab, Budi Kritik (2018), Growing Up Perempuan (2018) and Karyawan. She is also a participating artist for the upcoming 2019 edition of Objectif’s annual Women in Film programme.
Blog Posts