About Concerned Citizens Programme
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.
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.
Concerned Citizens Programme 2017
The 2017 programme was led by artist-mentor Tan Guo-Liang.
Tan Guo-Liang is a visual artist and writer based in Singapore. He completed his MFA at Glasgow School of Art and was a guest student at The Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. His work has been exhibited and collected in Asia and Europe, including his first solo exhibition ‘Dead Play’ at Space Cottonseed and 'The Trouble With Painting Today' in Pump House Gallery, London. He is a recipient of the Singapore National Arts Council Scholarship for visual art and is a contributing writer on various art journals, catalogues and websites. More recently, he was an artist-in-residence at the NTU CCA residency and currently co-runs the project space Peninsular. He also teaches part-time at Lasalle College of the Arts.
Concerned Citizens Programme 2019
The second iteration was led by artist-mentor Cheong Kah Kit, alongside co-mentors Alvin Tan, Kin Chui, and Nurul Huda Rashid.
Cheong Kah Kit is a visual artist based in Singapore. He graduated from Umeå Academy of Fine Art, Sweden in 2008. Kah Kit was affiliated with p-10, a Singapore independent curatorial team (2004-2006). In 2016, he co-founded Peninsular, an artist studio / project space in Singapore. Kah Kit was Manager for Research at NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore between 2016-2018. Prior to that, he was Reference Art Librarian at the Lee Kong Chian Reference Library, National Library Singapore (2009-2015). Kah Kit was artist-in-residence at Para Site, Hong Kong, 2015.
Alvin Tan is the Founder and Artistic Director of The Necessary Stage and a leading proponent of devising theatre in Singapore. In 2014, Alvin was conferred the Cultural Medallion for his artistic excellence and contribution to Singapore’s arts and cultural landscape. He was the first Artistic Director of Peer Pleasure, an annual youth-oriented theatre festival in Singapore.
Kin Chui was one of the 8 cinematographers who won best Cinematography at Singapore International Film Festival’s Singapore Film Award in 2009 for the Lucky 7 Project. Since studying at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Kin Chui has been involved in a number of anti-discriminatory initiatives. He was a co-organizer for the project Re-Emphasis, as part of the cultural festival Wienwoche, that consisted of a public installation and forum that addressed the topic of migrant and refugee rights.
Nurul Huda Rashid is a researcher, photographer, and educator. Her research interests focus on images, narratives, visual and sentient bodies, feminisms, and the intersections between them. Her current research project, Women in War, is a survey of images of women in war, critiqued through concepts of gender and violence, politics of the visual, and the role of the algorithm and archive as methods.