Per°Form Open Academy of Arts and Activations

Per°Form Open Academy of Arts and Activations (POA) is 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 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.

The other 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 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.

Dr. Ong elaborates, “our main research has been our public, what are they looking for in a world that has transformed itself with Netflix and digital stay-at-home flexibility? Why do we gather today “live”? Is there no other option to our existence on this planet, except to be at the marketplace? Our response is the Per°Form Open Academy (POA), an open academy, open to everyone. It is a festival of arts and activations where Global South fellows presenting their proposals for a liveable society in their contexts – a mapping of the translocal, which substitutes the notion of the international. In short, it is an urban picnic with hammocks where we are transported around the world, where we listen to inspiring narratives of artists and cultural innovators who are transforming their communities.”

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.

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 is presented by T:>Works, an independent and international arts company based in Singapore at its space, 72-13.

Brack is proud to be an Artpal at this year’s Per°Form Open Academy.