The People Behind
Brack is comprised of a core team of active members, as well as a Diverse Community of artists, writers, and cultural / social intermediaries in Southeast Asia.
Jevon Chandra
Jevon Chandra is an artist, sound designer, and cultural worker. Drawing inspiration from therapeutic and peer counselling approaches, his art practice estimates the (mis)translations that occur between thought, theory, and praxis, as sometimes seen in acts of caring, communicating, and holding faith. As a cultural worker, his time is divided between leading community-oriented activities, crafting outreach programs, and designing booklets for art-going audiences. Elsewhere, his preoccupations unfold in the form workshops, initiatives and public interventions, seeking to outline an ethics of congregation, polytemporality, and other-centredness.
Alecia Neo
Alecia Neo is an artist based in Singapore. Her practice unfolds primarily through moving image, public interventions and participatory workshops and platforms that address modes of radical hospitality, reciprocity and caregiving. Her recent projects include Care Index, an experimental platform that collects and features diverse practices of care performed by people from all walks of life. She also runs Ubah Rumah Residency in Bintan and Unseen Arts Initiatives, a Singapore-based platform for professional and emerging disabled artists. Read more.
Kei Franklin
Kei Franklin is a facilitator, coach, organiser, and artist who is currently based in northern New Mexico (USA). Her practice centers on the belief that the power dynamics that sustain broad systems of injustice are reflected in our relational lives. Kei’s creative practice takes on various forms - from performance to music to the written word. She is currently exploring the plurality of truth in the context of conflict, humour as a tool for resistance, and the conditions that nurture conscientisation. Kei is embedded in a web of kin who are usually located in Singapore, the UK, Eswatini, and various parts of the USA. All that she does emerges from dialogue with these loved ones.
Melanie Chua
Melanie Chua is an editor and the first certified Building Biologist in Asia. Her interest is in how we perceive and inhabit the invisible world around us with a focus on the relationships between space, health and wellness. Her writing and art works, recently Urban Body (2012) and Next In Line (2014), utilise the personal narrative to reveal social products of culture.
Jill Tan
Jill J. Tan is a Singaporean writer, artist, and researcher committed to collaborative practice and multimodal exploration through games, performance, and poetics. As a doctoral student in Anthropology at Yale, Jill studies death and dying in Singapore and works with the funeral profession. Elsewhere, she researches agency in children's dance, writes about socially-engaged art, and co-runs Little Study Zine. Jill is also a contributing editor of the Society for Cultural Anthropology's Visual and New Media Review. Her work has appeared in City and Society Journal, Guernica, Ghost Proposal, Palimpsest, Mynah, Brack, the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival anthology Film Criticism Collective Volume II (2017), and Resistant Hybridities: Tibetan Narratives in Exile (Lexington 2020). Find her at jilljtan.com.
Kirin Heng
Kirin is a Dutch-born research master’s student of Media, Art and Performance Studies at Utrecht University. Her research looks at marginalised identities in society and socially-engaged art.
Natalie Tan
Natalie Christian Tan is a visual artist and writer who was trained at Yale-NUS College. She is interested in using visual art as a medium to communicate and evoke ideas which would otherwise have been lost in static texts. Natalie devotes her time to researching and addressing issues affecting racial, religious and gendered identity in Singapore.
Ethan Leong
Ethan is an arts administrator with a background in media and sociology. His other writings include literary reviews published in Ethos Books (LivePRESS Pilot) and poetry in The Library of Rejected Beauty. He is interested in film, critical theory, philosophy, poetry, and examining art’s potential as a medium for social panacea.
Wong Yunjie
Wong Yunjie (Jacky) is a theatre artist, researcher and writer curious about the gaps to collective human flourishing in present-day capitalism, and in Asian traditional art practices as embodied philosophy/values in danger of being lost. He practised community-based theatre with Makhampom, Chiangmai (2012-2014) and Playback Theatre and Taichi. Yunjie studied Noh, Wayang Wong, Beijing Opera, Taichi and Kuttiyattam alongside Western theatre traditions at the Intercultural Theatre Institute (2015-2017), and wrote a thesis on Thailand’s democracy movement and cinema in the 1970s as a political science student in NUS (2003-2007).
Alfonse Chiu
Working at the intersection of text, spaces, and the moving image, Alfonse Chiu is a writer and researcher interested in the urban condition and methods of occupancy.
Anthea Julia Chua
Anthea Julia Chua writes, directs, and performs, with a background in anthropology, choral music, and theatre.
Ernest Goh
Ernest Goh is a visual artist whose work focuses on ecological relationships, especially through our interactions with animals via anthropomorphism. He is the founder of Ayer Ayer Project, an ecologically-engaged art project. Previously a photojournalist with The Straits Times, Ernest has freelanced for wire agencies and international publications such as Smithsonian and Monocle. Ernest studied in Goldsmiths College London’s Institute of Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurship. His work has been commissioned by and installed at the Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum, Singapore, collected by the Multimedia Art Museum Moscow, and also resides in corporate, public and private collections in Asia.
Gracie Teo
Creating experiential programs is a unique characteristic of how Gracie Teo communicates messages, with favoured themes centring on culture, creativity and community. Gracie produced the Yesterday Mobile Karaoke for the Singapore Arts Festival (2011) and introduced live mystery games from Japan when the first Real Escape Game was staged in Singapore (2012). She was involved in production work for the award-winning film Untouchable: Children of God (Humanitarian Film Award, New Port Film Festival 2014). Gracie was the Project Manager for the Singapore Snaps project (Past Forward exhibition, 2015). During the Greenhouse Labs, which aims to bring art practitioners, social workers and researchers in the area of community development, her team won the inaugural pitch.
Melinda Lauw
Melinda Lauw is a Singaporean artist based in New York. She works extensively with textiles, specialising in hand tufting, a technique of carpet making. She is the recipient of The Christine Risley Award 2015 from the Goldsmiths Textile Collection & Constance Howard Gallery. Her research interests include human perception, material culture and guerrilla-style art.
Nasri Shah
Nasri Shah is a writer and graduate student in history of art at University College London, where he was a recipient of the J.L. Wine Trust Prize. His research has recently been included in events such as Rematerialising Feminism (2014, Arcadia Missa), An Aesthetic Project (2013, House Gallery) and Urban Body (2012, SCYA).
Jade Chen
Jade Chen is a researcher and writer with a background in Sociology. Her current work involves investigating educational and geographical issues using qualitative methodologies. Outside of academia, her forays into writing include her short story 'Meteors' published by Blackpear Press (2014) and a magazine article in BrackMag (2016). Other abiding interests of hers revolve around topics on culture, music, food, sustainability and the environment.
Nazry Bahrawi
Nazry Bahrawi is an academic, literary translator and essayist. His research explores the interstices between cultures, philosophies and aesthetics of Muslim Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Nazry teaches at the Singapore University of Technology and Design. He is also a founding member of the critical humanities collective, the Bras Basah Open School for Theory and Philosophy. His op-ed commentaries have appeared in Al Jazeera, The Guardian, South China Morning Post and Today.
Samantha Tio
Samantha Tio (Mintio) is a visual artist born in Singapore. Trained as a photographer at the School of Art, Design and Media in Nanyang Technological University, Mintio has been actively creating works and participating in exhibitions both locally and abroad. “Table for One” (2010) was Mintio’s first public venture into a participatory project, in which she dined with people she found eating alone over a span of one year. Mintio is currently based in Indonesia to work with Kabul to establish a project space named “Ketemu”, to facilitate relational and socially conscious artworks. Read more.
Seelan Palay
Seelan Palay is a visual artist from Singapore whose practice focuses on the concerns and complexities of the communities he identifies with and relates to. Taking form in painting, drawing, collage, installation, and video, his work reflects broader questions and conditions found in our contemporary globalised society. Seelan is also part of EngageMedia, an NGO working to develop the video and technology capacities of activists in the Asia-Pacific region. He is the founder of Coda Culture, Singapore.
Savitri Sastrawan
A Balinese nomad, Dewa Ayu Eka Savitri Sastrawan is an artist and a Bahasa Indonesia-English translator. Her artworks have been exhibited in Indonesia, The Netherlands and UK including with GondoRukem Batik Art Community Bali, the latter with whom she continues to give workshops with in the UK. She She is completing her Masters in Global Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London and is part of Lila Bhawa Indonesian Dance UK.