NUS Arts Festival 2017

Looking to The Past for The Future | Arts Festivals in Context

Joe Sidek, Festival Director, George Town Festival & Venka Purushothaman, Vice President (Academic), LASALLE College of the Arts

Moderated by Mary Loh, Festival Director, NUS Arts Festival (NUS Centre For the Arts)

Tue 24 Jan | 7.30pm | NUS Museum | Free admission with registration

Register SEE WHO ELSE IS GOING

< Back to What’s On

NUS Centre For the Arts presents a candid conversation about the role of history and heritage in directions to festival-making. From two different perspectives gleaned in two geographical places, Mr Joe Sidek and Mr Venka Purushothaman share their unique insights, experiences and thoughts about the future of festivals.

Mr Joe Sidek is the Festival Director of George Town Festival, an annual, month-long celebration of arts, culture, heritage and community in Penang. Inaugurated in 2010 in honour of George Town’s designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Festival transforms the city into a global stage, showcasing world-class performances, installations and collaborations from international and local artists alike. With over one hundred unique events each year, the Festival seeks to create new and vibrant connections between the traditional and the contemporary, the past and the future.

Mr Venka Purushothaman is the author of Making Visible The Invisible: Three Decades of Singapore Arts Festival, a seminal book which contains to date the most comprehensive study of the development of the Singapore Arts Festival. Lived experiences in Singapore, Toronto and Melbourne coupled with extensive travel across the globe – researching the cultural differences in the management of arts festivals and biennales –has provided him with a rare insight into the world of cultural flow and sensitivity to the place of art in societies and communities. He is also the Vice President (Academic) and Provost of LASALLE College of the Arts, where he leads arts in higher education.

You may also like:

Introducing the Quantum Music Project

On Places — Becoming Spaces

Joe Sidek

Festival Director, George Town Festival

With over thirty years of experience in the world of culture and creativity, Joe Sidek has established himself as one of Malaysia's leading advocates of the arts. An industrialist by trade and an entrepreneur by nature, Mr Sidek has organised countless shows and performances for a number of organisations across Malaysia, including government-sponsored events. His innovative expertise and business acumen, as well as his visionary passion, has led to his appointment as Festival Director of the George Town Festival in 2010, and as Managing Director of Tropfest South East Asia in 2013. Mr Sidek has since been invited to speak around the region about his role in the creation and continued growth of George Town Festival, including the New Cities Summit in Jakarta, ASEAN Branding Workshop in Cebu, APAM in Brisbane, and Asia on the Edge in Hong Kong. He has also been invited to participate in art markets around the world including the latest in Paris and Adelaide.

Venka Purushothaman

Vice President (Academic) LASALLE College of the Arts

Venka Purushothaman is currently Vice-President (Academic) & Provost at LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore - a leading institution in contemporary art/s and design practice and education in Southeast Asia. A leading expert in arts higher education and cultural and creative industries, he has led significant transformation in LASALLE’s curriculum and introduced numerous path-breaking programmes to support the cultural and creative industries; and to support the development of youths through the arts.

Venka is highly regarded for his research and insights in the cultural and creative industries in Asia-Pacific and lectures internationally on issues in contemporary art; festival cultures and cultural policy in Asia; and arts and design higher education. Heserves as an expert on many professional committees and has chaired importantportfolios such as funding committees for theatre, cultural awards committees andcommittees dedicated to developing youths in Singapore. It is this interest that spurredhim to conceptualise and establish ANCER (Asia-Pacific Network for Cultural Education & Research) at LASALLE and lead the founding of theGlobal Design Initiative involving five global universities.

Venka has also researched and published extensively. These include essays on artists such as Pierre & Gilles (France), Nathalie Junod Ponsard (France), Parvati Nayar (India); and, book length artist monographs: The Art of Sukumar Bose: Reflections on South and Southeast Asia (2013) - Winner of the 2015 ICAS IBP Best Art Book Prize; Dance Me through the Dark: The Photography of Tan Ngiap Heng (2008); and Salleh Japar: Gurindam dan Igauan. (2004). His books on culture includes Making Visible the Invisible: Three Decades of the Singapore Arts Festival (2007) and Narratives: Notes on a Cultural Journey, Cultural Medallion Recipients, 1979-2002 (2002). He is the editor of ISSUE: An International Art Journalpublished by LASALLE.

Venka is a member of the Association of International Art Critics, France (AICA) and Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts, UK (RSA), and member of the Virginia Commonwealth University-QATAR’s Advisory Board.