BRINGING HOMEWARD TO SINGAPORE | A EUROPE/ASIA PERFORMANCE-LECTURE + GUIDED TOUR WITH THE CURATOR
by Studio MoreThanThat
Saturday 22 August 07:30 PM
1 Sarkies Road Singapore, Level 2 Gallery , Alliance Française de Singapour
We welcome you to a double-bill event, composed of "Homeward", an interactive, multisensory lecture-performance, hosted the South Asian artist Natish Jain, and a guided tour of our new exhibit "A Tale of Wondering Wilds" by the curator Mathieu Gomez.
By getting tickets to this event, you will have access to both Natish Jain's immersive performance taking place in our gallery, AND the guided tour.
Homeward: more-than-human notes on migrating.
The cloud asks her lover:
How can I be your solid ground, your shelter
When I wander homeless, just floating away?
Homeward is an interactive, multisensory lecture-performance. Along with objects, scents, sounds and taste, this rich storytelling is a vivid collage of migrations. It gathers threads of leaving and arriving, returning, circling, renouncing or being cast into exile.
There are scallops dreaming of seeing the sky. There are signals sent into interstellar space on the chance that someone, somewhere, might answer. There is a flock of flamingoes that are getting more pink every day. There are cuckoos who are not interested in raising their own children. There is a bird flying over the Arabian Sea wearing the black and white robes of the monks she was named for, but she has never once rested on the roof of their monastery in Toulouse. The Golden Record carries human greetings from the Earth, and the salt in your last meal migrated across geological time.
Homeward is an invitation to discover plural ways of what it means to go towards home - without finding it, without knowing where it is, without knowing one has arrived. Can a tree long to fly away and can waves yearn to root?
The Artist: Nitish Jain
Nitish Jain (°1989, Lucknow, India) is a queer South Asian artist based in Prague, working between India and Europe. He makes multisensory, participatory experiences for diverse audiences using performance art, architecture, storytelling, and constructed objects.
His approach with the senses draws from Indian rasa aesthetic philosophy and the phenomenology of embodied experience. He invites audiences to engage with his works primarily through their senses of touch, taste, smell and sound rather than sight alone. His work carries a poetic sensibility rooted in metaphor, memory, and myth, and is shaped by postcolonial thought, ecological urgency, extractive fatigue, and reduced attention — engaging with rest as resistance as a broader cultural and political philosophy.
His works have been shown at various international festivals and institutions such as Wiesbaden Biennale of Art , Humboldt Forum (DE), Sharjah Days of Heritage Festival (UAE); BLR Hubba, Manotsava National Mental Health Festival and Serendipity Arts Festival (IN); across communities in Czechia, Germany, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, UK, Italy, and India.
The Curator: Mathieu Gomez
Mathieu Gomez is a curator whose practice focuses on creating accessible yet thought-provoking multidisciplinary and cross-cultural experiences.
His work spans cultural exhibitions developed with leading institutions, including the Paris National Opera, the Paris National Museum of Natural History, the Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum, the MINT Museum of Toys, and the Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Youth Foundation, as well as contemporary art exhibitions that foster dialogue between French and Singaporean artists.
Around each exhibition, he conceives multidisciplinary public programmes that bring together visual art, performance, cinema, and education, creating meaningful encounters between artists, institutions, and diverse audiences.