Counter-Occupation: Chia Amisola and Herdimas Anggara
About this Event
Counter-Occupation brings together artists Herdimas Anggara and Chia Amisola for an evening of performance and conversation presented in conjunction with , an online exhibition curated by Celine Wong Katzman for the Singapore Art Museum.
Herdimas will present RASUK in which familiar software platforms become sites of ritual occupation. Drawing inspiration from Aihwa Ong's essay The Production of Possession, Herdimas proposes spirit possession—and by extension, hacking—as a practice of inhabiting and disrupting systems of technological and economic power.
Chia will present SQUATTING, a browser-based artwork that traces connections between cybersquatting, informal settlement, and land politics in the Philippines. Through a participatory exercise, audiences are invited to construct and upload their own digital houses, exploring how acts of occupation, improvisation, and world-building unfold across physical and virtual space.
Following the presentations, the artists will join Celine in conversation to address issues around occupation, improvisation, and resistance across technological and social infrastructures.
Bios:
Heheheheherdimas Anggara likes to hijack familiar formats (like this bio) and toy with institutional seriousness. Working through an ongoing artistic framework titled RASUK (Indonesian for “possess”), hehehehehe haunts forms and coaxes them into deviating from their intended purposes. Hehehehehe holds an MFA from Yale School of Art, where hehehehehe began treating software interfaces as performance spaces. Hehehehehe now works as an Assistant Professor at VCUarts, where hehehehehe teaches students to trick infrastructure and occasionally hoodwink each other. Hehehehehe.
Chia Amisola is an artist & technologist of agencies and ambiences from Manila, Philippines. Their work is devoted to the internet's loss, love, labor, and liberation, particularly of the third world experience. Working with hypertexts, games, and performances, their practice explores the intimacies of infrastructures and the labor of tools. Their 'internet ambient' works build dense, durational, hypertextual worlds that entangle Philippine specificity and universal conditions. In 2016, they founded Developh, a research & arts institution dedicated to critical and creative technology practice in the Philippines, including project KAKAKOMPYUTER MO YAN! (That's what you get for using the computer!), an exhibition of Filipino net art.
Celine Wong Katzman is Associate Curator at Creative Time. Previously she was Co-Director at School for Poetic Computation and has held curatorial positions at Rhizome, an affiliate of the New Museum, and the Queens Museum. Celine has organized exhibitions and performances in museums, galleries, an office, an abandoned train tunnel, on a garlic farm, on the internet, and in other places. Celine has received fellowships, residencies, and grants from Singapore Art Museum, Asian Cultural Council, Teiger Foundation, NEW INC, and Queens Museum. Her writing appears in publications including The Art Happens Here: Net Art Anthology, Best! Letters from Asian Americans in the arts, and On NFTs. She is an alumna of Brown University, where she has lectured in addition to Vassar College, the School of Visual Arts, the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, and more.
Light refreshments will be provided.
Stills courtesy of the artists. Left: SQUATTING, 2024-2025, Chia Amisola. Right: RASUK, 2025, Herdimas Anggara.
The event is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, Ruth Foundation for the Arts, and other foundations and individuals.
Where is it happening?
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
USD 0.00
