Ute Meta Bauer was the co-curator for the Documenta11 in 2002, co-curator for the US Pavilion in 2015 and the Singapore Pavilion in 2022 at the Venice Biennale. She co-curated the 17th Istanbul Biennale with Amar Kanwar and David Teh and she is currently the Artistic Director of the 2024 Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale. Prior she served as founding director of the MIT Programme in Art, Culture and Technology, as Dean of the Royal College of Art. She is the Founding Director of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art and a professor at the School of Art, Design and Media at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

Lecture 1. 
Saying It Without Saying. Can a Biennale Be a Newspaper?: On The Process of Creating the 17th Istanbul Biennial

The suspension of life-as-we-knew-it is a rare license to do things differently. Doing justice to this moment means resetting our expectations and our purposes, reimagining our formats and making way for a fundamental questioning that is political and philosophical; for conversations, intimate and public, generous and trenchant. What is needed above all in this uncertain window is the confidence to try unfamiliar ways, old and new, of interacting with each other and with the world.

Lecture 2. Art And the Environment in Asia and South East Asia

Environmentally-engaged artistic practices in South Asia, Southeast Asia and the Pacific explore researchbased artistic practices from the region engaged in environmental themes such as traditional knowledge, biodiversity and ecosystems, anthropogenic impacts, and risk and resilience. The complexity of the climate crisis at hand requires a transdisciplinary approach to research and practice, even as we see climate change becoming an ever-pressing theme across the disciplines of science and humanities, including the arts, architecture and urban planning. This presentation and the related database on environmentally-engaged artistic practices have been funded by an AcRF Tier 1 Ministry of Education Grant, Singapore.