Singapore Art Museum (SAM) announced the four co-artistic directors who will spearhead the Singapore Biennale 2022: Utrecht-based South Korean curator Binna Choi, Berlin-based Indian curator Nida Ghouse, Amman-based artist and curator Ala Younis, and SAM’s director of curatorial, collections, and programs, June Yap. Singapore Biennale 2022 is slated to run from October 18, 2022 until March 19, 2023.

“While the region of Southeast Asia remains the Singapore Biennale’s immediate context, this edition will journey through unfamiliar terrains and beyond geography itself. In an attempt to grapple with questions pressing for humanity, the Biennale will conceive ways to relate to a public without relying on spectacle. Turning away from the conventional preoccupation with the visual, it will dwell instead on interiority, gathering around other senses and sensibilities,” the Co-Artistic Directors declare in a statement.

Binna Choi is the director at Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons in Utrecht, where she engages with both its artistic program and the organizational and (de)instituting practice as her curatorial and collaborative art practice. Travelling Farm Museum of Forgotten Skills with the Outsiders, Site for Unlearning (Art Organization) with Annette Krauss and the Casco team, are some of her recent or ongoing curatorial works, next to the process of restructuring and rearticulating the institution itself with the Casco team, the ecosystem and the annual Assembly (since 2018).

Nida Ghouse is a writer and curator. Her research into the arrival of sound reproduction technology to the Indian subcontinent began in 2012 and she co-curated the exhibition La presencia del sonido at Botín Foundation in Santander the following year. Her texts around sound include “Acoustic Matters” (ART India, 2015), “On Listening In” (Mousse Publishing, 2015), and “The Whistle in the Voice” (Archive Books, 2019). She has co-curated Parapolitics: Cultural Freedom and the Cold War (2017), and co-edited its accompanying publication (Sternberg Press 2021), also at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. Nida began her practice through a curatorial program in Cairo and once served as director of an experimental exhibition space in Bombay.

Ala Younis is a research-based artist and curator, based in Amman. In 2013, for Kuwait’s first national pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale, Ala Younis curated “National Works”. Her most recent solo exhibitions include “High Dam: Modern Pyramid” (2020–21) at Prague’s Vi Per Gallery and “Steps Toward the Impossible” (2018–19) at Sharjah Art Foundation. She was featured in the Istanbul Biennial 2017 and the Gwangju Biennial 2012.

JDr June Yap is Director of Curatorial, Programs and Publications at the Singapore Art Museum, where she oversees content creation and museum programming. Her prior roles include Guggenheim UBS MAP Curator (South and Southeast Asia), Deputy Director and Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, and curator at the Singapore Art Museum.