Synopsis: A 60-minute listening session of Sumugan Sivanesan's tape-piece "Migrant Labour/Migrant Leisure". Sivanesan weaves together field recordings taken in Singapore at places where migrant workers congregate, whether it be for work or rest. In the vein of electronic music composers like Steve Reich, Eliane Radigue, and William Basinski, Sivanesan's tape-piece pays homage to the transnational tape-trading networks across South East Asia for industrial and noise musics, while also exploring the connections between labor, border regimes, and art that constellate the lives of migrant workers in Singapore. 

Bio: Sumugan Sivanesan is an anti-disciplinary artist, researcher and writer whose interests include: music, minority politics, activist media, artist infrastructures and more-than-human rights. His artistic research project fugitive radio proposes that “post-internet” experimental radio is a counter culture to the visuality of platform capitalism. It develops live collectively-realised modes of “performance-radio” alongside a monthly podcast, “fugitive frequency”, zines and texts. fugitive radio was initiated in Helsinki in partnership with Pixelache and with support from the Kone Foundation (2020–21). It participated in documenta fifteen (2022) curated by Jakarta-based collective ruangrupa as part of lumbung radio. Most recently, Sumugan was a Community & Education resident in Singapore Art Museum’s SAM Residencies, Cycle 2 (1 April–29 June 2024), where he invented the Bureau of Race Neutrality as a participatory artwork, collective think tank and collaborative consultancy that seeks to divest from race as a category of difference.

Sivanesan will be joining the event via Zoom call. Sivanesan will be in conversation with CML PhD student Wahid Al Mamun, whose research focuses on migrant worker poetries in Singapore, and how poetry provides an avenue for migrant worker political subjectivity to emerge in Singapore.

Location: Critical Media Lab, Peterson Hall, Room 108.