[Listening Circle] Across a Membrane: Artist Talk by Aine Nakamura

Across a Membrane

By Aine Nakamura (US/Japan)

Presented by Listening Biennial Singapore and LASALLE McNally School of Fine Arts, in collaboration with Diploma in Theatre Production and Management

Address: 1 McNally Street Singapore 187940

Artist Talk (Open to all)

2.30 PM - 3:30 PM

Venue: F101a Seminar Room

Workshop

3:35 PM - 5 PM

Venue: H102 (L1 dance studio)

(Please register for the workshop via Google Form: https://forms.gle/MYSe4T12nER1xeY89

Due to limited capacity, successful participants will be informed via email)

“I started to generate my art form through a few experiences that shifted my view and my listening. One of them was this. I was asked to introduce myself without making sounds. It was snowing outside. I moved my body slowly. I realized I was listening not only to the sound of the room but more so to the sound outside the window, imagining the world outside, and then listening to myself, embracing myself in it. I began to listen to songs in body, and I continue to do so. In addition, performance experiences and a few vocal, physical and psychological injuries helped me search what sensing, listening and art-making can be. I would like to spend time with the participants to think about the possibilities and potentialities of voice and body, and art. Being able to hold and be together in fragility is a strength, I believe. I will talk and give a few work exercises with a hope to learn together about what it means to create a space for beings and feelings, and how we might imagine and evolve for relations even at this crisis of the world.”

About the Artist:

Aine Nakamura (US/Japan)

With her unique transnational background growing up between Japan and the United States, Aine Nakamura has developed her transborder and interdisciplinary art of voice and movement. She tells stories through her performances, exploring nuanced potentialities of voice and body, and of listening and sensing. Her recent works include her solo performance of sung and spoken voice and body Under an Unnamed Flower, presented at the 2022 Venice Biennale, which focused on war, weaving, silk, and mourning, gestures and objects connecting the multiple; solo performance project Circle hasu We plant seeds in the spring of mountains (2022), presented at Theatertreffen at Berliner Festspiele after its premiere at the Gallatin Galleries, focused on time-transcending recovery in season changes; and a month-long site-specific exhibition and performance project hands on tape (2025), presented at The Lab in SF, unfolded over research, conversations and collaborations, exploring architectural changes and hidden stories, silk threads, erased labor, and metamorphosis of bodies and materials as she explored through experiences of surgeries and changes of inner shapes in a community. Nakamura is recently interested in the topics of love, fragile kindness, and folds or wrinkles, a realm that is ungraspable but open to opacity and evolvement. Nakamura has been awarded the Venice Biennale Site-Specific Performance Grant, the Fulbright Fellowship (Berlin), and The Leo Bronstein Homage Award (New York University). https://evaaine.com/home

This artist talk is organised as part of the Listening Circle, a gathering designed for mutual learning and exchange between participants, the Listening Circle offers talks, participatory experiences and workshops by diverse practitioners who share methods, practices and knowledge on listening, care, and collaboration.

To apply as a participant, sign up here: https://forms.gle/shGrgcZWDUcpMAWm8

Download Full Programme

About The Listening Biennial, Singapore

Since 2021, The Listening Biennial has sought to foster research and discussion on listening, recognising its transformative power as key to enriching personal lives and social initiatives, and which supports ethical and political practices. As part of the Singapore Night Festival, the artists of The Listening Biennial invite you to enter the space of Third Listening, to listen out for a plurality of life-forms as well as pathways of interconnection between seemingly irreconcilable differences.

The curators of the Listening Biennial, Third Edition are Alecia Neo, Soledad García Saavedra, Suvani Suri with Brandon LaBelle.

Launched for the first time in Singapore, the Singapore edition is curated by artist Alecia Neo and co-programmed with publisher Ng Kah Gay of Ethos Books.

Singapore Edition: https://www.brack.sg/index.php/2025/07/12/the-listening-biennial-third-edition/