Jennifer Teo is a cultural worker with a wide interest in socio-cultural issues, particularly those related to climate, community, liberation, feminism, food, knowledge, and spirituality. She is a co-founder of and mainly works with Post-Museum, an independent cultural and social space which aims to encourage and support a thinking and pro-active community. Founded in 2007, Post-Museum is an open platform for examining contemporary life, promoting the arts and connecting people. They create events and projects, curate, research, publish and collaborate with a network of social actors and cultural workers.
Veronyka Lau is a multidisciplinary artist that searches for meaning in the interconnectedness of all ecological relationships.Her relational works investigate and amplify how we relate to things, ourselves, and each other. Through her performance works and roles in collectives,, she explores a contemporary embodiment of the feminine as power and its mercurial quality for conveyance and resistance in a climate of crisis and decline.
The artists will undertake an investigation into paradise and utopia as shifting imaginaries. They will explore dreams, non-linear temporalities and registers of ecological shifts on Nikoi Island and in its surrounding waters. They will attempt to make these complexities perceptible through two workshops, an open studio, and an artwork which will be installed on the island.
For Jennifer, the investigation undertaken will allow her to focus on her practice of connecting community, ecology and spirituality through artmaking and writing. It will also contribute to her understanding of and connection to Nikoi Island, its water and its inhabitants and visitors, while deepening her connection with Veronyka as it would be their first collaborative artwork after knowing and working alongside each other for many years. For Veronyka, this residency builds on research initiated through her solo exhibition Palms Blow North in 2024, which examined the northward migration of palm trees as both a climatic indicator and a poetic signal of temporal and ecological displacement. On Nikoi Island, this research expands into an island-based inquiry that weaves together botanical drift, acoustic phenomena, and visual traces to explore how climate change alters not only landscapes, but also the frequencies through which environments are sensed, remembered, and navigated.
Care for the Unseen Elements is a collaborative artistic research project that unfolds through subtle interactions, shared gestures, and material translations of lived experience on the island. Developed collaboratively by Jennifer Teo and Veronyka Lau, the work explores how care circulates through everyday actions—particularly through the often-unnoticed choreographies of those who sustain the island as a temporary home for others.
Positioned between performance, social engagement, and installation, the project draws attention to the embodied knowledge held within gestures of service, attentiveness, and presence. Through interactions with staff and guests, the artists create a porous space where moments of exchange become sites for sensing the unseen structures that shape the island’s rhythms.
Central to the research is an attunement to the “geology of time”: the layered temporalities of labour, and encounter. Dreams, both spoken and unspoken, are understood as extensions of this temporal field—intimate yet collective, fleeting yet sedimentary. By inviting participants into quiet acts of awareness, the work draws closer to the island’s embodied spirit in the movements, desires, and crossings of those who inhabit it, however briefly.
The culmination of the project takes form as an artwork that gathers gestures and reliefs—translating ephemeral interactions into tactile surfaces and imprints. These material traces hold residues of encounter, offering a space where care, memory, and imagination remain in gentle circulation.
Read more about the residency and the artists' work on The Straits Times: https://www.straitstimes.com/life/arts/singaporean-artists-build-offshore-networks-in-malaysia-and-indonesia-explore-nusantara-links
Special thanks to:
The women staff on island whose hands we photographed for this project: Esme, Meysi, Asna, Rose, Vinky, Gita, Sandri, Thailand, Ita, Mei, Desti, Zahara, Trea, Ani, Grace, Adel, Caca, Pipin, Adlene, Triana, Esti, Tiara and Nia.
Rasi and Renny, for their support with construction and the art installation.
Esti and Yudi, for their support with sourcing for materials and printing
Title: Where the Alang Alang Bends (2026)
Where the Alang Alang Bends is a sculptural proposition composed of stripped alang alang reduced to their central vascular line. The alang alang was salvaged from the replacement of the Nikoi kitchen roof when the artists could observe the precision and craft embedded in the vernacular construction. Very few things however can withstand the elements of salt and wind on the island and the ritual of repair is repeated every five or six years. Leaning into the vulnerable impermanence of all things, the sculpture functions as a material test: how far can the form be reduced while retaining coherence.
Ubah Rumah is an art residency and archive inspired by stories of our region.
