To mark the opening of SAMCollection: The Present is Unstable, Hao Jingban (Artist) will be in conversation with Han Nefkens (Founder of the Han Nefkens Foundation) and Shabbir Hussain Mustafa (Chief Curator at Singapore Art Museum), moderated by Elaine W. Ng (Editor and Publisher of ArtAsiaPacific).

Presented as part of SAMCollection: The Present is Unstable, I Witness resulted from the 2023 Moving Image Commission, co-established by the Han Nefkens Foundation, Mori Art Museum, M+, Hong Kong, and Singapore Art Museum.

I Witness is about grief and how difficult it can be to express. It looks at the memories of people who have lost someone close to them, and at the ways mourning often happens quietly and in private. Drawing on Hao’s research-led practice, the conversation will explore the development of I Witness and its themes of history, memory, mourning, and collective experience. It will also trace the work’s journey since its premiere, considering the collaborative partnership that brought the commission to fruition and its continued presentation across institutions.

About the Speakers
Hao Jingban is an artist who lives and works between Yunnan, China and Berlin, Germany. Her works explore the distance between the present and past, and between micro- and macro-narratives. Hao works with archives, interviews, and performance to connect personal experiences with events that affect wider society. Her recent projects look at how the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and the Black Lives Matter movement have shaped the way people think, feel, and remember.

Han Nefkens is a Dutch writer and collector who trained as a journalist in the US and France, and worked as a radio correspondent in Mexico. He founded the Han Nefkens Foundation in 2009, which focuses on grants and commissions that support the production of video art. The foundation acts as a funder of and mediator for art institutions producing new work, while neither collecting nor owning any of the resulting artworks itself. It works with partner institutions who, in the case of grants, have committed to exhibiting the new work; and in the case of co-commissions, to the work becoming part of the institutions' collections.

Shabbir Hussain Mustafa is Chief Curator at the Singapore Art Museum, where he oversees the museum’s programming at its post-industrial spaces. From 2023 to 2025, he was Senior Curator and Head of Exhibitions at the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, contributing to the development of the museum’s curatorial framework. He currently serves as a Board Member of the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art and as the Artistic Director of Aichi Triennale 2028.

Elaine W. Ng is an editor, publisher, and university lecturer specializing in contemporary art in Asia. She managed Hanart TZ Gallery from 1996 to 1998 and oversaw Videotage from 2000 to 2002. In 2001, she served as curatorial assistant for Hong Kong’s first pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Ng has taught modern and contemporary Asian art history, feminist art history, art criticism, and visual-arts research methodologies. In 2004, she joined ArtAsiaPacific, the leading English-language publication on art from Asia, the Pacific, and the Middle East, as editor and publisher.