Lecture performance and book launch by Tan Kai Syng followed by a conversation with NTU CCA Director Karin Oen
This event marks the Asian premiere of artist, academic, and agitator Tan Kai Syng’s lecture performance the author conceived to launch her monograph, Neuro-Futurism and Re-Imagining Leadership: An A-Z towards Collective Liberation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). An uproarious manifesto that blazes new ways to think about and perform ‘leadership’, the book offers a change-making heuristic tool kit to individuals and institutions that want to challenge normative structures of power and knowledge. Practicing tentacular thinking, Kai Syng concocts a unique intersectional recipe for ‘neuro-futurism’ out of an eclectic mix of discourses, including creative pedagogy, critical studies, social justice, altermobilities, and Daoist cosmology among others. The lecture performance will be followed by a conversation with Karin Oen, NTU CCA Director.
A limited number of copies will be available for purchase.
Kai Syng Tan PhD, PFHEA (she/they) is an award-winning artist, academic, agitator, and Associate Professor in Arts and Cultural Leadership at the University of Southampton, United Kingdom. Hyperactive and tentacular, Kai seeks to embody the possibilities of ‘artful leadership’ in her actions and approaches. They are a research leader of 6 global research networks, including the Neurodiversity In/& Creative Research Network, as well as a trans-disciplinary innovator, a change-maker, an artist, curator, creative director, and more. Kai is also an expert advisor for UK and Singapore government bodies and international research councils. These multiple capacities inform her artistic strategies and creative insights in developing her vision for a more equitable future. They were Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore in 2018 and 2019
Image: Still from performance-lecture at John Hansard Gallery, September 2024 (Southampton, UK). Courtesy Kai Syng Tan.
