Syed Farid Al-atas,
Aya Rodriguez-Izumi,
Angel Velasco Shaw

21 April 2021
7.30pm—9.30pm (SGT)
7.30am—9.30am (EST)

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Held in parallel with the Afro-Southeast Asia: Pragmatics and Geopoetics of Art During a Cold War webinar series, this panel discussion organised by NUS Museum seeks to illuminate questions around subaltern epistemology and the silenced breath of alternative practice. This panel discussion brings together three panellists, Syed Farid Al-atas, Aya Rodriguez-Izumi, and Angel Velasco Shaw, whose identities find confluences between practitioner, theorist, and educator. The panellists will address the notion of decoloniality as contextualised within their respective experiences that transgress the hierarchy of knowledge. In articulating their shared undertakings of community-building engagements beyond conventional classroom settings, the panel aims to shed light on the dialectical relationship between critical pedagogy and the situatedness of practice.


Dr. Syed Farid Al-atas is a contemporary Malaysian sociologist who is a Professor of Sociology at the National University of Singapore (NUS). He has lectured at the University of Malaya in the Department of Southeast Asian Studies prior to joining NUS. His areas of interest are historical sociology, the sociology of social science, the sociology of religion, and inter-religious dialogue.

Aya Rodriguez-Izumi is an artist living and currently working in Harlem whose practice includes sculpture, music, installation and performance that straddles influence from her residence in New York City as well as her birthplace of Okinawa, Japan. Being half Cuban / Puerto Rican, and Okinawan / Japanese, notions of socio-cultural identity have always been a focus of her work and life. Since graduating from Parsons School of Design, she has been included in various group shows and has exhibited at venues such as the MoCADA, The Knockdown Center, Free Candy, and FLUX Art Fair among others. Her work, Okinawa’s Tragedy: Echoes from the Last Battle of WWII is currently on show at the NUS Museum in the exhibition Wishful Images: When Microhistories Take Form.

Angel Velasco Shaw is a visual and media artist, educator, curator, and cultural organiser living in Manila and New York City. Her experimental documentaries—Inherited Memories, When Absence Becomes Presence, Motherload, The Momentary Enemy, Umbilical Cord, Asian Boys, Nailed and Balikbayan/Return to Home have screened in American, European, and Asian film festivals, museums, galleries, and schools. Over the course of 27 years, she has taught Media, Communication, Art, and Asian/Pacific/American Studies at the Philippines Women’s University, New York University, Hunter College, Columbia University, and The New School.