Change: One Portrait at a Time: The film takes place in Singapore where senior lecturer Joan Marie Kelly at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore has conducted her painting class inside a dormitory where 7000 Indian, Bangladesh Myanmar and Chinese foreign workers live. The students and workers engage for the first time through the act of portrait painting, a slow process that puts sight as the central means of engagement between the students and the workers. In an intimate exchange, the artist and sitter stare into each other’s eyes for hours during the painting process. 

Text by Joan Marie Kelly:

Although I took a job teaching at NTU in 2005 I wasn’t a stranger to SEA. My introduction to Southeast Asia began in New York City working as a waitress while attending art school. The cooks in the kitchen were Indonesian, working under the table without proper visas and therefore could not return home and return again to New York. So I went home for the Indonesian men, bringing photographs, letters and stories from family to family all the way down the island of Java. Many years later I have continued this thread through a social art practice initiating artistic encounters with migrant and marginalized communities.

Many years later I have continued this thread through a social art practice initiating artistic encounters with migrant and marginalized communities. I reinvigorate concepts of figure painting and drawing by collaborating with ethnographic practices. Art is a means to witness and engage with the environments and daily lives of communities that are often represented by constructions of the media and misperceptions. In recent years I have worked with incarcerated girls in Fez, Morocco and before that with women in a brothel in Kolkata.

Watching the transforming responses by students when we paint the portraits of foreign workers in the dormitory, has been some of the most satisfying work I have accomplished in Singapore and brings to light how we can do so much more to be inclusive.