A programme for photographers aged 15-23

Application Deadline: 3 October 2021, 11.59pm (SGT). Applications have now closed for the Shooting Home Youth Awards 2021. Thank you for your submissions.  

2021 Mentors: Ng Hui Hsien, Juria Toramae, Lenne Chai, and Marvin Tang
2021 Guest Lecturers: Dennese Victoria (The Philippines), Kamiliah Bahdar (Singapore), and Nurul Huda Rashid (Singapore)

The Shooting Home Youth Awards (SHYA) is a platform for Singapore-based students aged 15 to 23 years old to develop their photographic skills and ambitions. The programme has been running since 2011, and has mentored more than 90 students to date.

Themed around the idea of home, the programme encourages participants to draw inspiration from their surroundings and the issues most important to them. As such the photographs address a variety of subjects that are close to the photographers’ hearts such as their families and friends.

Through working with some of Singapore’s foremost young artists and photographers as mentors and guest lecturers, participants in SHYA will have the opportunity to:

  • Learn about crafting their own style and making their photography stand out
  • Build a strong portfolio
  • Exhibit their work publicly
  • Network with industry professionals. Many of the participants have continued to pursue photography through their studies and on a professional basis.
  • Deepen their understanding of the creative and professional possibilities in photography
  • Benefit from the resources and network at Objectifs, which is one of the foremost visual arts spaces in Singapore

Only 12 participants will be selected for this programme. Participants should commit to attending all workshop sessions in person.

Submission deadline: Sun 3 October 2021, 11.59pm (SGT)
Selection results: Fri 5 November 2021

Workshop dates:
1) Sat, 4 Dec: 12pm – 5pm
2) Wed, 8 Dec: 12pm to 5pm, 8pm – 9pm
3) Sat, 11 Dec: 12pm – 5pm
4) Sat, 18 Dec: 12pm – 5pm
5) Sat, 8 Jan: 12pm – 5pm
6) Sat, 15 Jan: 12pm – 5pm
7) 5 – 7 Feb, exhibition setup

Feb 2022 – exhibition opening

Shooting Home Youth Awards Facilitators

Ng Hui Hsien is an artist, writer, and researcher. Her art practice uses photography as a medium to explore themes such as consciousness, (im)materiality, and interconnectivity; her works are sites where the unconscious can find expression, indirectly or otherwise. 

Hui Hsien’s work has been internationally exhibited in various institutions and festivals, including the Shanghai Art Book Fair (China), Martin Parr Foundation (UK), and a solo exhibition at Reykjavík Museum of Photography (Iceland).

Juria Toramae is a visual artist whose work engages themes of cultural dislocation and the natural environment. Her practice is fieldwork-oriented, driven by a longstanding interest in borderlands, intertidal ecologies, and oceanic imaginations. She works in the intersection of photography, cartography, video, painting and installation. Her work has been presented at international festivals and venues including the Singapore Art Museum, the Singapore International Photography Festival, The Photobook Exhibition for Athens Photo Festival (Greece), the Obscura Festival of Photography (Malaysia), the Chiang Mai University Art Center (Thailand), and The Substation (Singapore).

Raised in Singapore and based in New York, Lenne Chai is a photographer and director who once fell into the sea while photographing Lily Cole. Having shot for magazines since the age of 19, her work has been featured in titles such as Vogue, BBC, CNN, Elle, Dazed, Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, WWD, and more.

When she’s not working with commercial brands such as Gucci, SK-II, Samsung, Canon, H&M, Spotify, Uniqlo, and Puma, just to name a few, Lenne enjoys creating sociopolitical personal work inspired by her dystopian homeland of Singapore.

Marvin Tang is a Singaporean artist who uses photography, moving images, and objects to visualise phenomena that surfaces through the act of control. His research questions the linearity of historical narratives, examining the notion of collective identities. His work builds on the multiple layers of cause and effect propagating from political decision-making to shifting social structures. He is particularly interested in applying this research to Singapore, attempting to investigate its own historical account and relationship to her expanded narratives across the globe. 

Marvin is a recipient of Kwek Leng Joo Prize of Excellence in Photography (2015), Singapore International Photography Festival Portfolio Review Prize (2016), and 8th France + Singapore Photographic Arts Award (2017). His works have been presented at international festivals such as Promenades Photographiques, Thessaloniki PhotoBiennale, Nooderlicht International Photofestival, and Odesa Photo Days. He is also a creative producer at Superhero Me; a non-profit inclusive arts movement that arms children from special needs and less privileged communities with creative confidence.

Guest Speakers

 Nurul Huda Rashid is a visual artist and writer currently pursuing her PhD in Cultural Studies in Asia. Her research interests focus on images, narratives, visual and sentient bodies, feminisms, and the intersections between them within the digital world.

Her current research project, Women in War, is a survey on images of women in war, critiqued through concepts of gender and violence, politics of the visual, and the role of the algorithm and archive as methods. In her free time, Nurul loves smelling old books and building on her collection of books and plant babies. She also hopes to adopt a kitty someday.

Born in October 1991, Dennese Victoria is an artist living and working in the  Philippines. Working across photography, moving image and installation, her work  touches on truth, memory, personal history, and the exchanges that occur between herself and those that are reached by the forming and the sharing of her  work. 

Receiving a degree in Journalism from the University of Santo Tomas in Manila in  2012, she has since worked as an educator, cultural worker, and cinematographer, including filming for Shireen Senoʼs second feature, Nervous Translation.

Kamiliah Bahdar has worked across numerous exhibitions, programmes and projects as curator, organiser, collaborator, researcher, and writer. Her first foray into curating was as a participant in Curating Lab 2012, a programme organised by NUS Museum to train young curators. Having developed an interest in the conditions of art production, she pursued an MA at Nanyang Technological University in 2015 where she wrote a thesis on microresidences in Indonesia, with a focus on how residency programmes support contemporary art practices. In 2017, she received the inaugural IMPART Awards for the curator category. She is now beginning a new cycle in her curatorial practice and looking into the role of art in education and visual literacy.

Related Public Talks 

Please click here to sign up for the public talks by guest speakers Dennese Victoria (The Philippines) and Kamiliah Bahdar (Singapore).