Fireside Chat with Michela Magas

Michela Magas
Founder and President, MTF Labs
President, Knowledge Graph Alliance (KGA)

Michela Magas bridges design and technology, research and industry. She is Chair and Director of Research and Innovation of the Stockholm-based Industry Commons Foundation, advisor to the European Commission and the G7 leaders, Member of President von der Leyen’s High Level Round Table for the New European Bauhaus, and member of the Advisory Board of CERN (ISAB-G). She currently serves as President of the Brussels-based International Knowledge Graph Alliance.

She is the Founder of Stockholm-based MTF Labs and has over the past 12 years been conducting technology experiments with its global community of 8000 contributors from the arts and sciences with methods that have been selected as best practice of Knowledge Valorisation by the European Commission. For 20 years she ran Stromatolite Design Lab in London creating design futures with global clients such as Apple, Nike and Nokia. In 2017 she was awarded European Woman Innovator of the Year by the European Commission, and in 2016 she was presented with an Innovation Luminary Award by the European Commission and Intel Labs Europe.

Low Sze Wee
Group Director for Museums at the National Heritage Board of Singapore (NHB)

Prior to joining NHB in 2024, Sze Wee was the Chief Executive Officer of the Singapore Chinese Cultural Centre for six years. During his tenure, the centre launched the award-winning SINGAPO人 exhibition and provided an active calendar of onsite and online programmes, highlighting the distinctiveness of local Chinese culture.

Initially trained as a lawyer, he later graduated with a Master’s in History of Art from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Prior to joining the Centre, he was Director (Curatorial, Collections and Education) at the National Gallery Singapore. Whilst at the National Gallery, Sze Wee was a key contributor to the conceptualisation and development of the S$530m project. Before that, he was Deputy Director (Curatorial and Collections) at the Singapore Art Museum (SAM), and participated in the development of its new wing 8Q-SAM. At SAM, he also oversaw the landmark donation of paintings by eminent Chinese artist Wu Guanzhong, the single largest art donation to Singapore.

Sze Wee has been involved in many exhibitions abroad and in Singapore, including important retrospectives on Singapore artists, the Singapore pavilion at the 50th Venice Biennale (2003) and collaborative projects in China, Japan, Korea and the United Kingdom. In 2016, he was the lead curator for the collaboration with Tate Britain, to present the international exhibition Artist and Empires: (En)countering Colonial Legacies. He has also contributed many essays and lectures on Singapore and Southeast Asian art, and presented papers at international platforms in the United Kingdom, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, and Malaysia. He is the first Singaporean to be selected as an International Fellow for the Clore Fellowship Programme in 2013-14.

In addition to being an award-winning curator with management experience, Sze Wee has also been involved in strategic arts planning and policy at the Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts, Singapore.

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