The scope of this workshop considers issues of curating contemporary art and its knowledge production. How does one critique the different politics and dynamics at play in the space of curating and exhibition-making, vis-à-vis the production of exhibition, of institutional and museum collections?
Taking into consideration the spatial context of art production, be it in/of Taiwan, (East and Southeast) Asia and other regions, and in white cube and non-institutional spaces, how can we think, play, experiment alongside or outside such spaces? This is important to challenge the stagnancy or limitation of institutional attempt of art historical framing or constructing narratives about art of a region or places. We could ask, for example, how curators/curation could engage or address the alternative or multiplicities of Southeast Asia beyond a single survey exhibition could envision. What could such alternative projects offer us?
The workshop invites curators to envision, to explore different transdisciplinary, transregional approach of research, collaboration, and as an active partner working with artist and other field of practitioners.
Merv ESPINA is an artist and researcher based in Quezon City, Metro Manila. His practice spans moving image, sound, performance, and text, to play with the lapses of cultural institutions, mistakes of current historiography, and the problematics of archives. His interests span the half-life and migration of ideas, images, sounds and spices, and how they sometimes became an essential part of localities and specific cultural landscapes. Traversing 60s Pop Yeh Yeh ecologies to failed nation states, spycraft and espionage to the white rajahs of Sarawak, Badjao gypsy electro to distilling the scents of cities, his projects attempt to tease out propositions and alternatives, through off-tangents and fuzzy juxtapositions, aimed at new knowledge production.
He helps run Green Papaya Art Projects, an independent arts initiative founded in 2000 that's slated to close in 2021. He's also one of the organizers of WSK Festival of the Recently Possible (founded in 2008), an experimental music and media art festival. In 2014, he started the Kalampag Tracking Agency with artist Shireen Seno, an initiative that explores the screening program as participatory archive of Philippine experiments with the moving image. He was part of the curatorial team of SUNSHOWER: Contemporary art from Southeast Asia 1980s to Now (2017) at the Mori Art Museum and National Art Centre Tokyo, the largest survey of Southeast Asian artists to be exhibited in Japan. More recently, he was one of the curators of VIVA EXCON 2018, the longest-running arts biennial in the Philippines.
YAP Sau-Bin teaches at the Faculty of Creative Multimedia, Multimedia University and is a member of Rumah Air Panas (RAP), an artist initiative based in Kuala Lumpur. His practice encompasses conceptual work, installations, performance, mapping and curation with RAP. Yap has also worked on the Narratives in Malaysian Art volumes published by Rogue Art. He has served on the jury panel for the Young Contemporary Arts Award (2013); as nominator for the Sovereign Asian Art Prize (2014 - 2016), Arts Maebashi AIR Programme (2016-2018) and the Hugo Boss Asia Art award (2017).
The MappingKLArtSpace mapping project on art spaces in the city had been featured in the 8th Havana Biennale in 2006; Migration Addicts in the 52nd Venice Biennale, and ShenZhen & Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism & Architecture in 2007; The Independence Project at Galeri Petronas in 2007 and Gertrude Art Space, Melbourne 2008. Other collaboration includes Wasteland Twinning Network in Berlin 2011; Operasi Cassava in the Media / Art Kitchen exhibition in Kuala Lumpur, 2013 and Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (YCAM) in 2014. Recent curatorial project includes ESCAPE from the SEA organized by the Japan Foundation, Kuala Lumpur in 2017.
