Absented Exhibitions take its cue from the concept of “hauntology” that developed by Jacques Derrida in Specters of Marx (1993). It attempts to explore “exhibition-making” as a conceptual maneuver to (re-)engage with the accumulation of unsettled past in Cold War geopolitics of present-day Asia by looking into possible events of knowledge that did not happen. By framing the process of exhibition-making as a critical thought experiment towards the development of experiential epistemology, the theoretical framework of the workshop triangulates the following three areas of discussion-the curatorial, the historical and the aural. As David Harvey has so rightly put, “How we represent space and time in theory matters because it affects how we and others interpret and then act with respect to the world.” The workshop unpacks the practice(s) of curatorial by questioning how could the curatorial practice(s) as both a research approach and the process of politicization in its own right could engage with the past through its absences. In other words, how the faded, obscured, and unmarked could come into presence through the curatorial practice(s). Participants are required to engage with a set of reading materials. The workshop will be conducted in a seminar format with potential walking exercise involved.
HSU Fang-Tze holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from the National University of Singapore. Her dissertation research, Cold War Acousmêtre: Artist Films and the First Island Chain, was supported by the President’s Graduate Fellowship and the FASS Promising Graduate Scholar Award. From 2010 to 2013, she served as the digital manager for the Asia Art Archive. She was appointed as a curator for the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts in 2013. In 2019, she presents Gendered Bodies in Southeast Asia in collaboration with Tessa Maria Guazon at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila. In 2016, she co-curated Negative Horizon:5th Taiwan International Video Art Exhibition, 2016, with Lu Pei-Yi, and presented the curated research project, Working-Through: Vandy Rattana and His Ditched Footages, at TheCube Project Space, Taipei. Her other cross-disciplinary research projects include Singaporean artist Loo Zihan’s Artists' General Assembly: The Langenbach Archive (2013), FIELDS: An Itinerant Inquiry Across the Kingdom of Cambodia (2013) co-organized by the SA SA BASSAC (Cambodia) and the ST PAUL St Gallery (Aotearoa, New Zealand), and On Site: A Centennial Retrospective of Robert Capa at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts. Her research interests include contemporary knowledge formation, Cold War aesthetics, memory, philosophies of technology, and the embodiment of artistic praxis in everyday life. Her writings can be found in the Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Art Critique of Taiwan (ACT), and LEAP (China).
Vipash Purichanont is an independent curator and a cofounder of Waiting You Curator Lab, a curatorial collective based in Chiangmai. Purichanont received his doctoral degree in Curatorial/Knowledge from the Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths, University of London. Purichanont’s practice has its roots in collaboration. Most of his theoretical work focused on notions of collectivity and community as well as caring and sharing. Although most of Purichanont’s curatorial projects are structured around Southeast Asia, his main objective is to initiate a meaningful conversation between the region and the globe. His previous curatorial projects included Concept Context Contestation: Art and the Collective in Southeast Asia at Bangkok Art and Cultural Centre (2014); Couldn’t Care Less: Cross Cultural Live Art Project at Deptford Lounge in Southeast London (2015); and Metaphors: An Evening of Sound and Moving Image with Kick the Machine at Bangkok CityCity Gallery (2017). He was an assistant curator for the 1st Thailand Biennale (Krabi, 2018) and currently one of curators for Singapore Biennale (Singapore, 2019). Purichanont is shortlisted for the ICI Gerrit Lansing Independent Vision Curatorial Award in the same year. He is currently a lecturer at the department of Art History, Faculty of Archeology, Silpakorn University, Bangkok.
