RECAP | Curatorial Roundtable 03 | A Moveable Feast: Itinerancy and Curatorial Practice

[From left] Farah Wardani, Vera Mey and Ahmad Mashadi.

The establishment of international curatorial networks follows the growing proliferation of curatorial residencies around the world. For some, this has helped encourage horizontal movements across the so-called global south by curators in their practice and research. Curatorial Roundtable 03 explored the issues and potentials of itinerancy in curatorial practice from the perspective of curators based around the region. This discussion brought together Farah Wardani, director of the Indonesian Visual Art Archive, and Vera Mey, curator of residencies at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore. The talk was moderated by Ahmad Mashadi, Head of NUS Museum.

About the moderator
Ahmad Mashadi is currently the Head of the National University of Singapore (NUS) Museum. Before joining the NUS Museum, Ahmad served as Senior Curator at the Singapore Art Museum focusing on Southeast Asian Art. Recent exhibitions curated include Archiving Apin (2013) and Camping and Tramping through the Colonial Archive: The Museum in Malaya (2011).

About the speakers

Vera Mey is a curator at the Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (CCA), a research centre of Nanyang Technological University. She was Assistant Director of AUT University’s ST PAUL St Gallery in Auckland, New Zealand from 2011 - early 2014 where she also convened the AUT University Master of Arts Management Curatorial Strategy program. For 2013, Vera was curator in residence at Arts Initiative Tokyo, Japan. Last December with Erin Gleeson, Sa Sa Bassac, Phnom Penh she curated the non-productive nomadic residency FIELDS: an itinerant inquiry across the Kingdom of Cambodia (2013). This involved a group of 17 artists, curators, and researchers traveling together for 20 days questioning the intersection between contemporaneity, archaeology and the politics of memory rooted in mutual unknowing within the context of contemporary Cambodia.  She completed her Masters in Museum & Heritage Studies from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand (2010) and most recently was a participant on the 8th Berlin Biennial Young Curators Workshop (2014). 

Farah Wardani completed her MA in Art History (20th Century) from the Department of Historical & Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College, London, UK, in 2001. She has been active as a teacher, researcher, writer, curator and art organizer since 2001 in her home country, Indonesia. She is the co-author of a book titled Indonesian Women Artists: The Curtain Opens (Indonesian Fine Arts Foundation, 2007). Her recent and ongoing projects include being the consulting curator for the exhibition Indonesian Eye: Fantasies & Realities at Saatchi Gallery, London, 2011; and Artistic Director for Biennale Jogja XII 2013. From 2007 until present she positions as the executive director of Indonesian Visual Art Archive (IVAA) in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, with works include the IVAA Digital Archive http://archive.ivaa-online.org/, the first digital archive of contemporary art in the country.

Curatorial Roundtable 03 | in photos

 

Curatorial Roundtable 03 | in video

Curatorial Roundtable 03 | A Moveable Feast: Itinerancy and Curatorial Practice from nusmuseum on Vimeo.

journal RECAP | Internship

Gillman Barracks [By: Samantha Yap]

"When I speak of representation, I am thinking of presence and action, I am thinking, is our art world diverse and inclusive enough? Is it amplifying voices and strengthening the presence of those who have already been consistently in the fore? I realize I am trying (or aspiring) to deconstruct a paradigm in order to see what are the walls of barrier and powers at play."
Samantha Yap, 5 September 2014, I'll be your mirror

prep room, NUS Museum [By: Luca Lum]

"8. Anxieties of come-what-mays, erudition and wall text mastery;
9. A thousand blank walls of potentiality - the space to research, interrogate, dream;
10. Above all else, poetry."
Raksha Mahtani, 8 September 2014, Museum [noun]
 

 


"In the arts, although the affordability of time offers stability with long-term benefits, I think working within limitations can also spur us on towards more creative synergy as we consciously expound on what we have."
Bernice Ong, 10 September 2014, Pulau Gillman

Safe Sea, National Museum of Singapore [By: Chua Ying Qing]

 "When the audience experiences an exhibition, they perceive it through a series of reflections. They never get to see the original source – the womb of curatorial intention. The trick then is not to leave traces of the illusion/intrusion. For we are now double agents, and this is the perfect crime." 
Chua Ying Qing, 15 September 2014, in four movements

Post-Popup, Centre for Contemporary Art
[By: Melvin Tan]

"The operational currency leans towards outreach and inclusivity...This offers an effervescence of programmes that makes the institutional platform unprecedentedly accessible, experimental and tangential to more professional practices in the vicinity."
Melvin Tan, 17 September 2014, 
Thoughts around the Institutional Prerogative: Part 2 PostPop-Up 

Shabbir Hussain Mustafa & Charles Lim
[By: Selene Yap]

"How do we map an experience? Across the grids that mark our seas, how do memories, ideas, and existence become decontextualised?  The absurdity of mapping or dividing the fluid composition of the sea into pixels of definable space parallels the tensions of confines imposed on the shifting location of human consciousness."
Cheng Jia Yun, Euginia Tan, Selene Yap, Wong Yeang Cherng, 
22 September 2014, 0018A / 5724C

[By: Kenneth Loe]

"“Curatorrent”, an obvious portmanteau of “curator” and “torrent”, was born in my attempts at hacking together a word within a set of self-imposed conditions...if we look at definition no. 2 of “torrent”, as “an overwhelming flow of thoughts, words, sound, etc”, you would be looking at a one-word tour d’horizon of my experience in the deep undulations of theory and theatricality"
Kenneth Loe, 24 September 2014, Pirates of the Curatorrent

thislandisourlab.tumblr.com

"The curator, like the translator, tries to mobilise a thing — an idea, or an artwork — from one co-ordinate to another, from an artist's personal oeuvre to the context of the exhibition and new sets of relations with other works. In doing so, the act of translation enacts transformations. "
Luca Lum, 26 September 2014,  
The Task(s) of the Curator*

journal RECAP | Curatorial Intensive & Overseas Field Trip

Heman Chong, NUS Museum, Curatorial-Intensive

  
"[W]e not only saw the art jungle as a whole working eco-system, but also, the micro-organisms of art practice were highlighted and magnified where we once might have been too green to appreciate." 
Euginia Tan, 8 August 2014

Centre for Contemporary Art, Curatorial-Intensive

"I found myself wondering about activism and liabilities of the curatorial particularly the local context. Within the sovereignty of practice, are curators sitting in a pivotal position to resolve such issues?"
Melvin Tan, 11 August 2014, Thoughts around the institutional prerogative: Part 1

[By: Cheng Jia Yun]

       "UNPICKING THE SEAMS OF A SUPER ARTY MUSEUM

@WeAreBUSYBodies couldn’t help

pulling on loose threads and

looser laurels,

pulling out the rug from

under all that media"

     Kenneth Loe, 23 July 2014,      
     Luxuriating in the Algorhythmic / Luxuriating in the Acceleration

[By: Cheng Jia Yun]

 "[O]ur Public Symposium (complete with packed hall) were rife with questions and new methodologies, rumblings of our fertile home ground, potent reminders to go design our own 'deh lee vehs' and generate our own start and finish lines."
Cheng Jia Yun, 13 August 2014,  Reflections: Curating Lab 2014

Para Site, North Point [By: Bernice Ong]

"[I]t becomes increasingly clear to me that the curation of anything has to allow for an open-endedness framed by certain topical guiding lines...It is a game we play as we attempt to list the rules abiding by our own logic, but also almost hoping that someone will hack our gem of a system to throw up new possibilities." 
Bernice Ong, 21 July 2014, Questions we can ask

Ying Qing & Raksha, Asia Art Archive

"One needs to remind oneself that beyond curating for the audience, the artist or the institution, one also needs to curate for himself or herself. One also needs to know (or rather admit) what he or she doesn’t know and wants to know from an exhibition."
Wong Yeang Cherng, 18 August 2014,  
Honestly Speaking: Controlling Art’s Enigma

Cosmin Costinas, Para Site, Po Yan St
[By: Selene Yap]

"While artists and curators have the autonomy in the staging of art as a non-frontal way of bringing subjects into question, this knowledge of and power over any given domain is both facilitated by and productive of various forms of enclosure. In propositioning content, we run the risk of asserting a truth-value onto the subaltern."

Selene Yap, 29 July 2014, On Exhibition-making and Its Dilemmas

Ten Million Rooms of Yearning.
Sex in Hong Kong, Para Site [By: Raksha Mahtani]

 "Exhibition happens everywhere. We must be exhibitionists at heart. We change our names to fit the fetish of every future lover; we perform all selves."
Raksha Mahtani, 31 July 2014, 
Curating as Violence, Exhibition as Trauma

Spring Workshop on @nusmuseum [By: Samantha Yap]

"I started seeing how diverse the role of a curator was, a curator who in our contemporary age, dovetailed as many other things too (writers, project manager, administrative extraordinaire, master emailer, etcetera). In the job of the curator, as with many other things in the art world, singularity does not quite exist."
Samantha Yap, 4 August 2014, CLARITY/UNCERTAINTY

Hong Kong Is Our Museum, OpenUU [By: Chua Ying Qing]

  

"post-art pre-museum

post-seeing pre-viewing  
re:presentation HOW"

Chua Ying Qing, 6 August 2014,  

hong kong in hypertext

Spring Workshop [By Luca Lum]

"Hong Kong shakes you awake with its surprising turns and its unceasing rhythms. Every sense in my mind and body is like a hypersensitive needle on a scale, tremblingly registering each new stimuli. Moments are full-bodied, deep and vivid. I absorb everything."
Luca Lum, 20 August 2014,  ISLE2ISLE / A TALE OF TWO CITIES

Curatorial Roundtable 03 | A Moveable Feast: Itinerancy and Curatorial Practice

CLICK TO ACCESS EFLYER

Date: 9 October 2014, Thursday  
Time: 7.00 - 9.00pm
Venue: Possibility Room, Level 5, National Library Building

Free admission with registration.
To register, please email museum@nus.edu.sg or call 6516 8817.

Moderator:
Ahmad Mashadi (NUS Museum)

Speakers:
Vera Mey (Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore)
Farah Wardani (Indonesian Visual Art Archive)

The establishment of international curatorial networks follows the growing proliferation of curatorial residencies around the world. For some, this has helped encourage horizontal movements across the so-called global south by curators in their practice and research. This session aims to explore the issues and potentials of itinerancy in curatorial practice from the perspective of curators based around the region.

About the Curatorial Roundtable Series
Presented in conjunction with Curating Lab 2014, the Curatorial Roundtable public talk series gathers together curators and artists working across different fields of research and engagement, to discuss the boundaries of curatorial practice. Amidst the increasing attention paid to the role of the curator, this series aims to probe further into the limits of curatorial practice. Although presented primarily for the participants of Curating Lab 2014, the Curatorial Roundtable is an opportunity to bridge the gap between the curator and the audience, providing opportunities for interaction and stimulating discussions on curatorial practices and processes.