Migrations of Curatorial Work

Carlos Quijon, Jr.

During the pandemic, it became necessary to reconsider the primacy of the physical exhibition as the privileged outcome of curatorial work. The exhibition was a site of encounter for art and its publics, and it required a discrete space where artworks and people gathered and interacted. This was a situation that in the context of the global health crisis became unfeasible, even life-threatening. The political and productive potential of the exhibition, ascribed in its capacity to animate and foreground the making public of art and the social contexts and relationalities that emerge from this assembly, coincided with the risks that came with the highly communicable airborne virus. This crisis required us to rethink the logic of curatorial work and the necessity of the physical exhibition as its culmination, and to imagine ways curatorial and artistic work may thrive in the time of the pandemic.

How do we reimagine curatorial labour in this context? How do we cultivate art’s publics and its publicness in response to the timely and necessary problematisations of the exhibitionary form that the pandemic has forced us to recognise and respond to? How do we interrogate the unquestioned buzzwords about relationality thrown about in relation to contemporary art and exhibition-making, such as hospitality, collaboration and digitalisation, among others? Most importantly, how do we foreground their undeniably urgent ethical and pragmatic implications in the time of Covid?

I attempt to think through these questions in relation to exhibitions and curatorial projects that I have been part of

during the pandemic: ‘Figure-proof’ (August – September 2020), ‘Minor Infelicities’ (August 2020), and ‘In Our Best Interests’ (January – March 2021).

The first few months of the global pandemic forced galleries and art spaces to rethink their programming. For a gallery such as A+ Works of Art in Kuala Lumpur, whose institutional framework centred on working with artists and curators in Southeast Asia, this necessitated rethinking collaboration and ways to persist despite the hard lockdown in the city. Upon invitation by Joshua Lim, owner of A+ and as part of their online-exclusive programming in 2020, I curated ‘Figure-proof’, an exhibition that presented works by young artists based in the Philippines. The migration of exhibitions to digital platforms might be taken as the initial response of art spaces worldwide to the global pandemic. Moving exhibitions to digital spaces ensured that despite the limited mobility and the constrained modes of production, the institutional life of the gallery and its support to artists and curatorial practices continued. While constraints and limitations definitely shape how the exhibitionary form pans out, what I decided to focus on were works by young artists from Manila and more importantly places outside of it.

Pam Quinto’s ‘Of Great Value; Not to be Wasted or Treated Carelessly’, 2019, for the exhibition ‘Figureproof.’ It consists of a bralette dipped in resin and ornamented with pearls. Quinto’s works explore female intimacies and sexuality using stoneware, text, photography, and performance. Image courtesy of the artist.

Since the digital context necessitated a rethinking of modes of participating in the exhibition and the exhibition’s circulation, we thought that the presentation of works also needed to change. Artists Miguel Puyat and Celine Lee made works out of resources available to them: for Puyat, found wood; for Lee, bleach. I asked Pam Quinto, who works with ceramics, to revisit and exhibit already existing works that were still in her possession. Since the exhibition was not constrained by costs and the pragmatic challenges of shipping, I invited artists Jan Sunday, who was then based in Cebu, and Ginoe, who is based in Silay, to participate in the exhibition, as well. The exhibition brief asked these artists to rethink the viability of figuration, particularly in a climate of shifting urgencies of artmaking and artistic production. What they presented were works that reimagined materials and processes: Sunday worked with aerosol paint and the ubiquitous basahan (dish cloth), Ginoe referenced the iconology of online messaging apps that shaped his social life during the quarantine, and Puyat made a toy that required sunlight in order to create figures.

Collaborative ways of working became challenging for the most part, but we found ways around it. The exhibition ‘Minor Infelicities’ was planned before travel became

impossible. Its aim was to gather young queer artists and curators from Asia (Bangkok, Hong Kong, Seoul, Singapore, and Manila) in Seoul to meet and get to know one another. While the possibility of traveling to Seoul soon became out of the question, the organisers pushed through with an on-site exhibition in Post Territory Ujeongguk in Seoul, and commissioned new works from the artists involved. The planning of the exhibitions, the production of works and the curation all happened remotely via video conferencing and Zoom meetings. A curatorial team, led by the exhibition organiser, the artist Jinhee Park, worked on-site while the curators directed the installation of works online.

Most recently, I co-curated the exhibition ‘In Our Best Interests: Afro-Southeast Asian affinities during a Cold War’ (January − March 2021), a research and contemporary art-driven exhibition that looked at the legacies of Afro-Asian solidarity discourses and movements and their conceptualisations in the contemporary moment. The plan for the exhibition was initiated before the pandemic happened, and like the previous exhibition, we had to adapt. My co-curator Kathleen Ditzig and I had met through the platform Modern Art Histories in and across Africa, South and Southeast Asia (MAHASSA) initiated by the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories project. The platform invited young scholars from these regions to present their ongoing research and

Installation view of Isola Tong’s ‘Vivarium of Agencies’, 2020, for the exhibition ‘Minor Infelicities.’ The work looks at how ecosystems and wildlife elaborate queer agency and relationality. It expands Isola’s research on the Arroceros Forest Park, a pocket of forest located in the middle of urban Manila. Behind Isola’s video work is Isaac Chong Wai’s installation titled ‘Disguised Camouflage’ (2020) that explores performativities of the queer bodies in the hypermasculine space of military infrastructures. Image courtesy of Jinhee Park.

Kathleen and I were part of the cohort for Southeast Asia. We conceptualised the exhibition during our meeting in Dhaka for the Dhaka Art Summit (DAS) in February 2020, which hosted one of two meetings of the MAHASSA. During the DAS exhibitions, it became clearer that the affinities between Africa and Southeast Asia were not explored in contemporary art history as much as connections between South Asia and Africa or South Asia and Southeast Asia.

‘In Our Best Interests’ simultaneously problematised the pragmatic limits of solidarity and elaborated on the persistence of its aspirations. In August, the National Gallery of Singapore and the Singapore Art Museum initiated the platform Proposals for Novel Ways of Being, which aimed to think about “new ways of being as we grapple with a new reality brought about by [the] pandemic”.1 The platform ensured the thriving of the Singapore art scene during the pandemic by supporting projects and exhibitions of local art institutions. Here, the physical exhibition becomes a productive site wherein parallel considerations about the possibilities of collaboration and coming together in the face of pandemic-related constraints are allowed to play out. It also foregrounds the social contexts of curatorial labour that spans everything from research to talking to artists, contractors, and vendors, exhibitionmaking and being in the actual space to install works.

Fyerool Darma’s ‘Flags for the Failed 1963 Maphilindo Confederation’, 2021, reproduces internet fan art of flags for Maphilindo, a short-lived confederation established in 1963 based on a pan-Malayan ethnic regionality. The flags are installed alongside an imagined exchange between fictional characters from important novels from the Philippines (Jose Rizal’s ‘Noli Me Tangere’) and Indonesia (Ananta Pramoedya Toer’s ‘Bumi Manusia’). Image courtesy of the NTU ADM Gallery.

Simon Soon’s ‘Papan Soerih Perhimpoenan Orang Melayoe’, 2021, draws from iconographic and symbolic references from the Malay world to imagine a mnemosyne atlas of the masonic organisation Perhimpoenan Orang Melayoe, which shaped the discourse of pan-Malayan ethnos that informed the establishment of Maphilindo in 1963. Image courtesy of the NTU ADM Gallery.

Yee I-lann’s ‘Dusun Karaoke Mat’, 2020, is a collaborative work between Sabahan local weavers and the artist. The woven mat, tikar in Malay, presents excerpts from the lyrics of Kadazan Dusun popular songs. The songs became anthems of populist resistance against the intrusions of Federal nation-state politics in Borneo and carried with them what the artist considers as mnemonic triggers of a genetic memory that she and her generation have lost. Image courtesy of the NTU ADM Gallery.

The exhibition presented works that looked at contentious histories of diplomacy and transregional affinities. It involved artists from Singapore, Okinawa, Sabah, Manila, Phnom Penh, and Berlin, and an archive of videos and materials from the 1960s to the 1990s. The scope of the exhibition is extensive, even under normal circumstances. Thus, having the timeframe for preparations coincide with the global shifts and changes in how people work and travel and what kinds of support were available became more challenging. From the history of the understudied and shortlived Southeast Asian confederation Maphilindo (Malaya, Philippines, Indonesia) based off a pan-Malayan ethnos, to the zones of contact in Okinawa between African-American soldiers, locals, and migrants, to the peacekeeping missions in Cambodia that left behind biracial children, ‘In Out Best Interests’ fleshed out the pragmatic histories of affinities alongside their more poetic and aspirational logics.

While the project was originally planned as a one-off exhibition, the ASEAN Foundation through KONNECT ASEAN offered to fund the travelling of the exhibition to Manila and Busan. Fulfilling its premises to think about notions of solidarity, affinity, and collaboration, the curatorial labour involved in the project became an earnest working together with us, the curators, the artists, and the institutions that support it. From planning, research, to installing, decisions relating to the exhibition were discussed via Zoom. The pragmatics and potential of collaboration informed the curatorial work. I remotely participated in the exhibition’s programming and in the curatorial tours via a disembodied representation through a monitor that welcomed the guests in the exhibition. I also conducted curatorial walkthroughs for classes and networks, including a history class at the Nanyang Technological University, and a curatorial class for the University of Bergen, the scholars network Global (De)Centring, and MAHASSA at the University of Heidelberg. The insistence of the exhibition to travel elsewhere also became an important part of the exhibitionary and curatorial framework exploring the limits and aspirations of solidarity and affinity, all the more because of the constraints in mobility and mobilisation of resources during the pandemic.

Surely, the practical, conceptual, and infrastructural frameworks of 'In Our Best Interests' play out limits of the exhibitionary form, but also flesh out the ways in which the exhibition might persist in a post-Covid climate. Only time will tell how the Manila and the Busan iteration will shift and rethink the persuasions of the physical exhibition, particularly its edition at the Vargas Museum in the Philippines, which as of the time of this writing is experiencing the longest ongoing pandemic-related lockdown in the world that started in March 2020.

In these projects, curatorial labour becomes responsive to the times. While it mutates and migrates in the digital realm in ‘Figure-proof’, the physical exhibition persists in ‘Minor Infelicities’ and ‘In Our Best Interests’. In all these cases, the curatorial has found ways to remain interventive. Definitely, the labor involved shifted and demanded a lot more in these two recent projects, but perhaps it is equally true that in this context the words hospitality and collaboration, bandied about for the longest time by the global contemporary artworld, fulfills their promise and reorganises how we work together. They re-emphasise the poetic and political capacity of working among plural and prolific agencies — the artists, the curators, the institutions — that the urgencies of the exhibitionary form situates itself in. The collaborative ethic is here not just an empty signifier of accumulation or centralisation, but becomes a way of thinking about relationalities and socialites thriving despite constraints.

Note

1. “Proposals for Novel Ways of Being,” accessed April 1, 2021, https://www.novelwaysofbeing.sg/#about.