Saturday 23 April: register now
Asia Forum is pleased to invite you to its in-person and online launch on Saturday 23 April 2022 in Venice, Italy, during the opening week of the 59th Venice Biennale.
Proudly supported by the Bagri Foundation, the Asia Forum for the Contemporary Art of Global Asias is a new itinerant platform envisioned for discourse surrounding experimental art practices and research that produce hopeful new worlds beyond the North Atlantic.
Through a series of incisive and engaging discussions, artists’ presentations, interactive sessions and screenings, the Asia Forum departs from the central exhibition, national pavilions, and collateral events that present the arts of ‘Asias’. Artists, curators, and thinkers will be invited to respond to pressing current events and engage in discussions addressing questions such as:
What is the role of art in reshaping public cultures, when both problems and solutions have become globally entangled?
How do adopting ‘Asias-centered’ perspectives help re-imagine futures beyond current thought paradigms? How do artistic practices reshape our understanding of the collective building and sharing of knowledge?
The one-day programme will provide a richer and deeper engagement with these and other questions, while amplifying narratives of transformation, knowledge building, and transnational solidarity. The one-day event seeks to provide a gathering place for like-minded local, national, and international people to foster connections.
Conceived by Annie Jael Kwan, the Asia Forum works with a council of international curators and researchers, Hammad Nasar, John Tain, and Ming Tiampo, in a sustained dialogue with contributors to navigate the key themes that have arisen in relation to contemporary artistic practices of Global Asias.
The Forum will be simultaneously live-streamed by the Forum’s exclusive media partner, ArtReview.
– PROGRAMME – Saturday 23 April 2022 | 9:00 – 18:30 CET
Register here | In-person at Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice | Live-streamed on ArtReview
9:00 | Registration + Welcome Coffee
9:45 | Welcome
10:00 | Roundtable: Tracing Asia Art Histories: Modernity as Crime Scene: with Hoor Al Qasimi, Patrick Flores, Annie Jael Kwan, Hammad Nasar, John Tain, Ming Tiampo.
11:30 | Factories, Tables, Postrevolution by Ho Rui An
12:20 | Break
12:30 | Curatorial Directions with Sheelasha Rajbhandari, Hit Man Gurung and Tsherin Sherpa, (Tales of Muted Spirits – Dispersed Threads – Twisted Shangri-La, Nepal Pavilion 2022)
13:30 | Lunchtime Screening Programme
– Lawrence Lek, Black Cloud 黑云 (2021), 11’, Winner of the 4th VH Award Grand Prix. Commissioned for the 2021 Eyebeam x VH Residency.
– Yarli Allison, In 1875 We Met At the Docks of Liverpool / 1875 於梨花埠遇上 (2021), 19’37”, English and Traditional Chinese subtitles
– Jin-me Yoon, Mul Maeum (2022) 30’52”
14:15 | Registration
14:45 | Welcome
14:50 | Abbas Zahedi X Querini Stampalia
15:30 | Paradise Camp by Yuki Kihara
16:20 | Break
16:30 | Screening of Sin Wai Kin, The One (2021), 10’00”, Single-channel video
17:00 | Collective Futures – participatory collective discussion with Reza Afisina (ruangrupa), Saodat Ismailova, Annie Jael Kwan, Hammad Nasar, John Tain, Ming Tiampo
18:30 | END
Read more about the contributors here
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Asia Forum is made possible with thanks to the additional support of Something Human. The Asia Forum is presented in partnership with ArtReview, Fondazione Querini Stampalia, IED – Istituto Europeo di Design, Ca’ Foscari Alumni, GAD – Giudecca Art District, School for Curatorial Studies Venice. With the patronage of the DVRI – Distretto Veneziano della Richerca e dell’Innovazione and Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.
Annie Jael Kwan is an independent curator and researcher whose exhibition-making, programming, publication and teaching practice is located at the intersection of contemporary art, art history and cultural activism, with interest in archives, histories, feminist, queer and alternative knowledges, collective practices, and solidarity. She leads Asia-Art-Activism (AAA), a research network that has presented an active public programme of presentations, talks, workshops, mini-residences and festivals that challenge and complicate notions of ‘Asia’. She currently teaches Critical Studies at Central St Martins, University of the Arts, London, and co-teaches Writing and Curating at KASK, School of Art, in Ghent, Belgium.
Hammad Nasar is a London-based curator, researcher and strategic advisor. He is presently Senior Research Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, where he co-leads the ‘London, Asia’ project; Principal Research Fellow at the University of the Arts London, Decolonising Arts Institute; and co-curator of British Art Show 9 (2021-22). He was the inaugural Executive Director of the Stuart Hall Foundation, London (2018-19); Head of Research & Programmes at Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong (2012-16); and, co-founded (with Anita Dawood) the pioneering hybrid arts organisation, Green Cardamom, London (2004-12).
John Tain is Head of Research at Asia Art Archive, where he leads a team based in Hong Kong, New Delhi, and Shanghai. He has organized several exhibitions, among them Yasuhiro Ishimoto: Someday, Chicago (2018), “Out of Turn” at the Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa (2018) and “Women Make Art History” and “The Body Collective” during Art Basel Hong Kong (2018, 2019), and most recently, Crafting Communities (2020), which looks at the confluence of feminism, crafts, and social practice in the biennial series of Womanifesto events organized in Thailand from 1997 to 2008. In 2019-20, he co-convened MAHASSA (Modern Art Histories in and across Africa, and South and Southeast Asia, 2019-2020), a collaboration with the Dhaka Art Summit and the Institute for Comparative Modernities at Cornell University.
Ming Tiampo is Professor of Art History, and co-director of the Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis at Carleton University. She is interested in transcultural models and histories that provide new structures for understanding and reconfiguring the global. She has published on Japanese modernism, global modernisms, and diaspora. Tiampo is an associate member at ici Berlin, a member of the Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational Advisory Board, a fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art on the London, Asia project, a founding member of TrACE, the Transnational and Transcultural Arts and Culture Exchange network, and co-lead on its Worlding Public Cultures project.
Bagri Foundation
The Bagri Foundation is a UK registered charity whose main mission is to realise unique, unexpected ideas from and on Asia, weaving traditional culture with contemporary thinking. The Foundation provides support towards artistic and educational projects and establishes collaborative partnerships with institutions that range in scale – from small cultural organisations that share our ethos and mission to large national and international partners like the British Museum and Hayward Gallery in London, Artes Mundi Prize in Cardiff, The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York, and La Biennale di Venezia. The Foundation’s supported projects include film, visual arts, music, literature, courses and lectures, and each of them aims at giving artists and experts from across Asia and the diaspora, or those inspired by the continent, wider visibility on the global stage.
