The history of curating has to be rewritten, abandoning its etymological and museological moorings. The presentation questions the foundational principles of modern museum practices since their emergence in the 17th and 18th centuries into their neoliberal avatar, locating them in regimes of what Achille Mbembe describes as necropolitics (a subjugation of life to the power and technologies of death).
Drawing on case studies and theoretical frameworks offered by artists, curators and philosophers, the talk asserts and elaborates on a paradigm shift in 21st century curatorial thought that challenges the epistemologies, assumptions, methods and politics of museological knowledge production.
Director, Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai
Sabih Ahmed is a curator and culture theorist living in the UAE. He is the Director of the Ishara Art Foundation in Dubai. His curatorial work spreads across exhibitions, archives, pedagogy and theory. Prior to Ishara, Sabih was a senior researcher and projects manager at the Asia Art Archive from 2009-2019, where he was involved in establishing their office in New Delhi. He served as a Visiting Faculty at the Ambedkar University Delhi from 2014 to 2019, and has been involved in several curatorial projects that include being a curatorial collegiate member of the 11th Shanghai Biennale Why Not Ask Again? curated by Raqs Media Collective in 2016, The Superhero Summit in collaboration with Taus Makhacheva and organized by Kadist and Centre Pompidou in 2019, Navjot Altaf: Pattern at Ishara in 2022, and co-curator of Notations on Time with Sandhini Poddar at Ishara in 2023.
Over the years, he has led projects around the digitisation of artist archives, creation of multi-lingual bibliographies of art, and has organized colloquia, seminars, workshops and mentorship for the Department of Culture and Tourism in Abu Dhabi, the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art in Delhi, MoMA C-Map in New York and Photo-Kathmandu in Kathmandu, among others. Sabih serves on the Advisory Board of the Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation. His writings have been featured in publications and journals that include the Whitworth, The Arts Newspaper, Arts Cabinet, Mousse, Oncurating, and The Sarai Reader. He is co-author of the book Mass Traffic with Lantian Xie, published by Kunsthalle Bern and Mousse Publishing in 2023.
Independent Curator
Wing-Yan Ting is an independent curator and researcher. Her research interest focuses on the cultural imaginations of diverse audience groups and their cultural consumption patterns in considering how public life can be shaped in different cities. She has been working with universities and art organizations to develop curatorial projects that encourage multiple narratives of local history articulated through creative means. Some of her projects include Essential Ques: Women’s stories and their times in Shigang District (2024-), Jockey Club Artistry Creative Aging Project Show (2022-2024), and Hong Kong House Residency programme at Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale (2019).
Independent Curator
Manray Hsu is an independent curator and critic. His intellectual work focuses on cultural conditions of globalization, the relationship between aesthetics and politics, and geopolitical situations of contemporary art and the arts of Anthropocene. His recent curatorial projects include: Love and Death of Sentient Beings: 2022 Taiwan Art Biennial (with I-Wen Chang, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts); Between Earth and Sky: Indigenous Contemporary Art from Taiwan (2021, The Tenth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art); Distances between Us and the Future: An Exhibition of Taiwanese Indigenous Contemporary Art (2021, the Taiwan Indigenous Peoples Cultural Park); Herbal Urbanism Hsinchu: Margins of the City as Method (2021, Hsinchu City Art Gallery, Hsinchu 241 Art Gallery); Futurist Wave: Contemporary Art from Greater Sandimen (2020, Pingtung Museum of Art); Crossing the Tuniu Ditch – Reactivating Tribal Deities, the Name Rectification of Makatao (2020, Assembly of Communities: MIX, MOCA Taipei); Kacalisian: Crossing the Tuniu Ditch (Pingtung Chaozhou Linhousilin Forest Park, 2019); When Kacalisian culture meets the vertical city: Greater Sandimen Contemporary Art (Taiwan Aboriginal Culture Park, Pingtung, 2019); Herbal Urbanism: An artistic project on cosmopolitics (Hong Gah Museum, Taipei, 2018). Hsu served as a jury member for the 49th Venice Biennale and a jury member of the Unesco Prize and the 7th Istanbul Biennial.