“Sites of Construction: Exhibitions and the making of recent art history in Asia”
21–23 October 2013
agnès b. CINEMA
Hong Kong Arts Centre
2 Harbour Rd, Wan Chai
Hong Kong
Registration: symposium [at] aaa.org.hk
In the absence of museums with significant contemporary art collections and well-developed academic art history departments dedicated to 20th- and 21st-century art across the region, exhibitions have become more than just sites of display and interaction. The curatorial strategies and institutional demands reflected in exhibitions, and the texts accompanying and framing them, are the most visible source of art historical narratives currently being generated in the region. To examine the implications of this phenomenon, Asia Art Archive has engaged some of the most prominent voices in the field to come together over three days of debate, discussion, and reflection.
“Sites of Construction: Exhibitions and the making of recent art history in Asia” marks one of the Archive’s most ambitious programmes to date, and is presented in collaboration with the Hong Kong Arts Centre. The symposium invites scholars and practitioners to frame a broader enquiry into this expanded role of exhibitions in the reception and historicization of art in Asia. Between 21 and 23 October, the symposium will be punctuated by keynote addresses by three of the world’s most influential critical thinkers: John Clark, Gao Shiming, and Irit Rogoff.
Its four sessions will be anchored around a series of exhibitions of art from China that took place in 1993, and will serve as a collective case study. Leading curators coming together in Hong Kong to look back at those historical exhibitions include Johnson Chang, Kong Chang’an, Francesca Dal Lago, and Andreas Schmid. Other sessions will consider how exhibitions function as sites, historical propositions and geographic imaginings. Each session will be led by leading international scholars Iftikhar Dadi, Jane DeBevoise, Patrick Flores, and Joan Kee, and will include contributions from artists, writers and curators including Sophie Ernst, Daniel Kurjakovic, and Lau Kin Wah; a series of six newly commissioned Open Call papers selected from over one hundred applications, from emerging scholars Annette Bhagwati, Kevin Chua, Pamela Corey, Atreyee Gupta, Simon Soon, and Lucy Steeds; and responses from international scholars and curators including Thomas Berghuis, Nora Taylor, and David Teh.
Please click here for more information of the Symposium, details will be updated periodically.
Film programme
Leading up to and accompanying the symposium in October, AAA is also presenting a series of films that examine the myriad ways in which the documentary form has been used to record the ecology of the art field, create new stories, complicate old ones, and circulate them among an expanded audience. Films are accompanied by conversations with film directors, artists, curators and scholars, including Doryun Chong (Hong Kong), Ho Tzu Nyen (Singapore), Huang Mingchuan (Taiwan), Payal Kapadia (India), Arun Khopkar (India), Avijit Mukul Kishore (India), Dinh Q Le (Vietnam), Lesley Ma (Hong Kong), Machi (Hong Kong), Ou Ning (China), Pi Li (Hong Kong), and Kumar Shahani (India).
Please click here for more information of the film programme. Details will be updated periodically.
“Sites of Construction” in the Context of Asia Art Archive
Asia Art Archive is an independent non-profit organisation in Hong Kong dedicated to documenting the recent history of art in Asia within an international context. Founded in 2000, AAA is widely regarded as one of the leading public resources in the field. One of the most significant components of its physical and online collections relates to exhibitions—including catalogues, ephemera, installation photographs, and the writings of influential curators. “Sites of Construction” provides an opportunity for AAA to activate these rich materials by inviting new research that could build parallel narratives and complicate existing ones. In keeping with AAA’s broader mission, this series of programmes looks to generate broad-based discussion and engagement around contemporary art in Asia.
