Worlds Apart, Strangers Together

Held in conjunction with the exhibition Tropical: Stories from Southeast Asia and Latin America, “Worlds Apart, Strangers Together” was a two-day symposium at National Gallery Singapore that expressed South-South solidarities and reconsidered the conception of the “Global South,” both within the legacies of modernism and in light of post-colonial debates.

Spanning art history, practice and curation, Partha Mitter, Yuki Kihara, Manthia Diawara, Solange Farkas, Atreyee Gupta, Eisa Jocson and Venuri Perera adressed the significance of projects like Tropical, and explored the possibilities that fulfil the promise of tropicality. The topics they covered included translation, geo-poetics, inter-species sensing and various turns in writing and worlding.

The exhibition itself as a medium is a site of limits, as it cannot fully capture a universe of implications. The symposium was in many ways a supplement to the exhibition, a way to address the gaps in the narrative, as well as the insufficiency of the exhibitionary enterprise in general. 

In the spirit of constant revisions evoked by the tropical atmosphere and the work of the tropic, both the exhibition and symposium can only anticipate more initiations in the future. These initiatives will continue to shape the art-historical imagination of Southeast Asia and Latin America, and the more complex ways of annotating prospective south-south relationships.

To revisit the programmes, please access the recordings below.

Partha Mitter on Reimagining Modernism: Picasso Manqué Syndrome and the Virtual Cosmopolitan
This lecture by art historian Partha Mitter proposed ways of revising art history by focusing on the nature of global exchanges in a“virtual cosmopolis,” a rubric which may well be the architecture for cross-cultural interaction and mutual incubation.

Please watch the lecture here.

In Dialogue with Yuki Kihara and Patrick Flores
In dialogue with art historian Patrick Flores, artist Yuki Kihara intertwined artistic production and art history, anticipating a future where both contribute to the restitution of ancestral memory and the transformation of the ecological and planetary context through the assemblage of care, community and colonial critique.

Recording available soon here.

Screening | Maison Tropicale
Director Manthia Diawara’s film Maison Tropicale (2008) probes the complex interrelationship between modernism, colonialism, and architecture in the Republic of the Congo and Niger, shedding light on issues surrounding cultural heritage in a post-colonial environment.

This film was screened at National Gallery Singapore on March 23, 2024.

Solange Farkas on Transcultural Curation
Curator Solange Farkas’ lecture delved into myriad curatorial gestures concerned with navigating the artistic expressions from the Global South. Her insights illuminated the intricacies of curating exhibitions that involve diverse art ecologies and geopoetic conditions, offering perspectives on crafting narratives that transcend continents and cultures.

Please watch the lecture here.

Atreyee Gupta on The Non-Aligned Movement
Art historian Atreyee Gupta centered her narrative around two protagonists: the Mexican poet Octavio Paz and his Indian painter friend Jagdish Swaminathan. Against the backdrop of the 1955 Asian-African conference in Bandung, Indonesia and the formalisation of the Non-Aligned Movement, her lecture navigated the dissonant temporal and spatial arcs of decolonisation, evoking a different mode of relating to the world.

Please watch the lecture here.

Magic Maids, a work-in-progress sharing by Eisa Jocson and Venuri Perera
Magic Maids was a work-in-progress sharing by artists Eisa Jocson and Venuri Perera that featured excerpts of their research on witch hunts and migrant domestic labour. Delving into the origins of the exploitation and extraction of women’s labour from the Global South, Jocson and Perera looked at the connection between the history of migrant labour and the European witch hunts.

Please watch the highlight video here.

Take a look inside the exhibition Tropical. Watch here.