Art Basel Hong Kong 2024, March 29

Can Artists and Curators Really Collaborate? | Organised in collaboration with Sharjah Biennial

How to Build a Biennial Together

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Gridthiya Gaweewong, artistic director of The Jim Thompson Art Center, Bangkok / Thailand Biennale Chiang Rai 2023 Amar Kanwar, co-curator, 2022 Istanbul Biennial Rirkrit Tiravanija, artistic director, Thailand Biennale Chiang Rai 2023 
Moderated by Amal Khalaf, co-curator, Sharjah Biennial 16, Director of Programmes at Cubitt and Alia Swastika, co-curator Sharjah Biennial 16, Director of the Biennale Jogja Foundation 
 
Biennials are reimagining curating as an exercise of working together by inviting curators and artists to collaborate on developing exhibitions. The Istanbul Biennial and Thailand Biennale are recent examples, with the Sharjah Biennial in 2025 led by five curators, one of whom is an artist. How do these collaborations expand the artist-curator relationship in the process? 

Gridthiya Gaweewong co-founded the Bangkok-based independent art organization Project 304 in 1996. Gaweewong’s curatorial practice often involves collaborating with artists and curators, focusing on the narratives that emerge from the social transformation confronting artists from Thailand and beyond since the Cold War. She has curated various regional and international exhibitions across Southeast Asia, Europe, and Latin America. She lives and works in Chiang Mai and Bangkok, and is an artistic director of the Jim Thompson Art Center and the 3rd edition of Thailand Biennale Chiang Rai 2023. 
Rirkrit Tiravanija is known for a practice that overturns traditional exhibition formats in favour of social interactions through the sharing of everyday activities such as cooking, eating and reading. Creating environments that reject the primacy of the art object, and instead focus on use value and the bringing of people together through simple acts and environments of communal care, Tiravanija’s work challenges expectations around labour and virtuosity. Tiravanija is on the faculty of the School of the Arts at Columbia University, and is a founding member and curator of Utopia Station, a collective project of artists, art historians, and curators. He also helped establish an educational-ecological project known as The Land Foundation, located near Chiang Mai, Thailand. 
Amar Kanwar has distinguished himself through films and multi-media works, which explore the politics of power, violence and justice. His multi-layered installations originate in narratives often drawn from zones of conflict and are characterized by a unique poetic approach to the personal, social and political. He has participated in Documenta 11,12,13 and 14 in Kassel, Germany. Recent solo exhibitions of Kanwar’s work have been held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; Tate Modern, London among others. 
Amal Khalaf is a curator and artist and currently Director of Programmes at Cubitt, Curator at large, Serpentine Galleries, and co-curator of the forthcoming Sharjah Biennial in 2025. Here and in other contexts she has developed residencies, exhibitions and collaborative research projects at the intersection of arts and social justice, grounded in an ongoing study of radical pedagogy. Recent projects include Radio Ballads (2019-22), Support Structure for Support Structures (2021-) and Sensing the Planet (2021). She is a founding member of artist collective GCC, a trustee of Mophradat, Athens; not/nowhere, London. 
Alia Swastika is a curator and researcher/writer that expands her practices in the last 10 years on the issue and perspectives of decoloniality and feminism, where she involved with different projects of decentralization of art, rewriting art history and encouraging local activism. She works as the Director of Biennale Jogja Foundation in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. She continues her researches on Indonesian female artists during Indonesia’s New Order and how the politics of gender from the regime influences the practices of artists from that period. This talk has been organised in collaboration with Sharjah Biennial.&nbsp;
The Art Basel Hong Kong 2024 Conversations program is curated by Stephanie Bailey.

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