Curators' Hub 2022

EXPERIMENTER CURATORS' HUB 2022
Announcing the 12th edition of the Experimenter Curators' Hub from 04 - 05 November, 2022

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“As we return to the 12th edition of the Experimenter Curators’ Hub 2022, the first in-person iteration of the Hub after 2 years, we are increasingly aware of the importance of creating a physical space that allows for critical yet constructive conversation between curators, thinkers, writers, artists and the audience.

All around us, we see a rapidly shrinking space for free debate and the emergence of hostile responses to ideas of plurality. The Experimenter Curators’ Hub attempts to build an environment for fearless and intimate discussions between some of the most forward thinking and influential curators, thinkers and practitioners of contemporary visual arts of our time, to build crucial interpersonal interactions and a space for discussion and sharing ensconced in nurture and care.”

– Prateek & Priyanka Raja, Directors, Experimenter

The participating curators at ECH 2022 are:

Ade Darmawan, Artist, curator and director of ruangrupa, co-artistic director of documenta 15

aqui Thami, Artist & founder of Sister Library

Ashok Sukumaran, Artist and co-founder of the group and studio CAMP

Brook Garru Andrew, Director of Reimagining Museums and Collections, and Enterprise Professor, Faculty of Fine Arts & Music. University of Melbourne & artistic director of NIRIN, the 22nd Biennale of Sydney

Hit Man Gurung & Sheelasha Rajbhandari, Co-curators of the Kathmandu Triennale 2077 & Nepal Pavilion at Venice Biennale 2022
Kabelo Malatsie, Director of Kunsthalle Bern

Tanzim Wahab, Festival Director of Chobi Mela International Festival of Photography
The hub will be moderated by Natasha Ginwala, Associate Curator at Large at Gropius Bau, Berlin; Artistic Director of Colomboscope, Berlin / Colombo
Guest speaker Karuna Nundy, Advocate at The Supreme Court of India, and international human rights lawyer
Guest performer Sabika Abbas Naqvi, Performance poet and Founder of Sar-e-rahguzar: Poetry on the streets & Co-editor of the Bystander Anthology and Senior Editor of the SAAG Anthology

Experimenter Curators' Hub 2022 is organised by Experimenter Learning Program Foundation and is supported by Australia Council for the Arts, Australian Consulate-General, Kolkata, Pro Helvetia, Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Kolkata, ArtReview (Strategic Partner) and TAKE on Art (media partner).
Ade Darmawan lives and works in Jakarta as an artist, curator and member of ruangrupa. He studied at Indonesia Art Institute (ISI), in the Graphic Arts Department. In 1998, a year after his first solo exhibition at the Cemeti Contemporary Art Gallery, Yogyakarta (now Cemeti Art House), he stayed in Amsterdam to attend a two-year residency at the Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten. His works range from installation, objects, drawing, digital print, and video. Exhibitions include “Magic Centre” (solo show held both in Portikus, Frankfurt, 2015, and Van AbbeMuseum, Eindhoven, 2016), Gwangju Biennial and Singapore Biennale (both 2016) and “Doing Business with the Dutch” (Lumen Travo Gallery, Amsterdam, 2018).

As a curator, he has contributed in Riverscape in-flux 2012, Media Art Kitchen 2013, Condition Report 2016, and Negotiating the Future: 6 Asian Art Biennial in Taiwan. From 2006-09, he was a member of Jakarta Arts Council, which led him to be appointed to become the artistic director of Jakarta Biennale in 2009. He has been the executive director of Jakarta Biennale during its 2013, 2015 and 2017 editions. Together with ruangrupa, curated TRANSaction: Sonsbeek 2016, and for Documenta 15 in Kassel 2022, ruangrupa appointed as the artistic director.
aqui Thami is a Janajati/Indigenous artist from the Himalayas, she lives and works in Bombay. aqui uses social exchanges and develops safe spaces to position art as a medium of healing in community. aqui's interdisciplinary practice ranges across ceremonial interventions, performances, drawings, zine-making, fly posting, and public intervention, brought together by participant involvement. Most of her work is self-funded and realised in collaboration.

Photo credit: Rachel King.
Ashok Sukumaran is a Mumbai-based artist. He is co-founder of the group and studio CAMP, active since 2008. His interests have included electrified desire and curiosity, non-natural ecosystem plumbing, maritime and other regional intimacies, and many variants of digital ontologies, and freedoms. These have become part of collaborative forms of expression such as artworks, exhibitions, as well as long-term projects both in Mumbai and online.

His work as an artist has received a UNESCO digi-arts award, a Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica and most recently with CAMP, the 2020 Nam June Paik Art Centre Prize. CAMP has had recent solo exhibitions at the Sharjah Art Foundation, the Nam June Paik Art Centre, Yongin, the Argos Centre for Art and Media, Brussels, and De Appel, Amsterdam. CAMP's projects have entered many modern social and technical assemblies: Energy, communication, transport and surveillance systems, neighbourhoods, ships, archives – things much larger than itself. These are shown as unstable, leaky, and contestable "technology", in the ultimate sense of not having a fixed function or destiny. They are currently developing new projects on streaming media and artist infrastructure.
Brook Garru Andrew is an artist, curator and scholar who is driven by the collisions of intertwined narratives, often emerging from the mess of the “Colonial Hole”. His interdisciplinary artistic practice harnesses alternative narratives to explore the legacies of colonisation and modernism. His artworks, museum interventions and curatorial projects challenge the limitations imposed by power structures, historical amnesia, stereotyping, and complicity to centre Indigenous perspectives. Apart from drawing inspiration from vernacular objects and the archive he travels internationally to work with artists, communities, and various private and public collections

His curatorial projects include artistic director of “NIRIN,” the 22nd Biennale of Sydney, 2020, and recently co-curator of YOYI Care, Repair, Healing scheduled to open in September 2022 at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin. He was international advisor to the Nordic Pavilion being transformed into the Sámi Pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia 2022. He current research projects include an ARC (Australia Research Council grant) with Dr Brian Martin: ARC Special Research Initiative for Australian Society, History and Culture: 'More than a guulany (tree): Aboriginal knowledge systems’.

Brook is Director of Reimagining Museums and Collections, and Enterprise Professor in Interdisciplinary Practice, Faculty of Fine Arts & Music, University of Melbourne; with a DPhil from the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford. He is an Associate Researcher, Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford; Honorary Senior Fellow, Indigenous Studies Unit and the School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne; and Associate Research in the Wominjeka Djeembana research lab at MADA, Monash University.

Photo credit: Giacomo Sanzani
Kabelo Malatsie is a curator and organiser living in Bern. She recently became director of Kunsthalle Bern (April 2022). Her ongoing curatorial research project explores the exhibitionary mode as unlikely starting points that place incongruous practices together, to instigate other ways of making and reading the world we inhabit. As an organiser she is preoccupied with the notion of autonomy and the underground. She was director of Visual Arts Network of South Africa (2018-2019) and an associate in the curatorial team at Stevenson gallery in Cape Town and Johannesburg (2011 – 2016). She co-curated the exhibition Deliberation on Discursive Justice for the Yokohama Triennale (Japan 2020), participated In the Open or in Stealth for Barcelona’s MACBA (Spain 2018), and curated solo exhibitions across various institutions in South Africa for artists such as Nicholas Hlobo, Moshekwa Langa and Sabelo Mlangeni. Malatsie holds a Master’s degree in Art History from the University of Witwatersrand.

Photo credit: George Mahashe.
Sheelasha Rajbhandari, born in 1988 in Kathmandu, is a visual artist, cultural organizer, and co-founder of the artist collective Artree Nepal. Her longitudinal research repositions quotidian and plural narratives, by weaving folktales, oral histories, and performative rituals as a juxtaposition to conventional historiography. Rajbhandari’s practice is rooted in the experiences of women and seeks to confront how female agency and corporeality become contested political sites for contemporary nation-states; a phenomenon that parallels the dismantling of matricentric landscapes in extractive societies. Her installation in the travelling exhibition “A beast, a god and a line” (2018-2020) was presented at Para Site, Hong Kong; TS1, Yangon; Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; Kunsthall, Trondheim; and MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum, Chiang Mai. She has also been an artist in residence at the Bellas Artes Projects (2019) and Para Site (2017). She has furthermore exhibited at Museum of Arts and Design, New York (2022), Weltmuseum Wien (2019); Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa (2017); and Kathmandu Triennale (2017). As a part of her collective she has been a part of Dhaka Art Summit (2020) and Biennale of Sydney (2020). Rajbhandari is co-curator of the Kathmandu Triennale 2077, Nepal Pavilion at Venice Biennale 2022, ‘Garden of Ten Seasons’, Savvy Contemporary, Berlin and 12 Baishakh-Post Earthquake Community Art Project alongside Hit Man Gurung.
Hit Man Gurung, born in 1984 in Lamjung, is currently based in Kathmandu. Gurung’s diverse media of works are concerned with some of the most pressing political, economic, and cultural phenomena transforming Nepal’s physical and societal landscapes. Particularly addressing the country’s decade long People's War, several years of unstable governments, and the impact all of this has had on the personal and professional lives of Nepali citizens. In parallel, his art also speaks to the strong impact of global capitalism, the dramatic economic boom in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, an unprecedented investment in infrastructure development within the region, and an incessant demand for cheap labor; he furthermore stitches together the various patterns of mass migrations seen across Nepal. Gurung infuses his paintings, documentary photos, videos, performances and installations with political conviction and personal poetry.

He has participated in exhibitions at SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin (2020); Biennale of Sydney (2020); Artspace Sydney (2019); Weltmuseum Wien (2019); Kathmandu Triennale (2017); Yinchuan Biennale (2016); Para Site, Hong Kong (2016); Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane (2015-16); and Dhaka Art Summit (2014, 2016, 2018 ,2020). He is co-founder of artist collective ArTree Nepal and a co-curator for the Kathmandu Triennale 2077, Nepal Pavilion at Venice Biennale 2022, ‘Garden of Ten Seasons’, Savvy Contemporary, Berlin and 12 Baishakh-Post Earthquake Community Art Project alongside Sheelasha Rajbhandari.

Photo credit: Artree Nepal.
Tanzim Wahab is a curator, researcher and lecturer. He lives in Berlin and Dhaka. His curatorial interests revolve around the sensory and community entanglement of cultural spaces, locational practice(s) and alternative art education. He is the festival director of Chobi Mela International Festival of Photography, Dhaka, and curator, community facilitator of Spore Initiative, Berlin. Between 2016 to 2021, he served as the chief curator of Bengal Foundation, heading several curatorial research projects and exhibitions across South Asia. Wahab, alongside Munem Wasif, has published two editions of Kamra – a comprehensive publication in Bengali, setting ideas and debates of photographic history and theories. He is currently co-editing ‘Primary Documents’ South Asia- A MoMA publication on cross-regional art history. Wahab was the Vice Principal of Pathshala South Asian Media Institute from 2013 - 2015, and is currently a trustee and lecturer at the institute. He has been recently appointed as a co-curator of the Biennale für aktuelle Fotografie 2024, Germany.
MODERATOR

Natasha Ginwala is Associate Curator at Large at Gropius Bau, Berlin; Artistic Director of Colomboscope in Sri Lanka and the 13th Gwangju Biennale with Defne Ayas (2021). Ginwala has curated Contour Biennale 8, Polyphonic Worlds: Justice as Medium and was part of the curatorial team of documenta 14, 2017. Other projects include Indigo Waves and Other Stories: Re-navigating the Afrasian Sea and Notions of Diaspora (with Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and Michelangelo Corsaro) at Zeitz MOCAA; Survey exhibitions of Bani Abidi, Akinbode Akinbiyi and Zanele Muholi at Gropius Bau. Ginwala was a member of the artistic team for the 8th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, 2014, and has co-curated The Museum of Rhythm, at Taipei Biennial 2012 and at Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz, 2016–17. Ginwala writes regularly on contemporary art and visual culture. Recent co-edited volumes include Stronger than Bone (Archive Books and Gwangju Biennale Foundation) and Nights of the Dispossessed: Riots Unbound (Columbia University Press).

Photo credit: Tavish Gunasena.
GUEST SPEAKER

Karuna Nundy is an Advocate at the Supreme Court of India, and an international lawyer. She was recently named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. She has advised governments and organizations on human rights, and constitutional and legal reform. She currently serves on the Columbia University Global Free Speech Experts' Committee, and the High-Level Panel of Legal Experts on Media Freedom founded by the former Chief Justice of England Lord Neuberger, and Amal Clooney. Qualified to practice law both in India and New York, Ms. Nundy holds degrees from St. Stephen's College, University of Delhi, University of Cambridge and Columbia University.

Photo credit: Ankita Chandra.
GUEST PERFORMER

Sabika Abbas Naqvi is a performance poet and Founder of Sar-e-rahguzar: Poetry on the streets. She is also the Co-editor of the Bystander Anthology and Senior Editor of the SAAG Anthology. She is an INK Fellow, formerly, a campaigner with Change.org and an alternative educator. Her work revolves around gender and minority rights and inclusive curriculum design. She has spoken at multiple platforms including India Today Conclave, RightsCon, BOMA India, Amnesty #NextStrategy, AWID, Goethe's Feminist Frequencies, University of Oxford etc. Her work is taught and researched at prestigious universities across the world.

She is the Training and Design Consultant with Change.org Foundation and currently manages the Community and Advocacy work at the Fearless Collective. She works on building communities and cross border solidarities.
Experimenter Curators' Hub presentations and ensuing discussions are extensively video-documented and archived as an online, freely-accessible resource. To view previous editions of the ECH, please click here.

For any further information or press enquiries email admin@experimenter.in or call on +91.33.4602.6457

Curators' Hub 2022

EXPERIMENTER CURATORS' HUB 2022