The Experimenter Curators’ Hub started off by acknowledging where we stand today; in a deep crisis exacerbated by genocidal war, extraction and economic instabilities. In the midst of this, 14th edition of the Hub aspires to be a space for rigorous dialogue and “fearless thinking,” said Prateek Raja, as he welcomed us to reflect not only on practice but also the “vocabulary to resist the forces that have disregarded all the values and principles that we have held so close to our hearts”. Co-founder, Priyanka Raja offered the hub as "porous house where the ideas of and for tomorrow reside”. This year Rattanamol Singh Johal takes on the role of moderator from Natasha Ginwala who had co-convened and nurtured the hub over the years.
An acknowledgement of loss, and the process of coming to terms with it possibly stems from the human spirit to continue and to embrace “hope” even in seemingly impossible, inhuman circumstances. Johal prefaced this as he quoted Judith Butler, “some of us must rather wildly hold on to it, refusing to believe that the structures that now exist will exist forever.”
Over the day and with the thoughts and work of Sharmini Pereira, Amal Khalaf, Mohamed Almusibli, and Akansha Rastogi, we engaged in a shared impulse to activate new institutional vocabularies; from incremental museums to commissions to Radical Budgeting and domesticity; and to place curatorial practice in an intimate conversation with collective, process-aware frameworks.
Sharmini Pereira opened the morning with a reflection on her path from publishing to institution-building. She situated her curatorial trajectory against the backdrop of absence particularly the lack of museums in Sri Lanka in the early 1990s or that of archives. Here publishing “became a way of building exhibition(s) in print form.”
Sharmini emphasized the role of research not as a derivative of collections, but as a generative and foundational process. “The assets are the people,” she affirmed, insisting that museum building must prioritize training and collective knowledge-building over static acquisition. Here the need to enable and build platforms that “will be passed on,” and the need to nurture an intergenerational transfer and a “chemical” (rather than canonical) understanding of art history.
Pereira was followed by Amal Khalaf who shared her long-standing engagement with civic and collaborative work practices through the lens of collaboration as articulated by American Artist Bronte Velez. For Amal, this framing signals the difficult, messy, and sometimes conflictual labor of working together toward transformation. “Collaboration” she explained, “is always about working together for change”.
Tracing her trajectory from training in documentary filmmaking to civic curator at Serpentine Galleries and most recently, co-curator of Sharjah Biennial 15, Amal spoke to the tension between institutional structures and community-led, care-based practices. Her 18-year career reflects a commitment to “minor movements, soft ripples” that intervene in dominant narratives.
Khalaf offered us a framing of the institution as a “body” where the institution is not fixed, but is sensed, joyously and painfully. “What does it mean,” she asked, “to feel the parts of an institution that have never been sensed before?” reimagining institutions as porous, sentient.
Through long-term engagements with artists and communities and forging infrastructures of emotional and financial support (including working with artists and unions, addressing legal and housing issues, using institutions as a platform for civic organizing, and engaging in what she calls “translocal” forms of care) Khalaf ideas of “radical hospitality” resonate with Sharmini’s “space of discourse organized by nothing other than discourse itself.”
During the afternoon presentation, Mohamed Almusibli proposed holding Knowledge in intimate forms that shaped the formation of Cherish, an “exhibition” space founded in his Geneva apartment living room. “We (Almusibli with co-founders James Bantone, Thomas Liu Le Lann and Ser Serpas) didn’t really have any budgets. We just decided to dedicate the living room into an exhibition space,” The space provided not only shelter and studio, but also a space of temporary belonging, acting as a “home for art” rather than a gallery for example.
This desire for intimate formats Mohamed’s subsequent work foregrounds hospitality, and tenderness. He emphasized how care and resistance often coexist in curatorial work, and how failure, exhaustion, and burnout are endemic to the field. His reflections recalled Amal’s own acknowledgment of “burnout” and the tendency of institutions to co-opt radical practices over time. Mohamed foregrounded the importance of proximity: to artists, to objects, and to the urgencies of the present through a deeply relational methodology, grounded in friendships and ongoing; in the evolution of conversations.
Akansha Rastogi, senior curator at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) in New Delhi proposed the framework of the “incremental museum” that is slow, embedded, and metabolic. The museum, she suggested, is not a static institution but a digestive system that “chews and rechews,” metabolizing difficult histories, “indigestible materials,” and contested archives. This model stands in stark contrast to the accelerationist demands of contemporary art institutions. Akansha’s work involves what she calls “incubatory exhibitions,” designed not as conclusions but as propositions and sites for research, collaboration, and rehearsal. For Rastogi her exhibitions are “platforms” rather than endpoints, with multiple generations of artists, researchers, and collectives entering and reactivating them over time. “It’s an open accumulation—an institution learning to look again and again, allowing voices and production to emerge” she concluded.
Rastogi, with Sharmini’s emphasis on curating as pedagogy and Amal’s commitment to iterative, care-based work underscored a tension between growth and introspection between institutional expansion and the need for considered development. But also as Almusibli placed the role of an institution as a host “to protect its artists, and their message” and work and enable them to exhibit and present the work the way they imagined it.
Day 1 of the Hub can perhaps be summarized with Pereira’s reminder to us that “sometimes the most meaningful work comes from creating your own path not despite those limitations, but because of them.”