I sat down to write this reflection several times over the past few days. Each time, I struggled and found myself returning to the same question. What does it mean to gather and/or talk about curatorial work at a moment when the freedoms that make gatherings possible are themselves under attack?
While the 15th Experimenter Curators’ Hub unfolded, another urgent gathering was taking place at Jantar Mantar. Our constitutional freedoms have steadily eroded over the past decade and several were/are imprisoned for exercising them. I thought of Umar Khalid. I thought of Sharjeel Imam, Srishti Gupta, and Akriti Chaudhary. I think of the dozens of NEET aspirants that have ended their lives between 2021 and 2026 because of systemic failure. And I think of all the students, the Gen-Z that have taken to the streets to demand accountability.
This tension shaped how I (and hopefully many others at the Hub) listened. Introduced by Prateek Raja as a place for “unbound thinking and free speech,” this is also the first Hub since the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party came to power in Bengal. In that, we gather with friends, collaborators, and comrades to discuss forms of thought, care, education, and solidarity - and all that remains possible in a world marked by displacement, censorship, ecological collapse, and deepening inequality. Crisis is the norm. Over the two days, across very different practices and geographies, a shared conviction emerged—curating as a practice of creating conditions where people might continue to think together.
Priyanka Raja invited us “to remain available to feeling” in a time saturated with images of unfolding (and constant) catastrophe. Drawing on Parable of the Sower and its idea of hyper-empathy, she wondered whether endless exposure to suffering has produced greater sensitivity or “a progressive desensitization.” Curating becomes an ethics of attention, where instead of asking visitors to consume information, it asks them to inhabit uncertainty together.
Borrowing from Rirkrit Tiravanija's idea of creating “a space where people can think for themselves,” moderator Rattanamol Singh Johal positioned the Hub as “a space... where we host each other.” Hosting is not passive and demands care, listening, and the willingness to remain open to disagreement. Johal turned to Giorgio Agamben's claim that “a contemporary is someone who... surveys the shadows instead of the lights” and “is able to write by dipping her pen in the darkness of the present.” The curator must therefore not illuminate the world with certainty but remain with its shadows long enough for other possibilities to appear or be devised.
In these times of protest, rallies, and forced migration, what other forms of gathering may emerge? Sepake Angiama argued that education begins with experience and not expertise. Through Stuart Hall’s formulation of “experience lived, experience interpreted, and experience defined,” she challenged the colonial assumption that knowledge always travels from institution to public. Her “aneducation” proposed something more modest—learning begins by being with others. Recalling Paulo Freire's insistence that “the essentiality [is] to be with,” she described exhibition tours as walks, conversations, and collective acts of interpretation. Museums have long privileged vision while disciplining bodies into silence. Angiama instead imagined education through movement, cooking, reading aloud, breathing, and listening.
Relation in Sabih Ahmed's presentation is approached through geography as he reflects on his work between South Asia and the Gulf. He questioned the framing through which regions such as the Middle East, West Asia, MENA, or MENASA are made imaginable. These formations are never neutral and carry histories of belonging and the powers that shape it.
Rather than asking someone, “Where do you come from?” He proposes a different question: “Where all are you coming from?” - Identity as an accumulation of journeys.
This shift from territory to forms of movement transformed his understanding of curating itself where exhibitions are not stabilized into fixed identities. They should reveal the vectors, migrations, relationships, and ecologies that continually shape and produce them. Drawing on Raqs Media Collective, he described exhibitions as observatories capable of perceiving the “deep present,” where historical time folds into contemporary crisis. In his Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale, co-curated with Nora Razian, processions became more than human rituals. How sand is carried across continents, migratory bird patterns, trade routes, digital networks, refugee paths, and bacterial life all move and overlap in this spillage of worlds.
Ahmed suggests we think less through maps and more through echoes and resonance—to inhabit the contemporary is to learn “to tremble with the world.”
Borrowing from Nayantara Gurung Kakshapati, Ahmed spoke of “imperfect solidarities.”
Over the two days, like Ahmed, several conversations challenged inherited and prescribed ways and words of imagining geography. Shabbir Hussain Mustafa confessed his suspicion of “continental thinking.” Growing up in Sri Lanka during the civil war made continents feel less like cultural homes than geopolitical intrusions. In response, he proposed the idea of “sly tropicality,” adapted from Homi Bhabha’s sly civility and Ashis Nandy’s non player. Rather than confronting Western modernity directly, sly tropicality moves sideways. It inhabits ambiguity instead of opposition. It values fabulation over certainty and translation over singular history. The goal of South-South dialogue, he argued, is not equality measured against the West but proposes a coexistence without sameness.
"Border girl" Gridthiya Gaweewong arrived at a similar position through a very different geographical experience. She reflected on building independent art infrastructures in Thailand when almost none existed. Curating emerged not because institutions were already present but because they were absent. This absence demanded invention. Her practice followed rivers, borderlands, Cold War histories, and indigenous territories rather than national narratives. Entering unfamiliar places, she suggested, requires “an empty head.” Knowledge begins with listening.
In a deeply profound, yet humorous assertion, “my country has never been modern. We jumped from the premodern directly to the postmodern,” Gaweewong challenges the (Western) universal timelines through which art history is often written.
Zoe Butt offered perhaps the most sustained reflection on institutional life. She insisted that “the exhibitions are not the final.” What mattered instead was “the space of being with ourselves in doubt and violence, vulnerability before anything is eventuated.” The invisible labour of mentoring, writing, and disagreement mattered as much (if not more) than the visible exhibition. Working for decades in Vietnam taught her that censorship often redirected artistic thinking than simply silencing it. Sometimes absent works generated richer conversations. “Representation of duress is not allowed,” she observed, “but a physical embodiment of it can be.” Institutions, therefore, survive by sustaining dialogue under difficult conditions, by being subversive, shapeshifting.
Gabi Ngcobo shared this refusal of exhibition making as an end in itself. “I don't think of myself as an exhibition machine,” she remarked. “I think of myself as someone who puts together plots.” Her documentary film Causality Dilemmas emerged from the collapse of a project in Dakar amid hostility towards queer narratives. Rather than explaining conflict, the film stayed within contradiction. Photographs, interviews, maps, and landscapes accumulated without resolving into a single interpretation. Elsewhere, she restaged colonial photographs so that historical figures faced one another differently. Carbon paper preserved traces rather than originals. The archive ceased to be a repository of facts and instead became a space where unfinished relationships could still be rearranged.
Reflecting on her own practice, Arnika Ahldag quoted Oswald Wiener: “Only when I heard how you understood me, did I know what I had said.” Meaning emerges between people rather than inside objects. At the Museum of Art and Photography, this philosophy translated into exhibitions supported by a range of discursive exercises including workshops, conversations, accessibility, and participation. Success could not be measured by attendance alone but by “what kind of stories emerged” and whether exhibitions produced “a (kind of) shift in mindset.” Museums become living infrastructures when they ask not what they wish to communicate but what their publics need.
Tarini Malik pushed this institutional critique further by insisting that care cannot remain an exhibition concept but must be embodied by institutions. It is not possible to separate questions of labour, governance, and representation from aesthetics. Her own experiences of racism and exclusion shaped an understanding of museums as contested political spaces where visibility is continually negotiated. Meaningful transformation, she argued, requires changing institutional structures rather than symbolic celebrations of diversity.
For Nikhil Chopra, these structures are sustained through collaboration. Breaking the word into “co” and “lab,” he described collective practice as a shared laboratory where artistic meaning emerges through friendship, duration, and mutual responsibility. Art is less an object than evidence of lived time. Dust, exhaustion, discarded materials, and shared labour become part of the work itself. Communities are not audiences but co-producers: “No site is without its people.” He proposes curating as an ethics of remaining present with others rather than directing them.
The panel discussion brought these different positions into direct conversation. Gaweewong questioned the growing sameness of biennials across the world. Diversity, she warned, risks becoming another standardized aesthetic. Context must remain the ethical foundation of exhibition making. Chopra responded by refusing to anticipate audiences through self-censorship: “The other thing that I don’t like to do is to assume the audience.” Artists have always developed forms of subversion because political life has always demanded them.
When questions turned towards institutions, caste, and political responsibility, Angiama reflected on the impossible burden placed upon institutions founded to address historical exclusions. Too often they become evidence that larger structures have already transformed, allowing everyone else to avoid responsibility. As the questions moved towards caste histories and how colonial critique cannot substitute for confronting India’s own hierarchies, Ahmed responded by arguing that caste demands “a complete aesthetic redistribution.” Redistribution is not simply about representation but transforming the very conditions through which authority, visibility, and legitimacy become perceptible.
Amidst increasing criminalization of artists, activists, and workers, Shuddhabrata Sengupta shared an observation from the court hearing for artist Srishti Gupta’s bail. The question asked in court was not what she had made, but “What was she doing there?” The anxiety is not in artistic production but in showing solidarity. The artist is deemed dangerous when they step outside the studio into public life.
As I end this, hundreds of peacefully protesting students were violently assaulted by the police. Gathering itself is a political act today. And to continue to think together may be one of the most necessary forms of practice available to us today.
Mario D’Souza
Mario D’Souza is a curator and writer based between Goa and Kochi, India. He is Director of Programmes at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale and was on the curatorial team of the 2022 and 2025 editions. He is also core team member and Curator at HH Art Spaces in Goa.