2022 Speakers

  • Ade Darmawan

    Ade Darmawan

    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 Contempo- rary 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 is the executive director of Jakarta Biennale during its 2013, 2015 and 2017. Together with ruangrupa, curated TRANSaction: Sonsbeek 2016, and for the Documenta 15 in Kassel 2022, ruangrupa appointed as the artistic director.
  • Ashok Sukumaran

    Ashok Sukumaran

    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. 
  • aqui Thami

    aqui Thami

    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
  • Brook Garru Andrew

    Brook Garru Andrew

    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, 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.
     
     
  • Kabelo Malatsie

    Kabelo Malatsie

    Kabelo 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.
     
  • Natasha Ginwala

    Natasha Ginwala

    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).
  • Hit Man Gurung & Sheelasha Rajbhandari

    Hit Man Gurung & Sheelasha Rajbhandari

    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.
  • Karuna Nundy

    Karuna Nundy

    Karuna Nundy is an Advocate at the Supreme Court of India and an International lawyer. Her litigation practise includes focus on constitutional law, she is recognised equally for her work on commercial dispute resolution, tech and media  law. She has been described as one of the world's 100 most influential people by Time Magazine, a leading lawyer of the Indian Supreme Court by the BBC, listed by Business World as India's Most Powerful Women.
     
    Her commercial work includes wins for one of India's largest Fintech Companies in a case against the six top Telcos. Landmark arbitrations in India and the United Kingdom, and corporate governance disputes for family owned as well as professionally run companies.

    Ms. Nundy has lead a number of constitutional cases including the case to criminalise marital rape, stemming from the Bhopal gas disaster, on free speech overbroad criminal provisions that quell speech as well as on tech regulatiom. She has also worked on the "anti rape" laws of 2013, and advised the United Nations and the governments k
    of a number of countries on women's rights. 
    Ms. Nundy has an Economics Degree from St. Stephen's College, and law degrees from the University of Cambridge and Columbia University. Qualified to practise in Inda and New York,  she has advised the United Nations and Governments of other countries affecting 192 legal systems globally. She currently serves on the Columbia Global Free Speech  Experts' Committee, and also the High Level Panel of Legal Experts for Media Freedom headed by former CJI of England Lord Neuberger and Amal Clooney. 
  • Tanzim Wahab

    Tanzim Wahab

    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.