Afro-Southeast Asia: Pragmatics and Geopoetics of Art during a Cold War is a webinar series that expands the current discourses that shape the history and legacy of Afro-Asian solidarity by prospecting connections and imagined affinities between Africa and Southeast Asia as regional frameworks that emerged out of Cold War decolonisation projects.

By examining cultural and political projects of the period alongside contemporary art practices that have sort to re-examine the micro and metahistorical trajectories from these affinities, Afro-Southeast Asia charts out the intersections of the pragmatism guiding historical solidarities and the geopoetics of their persistent aspirations.

Bringing together artists, theorists and historians, Afro-Southeast Asia is not just a Southeast Asian lens onto imaginations of transregional and global solidarities. The programme prospects new methodologies to study these lesser known histories and navigate their contemporary resonances in how we continue to imagine the world.

Organised in partnership with Grey Projects, the webinar is funded in part by the National Arts Council Singapore and is part of a larger research project on Afro-Southeast Asian histories and contemporary art supported by KONNECT ASEAN.

Week 1

︎︎︎Diplomacy as Theatre: Staging the Bandung Conference of 1955

Naoko Shimazu

︎︎︎Craft and Potency,
Place and Relations

Patrick D. Flores

Week 2

︎︎︎Classroom for the Silenced


Syed Farid Al-atas, Aya Rodriguez-Izumi,
Angel Velasco Shaw

︎︎︎Making of a ‘Free World’ City: Urban Space and Social Order in Cold War Bangkok

Matt Phillips

︎︎︎Ar(t)chive: A Map of Teruya

Ariko S. Ikehara

Week 3

︎︎︎Unsettled Assignments

Siddharta Perez, Vuth Lyno

︎︎︎Feeling Emotional Ever Since: From Bandung to Berlin

Renan Laru-an

Week 4

︎︎︎Thinking alongside: Afro-Southeast Asia as orientation

Roger Nelson, Kathleen Ditzig and Carlos Quijon, Jr.

︎︎︎Sparse, sporadic, unspectacular: parahistory and Afro-Southeast Asian affinities

Carlos Quijon, Jr., Serubiri Moses and Simon Soon

Week 5

︎︎︎Chicken Feet Alliances

Elia Nurvista

︎︎︎Cold War Cosmopolitans: Anti-colonial solidarity and the Asian Socialist Conference

Su Lin Lewis

With support from

Part of a research project developed in partnership with KONNECT ASEAN, an ASEAN Foundation arts and cultural programme funded by the Republic of Korea.