Roger Nelson, Kathleen Ditzig and Carlos Quijon, Jr.  

15 May 2021
4pm—5.30pm (SGT)

To register please email:
natalie@greyprojects.org

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Bringing together researchers and curators who are working on historical  and cultural projects  that challenge the assumed borders of 'regional' art practices, this panel is an introduction to three distinct projects being undertaken from Singapore.

Beginning with  presentations by Roger Nelson (National Gallery Singapore), Kathleen Ditzig and Carlos Quijon, Jr. (In Our Best Interests) and followed by a discussion between the speakers, the panel is an opportunity to think through the urgencies  and  emerging  discursive landscape that is enabling this new research.

Nelson will introduce his research on Singapore-born artist Chen Cheng Mei's works inspired by her travels in Africa and elsewhere, and Cambodia-born artist You Khin's works made while living in Sudan, Ivory Coast, and Qatar during the 1970s-2000s; the research will be presented in a forthcoming exhibition at National Gallery Singapore. Ditzig and Quijon.jr will summarise the divergent threads of the exhibition In Our Best Interests: Afro-Southeast Asian Affinities during a Cold War an exhibition of archival material and contemporary art that unpacked Afro-Asian legacies through Southeast Asia as a framework.

In bringing these research and curatorial projects into discussion, this panel is an opportunity to think through the productive entanglements of exhibition making and expansive curatorial research for undoing structural, systematic and disciplinary limitations and for generating new historical imaginarities that speak to the urgent demands of our present.

Roger Nelson is an art historian, and a curator at National Gallery Singapore. He was previously Postdoctoral Fellow at Nanyang Technological University. He is author of Modern Art of Southeast Asia: Introductions from A to Z (National Gallery Singapore, 2019) and translator of Suon Sorin’s 1961 Khmer novel, A New Sun Rises Over the Old Land (NUS Press, 2019), as well as essays published in scholarly journals including World Art and ARTMargins, specialist magazines including Artforum, books and exhibition catalogues. He is co-founding co-editor of Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, a journal published by NUS Press.

Carlos Quijon, Jr. is an art historian, critic, and curator based in Manila. He was a fellow of the research platform Modern Art Histories in and across Africa, South and Southeast Asia (MAHASSA), convened by the Asia Art Archive, Dhaka Art Summit, and the Institute of Comparative Modernities at Cornell University. He writes exhibition reviews for Artforum among other publications and his research was most recently published in  the book From a History of Exhibitions Towards a Future of Exhibition-Making (Sternberg Press, 2019)

Kathleen Ditzig is a Singaporean researcher and curator. She was recently a fellow of the research platform Modern Art Histories in and across Africa, South and Southeast Asia (MAHASSA). Her writing has  been published by Southeast of Now, Finance and Society, Artforum and in books including Perhaps it is high Time for a Xeno-Architecture to Match (Sternberg, 2018).