festival
Annie Jael Kwan
BIO
Based in London and working across Europe and Asia, Annie Jael Kwan is an independent curator and researcher whose exhibition-making, programming, publication and teaching practice is located at the intersection of contemporary art, art history and cultural activism, with interest in archives, histories, feminist, queer and alterna- tive knowledges, collective practices, and solidarity. She is director of Something Human, a curatorial initiative that launched the pioneering Southeast Asia Performance Collection (SAPC) at the Live Art Development Agency in 2017, and was then invited to co-curate the Archive-in-Residence exhibition, Southeast Asia Performance Collection at Haus der Kunst, Munich in 2019. Her recent curatorial projects include UnAuthorised Medium at FramerFramed, Netherlands in 2018; and as curator-in-residence, she curated Futures Ages Will Wonder 2021-2022 at FACT Liverpool; and as Digital Curator, she curated Noguchi: Resonances (September 2021 - January 2022) at the Barbican Centre. She was the co-editor of Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia’s guest issues: Archives (2019) and Pathways of Performativity (2022), and is a member of the Associations of International Art Critics (Singapore). She co-leads Asia-Art-Activism, the interdisciplinary, intergenerational research network, and she is the instigating council member of Asia Forum that launched in 2022 at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice alongside the 59th Venice Biennale.
Title: Making/Taking Space
building an archive, network and community for SoutheastAsia
This presentation reflects on two recent projects, the open-access digital archive, Southeast Asia Performance Collection, and the research network, Asia-Art-Activism.
The Southeast Asia Performance Collection project was led by the curatorial initiative, Something Human, and gathered and collated by a team of international scholars between 2015-2017.
It currently holds digital materials representing over 50 artists from Southeast Asia, and resides in the Study Room at the Live Art Development Agency in London.
In 2018, Asia-Art-Activism was launched as an intergenerational, interdisciplinary, and international, research network that brings together practitioners and researchers interested in the question of “Asia”, especially within the context of the UK and Europe.
AAA currently resides at Raven Row in London. It aims to explore an alternative space to the mainstream that accommodates lesser explored diaspora and migrant narratives. This presentation reflects on the urgencies and challenges of making/taking space for lesser- represented cultural communities, within the futuring endeavours of building an archive and a network.
