Bodies of Knowlegde
18-22 October
Campo De l'Abazia, 3549 Cannarego, Venezia
Curators: Jo-Lene Ong, Annie Jael Kwan and Amir Zainorin
Stateless Mind presents live and performance art of Asians in diaspora. The fourth edition is conceived as a satellite event in response to the Pera+Flora+Fauna exhibition, which is an official collateral event of the 59th La Biennale di Venezia. The programme will take place within the exhibition at the Archivi della Misericordia and its surrounds.
Stateless Mind_Bodies of knowledge focuses on the entanglements of Southeast Asian cultural and vernacular forms of knowledge that are held in the body, transmitted over generations and across national and regional geographies. Looking beyond Southeast Asia as identity, Stateless Mind_Bodies of Knowledge brings together artistic practices that investigate and speculate on Southeast Asia as modality. The five-day program presents 25 artists who are based in Europe (Scandinavia, Netherlands, United Kingdom and Malaysia) but work in relation to or think with and across sites of Southeast Asia.
Southeast Asia has long been a region of dynamic interaction and exchange of a multitude of cultures. Located along and framed as a crossroads of maritime trade and empire, it seems apropos that Southeast Asia is acronymed as SEA. In this region, people’s lives are closely tied to the rhythms and flows of the sea and its trajectories within and beyond. The rapid succession of colonisation, World War II, formation of independent nation states, and modernisation has eroded this way of living. However there remains a Southeast Asian sensibility for fluid frontiers and watery spaces. A hint of this hydrologics can be found in the Malay term “Tanah-air”. Forms of Malay languages are spoken in present day Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, Singapore, East Timor and parts of Thailand. “Tanah-air” is akin to homeland but connects with notions of both land (tanah) and water (air) to suggest a more fluid and elemental sense of belonging. “Tanah-air” conveys a way of being in world where we belong to things as much as they belong to us.
The participating artists are driven by a shared desire to recover forms knowledges richer and deeper than rationality. The works presented in Stateless Mind_Bodies Knowledge use Southeast Asia as modality to imagine inclusive fluid frontiers and capacious watery spaces for all bodies. Acknowledging that the climate crisis is a colonial crisis means that concerns for our threatened future must go hand-in-hand with recovery from the loss and omissions of the past five hundred years. Culture and indigenous knowledge are our best teachers on this journey of recovery, and here we find comradeship with Pera+Flora+Fauna exhibition that commissioned two projects in collaboration with the Semai indigenous group of Perak and presented contemporary artworks that sought a conversation with traditional and local knowledge.
Scroll down to read more about the artists
Nguyễn Thanh Thủy was born into a theatre family and was raised with traditional Vietnamese music from an early age in Hà Nội, Vietnam. She studied at the Hanoi Conservatory of Music where she received her diploma in 1998, followed by a Master of Arts at the Institute of Cultural Studies in 2003. She has received many distinctions including the First Prize and the Outstanding Traditional Music Performer Prize in the National Competition of Zither Talents in 1998. She has toured in Asia, Europe and the USA. Nguyễn Thanh Thủy has recorded several CD’s as soloist with orchestra and solo CDs, which were released by Phương Nam Film Vietnam; by dB Productions Sweden; by Setola di Maiale Italia and by Neuma Records & Publications USA. Between 2021-22 Nguyễn is an international postdoctoral research fellow at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, and at the Institute of Arts, Faculty of Education Western Norway University of Applied Sciences. Her artistic research project Music and identity in diaspora is funded by the Swedish Research Council.
Yong Sun Gullach is a Korean-Danish artist and a human rights activist with focus on Transnational adoption as colonial practise based in Copenhagen Denmark. She operates at the boundaries of performance, poetry, film, music, noise and installation art. Her art practice investigate the Southeast and East Asian diaspora and desorientation as she unfolds the aesthetics of the expressions and narrations that are embedded in-between the body, sounds and the spoken word.
Photo of Yong Sun Gullach by Marco Grimnitz
Pavana Reid was born in Khonkaen, Thailand in 1963 and moved to Northern Ireland in 1988 during the time of an on-going political trouble in Northern Ireland. Began her Art education from night class to a degree in Fine & Applied Art at Ulster University from 2006 to 2009, Belfast, UK.
I am working mainly in Performance Art and Performance related photography and moving picture, in Solo, Group collective, Performance in public space, Site-specific and Environmental Art Project. Based on the complexity of identity - as individual, member of community local/global, I investigate changing and developing identity as a perpetual process within wider notions of social norms. My performances, my actions, are intended as narratives that meet with the viewer’s own ideas to become new experience.
Photo of Yong Sun Gullach by Marco Grimnitz
Shaq, a contemporary artist and activist from the Temuan Orang Asli tribe in Banting, southwest Selangor state Malaysia, is known for merging art and activism into a glorious hybrid. His fondest memories are fishing in the nearby peat swamp and hunting small animals in the jungle. In primary school, he discovered art, a passion which shaped the course of his life.
In his early year, the land developer has encroached the jungle around his village and now it reflecting in his many works, that trauma in his childhood has fuelled his passion and led his to fight for his people land rights. For many years now, he is a common face at protests, standing shoulder to shoulder with activists to demand equal rights for Orang Asli folk.
Additionally, through art, he frequently expresses the plight of the indigenous communities scattered across Malaysia with his bold brush strokes. His work depicts gorgeous portraits of everyday Orang Asli people, with powerful stories that cling tightly to the canvas he paints on.
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen (Born 1970 in Manila) is a Danish/Philippine international acclaimed performance artist, who has done exhibitions and performances internationally. She has been exhibiting and performing at KIASMA Art Museum, Helsinki, Brooklyn Museum, New York, Tate Modern, London, Performa (performance festival), New York, Venice Biennale, Thessaloniki biennale, Busan Biennale, The Drawing Room Manila, Röda Sten, Gothenburg, AROS Art Museum, Aarhus, National Gallery, Singapore, in Copenhagen: SMK/National Gallery Denmark, Nikolaj Kunsthal, Copenhagen Contemporary
Kiss Lavin is a multi-disciplinary artist who was brought up in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, China and Denmark. Her work primarily revolves around painting, sculpture, music and performance. Often choosing to blend the different forms together, creating a totem-like collage of varied materials.
Within her practice, she explores social and cognitive psychology, non-duality, transience and the cyclic happening of life and death.
She is currently receiving her bachelor's degree at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Noel Ed De Leon (b.1976, Philippines) is an environmentalist, and a visual and performance artist. De Leon’s work includes archiving as an artistic practice, vernacular architecture,
installation, experimental sounds, raw videos, and multimedia sculptures. He explores the themes of remembrance, DNA, history, and memory; engaging with questions of how historical conflicts, migrations, ecology, and exchanges may be traced through surviving artifacts. He has presented talks, performances, and installations at the Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona; Live Art Development Agency, London; Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London; Framer Framed, Amsterdam; Raven Row, London; Haus der Kunst, Munich; Vargas Museum, Manila; gdl.arch Venezia Atelier. He is also the Founder of Transnational Movement and Co-director of Batubalani Art Projects with Eva Bentcheva,
a non-profit organisation working to promote Philippine art across museums and universities in Europe.
Bettina Fung | 馮允珊 is a Hong Kong born, British-Chinese artist based in London, UK. Her practice centres on the expansive and immediate nature of drawing and often performs live, sharing her process as the work unfolds over time. She creates two dimensional, performative and site specific works that explore and question the subjects of legacy, belonging, ritual, futility, productivity and progress. With a strong interest in the ideas of ‘commoning’ and creative collective actions, her recent works are associated with the themes of shared authorship and the dynamics within working and building together. Bettina has exhibited nationally in the UK and abroad and was the recipient of awards such as the a-n Artist Information Company's New Collaborations Bursary in 2014 and Arts Council England’s Grants for the Arts award in 2018. With a keen interest in peer-led learning, Bettina was a part of Syllabus IV, an alternative peer-led artist development programme delivered by six UK arts institutions in 2018/19, and was awarded the Airspace Gallery’s Artists Make Change bursary in 2020 to instigate a peer-led learning group to research the subject of artists making social change. Bettina is also a member of the Asia-Art-Activism Research Network.
Amir Zainorin (born in Malayisa 1963) visual artist and curator.
Amir is currently the leader for artist collective called Jambatan based in Copenhagen, Denmark.
He has worked as educator at the Danish Art Council House Artist Program and has organized and curated several exhibitions, which includes The Malaysian Art Festival in Copenhagen in 2009, Stateless Mind Festival in Copenhagen 2019, 2021, IPOH International Film Festival in 2019 and Pera+Flora+Fauna, an official collateral event at the 59th Biennale di Venezia 2022.
Zainorin studied Business Studies at the Polytechnic Ungku Omar Ipoh in 1980 and after graduating worked as a bank officer at Agriculture bank in KL. He furthered his studies at University of Conway Arkansas in1986 and University of Missouri Kansas City, USA in 1988.
Zainorin works in multidisciplinary arts and his art projects are often interactive and participative working with installation, performance, video, photography and drawings. The art projects aim is to bridge the interconnectivity between people.
His work has been exhibited among others at KL Biennale, National Art Gallery Malaysia, Museum of Contemporary art Roskilde Denmark, Overgaden Institute of Contemporary Art Copenhagen, Immigrant Museum Denmark, National Art Gallery Singapore.
Zainorin has received grants from among others, the Danish Art Council, Nordic Kultur Fond, National Art Gallery Malaysia and Cendana Malaysia.
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.
Finn Maätita is a Moluccan-Dutch artist and researcher, born and raised in the Netherlands, and recently graduated in Photography from the University of the Arts in Utrecht.
Within his current practice he explores the interspaces of his cultural identity. Resulting in multilayered media installations, where drawing, sound, moving image and performance come together.
“While reflecting upon the spaces that overlap within myself, I investigate the interspaces that emerge from these overlaps. Mental and physical interspaces, spaces that are unspoken of, or encrypted within the codes that I have to switch between. The collective experience of decolonization and intersectionality motivates me to make myself heard as a Moluccan individual. I remember the way I saw things as a child. Taking on a constant experiment with a language that was imposed by someone else.”
His latest work revolves around the process of revitalization within the colonial system and the importance of ancestral Moluccan principles within that process. He reflects upon a pre-colonial aspect of the contemporary experience of Moluccans in diaspora, to start a conversation about this perspective on the road to decolonization.
Honey Kraiwee is an MA graduate from Maastricht University with a major in curating. Before her education in the Netherlands, she was a vice director of the art and cultural department at Alliance Fraçaise in Bangkok, Thailand. Recently, she received a grant to create MOONMOON CALENDAR. Inspired by the Chinese lunisolar calendar, the project resets our way of thinking about time and rethinks horoscopes by unveiling an algorithmic similarity between astrologers and Artificial Intelligence. Honey is also a regular host at A Tale of a Tub, an institution for contemporary art and culture in Rotterdam. Its program is centred around questions of how art can contribute to our understanding of present-day social, political, and ecological issues. Honey is currently keen on researching and working with concepts interrelating amongst non-human centred cultures and internet cultur
Jo-Lene Ong
Jo-Lene Ong is currently works as co-curator at the Hartwig Art Production | Collection Fund special project 2020-21, co-curator of visual arts and theory at Other Futures festival, and teacher at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam.
She got her start in the field at the intersection of arts and social activism in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Her interests are in deploying non-western epistemic paradigms and more embodied ways of knowing as modes of extending boundaries. Recently she co-edited Practice Space a volume around locally embedded art initiatives. Jo-Lene was awarded De Appel Curatorial Research Fellowship 2018-19 after completing De Appel Curatorial Program 2017-18.
Recent exhibitions include Unpacking the 3Package Deal (2020, 2019) for Amsterdam Fonds voor de Kunst; Elsewheres Within Here (2019) at Framer Framed, Amsterdam; Brace for Impact (2018) at De Appel, Amsterdam; and SUNSHOWER: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia from 1980s – Now (2017) at the National Art Centre, Tokyo and Mori Art Museum, Tokyo.
Kent Chan is an artist, curator and filmmaker based in Netherlands and Singapore. His practice revolves around our encounters with art, fiction and cinema that form a triumvirate of practices porous in form, content and context. He holds particular interest in the tropical imagination, the past and future relationships between heat and art, and contestations to the legacies of modernity as the epistemology par excellence. The works and practices of others often form the locus of his works, which have taken the form of film, text, conversations and exhibitions.
He has held solo and two-person presentations at Kunstinstituut Melly, Bonnefanten Museum, National University Singapore Museum, de Appel Amsterdam and SCCA-Ljubljana, Centre for Contemporary Arts, Slovenia. His works and films has been exhibited in venues and festivals including International Film Festival Rotterdam, Times Museum (China), EYE Film Museum, Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam, Bienalsur (Argentina), Institute of Contemporary Arts, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Busan Biennale and Drodesera Festival of Performing. He is the 2021 winner of the Foundwork Artist Prize and his works are collected in the Rijkscollectie, Netherlands and Bonnefanten Museum.
Yin Yin Wong is a multidisciplinary artist working across a range of media including film, sculpture, drawing, performance and site specific installation. In the past they worked largely around themes of distribution, dissemination and circulation of visual culture through publishing artist books and curating exhibitions departing from text. Currently they are researching possible bridges and juxtapositions between their modernist graphic design education and their Chinese-Malaysian diasporic upbringing. By focussing on themself as a site where different legacies and languages converge and complicate eachother, Wong looks for the overlaps that speak cross-culturally. Through an auto-etnographic lens they criticise the dominant frameworks that permeate almost every aspect of their life.
Ribka M. Pattinama Coleman (They/Them) is doing the Masters programme at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Their practice engages in the influence of Indonesian heritage, colonialism, care, resistance and collective work. As a multidisciplinary artist their mediums span from sound, performance, video, sculpture and food.
Yellow Music in Diaspora
In this performance, the Vietnamese đàn tranh player Nguyễn Thanh Thủy and the Swedish guitarist Stefan Östersjö, two members of the intercultural group The Six Tones, present a series of experimental performances of iconic Vietnamese popular music, often referred to as Yellow Music. This music has become emblematic of Vietnamese diasporic culture, and their experimental versions seek to give the music renewed currency and allow for a renegotiation of its meaning.
Duration 30 mins
Bios
Nguyễn Thanh Thủy was born into a theatre family and was raised with traditional Vietnamese music from an early age in Hà Nội, Vietnam. She studied at the Hanoi Conservatory of Music where she received her diploma in 1998, followed by a Master of Arts at the Institute of Cultural Studies in 2003. She has received many distinctions including the First Prize and the Outstanding Traditional Music Performer Prize in the National Competition of Zither Talents in 1998. She has toured in Asia, Europe and the USA. Nguyễn Thanh Thủy has recorded several CD’s as soloist with orchestra and solo CDs, which were released by Phương Nam Film Vietnam; by dB Productions Sweden; by Setola di Maiale Italia and by Neuma Records & Publications USA. Between 2021-22 Nguyễn is an international postdoctoral research fellow at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, and at the Institute of Arts, Faculty of Education Western Norway University of Applied Sciences. Her artistic research project Music and identity in diaspora is funded by the Swedish Research Council.
Stefan Östersjö is a leading classical guitarist specialising in the performance of contemporary music. As a soloist, chamber musician, sound artist, and improviser, he has released more than twenty CDs and toured Europe, the USA, and Asia. He has collaborated extensively with composers and in the creation of works involving choreography, film, video, performance art, and music theatre. Between 1995 and 2012 he was the artistic director of Ensemble Ars Nova, a leading Swedish ensemble for contemporary music. He is a founding member of the Vietnamese group The Six Tones, which since 2006 has developed into a platform for interdisciplinary intercultural collaboration. As a member of the Landscape Quartet he has developed an articulated performative practice within ecological sound art. As a soloist he has worked with conductors such as Lothar Zagrosek, Péter Eötvös, Pierre-André Valade, Mario Venzago, and Andrew Manze. Stefan Östersjö is chaired professor of Musical Performance at Piteå School of Music, Luleå University of Technology, guest professor at Ingesund School of Music, Karlstad University of Technology, Professor II at Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, and associate professor at DXARTS, University of Washington.