This lecture by guest speaker Dr Adrian Tan examines how artists who curate have reshaped and contested the region’s art ecology over the last three decades.
Rather than treating “artist” and “curator” as separate roles, the lecture considers how many practitioners move fluidly between making, organising, researching and oftentimes teaching/facilitating.
The lecturer considers developments/projects from the 1990s to the present, calling attention to artist-run initiatives, independent spaces, biennales and archival projects that have changed how exhibitions are assembled and how publics gather and react/respond.
Through case studies from Singapore and Southeast Asia, the lecture reflects on how artist-curators question institutional histories, activate archives and work collectively within conditions often marked by precarity.
Dr Adrian Tan is an artist-curator whose practice examines how archives shape contemporary art’s social, spatial and institutional life.
His work investigates the ways histories are constructed, forgotten, and reactivated, and how artistic practices can reframe public memory through dialogue, collaboration, and site-responsive forms.
Working between research and artistic production, Tan reimagines the archive as a generative space for making, not merely a repository of the past.
His curatorial projects focus on the presence of contemporary art in public space, independent initiatives, and archival environments, often foregrounding processes of activation, annotation, and re-reading.
