Curating and Exhibiting Asian Diaspora Artists: Forum and Book Talk

Since the 1980s, there has been a significant rise in the number of exhibitions and transnational projects that presented diaspora as a theme or featured diasporic artists, including, most recently, DIASPORA: Exit, Exile, Exodus of Southeast Asia, which was held at the MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum and Lucid Dreams and Distant Visions: South Asian Art in the Diaspora, which was organised by Asia Society. However, very little attention has been given to ways in which diasporic art and artists have been represented within a curatorial and exhibitionary framework, or the experiences of artists participating in such shows.

This forum will consider some of the strategies and challenges of curating and exhibiting diaspora art. Questions of inclusion and exclusion, the curation of “Asian-ness”, the negotiation of diaspora identities, as well as artistic interventions in the liminal space of the diaspora are some of the issues that will be discussed. Among the speakers are an academic, a curator and an artist who will offer a variety of perspectives on the South Asian and Southeast Asian diaspora.

The forum will be preceded by a conversation between the editors of Interlaced Journeys: Diaspora and the Contemporary in Southeast Asian Art (Osage Art Foundation, 2020) Loredana Pazzini-Paracciani and Prof Patrick D. Flores. This book 'is the first anthology to examine the subject from the complex perspective of artistic and curatorial practices as it attempts to propose multiple narratives of diaspora in relation to a range of articulations in the contemporary context.'

Bios of speakers

Dr Zehra Jumabhoy is a UK-based art historian, curator and writer specialising in modern and contemporary South Asian art and its diasporas. A Steven and Elena Heinz Scholar at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London where she completed her doctorate, she was an associate lecturer from 2016–2020. Her book, The Empire Strikes Back: Indian Art Today, was published by Random House in 2010. She guest curated The Progressive Revolution: Modern art for a New India which ran from 2018–2019. She recently guest curated British artist Yinka Shonibare’s site-specific sculptural installation, Justice for All, at The Arts House in Singapore in January 2020.

Pao Houa Her is a visual artist living in Minnesota, USA. She works across multiple genres and technologies of photography to address Hmong identity and related notions of desire and belonging within the Hmong American community. Pao holds a BFA in Photography from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and an MFA in Photography from Yale University. She is the recipient of many prestigious fellowships and grants, and has exhibited extensively in Minnesota, as well as across the United States, and more recently, in Southeast Asia.

Loredana Pazzini-Paracciani is an independent scholar and curator of Southeast Asian contemporary art. Her research and curatorial practice revolve around critical sociopolitical issues in Southeast Asia, advocating a counter-hegemonic and non-Western-centric discourse. Among the exhibitions she curated are Diaspora: Exit, Exile, Exodus of Southeast Asia (2019) at MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum, Thailand and Architectural Landscapes: SEA in the Forefront (2015) at Queens Museum, New York. Loredana Pazzini-Paracciani is an alumni of the MA Asian Art Histories Programme from LASALLE.

Patrick D. Flores is Professor of Art Studies at the Department of Art Studies at the University of the Philippines, which he chaired from 1997–2003, and curator of the Vargas Museum in Manila. He is the Director of the Philippine Contemporary Art Network. He was one of the curators of Under Construction: New Dimensions in Asian Art in 2000 and the Gwangju Biennale (Position Papers) in 2008. He was the Artistic Director of Singapore Biennale 2019 and is the curator of the Taiwan Pavilion for Venice Biennale in 2022. Among his publications are Painting History: Revisions in Philippine Colonial Art (1999), Remarkable Collection: Art, History, and the National Museum (2006) and Past Peripheral: Curation in Southeast Asia (2008).