Curatography Issue 2 － Curators' Living Rooms

Issue 2 2020

Curators’ Living Rooms

Curatography

Editorial

Curators’ living rooms are artistic labyrinths of thinking and practice, places compatible with both reality and imagination.

According to the description in “Extended Living Room: Space and Conversation” by the Indonesian Jakarta art group ruangrupa, this living room is a place for them to “hang out” (in Indonesian, nongkrong), and it is a place for learning from each other, sharing living in the moment with others, and having a good time together. At the same time, it is also a place for them to develop the “barn” (lumbung in Indonesian) as the core metaphor to create a shared “resource pot” as a method to carry out collaborative thinking and collectivist practice…

Issue 2 Curators' Living Rooms

Extended Living Room: Space and Conversation

ruangrupa（Ade Darmawan, Mirwan Andan）

Ruangrupa is a Jakarta-based collective established in 2000, known for organizing festivals, exhibitions, and various events and publications. One recent project is the Gudskul Ecosystem, a community-based cross-disciplinary platform and cultural support system, inspired by collective farming and traditional agricultural methods in Sulawesi. Pronounced “good school” in English, the project’s complete name is GUD-SKUL: contemporary art collective and ecosystem studies…

Issue 2 Curators' Living Rooms

Freeing the Weight of the Habitual

Raqs Media Collective

In a recent conversation, the Vietnamese American writer Ocean Vuong elucidated the thinking process behind his new book, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous:

“It was important to me, at least in this book, that violence remain independent from any character’s self-worth, rendering it inert, terrible, and felt—but not a means of “development.” Through Kishōtenketsu, violence becomes fact and not a vehicle towards a climax. Having been a student mainly of Western literature, it became clear to me that the most perennial protagonist is not necessarily the main character, but conflict-driven plot. In Western narratology, the plot is the dominant mode to which all characters are subordinate…

Issue 2 Curators' Living Rooms

Curating Topography

Sandy Hsiu-chih Lo

Looking at the current art world, the main locations of art activities are still mainly art museums. In fact, from modern art to contemporary art, so-called “art” has always taken “gaze” as its core, constructed a logical aesthetic framework of “representation” based on authors, works, and viewers, and built an abstract space, usually a museum or a gallery, out of the context of daily life and social context as a field for displaying works of art…

Issue 2 Curators’ Living Rooms

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Editorial / Curators’ Living Rooms

Sandy Hsiu-chih Lo

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Extended Living Room: Space and Conversation

ruangrupa（Ade Darmawan, Mirwan Andan）

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Freeing the Weight of the Habitual

Raqs Media Collective

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Curating Topography