Adeena Mey

Adeena Mey is a writer, curator and educator. His work explores contemporary art and visual cultures in East and Southeast Asia, artists’ moving image, and exhibitionary contexts in relation to cosmopolitical and cosmotechnical thoughts. His curatorial projects have been presented at KCCUK (London), Medrar for Contemporary Art (Cairo), Centre d’Art Neuchâtel (Switzerland), and Post Territory Ujeongguk (Seoul), among others. He is the co-editor of several anthologies on artists’ films, videos and exhibitions histories, including Exhibiting the Moving Image. History Revisited and Cinema in the Expanded Field (both with JRP Editions, 2015). Since 2021 he has been co-convening the workshop series “Writing and Publishing Art in Southeast Asia” supported by the British Academy. He is Managing Editor of Afterall journal and a Research Fellow at the Afterall Research Centre, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, and a visiting lecturer at HEAD-Geneva University of Art and Design.

Contributions

Southeast Asia | One Work, Many Voices

Method and Metaphor: Dinh Q. Lê’s Untitled (Soldiers at Rest) (2003)

Untitled (Soldiers at Rest) (2003) belongs to a body of work which resulted from Vietnamese American artist Dinh Q. Lê’s long-term archaeological investigation of the visual culture of the American War (known as the Vietnam War in the United States), via a traditional Vietnamese weaving technique. Lê learned the latter from his aunt who, when he was a child in Vietnam, wove grass mats, and he later adapted this traditional craft for his own purposes.