aqui Thami is a Thangmi woman of the Kiratimma first peoples of the Himalayas. Her practice positions art as a medium of healing in community, grounded in social exchange, participation, and collaboration. Spanning ceremonial interventions, performance, drawing, zine-making, fly-posting, and public intervention, her interdisciplinary work is often self-funded and collectively realized. Her artistic pursuits are…
Alongside technocratic and geopolitical frames, other epistemologies exist [for understanding the Mekong]. For riverine communities, the Mekong holds cosmological significance and yields situated knowledge. Animated by spirits, omens, and ritual and narrative traditions, the river continues to be apprehended as a medium of passage, impermanence, and cyclical renewal.
In speaking about “modern Indonesia,” I am thinking less in terms of chronology or style and more in terms of conviviality as practice: the everyday negotiation of languages, traditions, faiths, empires, merchants, farmers, rulers, and neighbors. The “modern” was—and remains—about relations: how to live together, how to keep conversations open, how to practice care even when histories, hierarchies, and inequalities persist.
Rajyashri Goody (b. 1990) queries food and water politics, Ambedkarite Buddhist practices, literacy and Dalit literature, and mobility and place-making in the context of caste-based violence and Dalit resistance in India. She works primarily with paper pulp, clay, text, photography, and printmaking. What follows is an abbreviated account of Goody’s session with the C-MAP Bombay/Mumbai Group.…
This essay attends to some of the ways in which artists have mediated (and sometimes remediated) their interactions with curators as well as to their understandings of the curatorial. It surfaces a less familiar view of artists’ experiences of curation as often fraught, even while such engagements may also be enabling and even nourishing.
Gulammohammed Sheikh (b. 1937) is an artist, pedagogue, and writer known for his prolific career across practices that include curating and publishing. Sheikh taught art history and painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda—the foremost institute for avant-garde practice during the post-Independence period—for almost three decades, spearheading an…
Bagus Pandega assembles various electronic components, musical instruments, found objects, and 3-D-printed custom parts and software into artworks that combine and generate kinetic, acoustic, and light elements in a modular way: Each of the constituent components can be replaced, modified, or exchanged to form another iteration. Despite the technical marvel of his installations, Pandega’s approach to artistic practice remains fundamentally DIY—an artistic ethos that intentionally bypasses industrial standards. Pandega has adopted this “maker” mentality—rooted in Indonesia’s 1990s media landscape—to reexamine the collision between society and nature, as seen in The Diasporic Mythology.
The essay approaches the intimate configurations captured in Kazakhstani artist Lidiya Blinova’s Finger Ornament as a site of artistic expression that reworks local ornamental production, dissolving categories of high and amateur, domestic and public, visual and haptic. In so doing, the essay highlights how the artwork accentuates the conceptual potential of its primary reference: the ornament of textile associated with the pre-Soviet culture of Kazakh nomads. In order to align with the artistic intention to foreground regional creative forms, the essay proposes a speculative turn: adopting a relational reading and an intertextual analysis between the artwork Finger Ornament and traditional textile ornamentation.
In recent years, the practice of the Jakarta-based collective ruangrupa has gained exceptional traction in the contemporary art world. The book How to Pin Down Smoke: ruangrupa since 2000, published in 2025 maps out the genealogy of the animated and complex ecosystem that ruangrupa has cultivated and which has shaped the trajectory of the group’s practice. Carlos Quijon, Jr talks to the volume’s editors to discuss their editorial processes and considerations.
Maya Varma: A lot of your work turns toward the lineages that shape Dalit life and knowledge. When you think about these histories, how do you understand the inheritances you’re carrying forward? What pasts are you in conversation with, and how do you imagine the canon you’re stepping into? Shrujana Niranjani Shridhar: I think we…
Maya Varma: To begin, I wanted to talk about where you come from. How has Mumbai shaped you as an activist and as an artist? What did the city mean to you growing up? Shrujana Niranjani Shridhar: For me, Mumbai has always been a working-class city. That’s its defining character. Any city that grows because people come…
Beyond formal schooling, Hanoi Children’s Palace extended socialist cultivation into leisure time, reverie, artistic endeavors, and sports training. More than simply school routine, rituals were designed to develop the body and mind of the “new socialist human,” laying the foundation for building socialism in post-independence Vietnam. Taking the ideological history, architecture, and uncertain future of the Children’s Palace as a point of departure within the city’s broader projection of the creative industries as a strategic force, the project sought to examine how the institution’s pedagogical inheritance persists within the textures of everyday life and socialist memory.
