When we speak of the Mekong, we are referring not only to a body of water, a river that runs approximately 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometers) from the Plateau of Tibet to the South China Sea, but also to a body of land, a region, a geography of nations interconnected by this shared artery. Traversing China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia before dispersing into the Mekong Delta in the southern reaches of Vietnam, the river materializes what is described as the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS). Today, the Mekong and the GMS signify a problem of intensifying scale, one woven together by material geography, political governance, development strategy, and climate change. As Anoulak Kittikhoun (former CEO of the Mekong River Commission) has observed, the Mekong operates as a transnational artery of exceptional consequence, sustaining regional economies through rice production and hydropower while remaining among the most intensively “interfered with” waterways in the world, shaped by uneven regimes of management and intervention from colonial hydrology schemes to contemporary dam infrastructures (fig. 1).¹ Alongside these technocratic and geopolitical frames, other epistemologies exist. 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.

This juxtaposition of the multiple ways in which the Mekong exists as a figure of signification and a lived site gestures to the distinctions one might draw, not uncomplicatedly, between regionalism and regionality. If “regionalism” denotes the institutional pursuit of collective, coordinated identity, “regionality” suggests the more tacit, shared, or parallel worldviews that surface in a contiguous topography. Art exhibitions can be driven by regionalist enterprise, aspiration, and strategy. Artworks as well. But perhaps artworks can reveal more about cross-border affinities and imaginations shaped by shared ecological conditions and practices of worldmaking. To pursue this question, I turn first to earlier curatorial uses of geographical metaphor before shifting from representation to perception through close readings of specific works.

In my 2013 essay “Metaphor as Method: Curating Regionalism in Mainland Southeast Asia,” I examined the ideological work performed by geographical metaphor through the curatorial construction of regional art histories.² Drawing from political geography and humanist spatial theory, I approached terms such as “Asia,” “the Mekong,” and “the Ho Chi Minh Trail” not as neutral toponyms but rather as charged conceptual frameworks through which space is transformed into place and endowed with political, cultural, and historical meaning.³ Because metaphor operates through transference, if not transformation, I examined how artist-organizers and curators mobilized it in the 1990s and 2000s, when institutions such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the Japan Foundation sponsored exhibitions and symposia to reify Southeast Asia’s regional integration. Focusing on mainland Southeast Asia, which lacks the linguistic and geographic cohesion often associated with maritime Southeast Asia, or “Nusantara,” I argued that “the Mekong” functioned as more than a cartographic fact. It can be understood instead as a palimpsest of competing historical imaginaries, from colonial fantasy and wartime violence to its 1990s rebranding as the Greater Mekong Subregion. As such, the river functioned less as metonym than as metaphor, registering the traces of cross-border histories through which the region has been materially and imaginatively constituted. 

Therefore, when curators invoked “the Mekong,” they were tapping into this deeply sedimented imagery. Exhibitions like the Mekong platform at the 6th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in 2009, co-curated by Richard Streitmatter-Tran and Russell Storer, attempted to lend coherence to a selection of artists from Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam. There, the riverine metaphor functioned conceptually and pragmatically, as a recognizable framework for international audiences, a rationale for artist selection, and a narrative scaffold for regional dialogue, articulated by Streitmatter-Tran as a “mutual Mekong.”⁴ Yet the presentation drew criticism for its exclusion of China, through which more than 40 percent of the river flows, leading one critic to accuse it of producing a simplified, appealing image of Southeast Asia that masked the region’s complex political and resource conflicts.⁵ If this critique exposed the limits of metaphor as curatorial gloss, the 2010 Long March Project: Ho Chi Minh Trail intensified these concerns.“⁶ By overlaying the geohistorical specificity of the Vietnam War’s Ho Chi Minh Trail with the Chinese Red Army’s Long March, the artist-organizers sought to mobilize metaphor as a method for transnational dialogue. However, in tense dialogues that surfaced during the project segment in Phnom Penh, local artists and organizers challenged the project’s extractive nature, its privileged jargon, and its failure to acknowledge the specificities of Cambodian history, ultimately foregrounding the asymmetries of exchange that can underwrite such ostensibly collaborative ventures.⁷

An emphasis on the curatorial can mute the agency of artworks, meriting a shift from the question of exhibition as regional representation to the operations of metaphor as artistic method. Metaphor is always already at the heart of what art does in terms of poetic estrangement and provocation, as Soviet literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky theorized.⁸ This prompts consideration of how contemporary artworks engage the temporal and tacit dimensions of regional imagination, in which metaphor is treated less as geographical anchor and more as material and structural condition. Case studies from the 2023 Thailand Biennale, specifically works by Apichatpong Weerasethakul (b. 1970, Thailand) and Nguyễn Trinh Thi (b. 1973, Vietnam), demonstrate how landscape, ecology, theater, sound, and automation produce shifting, often indeterminate metaphorical associations that resist narrative legibility (figs. 2, 3). In doing so, these works activate geographical metaphor as a process of defamiliarization and refamiliarization, evoking the Mekong as a multiplicity of lived realities and an unstable metaphor for futurity.

Before turning to the 2023 Thailand Biennale, it is useful to situate perceptions of the Mekong as a catalyst for cultural production. Gridthiya Gaweewong traces the lack of coherence in earlier subregional initiatives to their roots in top-down geopolitical and philanthropic frameworks shaped by Cold War alignments and transnational funding.⁹ Often conceived in metropolitan centers and realized in urban capitals, these projects cast the Mekong less as a lived site than as a symbolic vehicle for “collaboration” in the service of regional development, with local practitioners positioned as ancillary to externally authored narratives. This echoes Patrick Flores’s critique that curatorial regionalism presents a quandary in which regional actors may be reduced to informants rather than interlocutors.¹⁰ In response to limited local initiative and indifference among Thai artists toward neighboring scenes, Gaweewong pursued a more grounded approach inspired by Montien Boonma’s proposal for a community-based “art and life” project, developing the Mekong Lab.¹¹ Though constrained by early 2000s political and economic conditions, she argues such efforts helped shift the Mekong from retrospective metaphor to a site of contemporary artistic production; she notes, however, that as institutional exhibitions featuring the Mekong proliferated, grassroots initiatives declined due to diminishing sources of international funding, underscoring the fragility of regionally embedded practices.¹²

More than a decade later, the 2023 Thailand Biennale, titled The Open World, revisited the Mekong as both river and region (figs. 4, 5). Co-directed by Gridthiya Gaweewong and Rirkrit Tiravanija, and co-curated by Angkrit Ajchariyasophon and Manuporn Luengaram, the biennale featured exhibitions and works installed across Chiang Rai province in northernmost Thailand, with sites in the cities of Chiang Rai and Chiang Saen, and along the Mekong in the Golden Triangle (the riverine confluence of Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar). Addressing themes of ethnic and artistic diversity, narcopolitics, and transborder mobility, it was distinguished not only by its spatial dispersion but also by the visible investment of local communities, shaping its social infrastructure and prompting its characterization as a biennale “only for the locals.”¹³ Here, the Mekong was not mobilized as curatorial metaphor or developmental trope, but rather encountered as a material site and figure of transborder and subregional historical formation. Curatorial and artistic strategies emphasized shifts in scale from city to province to region, privileging geohistorical genealogies, such as Lanna and the Golden Triangle, over current national frameworks, and inviting a more dispersed, diachronic sense of regionality. Chiang Rai thus served as a generative location through an embedded yet shifting configuration of perspectives, rather than as a centralized historical framework, abstract provocation, or fixed vantage point.¹⁴ 

The 2023 Thailand Biennale thus demonstrates a shift in regional representation that has been gaining currency. While major exhibitions of “Southeast Asian art” have tended to represent the region as a syncretic assemblage of artists from ASEAN addressing national problems¹⁵, over the past two decades, artworks and films have increasingly turned to microhistories and human geography, foregrounding the Mekong’s precarity across environmental, infrastructural, and religious domains. Here, the river emerges as a medium through which different forms of agency are negotiated. In his book Mekong Dreaming (2020), anthropologist Andrew Alan Johnson describes dreaming as an agentic technology mediating human and nonhuman worlds and enabling riverine communities to navigate the disruptions of hydropower and environmental change and the legacies of historical violence, opening vistas onto “new realms of the unknown and unnamed.”¹⁶ For those who live alongside it, the Mekong is thus understood through a confluence of science and lore. At the same time, the river functions as a metaphor for precarious ecology and uncertain temporality—figuring a speculative nonlinear time that plays with ambiguous duration and already mourns possible futures. 

The moving image has most notably been used to represent the Mekong as both physical site and shifting signifier, using the multimodal capacities of the medium to register precarity, unknowability, and temporal flux. Two films commissioned for The Quiet in the Land: Luang Prabang, Laos (2004–8, curated by France Morin), exemplify this approach. In All That’s Solid Melts into Air (Karl Marx) (2006), Vong Phaophanit and Claire Oboussier destabilize visual primacy through an atmospheric interplay of sound, voice, and image, producing what I have described elsewhere as a “horizon of un-knowing” that privileges listening over sight.¹⁷ Similarly, in The Ground, the Root, and the Air: The Passing of the Bodhi Tree (2004–7), Jun Nguyễn-Hatsushiba stages collective, futile gestures along the river to evoke disorientation and temporal slippage, casting the Mekong as a horizon without fixed destination, using presentism and transience as allegories for globalization.¹⁸ This unsettling of expected riverine imagery is echoed by Phan Thảo Nguyễn (b. 1987, Vietnam) in the film Mekong Mechanical (2012), where the pastoral delta is supplanted by industrial repetition and agribusiness, refiguring the river as a site of labor and environmental degradation, and the oneiric factory setting a site where personal and collective pipe dreams collide. Film theorist May Adadol Ingawanij observes how in Phan’s later film Becoming Alluvium (2019), the Mekong is revisited through a humanist, mythologizing framework, its “eco-aesthetics” rendering the Mekong’s cosmological and regenerative force, and interweaving cyclical and linear temporalities to position the river as both maternal and destructive.¹⁹ 

Other recent filmic projects have similarly explored the Mekong’s temporal currents, prompting “Mekong Futurism” as a potential shorthand.²⁰ Even if the naming of another regional futurism risks romanticization, projects like Mekong 2030 (2020), an omnibus of short films produced by the former Luang Prabang Film Festival, demonstrate the productive complexity of such speculative approaches. Bringing together filmmakers from across the region, Mekong 2030 taps into the draw of imagining possible futures.²¹ The resulting films range in tone from the allegorical and didactic to the lyrical and experimental, such as The Unseen River (2020) by Phạm Ngọc Lân (b. 1986, Vietnam), in which the Mekong becomes a metaphor for reversible flows of time, carrying regret, aspiration, and spiritual transformation through both narrative and cinematic form (fig. 6).²²

Phạm’s approach resists the techno-fetishism often associated with futurism, instead foregrounding more subtle constructions of riverine imaginaries. This reverts to the closing note of my earlier essay, which concludes with an alternative model of signification employed by the Reyum Institute of Arts and Culture (est. 1998) in Phnom Penh, as discussed by Ashley Thompson.²³ Reflecting on the untranslated Khmer word reyum (“cicada crying/singing”), Thompson describes it as a “present absence,” an inarticulate sonic trace of loss that resists translation.²⁴ In this sense, reyum operates as a culturally specific sonic metaphor. Rather than seeking external legibility, it focuses on local address as an affective and meaningful evocation that may suggest inarticulable loss, but also a regional cadence of cyclical, seasonal time measured by insect song. 

Along these lines, two artworks featured at the 2023 Thailand Biennale—Blue Encore (2023) by Apichatpong Weerasethakul (b. 1970, Thailand) and Ri s̄eīyng (Sound-Less, 2023) by Nguyễn Trinh Thi (b. 1973, Vietnam)—reveal something similar about the Mekong and metaphor. Focusing on their use of technology and theatricality, I question how one might infer a sense of regional identification from the artists’ visualization and auralization of landscape and ecology. The two artists are renowned as filmmakers, yet while these projects extend their cinematic trajectories, the works contain no filmic components. And in contrast to the works just discussed, the Mekong as region and river is visually elusive but not without some mimetic trace. What is most compelling here is how metaphor operates less as subject matter than as the technological, temporal, and atmospheric structures of the works themselves. 

Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s stories are typically set in the northeastern Isan region of Thailand, where animist cosmologies collapse boundaries between human, nonhuman, and spiritual realms. Informed by firsthand encounters with the Mekong’s ecological crises during projects such as Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010), he incorporates these conditions and regional mythologies into works like For Tomorrow For Tonight (2011) and Mekong Hotel (2012).²⁵ A recurring motif is sleep, which functions not only as narrative device but also as a medium of sociopolitical and perceptual transformation, akin to Johnson’s arguments about Mekong dreaming. In these liminal states, characters inhabit nonlinear temporalities marked by memory, rebirth, and the unresolved traces of political violence—what Ingawanij describes as the “stranded temporality” of post–Cold War Thailand.²⁶ For Weerasethakul, this threshold between sleep and waking becomes a generative space: “Dreams are very important to me, because a dream is like a movie, an illusion. It defies time and space. A dream is like another life recurring.”²⁷

Weerasethakul’s Blue series—comprising the 2018 film Blue, the 2022 film and performance collaboration On Blue, and the 2023 installation Blue Encore—suggests a dreamscape constituted by restless slumber. In Blue (2018), a woman lapses between sleep and wakefulness in a nighttime forest setting in which a painted theater backdrop unfurls to alternate between two landscapes: one a sunset on the water and the other a royal palace courtyard. As translucent flames slowly spread from the woman’s torso to engulf her recumbent body, and then her surroundings, the screen continues to spool and unspool, the movement and squeaking sound of the pulley punctuating a relentless rhythm even as the fire spreads to consume the dreamscape (fig. 7). On Blue (2022), created with composer Rafiq Bhatia, reimagines the earlier film and synthesizes it with a live, orchestral performance. As Weerasethakul describes: “On Blue was inspired by the moments of awakening, of sunrise. As uncertainty becomes the norm, I treasure this phenomenon’s consistency. It’s predictable yet brings tremendous change.”²⁸ 

 Blue Encore (2023), the third iteration in the series Blue, was presented at the 2023 Thailand Biennale. The installation comprised curtains printed with landscape paintings by Chiang Rai artists and set along the perpendicular walls of a classroom in a former primary school that is now a Buddhist community center. In Blue Encore, Weerasethakul withholds any filmic elements to physically literalize the moving image, creating a stage in which automated curtains expand and contract along walls and windows, the fabric flowing against the ground. The moving panels set organic form against geometry in choreographed animation and in perpetual interaction with the atmospherics of light and dust particles as daylight fluctuates. The movement of curtains traditionally marks spatial and temporal boundaries in theater, creating the illusion of a self-contained world and facilitating unnatural shifts through time and place via the setting of scene. Curtains play a similar role in cinema, opening and closing on the screen to cue the beginning and end of the audience’s release into spectatorship. In Blue Encore, Weerasethakul defamiliarizes the theatrical curtain as it has been naturalized through theater’s hypnotic effects and conflates the scene/screen with the curtain, or the work with its frame. Like the actions of the unspooling theater backdrop in Blue, the automated movements of the curtains are both dramatic and anticlimactic, performing without a narrative logic, their only seeming purpose to reveal the pictures on the painted fabric as they stretch to their full expanse. 

 Two of the panels feature rural landscapes painted by artists from Chiang Rai, a community of artists that Weerasethakul describes as local “impressionists” (fig. 8).²⁹ The third panel appears saturated in vibrant shades of blue, evoking water or some kind of aquatic abstraction, particularly against the green and brown classroom walls. Water and land thus appear to meet, overlap, and retreat from each other in a set sequence of slow and repeated mechanized actions that may test the viewer’s patience. Through the specific choice of landscape painting, they also conjure regional metaphors specific to Chiang Rai and the installation’s setting in Chiang Saen, a town and site of an ancient city located on the west bank of the Mekong River bordering Laos. 

As W. J. T. Mitchell has argued, landscapes have long been instrumentalized for ideological projection, whether as the dreamwork of imperialism or as metaphor for social order.³⁰ There is a dense web of national—and regional—art historical associations signified by the painterly style of these images and the audiences for whom they are intended.³¹ The paintings capture the modern rural idyll, bucolic but not without technological affordance, that is cyclically unveiled and contracted. The painted rural landscape as familiar visual and commercial stock presents itself theatrically and strangely—both as a physical and a symbolic one, and as a literal moving image, on curtains that frame the physical site itself as something to be revealed and looked at in a new way. The defunct primary school turned gathering place for Buddhist learning and social outreach is now activated as a scene and microhistory, as well as a metaphor for community, hope, and slow renewal. The repetition of the curtain’s movements thus engenders a recursive presentation of site within site, landscape within landscape, metaphor within metaphor, image and place as one—familiar and yet unfamiliar to audiences experiencing them as such within Weerasethakul’s installation.

Weerasethakul finds assurance in the measured repetition of programmed movement, replicating the predictable cycle of solar movement that organizes our experience of time regardless of the pace of change that happens around us. But in Vietnamese artist and filmmaker Nguyễn Trinh Thi’s Ri s̄eīyng (a Thai word that translates as “soundless” or “voiceless”), presented at Haw Kham (a wooden structure that once served as a royal residence and is now a museum of Lanna art), she uses instrumental sound to index the opposite: the unpredictable flux of water levels in the Mekong River that are a result of anthropocenic environmental change. In Ri s̄eīyng, deconstructed xylophones (ranat ek) and reed instruments (khaen) play automated musical chords coded to data gathered by water sensors in the Mekong River (fig. 9). Like Nguyễn’s previous work, And they die a natural death (2022), at documenta fifteen, the work has been metaphorized as theater—live, improvisational, musical, atmospheric—coproduced with nonhuman actors via environmental biofeedback mechanisms (fig. 10). While informed by environmental activism around hydropower and river modification, Ri s̄eīyng extends Nguyễn’s artistic praxis from earlier films such as Letters from Panduranga (2015), which uses epistolary narration to question ocularcentrism and recalibrate authorial voice, to films that explore the aural ecologies of highland communities in Vietnam (How to Improve the World, 2021), toward the predominant commitment to sound that has characterized her recent projects.³² Across her works, relationality is increasingly articulated through cut and soundtrack, centering auditory fields over image, and in her recent installations, the listener becomes part of an autonomous system of attunement between objects, space, and sound. 

For Nguyễn, the musical notes in Ri s̄eīyng represent collaboration, based on the ways in which Indigenous musicians compose music. As she describes: “One thing that I have learned from observing Indigenous communities across Vietnam play their instruments—and which have been incorporated in both installations at documenta and the Thailand Biennale—is that each person plays only one note on a single instrument. In contrast to the individualist figure of the Western composer, Indigenous music players cannot create melodies by themselves. This requires them to listen to one another and orchestrate their tunes collectively. I find this a compelling metaphor for community building; only when a balance between manifestations of the ego and collective coordination is reached can music be created.”³³

The installation in Chiang Rai also plays with signifying operations that may seem to contend with one another: index and metaphor. Sound is an index here; it traces and measures the river, translating its biodata into a nonhuman musical field. Metaphor then serves as a tool for the listener to link the sounds with conceptual imagery. The question here is what metaphors are invoked by the index, or the musical chords generated by the percussive and wind instruments. They render a soundscape and a cultural imagination that points back to its regional source—the river. Soundscape is traditionally understood as that which is produced by the atmospherics of a physical place (a form of ethnographic acoustic document) but can also construct the idea of a place and its culture. Ri s̄eīyng invokes aural familiarity through singular instrumental notes instead of recognizable compositional patterns; it does not attempt to reinforce the concept of a unified regional music, rather, it sounds out instruments that are widespread and go by different names throughout the Mekong region, especially in Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. Even the names of specific instruments in Thai or Lao contain metaphoric dimensions embedded in concepts of music-making that suggest passage between worlds and dream encounters.³⁴ As such, in Ri s̄eīyng these sounds indexically and metaphorically point to the Mekong and its associated imaginations.

In conclusion, the trajectory of metaphor—from a curatorial shorthand for regional cohesion to an artistic method probing the tacit and temporal—signals a shift in imagining mainland Southeast Asia. The artworks of Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Nguyễn Trinh Thi do not simply represent the Mekong region but likewise suggest its contemporary associations (such as the nonlinear flow of time, precarity, dreaming) through their very material and temporal constitutions. Blue Encore’s recursive theatricality and Ri s̄eīyng’s indexical soundscape foreground a regionality constituted not through geopolitical definitions but instead through image, sound, environment, and automation. They shift toward abstraction to offer more sensorial, sited, and opaque forms of representing place.

This essay benefited from feedback at MoMA C-MAP Southeast and East Asia, Yale Council on Southeast Asian Studies, NYU Institute of Fine Arts, and LASALLE College of the Arts; I am grateful to Carlos Quijon, Jr., Erik Harms, Joan Kee, Francis Maravillas, and Jeffrey Say for enabling those exchanges. I also thank Alexander Cannon for his musicological insights into the Mekong region.

The post Mekong and Metaphor: Contemporary Art and Regionality in Southeast Asia appeared first on post.

The Ford Foundation declined the grant. But beyond its paternalism and its questionable assumptions about African art, Rubin’s letter reveals something more consequential. The phrase “airport art” was not Rubin’s invention; it was McEwen’s term, and one he had been actively cultivating through the 1960s as both a warning and a sales strategy—a way to stake the Workshop School, his own in-house training program and production, against a looming tourist market.² Rubin learned the label from McEwen, and he deployed it here exactly as intended: to rule that this work was not that. In doing so, Rubin did more than offer aesthetic approval. He effectively ratified the very distinction McEwen had been working to enforce in order to promote the output of his Rhodesian Workshop School.

That distinction soon became certified by Western institutions. In 1968, sculptures from McEwen’s workshop began their world tour when they were shipped to New York; classified at customs “for exhibition purposes”; and insured, warehoused, and circulated by MoMA for two years across American universities and museums under the title New African Art: The Central African Workshop School. They were exhibited—and they were sold by MoMA. Within a few years, Zimbabwean stone sculpture, often labeled “Shona sculpture,” had become one of the most visible and commercially successful contemporary art movement from the African continent in Europe and the United States.³

This essay argues that the difference between what came to be known as “airport art” and “Shona sculpture” was neither simply rhetorical nor aesthetic. It was a matter of infrastructural control. In Salisbury (now Harare), production, pricing, exhibition, and sales were initially concentrated in a single institutional hub—the National Gallery and its Workshop School. When that hub was extended through MoMA’s circulating exhibitions apparatus, the circuit widened without becoming decentralized. In this system, authenticity was not the opposite of hybridity; it was the language that secured it. Together, these terms stabilized both aesthetic and financial value across the full chain of making, circulation, and display.

The Salisbury Hub: Concentrating Production, Distribution, and Display

Rubin repeats McEwen’s phrase as if it were already common sense. That is exactly the point. By the mid-1960s, “airport art” had moved from Salisbury into international discourse, in many ways thanks to Frank McEwen’s efforts. In his writings on the National Gallery of Salisbury and its Workshop School, McEwen began defining a foil against which his project could take shape. By the time of the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar in 1966, the phrase had entered a broader discourse.⁴ What began as polemic was becoming a shared diagnostic for the state of contemporary African culture.⁵

McEwen’s own definition was deliberately provocative. “Tourist art trade,” he wrote, is governed by “a base commercialization [that] controls the mass production of thousands of shiny wooden pseudo-African images. Lathes, calipers, sanders, polishers help exploit this form of art prostitution that tourists support.”⁶ The rhetoric was accompanied by photographs: sculptures cramped together on small tables, lined up in repetitive rows, and thereby stripped of aura and individuality (figs. 2, 3). The imagery did as much work as the words. Airport art was congestion, mechanical repetition, excess supply.

For McEwen, the problem was not just that artists were “heavily exploited” by middlemen, the deeper danger was epistemic.⁷ Tourist demand, he argued, had begun to dictate supply and corrupt vision. Airport art described an entire infrastructure that allowed the market to speak too directly.

McEwen’s key move in 1963 was that he framed the Workshop School less as a romantic enclave and more as a local counter-infrastructure “to develop a whole cycle of effective art production and protection.”⁸ This cycle involved gatekeeping talent, standardizing materials, reinforcing the pedagogical myth of non-teaching, creating “an international market . . . on itinerant exhibitions,” and having a strict “sales policy.”⁹ Crucially, McEwen was not trying to eliminate the market; rather, he was trying to own the market interface (selection, narrative, and placement) so that tourist demand could not directly sculpt form and category. Under McEwen’s tutelage, production, exhibition, pricing, and distribution were brought under one institutional roof, functioning simultaneously as studio complex, exhibition venue, marketing apparatus, and gatekeeper.

Artists were initially invited to work in proximity to the museum or on its premises, but they were not independent entrepreneurs. The National Gallery took a percentage of sales—initially around 50 percent—and retained authority over pricing and selection.¹⁰ Those who did not meet the aesthetic and commercial expectations would lose access to studio space.¹¹ Whatever its self-proclaimed laissez-faire pedagogy of “teachers who do not teach,” the system was tightly managed.

The crucial difference between airport art and what McEwen promoted as Zimbabwean “Shona sculpture” thus lay in the control of commerce. In McEwen’s National Gallery, production was centralized, exhibition carefully staged, pricing disciplined, and distribution mediated through a single hub. Tourist demand could not directly address the artist, now shielded in “quarry-factories” like Vukutu hundreds of miles away from the site of display (fig. 4). The National Gallery did not reject the market, it filtered it.

MoMA as Transnational Extension

If Salisbury concentrated production, pricing, and exhibition under one roof, MoMA scaled that structure when the sculptures arrived in New York. Indeed, the Museum translated McEwen’s hub into an institutional system of customs classification, valuation, touring logistics, and controlled sales.

In February 1968, six crates weighing more than 3,100 pounds arrived in the United States. As one internal memo to Rubin put it, “[McEwen] has had over 300 sculptures shipped here from Rhodesia, mainly to get them out of the country.”¹² In fact, timing mattered: The shipment arrived just months before Rhodesian exports faced an intensified embargo due to its apartheid regime.¹³ To enable the import, MoMA’s staff did more than process paperwork. Through letters from Waldo Rasmussen (Director of the Department of Circulating Exhibitions) and William Rubin, the works were imported under tariff item number 765.2000 and 765.0300, allowing the Museum to pay as little as $55 import duty on freight that it had insured for over $50,000.

The reason for the tariff exemption is twofold: For one, Rasmussen made clear in his letter to the customs officials that the shipment was only for “for exhibition purposes.”¹⁴ On paper, they were loans. In practice, however, they were also inventory for sale. On the other hand, William Rubin’s letter to the customs officials added, somewhat laconically, “These [sculptures] are serious, and in most cases, very good works of art which should not be in the least confused with ‘ethnic’ craft objects of the type sometimes produced outside the centers of Western art.”¹⁵ Customs, in other words, did not merely facilitate border crossing, it contributed to the sharpening of aesthetic policing. The import process became a site where “serious art” was administratively distinguished from its contemporary others—whether labeled “ethnic” craft or dismissed as “airport art.”

From customs, the exhibition entered MoMA’s Circulating Exhibitions apparatus, where Rasmussen’s department created the tour package: a title, a brochure, press material, and sales documentation.¹⁶ The title—New African Art: The Central African Workshop School—was itself a strategic distortion. It redirected attention away from Southern Africa and Rhodesia, names increasingly associated in the US media with the violence of white minority rule, and toward a safer, generalized geography of “new” and “Central African.”

The brochure text had a double function here, producing individuality and collectivity at once. For one, it individuated the sculptors: Each artist is named (alphabetically), with a birth year and a place of work, alongside title and medium. These biographical coordinates establish them as authors in contrast to their “airport art” competitors. On another, the same brochure folds those authors back into a collective identity. McEwen’s heavily shortened text supplies a developmental narrative that converts these artists into a single “school.” They are cast as “deeply immersed” in folklore, ritual, and “magic” then mapped in a staged progression—from “adult-child art,” through “heavy primitivism” and a “pre-Columbian” phase, “before achieving personal sophistication.”¹⁷ Strongly reminiscent of narratives around Pablo Picasso’s creation of Cubism, the result is a familiar modernist story of maturation and refinement, one that renders stylistic change legible as individual aesthetic progress—while making “the Workshop School” appear as the shared engine behind the individual authors.

The brochure also standardizes formal looking, making sure that viewers will notice the same sculpture’s features. It identifies recurring elements—enlarged heads, frontal poses, vertical emphasis, “relaxed tension,” and integrated bases—while treating variation as local content (“spirit images”) within a shared visual grammar.¹⁸ The point was not only to describe the sculptures, but also to stabilize what would count as their defining qualities as the objects moved from venue to venue.

Where text and image reinforced that stabilization, pricing gave it teeth. The brochure circulated alongside a price list and other sales materials for prospective buyers (fig. 5), and the price schedule tracks the implicit hierarchy more closely than it does medium or scale. Most works cluster around roughly $350, suggesting a baseline “serious sculpture” price, while the upper tier appears reserved for artists positioned as more “advanced.”

Joram Mariga’s Universal Spirit (n.d.) sits at the top of the list at $811, consistent with his status in the literature as an early catalyst for stone carving.¹⁹ Next come Bernard Manyandure’s Traditional Dancing (n.d.), one of the largest works in the exhibition, and Vaisi (Vais) Chimange’s Frog-man Spirit (n.d.), both priced at $679 (fig. 6). Chimange is especially instructive: Born in Mozambique, only 24, and a recent entrant to stone carving, he complicated any simple equation of “sophistication” with age and made “Shona” a shaky explanatory anchor for the categories being built around the work. At the low end, Kitela’s Head ($275; fig. 7)—a medium-size brown steatite sculpture not dramatically smaller than Chimange’s and carved in the same material. Embodying neither the vertical emphasis nor relaxed tension, its price suggests that quality was assessed according to ranked authorship and McEwen’s formal criteria more than medium or dimensions.

Photographs for prospective buyers staged the works outdoors—including images implying MoMA’s sculpture garden, even though they were never exhibited there as if to suggest to install it outside after acquisition (fig. 8).²⁰ Similarly, the cover of the brochure depicts the sculptures placed on tree trunks, highlighting verticality in a setting that would have read to many viewers like it read to Rubin, namely as “the bush” (fig. 9). These choices did quiet work: They suggested origin, authenticity, and installability at the same time, while keeping the objects visually distinct from more commercial environments.

The exhibition traveled to eight venues across the United States, typically staying three to four weeks at each stop. University galleries and museums paid fees scaled to institutional status between $100 and $500 in addition to covering the shipping fees. Pedestals were fabricated. Sculptures were drilled for stability. Condition reports tracked chips and cracks; repairs were ordered; damage was evaluated against insured value. This was not incidental administration. It was the material infrastructure that allowed the works to circulate as “serious sculpture” within a curated circuit.

Throughout the tour, the works remained available for purchase. MoMA took a 10 percent commission on sales, with an additional $30 markup on objects requiring plinths.²¹ Administratively, the objects could be filed as loans. Functionally, they operated as managed inventory: curated, toured, and sold through institutional mediation. Demand did not speak directly to the sculptor but with the Department of Circulating Exhibitions; it was filtered through a system designed to buffer the feedback loops McEwen feared. The central hub in Salisbury was geographically displaced but structurally preserved.

In this mediation, MoMA assumed multiple roles simultaneously: It was customs broker, classifying the works to ensure favorable entry. It was insurer, establishing and revising monetary value. It was warehouse manager, responsible for storage and handling. It was touring coordinator, structuring the itinerary and institutional framing. It was commissioned seller. And above all, it was validator.

Press responses suggest the system worked as intended. Reviews repeatedly echoed the brochure’s language and interpretive frame: formal traits (enlarged head, verticality, “relaxed tension”) and claims of cultural isolation, folklore, and “ancient” heritage.²² In one instance, a local art history department chair even went on the record, lending his institutional authority to repeat the brochure almost verbatim.²³ Meaning traveled as reliably as the crates did.

Hybridity, Formal Coherence, and the Historiography of Stone Sculpture

Across the primary and secondary literature, stone sculpture is typically organized through two overlapping sets of divisions: institutional centers and origin stories. On the one hand, survey accounts map the movement onto parallel, if not competing, hubs—most commonly McEwen’s National Gallery/Workshop School lineage and the Tengenenge farm under Tom Blomefield. On the other hand, revisionist histories redivide the field genealogically: Instead of an ex nihilo “Shona” flowering, they trace stone carving to earlier mission-based pedagogies (Cyrene and Serima) and then to a dispersed first generation whose biographies cluster by region (Cyrene, Serima, Harare, Nyanga, Tengenenge).²⁴

My argument sits adjacent to (and slightly orthogonal to) the standard poles of the debate. Jonathan Leslie Zilberg’s influential formulation treats “Shona sculpture” as an engineered tradition, one shaped by McEwen’s intellectual templates and by intercultural traffic rather than ethnic continuity.²⁵ Later work complicates that account by reasserting artists’ agency and the thick reality of belief and training—whether through interview-based cultural contextualization and patronage analysis (Celia Winter-Irving and Elizabeth A. Morton), anthropological emphasis on identity-making and customary continuities (Joseph James Kinsella), or revisionist re-centering of African artist-teachers and system-level causality (Barnabas Muvhuti).²⁶ I add to this conversation a third term: “circulatory infrastructure as a generator of form.” Rather than adjudicating whether aesthetic form originates in indigenous “spirit” or modernist “invention,” I treat form as the repeatable outcome of touring, insurance, photography, installation standardization, and market buffering. What looks like “style” is also a set of solutions to photography, packing, customs, insurance, reinstallation, and sale—an aesthetic that crystallized under the economic discipline of circulation.

The features most frequently highlighted by McEwen and the press make this clear. Frontality is not only a compositional preference, it is also is a media strategy. A frontal figure reproduces cleanly in brochures and newspapers and remains legible at a glance—especially when reduced to black-and-white halftone. The claim that the stand is built into the sculpture similarly functions as both ontology and logistics: It renders the work self-sufficient while making it easy to install, reinstall, and stabilize across changing venues. Scale performs as portable monumentality—large enough to command a pedestal, compact enough to fit predictable crate dimensions and touring schedules. Material decisions—shifts toward harder serpentine and granite—also read differently when paired with documentation: Durability reduces loss and repair; the rarity of hard stone supports “anti-fake” branding; and a stable material profile simplifies valuation and insurance. McEwen’s much-emphasized polished surfaces became an interface between form and paperwork: Finish registers as quality in photographs and can be described, compared, and verified in condition reports. Verticality, often treated as purely expressive, can be understood as another touring form. Upright figures maximize presence while minimizing footprint: They store efficiently, stabilize easily on pedestals, and hold a crisp silhouette under varied lighting conditions.

The installation photograph from the West Virginia University Gallery iteration makes the infrastructural logic visible (fig. 10). The works are dispersed across pedestals and a curved platform, each isolated by dramatic lighting into a discrete, readable unit. Nothing relies on a complex environment or contextual explanation; each object is made to “hold” its own display conditions—self-supporting, immediately legible, and resistant to visual noise. Even the museum’s standardized tools (track lights, plinths, open sight lines) seem anticipated by the sculptures’ compact massing and restrained protrusions.

Seen as a whole, the story is less about stylistic evolution than it is about a value chain that continuously converts risk into form and form into value. McEwen’s Salisbury hub concentrated production, selection, pricing, and narrative; MoMA extended that hub transnationally by translating “seriousness” into customs categories, insurance schedules, touring contracts, installations, commission-based sales, and the press. “Shona sculpture” operated as a circuit in which authenticity rhetoric and modernist legibility worked together to make circulation profitable without appearing commercial. Once the chain was visible end to end, formal traits stopped reading as timeless cultural signatures and began to register as logistical achievements: frontality that photographs, integrated bases that reinstall, vertical silhouettes that pedestal and pack, hard stone and polish that insure and reproduce. This is not to cast Zimbabwean sculptors as passive outputs of a system, but to mark the conditions within which they made decisions—navigating, negotiating, and at times exploiting the constraints and opportunities of touring, documentation, and sale—as part of their artistic practice. As Bernard Takawira, who was only 20 years old at the time of the exhibition and would later become one of its most internationally successful participants, put it: “Sculpting is not a train station: It is the journey itself.”²⁷ Modern art here is not a look so much as a route—made in and through the conditions of circulation.

Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders for Figures 2 and 3 in this article. If you hold the rights to any of the material used and have not been contacted, please reach out to contact_c-map@moma.org so that proper credit can be attributed or the material removed.

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To begin with, I want to stay with the title.¹ All of its terms are plural, and this matters. My concerns are not the singular, canonical, capital H History or the capital A, capital H Art History—the forms of knowledge claimed by the state or by national narratives, academic institutions, market logics, or whatever capital is able to extract value from them. Histories, convivialities, art practices: These are multiple, distributed, often contradictory, and they don’t require elaborate justification in the context of what I want to unfold here.

The idea of conviviality that I often return to comes from Paul Gilroy, a theorist of race and racism whose work continues to shape how we understand coexistence in postimperial worlds. Gilroy uses “conviviality” not as a slogan or a more cheerful synonym for multiculturalism, but to describe how people in postimperial cities actually live with difference: the ordinary, improvisational mess of everyday life. People who, despite long histories of race, empire, and inequality, still find ways to eat together, borrow sugar, share the same streets, laugh at the same jokes. He is drawn to those small negotiations—those moments in which what might have divided people (language, skin, faith, memory) ends up coexisting with what they share: a bus ride, a football team, the weather, the city itself.²

When Gilroy’s book first appeared in Britain, it was titled After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture?—a diagnosis of a nation unable to let go of its imperial past. But when it crossed the Atlantic to the United States, the title was quietly changed. Columbia University Press published it as Postcolonial Melancholia.³ “Empire” disappeared. “Convivial culture” was deemed too cheerful, too opaque, perhaps too British. Instead, “melancholia”—the mood of something lost but not admitted—fit the American atmosphere of the early 2000s. This was the period after 9/11, when the United States was in the thick of the “War on Terror” and attempting to police the world while insisting it wasn’t an empire. The new title spoke to that anxiety: a grief that follows power but refuses to name itself.⁴

Gilroy was, of course, writing about postimperial Britain, where the residues of empire cling to everyday encounters—in accents, in skin, in smell, in gesture. And yet he observed how, despite all of this, people still manage to live side by side: joking, arguing, sharing food, improvising a common life out of uneven materials. This, for Gilroy, is conviviality. Not harmony, but the practice of staying with differences. And it is this practice—with all its messiness, its harshness, its in-your-face realities, its tragedies and anxieties and dramas, and its inseparability from humor, generosity, kindness, and the continuous effort to make not just a life but a livable environment for oneself and for others—that resonates so deeply with the archipelago now known as the Republic of Indonesia. A place where coexistence has long been ordinary and difficult at once, where differences are not exceptions but conditions of life.⁵

Allow me to briefly outline what I mean by “modern Indonesia.” I do not mean a tidy timeline or a national story one finds in textbooks. I mean something provisional: the ongoing, unfinished effort of learning how to live together across differences—ethnic, linguistic, religious, ecological—and under changing regimes of power and imagination. This definition is not final, and it will never become final. It is subjective and temporal, crafted for the purposes of this moment, and one I would likely contest in another conversation. But it is a starting point—a way to think about how conviviality, histories, and art practices intersect in this archipelago and its many modernities.

Let’s say that the “modern Indonesia” began around 1908, with the Sumpah Pemuda—the Youth Pledge.⁶ The moment when Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian) was declared a unifying language across the archipelago that was colonized by the Dutch. It is important to note that even today, Bahasa Indonesia is the first “foreign” language most Indonesians learn in school. More than 700 languages continue to be spoken across the archipelago; for most people, one or two of these remain their mother tongue—some of the languages have their own scripts, their own cosmologies, their own epistemologies of the world.

The decision to adopt Bahasa Indonesia as a unifying language, the way I see it, was an invitation—not a solution or a magic key. It was a proposal for an experiment in speaking and being together across islands, tongues, and lifeworlds. Around this same period, in the arts, painters such as Wakidi (1889–1979), Abdullah Suriosubroto (1878–1941), and Mas Pirngadi (c. 1878–1979) were producing the mooi-indie (beautiful Indies) landscapes—colonial-era images of ordered nature, picturesque tranquility, and the comfort of distance. By the 1940s, other forms began to surface: the untamed figures of Emiria Sunassa (1894–1964)⁷, the expressive sculptures Tridjoto Abdullah (1917–1989)⁸—gestures that argued, questioned, and refused to remain fixed within the available vocabularies. What, then, begins to shift in these works? Is it a matter of representation, or something else—perhaps a reconfiguration of relation, of subjecthood, of how bodies and environments hold one another? I will now introduce you to two of Emiria’s works that I have encountered and (re)staged. Even as they appear here within exhibition space, these figures do not fully settle into the distance of representation. They retain a proximity that resists being reduced to image alone.

A male figure poised in mid-action. His archer’s bow drawn, body leaning back, muscles taut as he prepares to release an arrow. His dark-toned skin is accentuated by ornaments—large earrings, a feathered headdress, and a red sash at his waist. He stands within an environment dominated by the enormous vivid pink and red lotus leaves and blossoms that are blooming around him. The contrast between the earthy tones of the archer’s body enveloped in a dense vegetal field and the saturated hues of the lotus flowers creates a heightened sense of drama.

Emiria often painted figures from across the archipelago—from Balinese and Tidoreans to Dayaks, Bugis, Papuans, Javanese, and Sundanese—but here the figure’s identity is imagined, a creation of the artist’s vision. The surreal scale of the lotus plants transforms the scene into a suspended, almost mystical moment. Painted around 1941–46, during the final years of colonial rule and the dawn of Indonesia’s independence, the work conjures questions of identity, perception, and the Other, framing a human presence within a lush, dreamlike world on the threshold of a history in the making.⁹

A female figure from Sulawesi. But let’s talk a bit about Emiria in around 1910–20. She entered Jakarta’s artistic and political circles in the 1940s and 1950s. Before then, she was remembered otherwise. Oral accounts suggest she was identified not as a princess of Tidore but rather as Emmy Pareira (a Minahasan woman from the Manoppo-Pareira clan), who was raised in Manado and educated in Christian missionary schools. In the mid-1910s, she and one of her sisters were known as musicians—a pianist and singer, respectively—who performed in Dutch society circles in Ternate and, briefly, in Europe (1914–15). There she went by the name “Sunny.” Later, in the 1920s, she described herself as a “girl from the East” who was studying Dalcroze eurhythmics (a musical pedagogy based on body movement) in Brussels and Vienna.¹⁰

In the late 1940s, art schools began to open, bringing Western curricular structures. What is now the Institut Teknologi Bandung (ITB) was established as the Technische Hoogeschool te Bandoeng in 1920 under Dutch colonial administration. After independence, its art-related programs developed within this technical and pedagogical lineage, eventually forming the Faculty of Art and Design in 1984.¹¹ Meanwhile, the Institut Seni Indonesia—Yogyakarta (the first of its kind, now replicated across the archipelago) emerged from a series of institutions founded by nationalist artists—many left-leaning and largely self-taught—including ASRI (Indonesia Academy of Fine Arts, 1950)¹², ASDRAFI (Indonesia Drama and Film Academy), and AMI (Indonesia Music Academy). One might expect that this Yogyakarta group of founders—known for critiquing their predecessors’ idealized depictions of Indonesia in the style of colonial painters—would create a curriculum of their own. Mind you, they did not. The Jogja art school, too, adopted a Western structure and orientation. What is now the Institut Kesenian Jakarta (IKJ), which only formed in the late 1970s, is perhaps the only one that openly stated its grounding in the approaches of Santiniketan.¹³ Yet even there, the national education system surrounding it remained thoroughly Western in design, imagination, and form.

This quick sketch of these schools—their differences, their genealogies—is meant to show that the “modern” in Indonesia was never singular. With their establishment, people’s sense of what counted as “high art” shifted from wayang and temple reliefs toward painting, sculpture, and other forms taught in majority art schools all over the Western world. But the older forms never vanished. As long as they remained functional within their communities, they continued to circulate, inspire, and complicate any neat narrative of artistic progress. 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.

Another example, from a different time, might help to make this more tangible. These are images I often return to—of artworks and people being with them. Not just looking, but talking, pointing, laughing, pausing. There is curiosity there as well as a kind of ease. A willingness to stay with the work, and with one another, without needing to resolve anything too quickly. If we stay a little longer within these situations of looking, certain works begin to hold our attention differently. Not as examples of a period, but as presences that gather and redistribute how people stand, point, speak, and remain.

The first photograph was taken within As if there is no sun, an exhibition that was part of the 58th Carnegie International: Is it morning for you yet? in Pittsburgh (2022).¹⁴ The other is from a more recent exhibition at Gajah Gallery in Yogyakarta titled Kebebasan Manusia Perasa (Freedom of the Sentient Beings, 2025).¹⁵ Research-wise, the latter extends the former, continuing Hyphen—’s inquiry into the practices, rhythms, and daily worlds of mid-twentieth-century painters often left out of national and mainstream narratives. Both titles are not newly coined.¹⁶ They arrive from writings produced alongside the works themselves—from observers of their own time. In this sense, the exhibitions do not simply look back. They carry forward ways of sensing that were already in circulation, allowing them to meet the present again.

In the photograph from the Carnegie, one such work draws a more focused kind of engagement: Two viewers stand close to it; one points toward the lower part of the canvas, the other follows. The gesture is small, but it reorganizes the encounter. Attention narrows, slows, becomes directed. The painting is not simply seen; it is entered into through another’s indication. In her painting Aku Hamil (I’m Pregnant, 1962), Kartika (born 1934) presents her own body turning slightly away, even as her gaze meets ours. The interior around her—chairs, a hanging lamp, a smaller portrait—recedes unevenly, as if space itself is unsettled. Objects gather in her hand and scatter at her feet. The palette presses rather than opens: yellows, greens, ochers that feel closer to density than light. What is held here is not immediately shareable. The painting does not clarify itself; it withholds, or perhaps more precisely, it concentrates.

And yet, in the photograph, this interiority does not remain closed. It is approached collectively—through pointing, through conversation, through the act of showing something to another. What might otherwise remain singular becomes partially held in common. Not fully understood, not resolved, but shared enough to sustain an encounter. If conviviality names the practice of living with difference, then this moment suggests that such practice does not depend on transparency. It can also be built around what resists easy articulation—around forms of sensing that are unevenly distributed, guided, negotiated. One points, another follows. Attention is shared, but not equally. The work participates in this asymmetry, shaping how relation unfolds.

A different rhythm appears in the second image, where Title not yet known (2005) by Siti Roelijati (1930–2023), Bakau-bakau (Mangrove, 1973) by Sriyani (1930–2006), and Gerobag (Cart, 1969) by Kustiyah (1935–2012)—are gathered along the wall. Here, attention does not settle as tightly. It moves—across surfaces, between figures, from one painting to another, and back again. Viewers do not fix themselves in front of a single work; they circulate, pause, resume. The encounter becomes less about entering one interior and more about navigating a field. In Roelijati’s compositions, lines rarely rest. Figures, animals, and objects seem to emerge through movement rather than outline. The eye follows but never quite arrives. Looking becomes a matter of attunement—of staying with rhythms that do not resolve into a single focal point. Sriyani’s works, by contrast, often hold a quieter density. Forms gather slowly; darkness is not absence but a kind of presence that reveals itself over time. One does not grasp the image at once. It requires returning, adjusting, allowing the work to unfold at its own pace. Kustiyah’s paintings move still differently. Her brush seems to glide, carrying a lightness that does not negate depth but instead approaches it without weight. Flowers, objects, self-portraits—these do not insist on symbolic reading. They offer themselves as things to be lived with, to be encountered in their immediacy.

Taken together, these works do not present a unified style or direction. What they share is less formal than relational: a way of holding the world that allows proximity without collapse, distance without detachment. They invite forms of looking that are sustained, negotiated, and often shared. It is perhaps here that the words of Oei Sian Yok return, not as a statement to be confirmed, but as something that begins to resonate differently: “The birth of nationalist awareness at the beginning of this century also awakened Indonesia’s humanist consciousness. This, then, became their right to freedom as sentient beings.”¹⁷

Read from within these situations—of looking, of pointing, of staying with works and with one another—this “right” does not appear as a declaration secured once and for all. It emerges, rather, in the act itself: in the ability to attend, to respond, to remain with what is not immediately resolved. Freedom, here, is not located outside the encounter but practiced within it. In one instance, it takes the form of a concentrated interiority—a figure who holds something not fully shareable, yet not entirely closed. In another, it disperses across a field of works, where attention moves between images and bodies, never settling for long. In both, what is at stake is not only what is seen, but also how seeing becomes possible, and with whom.

Marianne Katoppo’s writing offers another way to approach this. For Katoppo, freedom is rooted in compassion—not as sentiment, but as a capacity: the ability to be touched and to touch in return. Such a capacity does not eliminate distance; it works through it.¹⁸ It allows proximity without possession, relation without the need to resolve differences. Perhaps this is what these works—and the situations that gather around them—make available. Not a unified account of modernity, nor a stable image of the human, but a set of practices: of sensing, of attending, of being with others, human and otherwise, in ways that remain open, partial, and ongoing.

If histories are multiple, and convivialities are lived rather than declared, then art practices might be understood less as objects to be interpreted than as conditions for such encounters to take place. Not answers, but occasions. Not resolutions, but ways of staying.

The post Histories, Convivialities, and Art Practices in Modern Indonesia appeared first on post.

With two images, I preface this speculative meditation on artistic (re)mediations of encounters with curators and with the curatorial. Both are paintings by Svay Ken (1933–2008), who began painting in 1993 at age 60, without formal training, having worked since the 1950s in a luxury hotel in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. In his autobiography, he wrote that he became an artist “in order to have money and be able to give offerings and do good deeds,” referring to common Buddhist practices.¹ Despite his unusual beginnings, Svay Ken is widely celebrated as among the “first” contemporary artists in Cambodia.² 

An untitled painting made in 2005 depicts two museum curators who, portrayed with cameras in their hands, are visiting from a major museum in Japan (fig. 1). They are keenly photographing paintings by Svay Ken, which hang in two rows in the upper half of the canvas. The curators were conducting curatorial research for the 1st Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale, a major exhibition held in 1999 at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum that sought to convey what its curators described as “the free form of expression corresponding to the situation of each Asian region.”³ While greedily documenting Svay Ken’s singular practice, the curators appear in the painting to be completely ignoring the artist himself, as well as his wife, Tith Yun. The visitors look away from their hosts and rudely point their elbows sharply toward them. Curatorial research is presented here, from the artist’s perspective, as being instrumental, extractive, and perhaps even hit-and-run.

In this work, equally as conspicuous as the curators’ narrow fixation on the paintings rather than the painter, is the nakedly perturbed expression on Svay Ken’s lined and weary face. The artist’s knitted brows, clenched jaw, pursed lips, and slight squinting of one eye convey his tense feelings of discomfort with the encounter. Although slightly more inscrutable, Tith Yun also appears wary and withdrawn. Her eyes, like the artist’s, do not quite meet ours; instead, the couple stares vacantly off to one side, as if lost in the uneasy, perhaps unhappy experience of hosting these unfamiliar international curators. 

By contrast, in I in Hotel Room (2004), the artist stares confidently, calmly, and contentedly at viewers of the painting (fig. 2). His wide eyes meet and hold our gaze even while he is also hard at work polishing a shoe, one of his duties as a hotel employee. In this painting, the green background visually links Svay Ken to all the surfaces and objects around him, including the walls and floors of the hotel bathroom and bedroom. With his head grazing the upper edge of the picture, the artist dominates the scene, his prominence in the composition implying that he gladly reigns over this domain of green. Here, we see a happy and self-possessed man who is proud of his work, which he does to support his family and facilitate his devotional practices. 

In many of Svay Ken’s paintings, the setting is rendered in a conspicuously flat and uniform green. This verdant background serves in one work as a stage for the artist’s discomfort and humiliation while meeting with international curators (fig. 1) and, in another, for his dignity and assurance while carrying out humble manual labor (fig. 2). The discrepant compositional function of the green background in the two paintings emphasizes the starkly different affective tenor of these two moments in Svay Ken’s long life. The color commingles fern and celadon, reflecting the naturecultures in which Svay Ken lived and worked. During the artist’s lifetime, these environments and contexts had shifted from easeful and peaceful to violent and pained and back again. I in Hotel Room portrays the artist harmoniously at one with his workplace environment. In the painting depicting the museum curators, however, the green background operates instead to separate the artist from his camera-wielding guests. The empty expanse of green marks a gulf between the artist and the curators that is not only spatial but also symbolic. The painting suggests that Svay Ken’s first encounter with curators was undignified, perhaps even injurious. 

That the same shade of green background can invoke congenial harmony in I in Hotel Room and hostile isolation in the painting depicting the museum curators suggests that for Svay Ken, the experience of being an artist vacillated between divergent emotions. The green also reappears in several of the paintings seen hanging on the wall in the painting of the curators. This suggests that the use of green was a constant in the artist’s practice, while the experience of interacting with curators was an unusual interruption. 

When the two museum curators from Japan visited Phnom Penh in 1998, it was the first time Cambodia had been included on the itinerary of the then-emerging class of international curators in Asia.⁴ Their visit came less than two decades after the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge regime, which between 1975 and 1979 had killed a vast majority of Cambodian artists along with a substantial portion of the overall population. With these circumstances in mind, it is therefore unsurprising that Svay Ken was palpably uncomfortable. 

In the years since then—and particularly after the participation of several “Cambodian artists” in biennales and other major international exhibitions during the 2000s and 2010s—Phnom Penh has become a regular stop for curators on research trips in the region. This opportunity is welcomed by many but may nevertheless remain an ambivalent experience. Svay Ken was certainly proud of attracting the curators’ attention and being included in the Triennale—as he would later boast, “In 1999 my name was known throughout Asian art circles”—but his pleasure was tinged with distress, as intimated in figure 1.⁵ 

This visual record of Svay Ken’s encounter offers a rare insight into how it might feel for an artist to meet with curators—who are often strangers—visiting from a distant and unfamiliar location, and how this uncomfortable experience might manifest in an artist’s practice. Such encounters with curators often initiate larger and more amorphous engagements with the curatorial: a mode of practice and province of discourse that encompasses not only studio visits and exhibition-making, but also many other kinds of relating and mediating between practitioners and publics. 

* * *

Artistic practices narrate, mediate, and sometimes fabulate histories: This is as well known in Southeast Asia as it is elsewhere.⁶ Curators present and occasionally misrepresent artistic practices: This too is clear in this region and beyond. And artists can also be curators: This phenomenon has taken on special prominence in the history (and historiography) of contemporary art in Southeast Asia, particularly since the 1970s.⁷ 

But how do artists represent and even historicize the curatorial and the experience of being curated? Beyond visits to artist’s studios and the preparation of museum exhibitions, in what ways does the curatorial manifest? What image of curation is immanent in artistic practice? These questions, seemingly straightforward enough, may elicit a surprising realization. Despite the inescapable ubiquity of the curatorial in global discourses on contemporary art, including in Southeast Asia, curation is rarely made visible within artistic practice. 

In this short essay, by focusing on accounts of the experience of being curated that appear within artworks—rather than in written form—I propose that artistic practice can also constitute a form of critical and (art-)historical commentary. This claim is prompted, in part, by the influential and widely cited Southeast Asian art historian and curator T. K. Sabapathy who, as early as 1979, recognized that with art, “critical activity need not necessarily be defined in terms of, or limited to, literary forms.”⁸ 

As well as rejecting the false binary cleaving theory from practice and creativity from commentary, with this statement, Sabapathy is also insisting on the intelligence and criticality that inheres in artistic practice. His notion of “critical activity” positions the work of an artist or a curator as always already a dynamic and vital intervention in the world: Never only a static object, but instead a perpetually unfolding activity. Moreover, Sabapathy does not disavow the importance of textuality, which he calls “literary forms,” but he nevertheless affirms the need to transcend the textual even while encompassing it. These qualities of Sabapathy’s “critical activity” are also paradigmatic of the curatorial.

My discussion here addresses artists’ encounters with the curatorial, but in a forthcoming book titled Artistic Art Histories in Southeast Asia: Modernisms in Contemporary Practices, I discuss a wider array of ways in which artists engage with the art-historical within their artworks.⁹ I argue that art-historically engaged modes of practice proliferate globally but take on particular importance in Southeast Asia, where art history as an academic discipline remains relatively nascent and where, since the 1960s, many foundational texts on modern art have been written by artists (and more recently by curators). 

Although I have argued elsewhere for the need to “deprovincialize” Southeast Asia’s art, in this essay I have chosen to draw exclusively on sources emerging from or explicitly related to the region, and thereby to center and amplify work being done in and on this part of the world.¹⁰ Like many commentators and practitioners engaged with Southeast Asia, I view the region not as a fixed geography but instead as a dispersed imaginary that is—in the words of curator and art historian Patrick D. Flores—“in the process of constant forming” and always contingently connected with “the vaster world of which it is a vital part.”¹¹

* * *

In the paintings discussed above, Svay Ken mediates his early encounters with curators; by contrast, more recently another generation of artists has mediated their own experiences and understandings of the curatorial. 

Curators are individuals, often working for institutions; in Southeast Asia, many of them feel that they must “play different roles” to “build our own infrastructure” through various forms of what Bill Nguyễn calls “engagement, facilitation and attention.”¹² In turn, the curatorial is a method, a practice, and a mode of thinking. In Flores’s articulation, the curatorial is “able to simultaneously particularize and generalize.”¹³ Thus, the curatorial may be practiced by curators, but it nonetheless transcends the individual and the institutional. 

An exemplary case is 82 131 39, an installation initiated by the Hanoi-based Nhà Sàn Collective (est. 2013) in homage to their predecessors, an artist-run collective space called Nhà Sàn Studio (1998–2010), which was also located in Hanoi (fig. 4). Although the installation is credited to several makers, chief among them is Mẹ Lương (Lê Thị Lương): Her kitchen table—whose physical dimensions inspired the title—is at its heart, and she curated the accompanying cookbook, which is illustrated by other artists.¹⁴ Beyond this physical facticity, the installation imaginatively mobilizes the kitchen table, cooking equipment, dishes, and stools as a fertile allegory for the hospitality and affective labor that underpin artistic and curatorial practice. 

The installation was made for and first shown in the 2017 exhibition Spirit of Friendship, which focused on “artist groups” like Nhà Sàn Studio and Nhà Sàn Collective. The curators Zoe Butt, Bill Nguyễn, and Lê Thiên Bảo describe the project as seeking “to highlight the role and contribution of artist friendships in furthering the development of experimental languages in Vietnam, since 1975.”¹⁵ A text made to accompany 82 131 39 begins by introducing Nhà Sàn Studio: 

Considered one of North Vietnam’s most resilient independent art spaces, over the last two decades Nhà Sàn has continuously shape-shifted and endured the challenges brought about by both the artistic and social landscape of Vietnam, never once ceasing to maintain its status as a ‘home for the arts’ and a haven for the odd ones out in Hanoi; having nurtured generations of artists, while always keeping its doors open to those inspired enough to step in.¹⁶

This statement insistently and insightfully aligns resilience with nurturing, emphasizing hospitality as a cornerstone of creative practice and community. These enmeshed qualities—which are both affective and embodied—are then related to the curatorial, as the text continues: 

As the status of art and artists in Vietnam today continues to be challenged (i.e., more and more we see artists responding to both past and present historical issues with their work), similarly the practice of the curator is expanding as a necessary role. The specificity of the sociopolitical and educational contexts of Vietnam means that a curator is to take on a myriad of other roles besides just an exhibition maker—as a study partner who shares knowledge, researches and debates with artists; and a mediator who negotiates and connects artists with the public, the authorities and other agents in the cultural field. It is no longer about what or who to curate, but rather, how.¹⁷

With this context of the enlarged and layered function and reflexivity of the curatorial established, the culinary materials used in the installation are explained as being not only supplementary to curation, but also more profoundly connected to the practice and discourse of the curatorial: 

Nhà Sàn Collective proposes a different look into the (grand) history of Nhà Sàn by presenting one of the often undiscussed micro-histories of Mẹ Lương (wife of Nguyễn Mạnh Hùng, one of the cofounders of Nhà Sàn Studio) and her kitchen space. Lovingly called “mẹ” (mother) by all, Mẹ Lương welcomes, cooks and tends to all artists, visitors, or any passersby; her motherly presence maintaining the organic and family-oriented soil upon which Nhà Sàn exists and flourishes. Her kitchen space is . . . enabling the more private and humble, but no less significant chitchats to take place. Inviting Mẹ Lương to use her kitchen space and self-curated cookbook as source materials, Nhà Sàn Collective metaphorically points to, and reiterates, what it means to make art and to be artists in the context of Vietnam today, while continuing their own legacy in further complicating and opening up our (as well as their own) perceptions of the other forms that art, art history, and curation can take.¹⁸

This statement makes clear that 82 131 39 is not only an artistic mediation of the curatorial, but also a meditation on the corporeal and maternal labors of sustenance and care that underpin all forms of creative and critical practice, including the work done by artists and curators. As well as prizing “more private and humble” exchanges within creative communities, the installation positions that practice as productively contingent and perpetually fluctuant. 

The installation was positioned near the heart of the Spirit of Friendship exhibition, with Mẹ Lương’s cookbook displayed on the same wall as paintings and other more conventional artworks (fig. 4). This unassuming yet effective gesture proffers the possibility that although artists’ encounters with curators may be fraught—as Svay Ken’s paintings make palpably plain—they offer abundant potential for affinities. Respect, sincerity, hospitality, care, and sustained engagement may be some of the necessary foundations for the curatorial to be experienced—and artistically mediated—as generative, and even generous, as opposed to extractive. 

* * * 

The labors and cares of artists and curators often overlap. As noted above, the figure of the artist-curator has been particularly prominent in Southeast Asia and important in the development of the region’s contemporary art and its dispersal into other discourses, including those in the North and the West. Nhà Sàn Collective epitomizes an increasingly prevalent mode of practice, one that is both artistic and curatorial. The distinctions between these modes of “critical activity” have begun to dissolve in recent years. But what are some antecedents of this conjoining of the artistic and the curatorial? How have artists mediated their own practices in contexts without well-developed infrastructures? 

Svay Ken offers some answers to these questions. When he began painting, less than 15 years after the end of the genocide that annihilated Cambodia’s artists and intellectuals, the country still had almost no galleries in which to exhibit contemporary artworks, almost no art market, and almost no other infrastructural supports for “critical activity.” The memory of violence—which Svay Ken also painted early on (fig. 5)—was still fresh. 

In stark contrast to painted scenes of violence, I Showed Guests at the Swimming Pool My Paintings (2001) offers a record of Svay Ken’s early experience of showing and selling his artworks to guests at the luxury hotel in which he worked (fig. 6). 

In a substantial and detailed autobiographical text, Svay Ken recalls the scene: “When foreign guests came now and then to swim in the pool of the hotel, I would take my pictures and try to show them to them. Some guests were annoyed and didn’t want to look, but others who loved art looked at my paintings and smiled, praising the pictures.”¹⁹

Looking at I Showed Guests at the Swimming Pool My Paintings, it is impossible to discern whether the pink-skinned man to whom Svay Ken is showing his painting is a guest who feels “annoyed and didn’t want to look” or is instead someone “who loved art” and was “praising the pictures.” What is unmistakable, however, is that the artist is resolute in his determination not only to make art, but also to make it public, to mediate its reception, and to textually annotate these procedures. 

Thus Svay Ken was a curator of his own artwork. That he chose to memorialize and historicize this experience among all of the other moments that made up his turbulent life indicates that it was meaningful to him. The curatorial was, for Svay Ken, not only a form of “critical activity” but also a kind of becoming, even of liberation. From him, we still have a lot to learn.

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A Diasporic Mythology (2021) by Bagus Pandega (Indonesian, b. 1985) is a kinetic and sound installation organized in concentric rings (fig. 1). In the outer ring, several stringed instruments are similar in shape but culturally distinct: a taishōgoto from Japan and a sijobang harp, Balinese penting, Lombok penting, and mandaliong, all native to Indonesia. At the center of this arrangement are live tea plants equipped with MIDI Sprout sensors that capture bio-information from plants, which is translated to signals that activate the instruments. The MIDI sensors are also connected to a mechanical system that reads musical scores printed on a sheet of vinyl paper. The scores are informed by interviews Pandega conducted with local musicians who played the instruments included in the work. From these conversations, Pandega wrote scores that the sensors read as digital annotations, triggering a network of solenoid drivers and rotating motors to strike strings or press keys, creating an automated, live performance. This automation is bound by an invisible thread of historical and cultural translation. While the instruments explore how the same acoustic apparatus (the string instrument) circulates and adapts across different regions and cultures, the tea plants speak of the colonial history of the Dutch bringing tea from Japan to Indonesia.¹ Without oversimplifying the work through a mere, brief description, this is the intricacy of Pandega’s aesthetic.

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.

DIY culture in Indonesia as it relates to art is primarily associated with self-organizing. It acts as a response to the lack of art infrastructure or institutions, and takes form in collective or community-based practices. However, DIY can also be seen in the process of creating artwork through a culture of customization and the use of “low technology” in media and new media art, that was introduced to Indonesia in the 1990s, along with the growing consumption of media and information technology, such as computers and the internet, in Indonesia and Southeast Asia in general. 

Pioneering multimedia artist Krisna Murti (1957–2023) utilized video installations to critique the friction between Indonesian tradition and technological consumerism. Canonical works such as 12 Hours in the Life of Agung Rai, the Dancer (1993)² and Learning to Queue Up to the Ants (1996)³ highlighted a clash of modernities in which the digital medium was used to examine tradition rather than replace it. While Murti’s installations were not modular and, furthermore, were typically fixed in their configuration, his interdisciplinary approach laid the groundwork for the more fluid systems developed by the next generation. 

In contrast, Heri Dono (b. 1960) created low-tech kinetic installations that critique Indonesia’s position as a consumer of technology. Observing that defective electronics were more often discarded than repaired, he incorporated used motors and coils into his work. Dono looked upon this process of “reviving” obsolete objects as a form of mechanical animism.⁴ His practice was further informed by the concept of dua seni rupa (two arts) first explored by Sanento Yuliman in 1984, which encourages a dialogue between “high” and “low” sociocultural phenomena.⁵ Dono’s works, for example Gamelan of Nommunication (1997), use mechanical devices and samples to automate traditional instruments, prefiguring the automated ensembles later made by Pandega (fig. 2). 

In their work in the 1990s, Murti and Dono examined encounters between technology and tradition as well as the binary tensions arising from symbolic and performative gestures addressing them. Sometimes, they distanced themselves from the concept of high technology. At other times, they were satirical or parodic in their approaches to it. Their video works are parts of fixed installations that would always be arranged in the same way—as opposed to being modular and reconfigured depending upon the context. Yet, their works are also interdisciplinary in nature, a characteristic that foreshadows the new media works of a later generation of artists.⁶ As Indonesian curator Agung Hujatnika has observed, the early Indonesian media artists who merged art and technology were not driven by a spirit of “scientific discovery” but rather by their interest in the impact of technological culture on and in the everyday lives of Indonesians.⁷ 

Ade Darmawan (b. 1974) and other artists working at the dawn of the 2000s—in post-Reformasi Indonesia—expanded new media art in terms of both artistic expression and infrastructure.⁸ Though the cultural mood of this period was in many ways euphoric, including for artists and musicians, the capitalist television and music industries, which favored more popular media, remained a hegemonic and out-of-reach ecosystem. As a reaction to this, machine customization culture, closely linked to experimental sound and music performance, flourished. For example, the early sound installation performances of the short-lived Yogyakarta-based artist duo Garden of the Blind—Jompet Kuswidananto (b. 1976) and Venzha Christ (b. 1975)—were primarily constructed from tinkered technology. Kuswidananto described their practice as “electrocraft,” a term he coined for a method of working that falls somewhere between the realms of analog and digital.⁹ This kind of low-tech assembly is apparent in the duo’s performance Kingdom of Broken Heart (2001), which features a cyborg-like performer equipped with a sensor-based right-hand glove and a spine that emits beeps when it moves (fig. 3). Seated in a chair on a postapocalyptic stage, beneath rotating televisions suspended from the ceiling, the performer remains central to the installation. 

Pandega’s practice emerged from a more established landscape of artist-led infrastructure, including collectives like ruangrupa (est. 2000, Jakarta), which staged the first OK. Video—Jakarta International Video Festival in 2003, and Bandung Center for New Media Arts, which institutionalized DIY and DIWO (do-it-with-others) mentalities. As part of the generation that emerged after the new media artists born in the late 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, Pandega had earlier and more significant exposure to technology and relatively established infrastructure and reception. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in sculpture in 2008 and a Master of Fine Arts in 2015 from the Faculty of Art and Design at the Institut Teknologi Bandung (ITB). Pandega’s artistic development coincided with the emergence in 2007 of “intermedia” within the practical and pedagogical trajectory of ITB, which developed the category as a new and separate discipline within its fine arts department as a means of integrating art within media and information technology. Though Pandega himself remained an autodidact, this institutional shift in focus made new media art a budding practice within the formal infrastructure of ITB, which traditionally, had been more artist-initiated and grassroots-oriented.

In 2007, Pandega also encountered the work of Japanese artist Muneteru Ujino (b. 1964) at KITA!! Japanese Artists Meet Indonesia, where Ujino exhibited The Rotators (2007) (fig. 4).¹⁰ Ujino is known for sound installations that combine 20th-century industrial products, such as household appliances, electric guitars, cars, and building materials, with DIY technology. Pandega took inspiration from his practice and started exploring the tension between the functional history of an object and its potential to generate sound.

By 2015, Pandega was fully integrating modularity, treating installation components as individual, wall-bound units of vinyl and light—a pivotal shift evident in his Clandestine Transgression series (fig. 5). In subsequent works, like Polka (2016) and A Tea Poi on Moo (2016), he further distilled the complex setups into self-contained modules. This new approach allowed him to extract and recontextualize various components across exhibitions, to look upon them as technical and conceptual nomads rather than fixed parts of a single unit. While Murti and Dono utilized traditional musical instruments to symbolically illustrate a cultural clash with modernization, Pandega favored a different friction: stripping the instruments of their melodic expectations and treating them as raw sound generators. 

Referring to his practice as “social-based DIY,” Pandega visits local smiths and technicians—such as lathe operators—to commission components and machine parts for his installations as well as to establish long-term relationships with the people integral to his artistic practice.¹¹ His works are hands-on, and his deep, consistent engagement with objects and the smiths who make them is testament to the dialogic and often communal nature of new media arts in Indonesia. Pandega’s work transforms and deconstructs the functionality and nature of everyday objects, some of which he has acquired secondhand. His use of modern musical instruments, whether they are intact or physically deconstructed, echoes the interdisciplinary ethos of earlier artists. Whether using vinyl LPs, lamps, or custom instruments, Pandega treats every variable as a technical and conceptual nomad that can be continually repurposed through new prompts and iterations across different modular systems.

A Diasporic Mythology explores the diaspora of culture and objects through trade and musical influence. This kinetic and sound installation establishes relationships between Indonesia and Japan by bringing together seemingly unrelated items from across borders into a diasporic ensemble. The taishōgoto, a 1912 Japanese invention, hybridizes a typewriter mechanism and stringed instrument. In joining it with Indonesian instruments—a mandaliong (Lombok), penting (Bali and Lombok), and kecapi sijobang (West Sumatra)—Pandega creates a cross-cultural dialogue. 

This ensemble is connected to the live Camellia sinensis, a tea plant with deep roots in colonial trade between Asia and Europe. MIDI Sprout sensors detect the plants’ electrical conductivity as biodata, triggering solenoids and motors to pluck the strings. The resulting sound is a musical and historical cacophony that highlights three of Pandega’s core interests: 1) an assembly of instruments from different cultures; 2) the use of nonhuman agency (nature) to “control” technology; and 3) the contrast between traditional, native instruments and modern, technological devices and softwares. The contrasts explored here by Pandega mirror the cultural tensions explored by Murti and Dono in the 1990s. 

In the context of A Diasporic Mythology, modularity operates on two levels: technically, in merging electronic components and living organisms into reconfigurable systems, and conceptually, in recasting cultural objects and their inherent histories as interrelated fragments brought together to reconstruct an ensemble or an ecology. The modular logic allows each work to perform as a fluid mechanism capable of being dismantled and recalibrated to inhabit new geographical and curatorial environments without losing its integrity. Since its inception, A Diasporic Mythology has experienced a dispersion from its original articulation. The work debuted in 2021 as a commissioned piece in the 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art. It was then featured in 2022 in Pandega’s solo exhibition O (pronounced “circle”), the focus of which was ecological extraction and circular economies. On both occasions, the arrangement of individual modules, each enabled by its own inherent technical and architectural capability, echoes the diaspora it aims to address. 

The modular nature of A Diasporic Mythology is also due to the functional independence of its components. As previously mentioned, Pandega treats acoustic, light, and kinetic as individual elements that can be brought together to form a more expansive body of work, that is, a richer ecology. This work is composed of several self-contained modules that can operate independently or on a smaller scale. Indeed, some of them have been used in entirely different artworks. For example, the taishōgoto is also part of Pandega’s Remaining Ending (2020). In this earlier piece, an orchid is clipped to the MIDI Sprout so that its conductivity can be read by the device to play the taishōgoto. In front of the musical instrument, Pandega placed three books on Pendidikan Sejarah Perjuangan Bangsa (Education on the History of the National Struggle), a subject in the curriculum of the Indonesian New Order.¹² Different from A Diasporic Mythology, the taishōgoto in Remaining Ending conceptually represents the history of education in Indonesia, which was influenced by Japanese colonialism, and links it to the education system and controlled narratives of the New Order era. 

In A Diasporic Mythology, this same instrument conceptually represents a different colonial historical network, a shift that is further complicated by a series of similar stringed instruments with nonetheless different cultural associations. This example shows how the very same module might conceptually transform when it is recontextualized, or placed within a different and more entangled installation.¹³ This particular mechanism also echoes the diaspora in that modules formerly concentrated in one environment have scattered from their homeland to inhabit new, more culturally intricate environments.

A Diasporic Mythology does not hide its modularity (fig. 6). Indeed, its constituent parts are literally laid bare—with nothing shrouding them. Viewers can simultaneously observe the exposed circuitry, structure, and tangled wires up to the electric power socket into which they are plugged. On full display, the modules making up A Diasporic Mythology are thereby rendered visibly equal—even though the tea plant and musical instruments serve as the main discursive points, and despite the fact that the rotating LED screen is at the center and top of the concentric installation. Pandega’s objective as a new media artist is to invite viewers to pay attention to his work’s complexity. A Diasporic Mythology coaxes them to trace how the tea and taishōgoto, for example, are connected not only through the MIDI Sprout, but also through the cultural diaspora. The repetition of certain objects across Pandega’s works demonstrates a configurability that reveals both diasporic and prototypic dimensions.¹⁴ By considering the same mechanism in the context of different arrangements, we can see how it might serve as a prototype, or preliminary mechanism, for future rearrangements—wherein new elements are added and old ones subtracted or repurposed to serve a new ecology of relations. Ultimately, any one module might be rescaled and/or rearranged, evolving alongside the specific ecology of a particular exhibition.

To define the trait of a module and modularity in Pandega’s practice, we might look at how the artist combines physical hardware and historical objects. In Pandega’s practice, which evolved from studying fine art sculpture to applying his “social-based DIY” method, a module is not merely a building block of an installation; it is a self-contained conceptual block capable of inhabiting different contexts. Each module represents a combination of technical and conceptual components. Each possesses the functional capacity to operate as a single mechanism, as exemplified by Remaining Ending, or as part of a larger, webbing ecosystem, such as A Diasporic Mythology. Each constituent possesses a distinct history or association, be it with colonial trade or musical migration, that persists regardless of its physical and historical displacements. Hence, modularity is the aesthetic that allows the inherent cultural or historical quality of an object to be as reconfigurable as its hardware.

As seen in A Diasporic Mythology, modularity is also defined by the exposed relations within the installation. By baring its circuitry, the work weaves technical mechanisms into visible figures of speech. This unshrouded modularity invites the audience to trace the relationships between the modules—not just their physical presence. Modularity mirrors the diasporic framework: It embodies the historical dispersion of the objects it utilizes by migrating across geographical and curatorial ecologies.

Pandega’s modularity clearly addresses more than technological or scientific discovery. It also calls attention to artistic derivations resulting from the discrete material and conceptual properties of each module. It demands an understanding of a complex material ecology: What did the module look like previously? How does it function in the present work? What possible mechanisms might it operate in the future? Within this circuitry, historical moments serve as “invisible” modules, the connective tissue that complicates Pandega’s installations and enhances what might otherwise be a purely kinetic endeavor. By treating every component as a module, Pandega moves beyond the binary tensions of the 1990s media art into a space of fluid, intermedial conversation. Through this intricate assembly, Pandega ensures that the complexity of his modularity lies not just in its technical spectacle, but also in its ability to fundamentally question our own relationship with technology, its politics, its ecology, and its history.

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In this essay, I approach the intimate configurations captured in 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, I highlight that 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, my essay proposes a speculative turn: adopting a relational reading and an intertextual analysis between the artwork Finger Ornament and traditional textile ornamentation. Through an intertextual reading of Blinova’s work and traditional ornamentation, I trace and disentangle how Finger Ornament recontextualizes textile art.

Kazakh ornament is a nonfigurative aesthetic sign associated with carpets and textiles produced domestically by women in nomadic society. Kazakhs lived as pastoral nomads from the 17th century until the early 20th, when Stalinist modernization policies forcefully sedentarized nomadic polities in the Soviet Union. The atemporal dialogic proximity of Finger Ornament and the semantic figure of traditional ornament serve as precursors to the postindependence cultural shift toward regional creative practices and their media, while operating across divides of fine and folk art, of high and low, of visual and haptic modes of perception. Relational reading enables us to shed light on conceptual characteristics of pre-Soviet textile art, previously obscured by its epistemic and institutional positioning as craft and folk art. 

Haptic Ornament 

Finger Ornament is one of the few surviving works from the partly lost and, by nature, fragile and ephemeral, body of work by Blinova. Formally trained as an architect at the Kazakh Polytechnic Institute, Blinova had worked at the architectural bureau in Almaty. Together with her husband, Rustam Khalfin, she organized apartment exhibitions and gathered together a small community of like-minded artists. In the mid-1980s, the couple abandoned formal positions as architects to commit themselves to their artistic practice. Unlike her life partner, a prominent figure in the Central Asian contemporary art scene, Blinova left behind a modest artistic heritage: scattered pencil and watercolor drawings, a book, “A Poem about a Learned Cat” (1994), several wooden sculptures, photo-documentation of her plastic jewelry, and Finger Ornament. The latter is a series of ten black-and-white photographs of figures and signs composed by the artist using her own fingers and palms. By turning, twisting, opening, and closing her hands, Blinova made new spatial forms, which she had photographed, and then she assembled the pictures into a two-row grid, creating an ornamental structure. This corporeal and intimate reenactment of visual patterns invokes a haptic aesthetics—a visual register where the boundaries between sight and touch collapse into a single mode of perception.

Blinova was interested in what she called “elementary sculpture,” or the basic form that exists before the hand touches a material.¹ In the early 1990s, she was experimenting with plastic jewelry, crafting sculptural and wearable objects for possible sale. She undertook this domestic, kitchen-based production of small jewelry pieces to help sustain herself and her husband during the economic upheavals and social uncertainty of the early 1990s. Figures of Finger Ornament sprang from the artist’s tactile practice of molding soft plastic and her exploration of the notion of basic form. Blinova stripped away the material and instead modeled her sculptures from her own hands. The artist’s friend, the architect Larissa Andreeva, photographed them at Blinova and Khalfin’s flat. The artwork is composed of a series of fragile and transient sculptural forms, each of which embodies the dissolution of the previous sign. By flattening spatial objects into an ornamental pattern, Blinova sensed and exposed the haptic aesthetics coded in traditional carpets and their ornamental vernacular. Haptic reenactment of the ornamental grid shifts the focus away from the prolonged vision-centered discourses that have constricted textile practices to minor and applied arts. 

The ornament is intrinsic to textile objects such as carpets, tapestries, and garments, which constituted the core of the material culture of nomads in pre-Soviet Central Asia. In nomadic culture, creative practices were deeply enmeshed into the process of living—as opposed to separated into the distinct and detached realm of autonomous art. In the 1930s, along with the forced sedentarization, Soviet modernization policies introduced and institutionalized the pictorial tradition of oil painting. Simultaneously, a wide range of local creative practices was academically narrated and institutionally contextualized as folk and applied art. After the demise of the Soviet Union, while both cultural practitioners and institutions turned to the reassessment and reimagination of regional cultural heritage, its forms, and media, the previous analytical tradition continued to maintain the split between art and craft. Decorativeness served as the main signifier for practices that involved ornamentation, confining them to the category of craft. It should be noted that the notorious notion of the “decorative” was one of the organizing principles in the prolonged hierarchy of art and craft not only in the former Soviet bloc, but also more widely in Euro-American scholarship and art criticism. Juxtaposed with modernist pictorial and conceptual innovativeness, the decorative served as a rhetorical device to distinguish between high art and minor arts, which were often associated with gendered and racialized practices in postwar North America.² In post-Soviet Kazakhstan, one of the first academic books focused on the exploration of Kazakh ornament urged artists, artisans, and scholars to overcome the indulgent standpoint and to extricate ornamental practices from the limiting notion of the decorative.³ Drawing on Vladimir Propp’s structural analysis of Russian folk tales and Soviet Kazakhstani archaeologist Alan Medoyev’s formal analysis of petroglyphs and cave paintings, Karlygash Ibrayeva suggests approaching folk ornamental production as a system that models and is directly related to the surrounding environment.⁴ The architect Almas Ordabayev, who contributed to the volume and provided graphic materials and photographs, was a professor in the department of architecture at the Polytechnic Institute when Blinova and Khalfin were students there and later became friends with Blinova. Indeed, she was familiar with Ordabayev’s studies of ornamentation in architectural monuments in Mangyshlak, a region in southwestern Kazakhstan.

Finger Ornament was first exhibited in 1995 at the Parade of Galleries, an event that marked the emergence of private galleries on the post-socialist institutional landscape. The Parade of Galleries, also titled Independent Galleries of the City, hosted by the Abylkhan Kasteev State Museum, was in itself a novel platform that celebrated the spirit of the transition period in society, its aspiration to expanded civic freedom and to opening up new market relations. More than simply introducing market mechanisms, The Parade functioned as a diverse semi-institutional space for artistic and cultural producers’ experiments across dozens of private galleries. The event showcased an array of artistic practices that sought to move beyond the stylistic traditions of official art and its Soviet legacy. The emergent aesthetics of transition manifested in experimental and expanded media and material choices, as well as in time-based and performative practices. Blinova’s delicate Finger Ornament both anticipated and participated in the strong trend of exploration and reimagining of regionally situated cultural and creative practices and forms by official and nonofficial artists and art institutions. The ornament has become a recurrent visual trope in artistic production, design, and architecture, solidifying its status as a vernacular expression. What distinguishes Finger Ornament is its non-mimetic yet haptic reenactment of traditional ornamentation, which both elucidates and recalibrates its conceptual code as well as alludes to its codependency on the wider cultural and environmental webs of relations.

Haptic aesthetics, a recently emerging academic field, examines the implications of touch, tactility, and sensorial interactions across disciplines, from art history to anthropology. Film scholar Laura Marks theorizes haptic images as ones that, by reducing the distance between the viewer and the image, generate embodied response, evoking memories of physical sensations and drawing attention to texture and proximity rather than distant contemplation.⁵ Haptic registers in Finger Ornament sense the co-constitutive interaction between vision and tactility, foundational in the process of producing textile ornamental objects and in their perception. It is difficult to say whether Blinova was familiar with traditional methods of carpet-making, which involve stages of felting the wool by hand and subsequently rolling a pattern of colored wool into the base of semifinished felt (fig. 2). However, Blinova experienced tactile operations of kneading and molding plastic and the work of one’s body in making a visual form. 

If we adopt an intertextual reading of the traditional ornament through the haptic registers of the artwork, we are able to highlight its structural affinities. In traditional carpets, patterns trace corporeal movement and the sense of touch: The wool is transformed into felt through the physical pressure and movements of the entire body. The photographs in Finger Ornament do not mimetically reproduce the visual referent; instead, they capture the dynamic process of creating a new sign through lived, bodily gesture. The artwork alludes to the ornament’s non-referential and nonmaterial characteristics. Shifting emphasis from the visual to the tactile, the indexicality of Finger Ornament reveals what is not visible in traditional ornamental production—such as the corporeal performativity of its making. In pastoral nomadic culture, felting and carpet-making included individual but more often collective women’s creative labor. It played a vital role in the transference of knowledge and familial stories along maternal lines. Nurbolat Masanov (1954–2006), a scholar of nomadism, argues that pastoral nomadism, its economic organization around cattle breeding, and its material culture were determined by the geo-ecological and climate systems in the arid territory of Kazakhstan.⁶ The textile object stands within the intricate web of codependent relations between the ecosystem, social and economic organization, and women’s sensibilities and creative practices. Finger Ornament restages the ornament as a coded system rather than as merely a decorative sign. The artwork’s performativity emphasizes the flow of creative energy and ideas that guided domestic ornamental production. 

According to the recollections of friends and artists from the Almaty art scene, Blinova was a modest person and a rather unknown artist. Almas Ordabayev has stressed that though she was very gifted and could research themes in linguistics, history of art, and culture, she did not want to limit herself to either the restraints of official institutions or the framework of particular media.⁷ He added that Blinova had preferred the intellectual intensity of coining and thinking through ideas and the creative interplay to finalized and polished art objects (fig.3). Various memoirs recurrently describe Blinova as the one who quotidianly lived within the flow of unbounded imagination.⁸ After leaving her job at an architectural bureau, she participated in several exhibitions. The period of the early 1990s was marked by a loose institutional infrastructure and a lack of support for independent and experimental practices. In 1995, the artist presented her “A Poem about a Learned Cat” at the Kokserek gallery in Almaty, mounting lines of its verses along the walls at a very low height from the floor—that is, at a cat’s-eye level. The playfulness of her practice was accompanied by the conceptual exploration of tactility, spatiality, and bare form. The nascent art market, probably, contributed to her ephemeral creative labor. Although few of Blinova’s works have survived, her artistic presence endures in oral histories, artistic projects, and publications by a circle of friends, artists, and peer members of the Almaty underground art scene in the late 1980s and 1990s.⁹ These guardians of memory portrayed her as an artist whose life was guided by the power of imagination and whose legacy shimmers and resonates in the work of others, most notably that of her husband. 

The dialogic interplay between Finger Ornament and traditional ornament explores how the haptic is entangled with the social and relational in everyday, uncommodified female creative practices. The artistic fate of Blinova gestures toward the larger question of the art-historiographical positionality of numerous women whose creative labor formed the core of the material culture of nomads. The process of mark-making in ornamentation is intuitive, gestural, and even chance-driven. The performativity of Finger Ornament echoes the process and passion-driven nature of ornamentation and its deep immersion in the flow of crafting a new form. Thus, Finger Ornament presses into the continuity of local creative traditions while expanding their medium and conceptual code. In postindependence Kazakhstan, where artists sought to reimagine cultural forms rooted in the region, Finger Ornament is a delicate exploration of haptic knowledge and practices guided by a love of crafting and making. If the dialogic reading of the traditional ornament and the artwork of Blinova should arrive at a concise conclusion, it is the one that charts mutually formative connections between the high and the vernacular, between pattern and thought. 

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Carlos Quijon, Jr.: Can you walk us through the decision of choosing ruangrupa (ruru) for the Exhibition Histories book series? Of course, with the recent developments in ruru’s practice, talking for example about their artistic direction of documenta 15, the book has turned out to be a very timely historicization and mediation of the collective’s practice. I am wondering what the considerations were in writing about ruru’s practice at this particular historical moment?

David Morris: We can recall that conversations toward the book solidified around 2018, when farid rakun came to visit Afterall and spoke with exhibition studies students, and we started exploring the idea of archiving and historicizing ruru—the whys and the hows of it. It quickly became clear that this presented a number of challenges to the kind of research we do, practically and intellectually, and this seemed like a good place to start. As with most of the Exhibition Histories publications, the book developed quite organically from there, in a slow-burn way and across many conversations with our editorial collective and ruru friends and network, until it felt “ready.” (We often describe the Exhibition Histories process as a kind of simmering, slow cooking with multiple pots on at once.)

In short, when the documenta plan was announced, we were already some way along. If anything, it diverted our book plans since, understandably, documenta 15 (d15) took up a lot of the ruru bandwidth—although how things played out in Kassel made the need for a deeper analysis and understanding of ruangrupa’s work seem all the more urgent. 

Wing Chan:  In the book itself, ruru’s participation in d15 takes up maybe 2 percent of the overall page count. What interested us more are these questions: what kind of collective activism is ruru evocating? Where did it come from? How has it kept ruru going for decades in Jakarta and beyond? Personally, I feel ruru’s stories can teach us a lot about why it is important to not do things alone, about genuine, sustainable ways of relating to one another. It’s timely in this world full of wars.

Arianna Mercado: After 2022, so much of the conversation around ruru and their process suddenly became only about d15 and its aftermath. There was much to be said about ruru and how they operate in global and local art ecologies that goes way back to before d15. In the process of making this book, we felt that it wasn’t necessary to just continue adding to the conversation around d15, hence it is only briefly covered in the book. Ruru has been working through lumbung, through ideas of sharing and reciprocity, since their inception, so we felt that it was necessary to highlight this immense body of work by focusing on their support systems and the infrastructures they have built in Jakarta, Indonesia, and beyond.

When Wing and I were first doing the research before we went to Jakarta, it was a lot of, “OK, so let’s put ourselves in their shoes in 1998. What did their life look like back then? What pop culture media were they consuming? What was circulating in universities and in more artistic circles?” We watched a lot of movies, especially romcoms, like Ada Apa dengan Cinta? (What’s Up with Love; 2002). We read some of the books that were banned at the time—Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s novel This Earth of Mankind (1980), for example. We also listened to a lot of music of their time. We wanted to put ourselves in the shoes of ruru to think about their dreams, aspirations, and lives before even trying to understand their practice.

CQJr: I am interested in how you imagined the structure of the book. Of course, the book is about ruru’s 25-year history, so for the most part, it takes ruru’s practice as a frame through which a possible history of the interfacing between art, exhibition, and history (in Indonesia, in Southeast Asia, in Asia, in the global contemporary, etc.) can be written, understood, or—even as a baseline—be made legible. Because of the apparent “centrality” of ruru in the development of contemporary artistic discourse in Indonesia and across Southeast Asia (i.e., how almost all practitioners active in the contemporary art ecology of Indonesia were once part of or have worked with ruru), I am wondering if there were considerations around how to foil this narrative of centrality. 

DM: ruru’s 25-year lifespan is the longest timeframe we have attempted in the series, and this was among the creative challenges we had in making it legible to a wider audience (we hope) as well as in opening up larger questions about “art”, “exhibition”, “publics” and their interconnected histories, geographies, economics, ecosystems, etc., and the difficulties and possibilities they create for researchers, art historians, artists and institutions—what methodologies they demand or suggest. 

At some point early on, we were thinking it could be productive to constellate ruru with other different but comparable initiatives in the region, to look at all of them together, which might have worked to “decentralize” ruru and foreground a regional narrative—this is an approach of some earlier books in the series. But for this book, we took up a different challenge in trying to develop a kind of “institutional history” of ruru with the idea that perhaps a method would develop that could then offer an approach for other kinds of institutions, whether quite similar to or very different from ruru.

WC: Contributions to the last chapter of the book, namely Enin Supriyanto’s interview write-up and Nuraini Juliastuti’s essay on jamming, offer a long view on sustainable collective practices shaped by the sociopolitical climate in Indonesia and globally since the 1970s.¹ We hope that people who care about ruru—and ruru themselves—will be informed by these perspectives. In addition, Melani Budianta’s research on ruru’s economic models from 2000 illustrates how ‘centrality’ could be a myth.² I’d like to believe that our writers have introduced some new focal points.

There are things that repeatedly emerged that we just picked up on. For example, people will say, “Oh, ruru is a boys club!” So Arianna and I would debrief and ask what they really mean? People would say, “Oh, ruru, they were a product of Jakarta.” When you hear this more than two times, three times, four times, you start to build a vocabulary about how to describe ruru and the narratives that counter these descriptions. Somehow, along the way, we also identified the writers that we wanted to commission to talk about these things. I think what is quite interesting about the ruru book is that the commissioning or the identification of the writers or artists happened throughout the entire process—rather than at the start of the actual research. It doesn’t matter how many books we have put together before. No formula applied neatly to ruru. Everyone—scholars, artists, ourselves—were learning. Our team learned by doing.

CQJr: How did you engage with the scope and address of ruru’s practice? I am imagining that looking at ruru’s practice would necessitate looking at it in relation to various coordinates and geographies and publics and ecologies and addresses: “Indonesian,” “Southeast Asian,” “Asian,” “global contemporary,” and so on. How did you deal with this editorially? 

DM: I remember being very struck by how it was almost like there were at least two versions of ruru in circulation. Or, there were two in particular that we were thinking about from early on. What have they meant to people locally in their immediate context? And what have they meant to their wider publics, beyond Jakarta, beyond Indonesia? We were thinking about how to “translate” in both directions—people locally knew one side of the story, and people outside Indonesia (or even, outside their local Jakarta neighborhood) would know another. It’s a story that has many sides, but these are two parts of it we tried to bring together. They have such a presence internationally, such a currency, and it’s not really my sense that they’re much more concerned with that than with building their local infrastructure, with thinking about the next generation—you know, they’re very committed to that. I think that to some extent, there’s a calculation of using the international footprint as a way to consolidate the projects they have in and across Indonesia.

AM: It’s hard to specify the who’s of ruru’s address, because on the one hand, Jakarta (and Indonesia as a whole) is a really important part of the work that they do—on-the-ground and as material. But I do think that in extending their networks internationally, they give people different understandings of how to work, the ways in which you can work equitably or do things with your friends and  build something together.

In the process of doing research for the book and commissioning writers, I personally felt that the idea of placing ruru within conventional narratives of “Southeast Asian art” seemed less and less appropriate—or necessary. When we visited Jakarta, the impact of ruru in the building of arts infrastructure felt very clear and palpable. Their documents, archives, and personalities have a somewhat mischievous nature, but in speaking to ruru and their collaborators, it was really interesting to hear about their efforts to build projects outside of Java, about how important upskilling is and how they engage with students and practitioners outside art fields. All of these plans and ideas are not very known or talked about in the realm of “global contemporary art,” partly due to language barriers, but perhaps also due to conceptions of what a “global contemporary art practice” might look like. We hoped through the book to be able to communicate the breadth of their practice and how it escapes these labels.

CQJr: Lastly, in terms of the category of the series Exhibition Histories: How do you make sense of ruru’s inclusion in this series? Did you see it as a case study that extends the categories of the “exhibition” and its “histories”? Is it a critique and maybe a move toward doing away with this framework? What were the kinds of conversations that you were having in relation to Exhibition Histories as a discursive formation and the book’s entry to the series?

WC: I think in terms of the series, from the book FESTAC ’77: The 2nd World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (published by Chimurenga and Afterall Books, in association with Asia Art Archive, the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College and RAW Material Company, 2019) onward, the Exhibition Histories framing is already not containable. Because the FESTAC book was already blurring what is actual historical material and what are new commissions. Visually they are treated pretty much the same, which means that the chronology is very blurry for a book on exhibition history. 

If the ruru book is not part of Exhibition Histories, if it were placed in a bookshop, it would be grouped under something like relational intelligence instead of exhibition histories.

DM: We were also looking back to Artist-to-Artist: Independent Art Festivals in Chiang Mai 1992–98 (published by Afterall Books in association with Asia Art Archive and the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, 2018), which was already starting to rethink the parameters of “exhibition history” in a comparable way. I think we’ve kept that descriptor even though in practice it’s become pretty expansive. FESTAC and Chimurenga were so amazing. It was a massive learning on my part—and on all our parts—in terms of how to take a very different approach to historical research and publishing. 

FESTAC was a massive Pan-African festival that contained exhibitions as part of it. It was important to think about the whole thing and that’s where the focus must be. You miss a lot if you’re just talking about one of the exhibitions that were part of it. (They had a lot of really interesting exhibitions as well as the expansive presentation of artistic work from across the continent and diaspora there were dedicated exhibitions on contemporary Nigerian art; African architectural technology; Pan-African books, fashion, science, plus film and performance programmes, a huge conference . . . and still more!)

The way that “exhibition” was always understood by us is as a point where art meets a public, where it becomes a collective activity. With ruru, the idea of “art” is put into question—and while the “exhibition” is not where they’re coming from either, it’s still about practices of coming together.

I think there’s something to be said for the analytic—there’s something that it does when you put it in a framework of exhibition history that is, to me, still productive. 

For one thing, it helps with people who are more invested in the exhibition as form, allowing them to reconsider their assumptions. In the part of the world where we live and work, there are more parts of the art ecosystem that are more invested in a certain idea of exhibition’s white-cube lineage. There’s a certain strategic value to saying, “Well, this practice has equal, and in my view, much more relevance. And if you want to talk about the history of exhibitions, we need to talk about this.” And perhaps the more things you put in this “box” of exhibition history that don’t look like that, the more stretchy and expansive the term can become. It allows a bit more openness to thinking about “exhibition” and “history,” both of which are, in the case of ruru, tricky terms.

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The concept of establishing a museum in a remote region of India—one that is not only geographically isolated but also prone to natural disasters such as earthquakes and cyclones—presents a complex set of challenges. Yet, it also offers a rare opportunity to engage deeply with the traditional knowledge systems of local communities. Located in Ajrakhpur, just outside the city of Bhuj in Kutch, Gujarat, in western India, the Living and Learning Design Centre (LLDC), founded in 2016, exemplifies this duality (fig. 1). Conceived as a multipurpose cultural institution, LLDC is dedicated to the preservation, revival, and continuity of the diverse craft traditions of Kutch.¹ Situated on a nine-acre campus, it houses three galleries as well as craft studios and educational spaces that collectively serve as a platform for cultural transmission and innovation.

Tracing the development of LLDC, this essay focuses on how indigenous systems of knowledge informed its planning, construction, collections, infrastructure, and modes of audience engagement. Using LLDC as a case study, it explores how the model of a global museum can be thoughtfully translated to a local context—one that is shaped by environmental precarity, cultural richness, and community resilience.

Building Trust: The Elders as Gatekeepers of Knowledge

The seed of the Living and Learning Design Centre was planted more than five decades ago in a chance encounter between the late Chanda Shroff (1933–2016) and women from the Ahir and Meghwaad Gurjar communities.² In 1969, Shroff traveled overland from Bombay (present-day Mumbai) to Dhaneti in Kutch to assist with famine-relief efforts.³ For the fifth consecutive year, Kutch—the second largest district in India—was experiencing severe drought that had resulted in an acute need for humanitarian assistance as many residents faced starvation. Despite these hardships, women arriving to collect food aid remained impeccably dressed and were hesitant to accept charity. They had nothing to exchange for the food parcels they received as they had sold most of their belongings—including valuable embroidered heirlooms passed down through generations—just to survive. 

Their pride and skills caught the attention of Shroff. Recognizing the need for a long-term solution, she asked if they would create embroidered designs on plain saris that she would then sell in Bombay, returning the proceeds of any sales directly to them. The women agreed to participate under the condition that the patterns and motifs would be outlined by Parmaben Balasara, an aarekhni artist and their designated designer.⁴ This was Shroff’s initiation into how traditional crafts, such as embroideries, were not just borne from women who sat in their homes and created them, but rather from a regulated system that relied on the wisdom and knowledge of elders from their community. Without the support of Parmaben, Shroff could not have engaged these communities (fig. 2), and it was through her steadfast support that the initial seeds were planted for LLDC, building trust with the communities through their first organization, Shrujan.⁵

Engaging Communities: The Need for a Mobile Museum

In the late 1990s, Chanda Shroff launched a precursor to the Living and Learning Design Centre through an innovative mobile museum housed in a repurposed bus, initially named the Design Center On Wheels. This initiative was instrumental in introducing the concept of a museum to the rural craft communities of Kutch, many of whom had limited exposure to formal cultural institutions. Rather than imposing an external model, the mobile museum served as a dialogic platform—demonstrating how a museum could emerge from within the community’s own knowledge systems.

The Design Center On Wheels featured a rotating display of specially commissioned panels and garments, showcasing traditional patterns and techniques in contemporary formats, all painstakingly hand-stitched by women from the various communities of Kutch (figs. 3–6) 

Encouraging the use of traditional stitches in a modern color palette and moving beyond clothing and textiles were crucial steps in teaching the women how, through the eye of a needle, to reinvigorate and expand their cultural histories using their own knowledge and experience. Between 1997 – 2003 they created over 1000 embroidered panels and over 600 garments, in a range of designs and colorways, establishing a rich visual archive of stitches and motifs. From 2003 to 2012 the Design Center On Wheels travelled across Kutch, exhibiting a rotating selection of these panels. This mobile museum not only documented craft heritage, but it also inspired renewed interest among younger generations, who began to see their cultural practices as valuable and evolving (figs. 5, 6). 

By visiting more than 100 villages and engaging more than 20,000 community members, the mobile museum played a critical role in the instruction, retention, and revitalization of an intangible cultural heritage. It laid the groundwork for LLDC’s later development by fostering a sense of ownership and participation among artisans and by demonstrating that museums could be truly inclusive and rooted in lived experience.

In 2006, Chanda Shroff was honored with the international Rolex Award for Enterprise for preserving, protecting, and safeguarding the unique embroidery heritage of Kutch and for empowering rural craftswomen. Her pioneering efforts were recognized as “one of the most successful models of social entrepreneurship in her country.”⁶

Building the Living and Learning Design Centre

With the support of the prestigious Rolex award, Chanda Shroff advanced her vision by establishing the Living and Learning Design Centre in Ajrakhpur—a village founded by the Khatri community after the devastating 2001 earthquake in Kutch. The Khatris, renowned for their intricate ajrakh block printing, had previously lived in the village of Dhamadka.⁷ However, the earthquake altered that village’s natural water sources, changing their mineral composition, which negatively affected the quality of the dyes produced there. Seeking better conditions, many Khatris relocated to Ajrakhpur, a site near Bhuj with a more suitable water supply for their craft.

Recognizing the potential of this new site, the Khatris encouraged Shroff to consider acquiring land in the same area, which subsequently led to the procurement of the plot. The location was selected not only for its proximity to the artisans but also for its potential to host a multifunctional campus. Through a process of community dialogue and environmental assessment, the land was eventually prepared for construction. Importantly, the acquisition of this property involved ongoing community collaboration and consultation, outlining the vision and plans for the site, ensuring that the initiative was embraced as a collective effort rather than an external imposition.

The acquisition of the land marked a pivotal transition for LLDC—from mobile outreach to a permanent institutional presence. It signaled a long-term commitment to the region and laid the foundation for a built environment that reflects the values of resilience, inclusivity, and cultural continuity. By embedding the institution within the living context of one of Kutch’s most iconic craft traditions—ajrakh—LLDC reinforced its mission to support and sustain artisan life through meaningful, place-based cultural infrastructure.

The architectural design of LLDC had to emphasize structural resilience, incorporating earthquake-resistant technologies alongside vernacular building practices. In doing so, it addressed environmental risks while maintaining the region’s architectural heritage. The design team, working with local engineers and artisans, aimed to ensure the building could withstand future seismic activity.

Locally sourced materials were combined with reinforced structural systems to create a hybrid approach that enhanced durability while preserving cultural continuity. The campus layout—including galleries, studios, and open courtyards—was designed to support rainwater harvesting and to optimize natural ventilation and lighting, thus reducing reliance on mechanical systems and promoting environmental sustainability. For thermal stability, the design team used bricks made from lime and fly ash. Lime mortar was prepared on-site by grinding lime with sand and cement, and this gauged mortar was used for the masonry work. Natural lime plaster, applied using traditional methods, was used in the interiors of two galleries.⁸

Although Kutch experiences a predominantly hot and arid climate, winter nights can be very cold. To regulate temperature extremes, the building plan incorporates passive cooling strategies. Fenestrations of varying sizes on the west and south sides allow winter sunlight while minimizing summer heat and enhancing ventilation. Shaded passageways offer cooler zones, and rainwater harvesting tanks collect approximately 500,000 liters annually, supplemented by onsite wastewater management.

By embedding resilience into its architecture, LLDC exemplifies how cultural institutions can be both context-sensitive and future-ready. The building itself serves as a pedagogical tool, demonstrating how indigenous knowledge and modern engineering can converge to create spaces that are safe, sustainable, and symbolically rich.

Documenting the Collections 

Alongside the building of the Living and Learning Design Centre, work was begun on documenting the collections in readiness for the gallery displays. Of particular importance were the specially commissioned embroidered panels initiated through the Design Center On Wheels. Each piece was systematically photographed and catalogued, including details such as the maker’s name, community affiliation, and pattern type, preserving the unique identities and cultural significance of each motif, such as the scorpion at the midway point on either side of the central medallion in figure 5. Oral interviews were conducted in Kutchi—a dialect that has no written script—and were later translated into Gujarati and then English. These interview transcripts were also digitized to ensure comprehensive recordkeeping. This time-consuming process could only be overseen through locally recruited teams composed of members of the communities themselves. In doing so, LLDC has been able to capture and contextualize some of the region’s most intricate embroidery as markers of its ecosystems and holistic way of living, heralding a break from previous museological practices. Importantly, many of the team at LLDC are multilingual and have the advantage of being able to speak Kutchi. By sitting with the community members, sharing food, and listening to intergenerational stories of how their crafts have changed over time, they have slowly collected facts, piecing them together over days, months, and years. To date, the communities that are being documented (an ongoing process with varying degrees of completion) are the Ahir (within which are the subgroups of Pranthadiya, Machhoya, Boricha), Meghwaad Gurjar, Sodha and Jadeja, Rabaari (including the subgroups Debariya, Kaachhi, Vagadiya, and Bhopa), Meghwaad Maaru, Jat (Garasiya, Danetah, Fakirani, and Haajani), Rau Node, Mutwa, and Halepotra. 

By actively recruiting staff from within these communities, LLDC has been able to ensure and conserve a granular level of knowledge that has been authentically verified at each stage. This practice remains ongoing, safeguarding cultural heritage through grassroots representation and local expertise. Additionally, the collection continues to expand through the acquisition and donations of personal traditional garments and artifacts from the communities as well as those made for commercial sale and the repatriation of antique garments and crafts from Kutch, previously held in Western public and private collections.

Storing the Collections

The collections at the Living and Learning Design Centre are housed in purpose-built, specialized facilities, with the natural materials of the building and construction serving as active agents, conducive to regulating the temperature and light levels. To ensure the collections are protected from pest infestations, natural preventive methods that use local indigenous insect-repelling herbs are employed. Since traditional Western materials like Melinex are unsuitable for the climate, finely woven unbleached cotton and herb-filled pouches are placed within the storage units, and to minimize contamination, visitors and staff must enter barefoot: No outside footwear is allowed inside the archive.⁹

Programming at the Living and Learning Design Centre

The Craft Studio and Hands-On gallery at LLDC serve as dynamic spaces for the transmission, experimentation, and celebration of Kutch’s rich craft traditions. Designed not merely as a production unit but also as pedagogical and collaborative environments, these spaces facilitate a range of activities bridging traditional knowledge and contemporary practice.

Workshops are regularly conducted in the Hands-On gallery, bringing together master artisans, apprentices, students, and visiting designers. These sessions focus on skills transmission, enabling younger generations to learn intricate techniques such as ajrakh block printing, embroidery, felting, spinning, weaving, and dyeing. The studio also functions as a site for experimentation, as a place in which artisans are encouraged to innovate with materials, motifs, and forms while remaining rooted in traditional aesthetics.

Community engagement is central to the Craft Studio’s ethos. Local residents and artisans are invited to observe and participate in open-studio days, fostering a sense of shared ownership and cultural pride. Collaborative projects with design institutions and nongovernmental organizations create opportunities for cross-cultural dialogue and economic empowerment. Through its multifaceted programming, the Craft Studio and Hands-On gallery exemplify LLDC’s mission to sustain living traditions by embedding them in spaces of learning, creativity, and community interaction.

Currently, there are approximately 30 active crafts in Kutch, encompassing textiles, vegetal materials, metals, and pottery. Each craft is maintained and utilized, with traditional techniques adapted to suit the available natural resources. LLDC includes these practices as a central aspect of its programming.

Throughout the year, various programs take place, featuring live and performing arts such as dance, drama, music, and film screenings as well as academic conferences and award ceremonies that recognize the work of local artisans. The Winter Festival is an annual major event bringing together traditional craft communities from across India.

Sustaining the Longevity of Craft: Community and Cultural Resilience

The Living and Learning Design Centre offers a compelling model for rethinking museum practice in rural and environmentally sensitive contexts. The pioneering work of the late Chanda Shroff continues under the leadership of her daughter, Ami Shroff. By integrating indigenous knowledge systems into its architectural design, curatorial strategies, and community engagement, LLDC challenges conventional museological frameworks that often prioritize static preservation over dynamic cultural continuity. Its establishment reflects a deliberate effort to create a space that is not only resilient to seismic and climatic disruptions but also responsive to the sociocultural fabric of the region.

The Centre’s infrastructure—characterized by its use of local materials, vernacular construction techniques, and participatory planning—demonstrates a contextually grounded approach to sustainability and resilience. Furthermore, LLDC’s hybrid functionality as a museum, educational hub, and craft studio positions it as a site of both cultural preservation and economic empowerment. It facilitates intergenerational knowledge transfer and supports the livelihoods of artisans engaged in traditional crafts such as embroidery, weaving, and block printing (to name but a few), each one a complex and historically rich practice unique to the region.

In translating a global institutional model into a locally embedded framework, LLDC contributes to a broader discourse on culturally responsive heritage infrastructure. It underscores the importance of ecological sensitivity, community participation, and cultural specificity in the development of museums that serve not only as repositories of history but also as living systems of learning and innovation. As such, LLDC offers valuable insights for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers seeking to design inclusive and resilient cultural institutions in the Global South.

This essay stems from the Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP) Bombay/Mumbai initiative at MoMA. The 2024-2026 Bombay/Mumbai research program was conceived and organized by Ananya Sikand (C-MAP Bombay/Mumbai Fellow) and Lucy Gallun (Curator, The Robert B. Menschel Department of Photography). Read more about C-MAP here.

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Among the topics that were discussed were assemblies of the human and other-than-human as collectives, assemblies of materials into collections, and assemblies of spaces and places into shared worlds. The speakers drew from their engagement with exhibitions, films, public programs, and cultural institutions to map how these forms of assemblies realized the poetic potential of coming together through difference. Assemblies in Uncertain Times offered an opportunity to imagine other futures together, complicating established linearities and teleologies.

The 2025 C-MAP Seminar took place on June 11–12, 2025 and was conceived by Diana Iturralde, Cisneros Institute Research Fellow; Beya Othmani, C-MAP Africa Fellow; Carlos Quijon Jr., C-MAP Southeast & East Asia Fellow; and Ananya Sikand, C-MAP Bombay/Mumbai Fellow with support from the International Program: Marta Dansie, Department Coordinator; Jay Levenson, Director; Ksenia Nouril, Assistant Director; and Elena Pérez-Ardá López, C-MAP Program Coordinator. The C-MAP Seminar is organized in collaboration with the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America at MoMA.

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While Tibet has ceased to exist as an independent nation, Tibetan material heritage continues to be extensively circulated, collected, displayed, and interpreted in museums, the art market, and academia (fig. 1). Exhibitions of “Tibetan art” remain a regular occurrence in the exhibition circuit. Moreover, Tibetan objects are omnipresent in auctions of Asian art every season at all the major international auction houses and continue to fetch record prices in the global art market. This hypervisibility of Tibetan objects in museums and the market raises a fundamental question: Why is so much of Tibet’s material heritage circulating outside Tibet, displaced from its original place of worship and practice, and so far removed from Tibetans? This phenomenon is succinctly captured by Clare Harris, who notes, “The bulk of Tibet’s portable cultural heritage has been retained everywhere other than Tibet, and is now most readily at the disposal of everyone other than Tibetans.”⁵ Hence, further attention to the provenance of Tibetan collections dispersed across the world in public and private collections is warranted, particularly to assess the colonial entanglement of sacred Tibetan objects. 

The complex colonial entanglement of museum collections in the Global North has led to a growing body of scholarship suggesting that museums must engage with the communities to which these objects originally belonged as a form of symbolic reparation and restorative justice.⁶ This practice has been gaining recognition and momentum, with various attempts to “transform” the museum or, at the very least, alter the relationship between the museum and “communities of origin,” a move that has been deemed “one of the most important developments in the history of museums.”⁷ However, to this day, there is an acute absence of Tibetans in museums, whether as curators, interpreters, collaborators, or other agents in the construction of knowledge and representation or as members of the audience for museum displays.

“Doubly colonial” Tibet: An Inheritance of Loss

In her seminal text The Museum on the Roof of the World: Art, Politics, and the Representation of Tibet (2012), Harris highlights that the hypervisibility of Tibetan objects is due to the extensive scale of displacement of Tibetan heritage from the Tibetan landscape and people through repeated waves of extraction of objects in a “doubly colonial” context, that of both British and Chinese looting in the twentieth century.⁸ She articulates that Tibet is a possibly unique example of being “doubly colonial” as before the People’s Republic of China assimilated Tibet, it witnessed a British colonialist intervention in the form of the Younghusband “Expedition” of 1903–4. These repeated waves of pillaging have physically deprived Tibet of significant quantities of its material heritage, which is now found primarily in Western or Chinese museums and private collections worldwide, not in Tibet itself.

The Younghusband Mission was a British military campaign sanctioned by Lord Curzon (1859–1952), who served as viceroy of India (1898–1905), due to rising anxieties over perceived Russian influence in Tibet. There was no intention to annex Tibet into the British Empire, but the aim was to force the Tibetans to end their suspected dealings with Russia and to establish a dominant British influence in Tibet, an agenda some have deemed “almost entirely bogus.”⁹ Strikingly, the Younghusband Mission was primarily a military campaign, deploying the latest technology available to the British at the time: four field guns firing shrapnel shells and two Maxim machine guns capable of firing 760 rounds per minute. To illustrate the scale of senseless violence and plunder that took place during this invasion, let’s revisit the infamous “Battle of Guru,” known among Tibetans as the “Massacre of Chumik Shenko” (fig. 2).

On March 31, 1904, the incursion of British forces was halted by Tibetan forces in the valley of Guru in southern Tibet. According to Tibetan sources, the British proposed that as a precondition for negotiations, all Tibetan soldiers must unload their weapons and extinguish the fuses of their muskets.¹⁰ While preparations for negotiations were taking place, British forces strategically positioned their machine guns on nearby hills and surrounded the Tibetan army from three directions. According to Tibetan government records, when the British opened fire, 523 Tibetans were killed and 300 more were wounded.¹¹ While there is debate about what started the skirmish, it is apparent that the British army used a strategic maneuver to outflank and “box in” the Tibetan army, attacking them from three sides and firing over 15,000 rounds of ammunition on retreating Tibetans.¹² British forces pursued Tibetans for 12 miles and continued to kill and maim them.¹³ After this massacre, many battle trophies were collected from the bodies of the dead or from surrendered Tibetan soldiers, including earrings, gau (box amulets), bandolier belts, weapons, and clothing.

After seizing key strategic positions in Tibet, such as the monastery-city of Gyantse, British officers committed what Patrick French has termed “casual robbery” in deserted monasteries or houses.¹⁴ What began as collecting battle trophies at Guru became frenzied looting among the ranks at every available opportunity, but the expedition later followed a formalized protocol to sift through the material, which would, in appearance, be “a more reputable form of collecting for intellectual pursuits.”¹⁵ According to Harris, the Younghusband Mission is significant because it created a desire and appetite for Tibetan objects in the market.¹⁶ Even before Younghusband’s military campaign reached its conclusion in Lhasa, a steady stream of looted Tibetan objects had been trickling into Great Britain, some of which fetched high prices at Christie’s auction house in London.¹⁷

The state-led destruction of Tibetan cultural heritage peaked later, during the Cultural Revolution (1967–77), when according to Tibetan sources, more than 6,000 Tibetan temples and monasteries were ransacked and partially or fully destroyed mainly by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and agents of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).¹⁸ During this purge of Tibetan culture, sacred Buddhist sites such as the Jokhang temple in Lhasa were desecrated (fig. 3). This systematic desecration was through the destruction of venerated sacred images of Buddha, Bodhisattvas and protective spirits; the burning of precious manuscripts, manuscript printing blocks and thangka paintings as cooking fuel; and the turning of the area into a pig slaughterhouse and toilet by the PLA Garrison Command.¹⁹ Sam van Schaik notes this destruction was a “carefully planned operation” as each site was first inventoried, with “all precious stones and metal objects carefully labelled and prepared for transportation to Beijing.”²⁰ The desecration and destruction of the Jokhang temple are illustrative of what happened to many sacred temples and monasteries all over Tibet. 

In an overview of different case studies on plundered cultural properties for the International Committee of Museums (ICOM) publication Countering Illicit Traffic in Cultural Goods: The Global Challenge of Protecting the World’s Heritage (2015), Sam Hardy argues that the loss and destruction of Tibetan heritage under the Chinese state was “incalculable both in terms of culture and in terms of sheer quantity.”²¹ For instance, in the 1990s, monasteries in Tibet were targeted by Chinese gangs who “killed monks in their violent attempts to remove statues from monasteries” so that they could profit from the appetite for Tibetan material heritage in the global art market.²²  In 2008, the Chinese police confiscated cultural assets from Tibetan communities as a punishment for the Tibetan uprising, and this was evidenced by a marked flow of Tibetan cultural material onto the antiquities market.²³

The destruction and dispossession of Tibetan material heritage has been acutely experienced by Tibetan refugees, who were forced to sell their material heirlooms to survive and sustain themselves. The exodus of refugees from Tibet in 1959 has only added further symbolic capital to Tibetan material culture.²⁴ Despite the mainstreaming of debates around decolonizing museums and restitution of looted heritage, the case of Tibet in museums has remained conspicuously absent from both postcolonial and decolonial discourse.²⁵ Tibetans remain completely marginalized within such museum agendas and discussions, giving rise to a paradox that while objects from Tibet are much desired and welcomed in museums, Tibetan people are not.²⁶ Thus, the fractures in the geopolitical and cultural identity of the Tibetan people are further amplified as they endure the loss not only of their land but also of their material heritage. 

Uncovering the “Debt of Truth” in Tibetan Collections

Among the vast Tibetan collections dispersed across museums and private collections in the United Kingdom lie the muted and suppressed histories of violence and plunder that took place during the Younghusband invasion of Tibet, often embedded in the object’s very materiality. This was particularly evidenced by a gau pierced by a bullet and now held in the Cheltenham Museum and Art Gallery in Gloucestershire, which Harris argues was collected as a battle trophy by the British army.²⁷ Another gau riddled with a bullet hole (fig. 4) was discovered in the collection of the National Museums Scotland.²⁸ The late historian of Tibetan art John Clarke highlights that for a gau to be effective, it must be in contact with the body.²⁹ For this reason, although we do not have Tibetan bodies to examine to uncover the violence that took place during Younghusband’s military campaign in Tibet, the gau becomes a proxy for Tibetan bodies and lives in material form. During my collections research at various museums in the United Kingdom, I have encountered a vast number of gau and even if only a minority of them were removed from the bodies of dead Tibetans, this still potentially represents hundreds of lost Tibetan lives (fig. 5).

This loss of life can be even more “explicitly” evidenced through Tibetan objects I encountered during my doctoral fieldwork that have spots of what could be blood. I observed such spots on two objects, both with a direct Younghusband provenance—a gau in the World Cultures collection of the National Museums Liverpool and a wicker shield from the British Museum.³⁰ The gau (fig. 6) houses a tsa-tsa (clay tablet) of Mahakala and a folded kha-btags (white silk scarf). The handwritten label reads, “Charm against bullet—taken from the body of a dead Tibetan at Dongste monastery by Major.”³¹ The label refers to a Geluk monastery at Drongtse (‘brong-rtse), near Gyantse, that was founded in 1442. On examining this gau, I observed a sizeable, red spot on the object’s textile amulet (srung-nga) component. I thought this stain was possibly blood due to the acquisition circumstances (it was taken from a dead Tibetan’s body) and the knowledge of how the amulet is traditionally worn across the body. I immediately requested testing, and the in-house investigation was conducted by senior organics conservator Tracey Seddon. Due to the museum’s hesitance to authorize destructive sampling, we discussed and explored alternative, nondestructive analytical procedures. However, such methods were inconclusive.³² Joanne Dyer and Diego Tamburini from the Department of Scientific Research at the British Museum also conducted noninvasive testing on the shield, with FORS (Fiber Optic Reflectance spectroscopy) as the only available in-house option (fig. 7). Preliminary tests on both objects were unable to conclusively scientifically verify the presence of blood, and multiple experts, including the team at the British Museum, concluded that the only viable route would be to conduct proteomics analysis (a cellular examination of proteins), which would require destructive sampling.³³

Even with the small sample size of the collections review during my doctoral research, I uncovered two objects of potential significance at the British Museum whose origins were inscribed on them—a kapala (fig. 8) and a helmet (fig. 9).³⁴  Both had been “collected” by Major H. A. Iggulden, a member of the Younghusband Mission. Upon examination, I observed that “Palkhor Chode” had been inscribed on the base of the kapala. This refers to Pelkhor Chode, an important monastic complex in Gyantse (located in the historical Tsang province of Tibet), which was attacked and occupied by the British in 1904.³⁵ I argue that this kapala was inscribed by the field “collector” to mark the origins of this battle trophy collected from Gyantse. The helmet revealed a Tibetan inscription rgyal-tse (Gyantse), which is accompanied by what appears to be the Tibetan numeral seven (༧). I believe that these objects were removed and taken from the Pelkhor Chode monastery (or Gyantse dzong) by Major Iggulden, but were transcribed by two different types of agents: Indigenous (Tibetan) and colonial (British). However, it is noteworthy that the museum recorded neither of these easily legible inscriptions, particularly considering they reveal direct provenance. These gaps in the museum database are not highlighted to criticize the specific institutions, as this is symptomatic of the broader sector, but rather to show how such gaps could become focal points for museums to coproduce knowledge with living members of the Tibetan community, rather than re-amplifying what was said or done by British officers. 

Considering the limitations in archival information (notably on early Tibetan collections), and more importantly, due to suppressed and silenced histories in the colonial archive, new modes of scientific inquiry on Tibetan objects could be deployed to uncover “truths” in the collection. Such inquiries can make the hidden violence of Tibetan objects explicit, which historian Achille Mbembe calls a “debt of truth” that museums should address.³⁶ This case study also highlights the inherent conflict between institutional guidelines that seek to preserve the physical integrity of objects and the necessity of conducting tests that generally require destructive sampling.³⁷ Reflecting on the histories of the museumification of Tibet’s material heritage, venerated Tibetan sacred images and objects (such as gau) have been emptied of their sacral contents (gzungs-gzhug) in the name of scientific inquiry and thangka paintings have been radically altered with their textile borders (gong-gsham) removed to elevate them as “fine art.”³⁸ Considering sacred Tibetan objects have been subjected to such forms of museal violence across different institutions, museums must reconsider and prioritize such modes of inquiry that would uncover the colonial violence that caused the object to be in the museum’s collection in the first place. 

Reanimating Tibet in the Museum

While Tibetans have had limited agency in how much of Tibet’s portable heritage was deposited in museums across the world through “doubly colonial” extractive regimes, it can be argued that the objects have only survived significant periods of destruction due to their “museumization.” However, as is apparent, there are substantial gaps in the knowledge and provenance around/of Tibetan collections across institutions. To address these gaps and offer an antidote to the dislocation and destruction of Tibetan cultural heritage, museums must engage with Tibetans and reconnect these objects to the community (fig. 10).³⁹ To begin addressing the colonial entanglement, these Tibetan collections could serve as focal points for long-term and sustainable engagement between museums and Tibetans. Besides tackling issues surrounding the lack of Tibetan agency and the acute absence of Tibetan voice(s) in museums, this could give rise to innovative approaches to creating new knowledge and working with Tibetan collections. However, Tibet’s complex and contested nature raises a foundational question: Who can represent Tibetan interests in museums and in the related “authorized heritage discourse”?⁴⁰

While working with communities has become increasingly mainstream across the museum and heritage sector in the United Kingdom (and beyond), prevailing practices and discourse primarily focus on the outputs of community engagement or collaboration. As noted by some scholars, there is a need to move beyond the prevalent “black box” approach to community engagement and pivot the focus from the products of consultation or collaboration to its underlying process and methodologies.⁴¹As museums become increasingly social spaces and undertake more extensive consultation and collaboration initiatives, divergent actors and groups will inevitably emerge to compete for the role of representing a “community of origin.” Hence, the museum will have to mediate between these competing groups and subsets of communities. Considering the cultural and geopolitical implications and shifting goalposts in ethics, community-oriented museum practices must be grounded in sustained research, methodology, and ethical and critical precision, particularly when the ownership of material heritage is contested and its provenance is complex. My work remains grounded in a simple idea—let’s not propose or conceive of solutions to problems we don’t fully understand, especially if the decisions are irreversible and permanent, such as restitution. Museums (and academics) could instead try to create conditions or spaces that allow communities to undertake “slow agentive decision-making” in choices concerning the future of their heritage accessioned in Western museums, which will have long-lasting impact and significance.⁴² In such slow, agentive processes, it can become more apparent how sub-state actors such as Indigenous/historically marginalized communities could assert agency in authorized heritage discourse currently dominated by (direct and indirect) state actors. It’s evident that the complex and contested case of Tibet in museums requires a nuanced research-led approach. Perhaps this is a true litmus test for the decolonial agendas of the museum and heritage sector?

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