In 2015, Goethe-Institut launched CuratorsLAB, an educational program dedicated to support contemporary curatorial practice in Southeast Asia. In collaboration with independent curator and lecturer of Institut Teknologi Bandung, Agung Hujatnikajennong, and Fabian Schöneich, curator of Portikus in Frankfurt am Main, 14 participants were selected from different backgrounds and practices in the region.
Since then, the participants have been involved in the program in several phases including field trips to Bandung, Berlin, Frankfurt, Cologne to visit artists’ studios, art institutions and events, such as KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Hamburger Bahnhof, Kunstverein Cologne, documenta. They also participated in a workshop in Bangkok in preparation to the final presentation of CuratorsLAB. The final presentation take place in form of an exhibition and a research project under the names of
Mutual Learning and
Mutual Unknown.
Mutual Unknown exhibition is derived from “
Mutual Unknown” - a term proposed by the CuratorsLAB to refer to the fact that we have still yet to learn properly about each other. CuratorsLAB still have a journey to go in terms of understanding each other’s context and finding ways to move forward together.
Moving forward with this concern, the project aims to facilitate shared questions on the regionality of Southeast Asia :
- Do we have a ‘shared regional thinking’?
- How could an exhibition and related art activities create possibilities among sporadic networks and varied interests?
- How could an exhibition present an ongoing process of creating and working through differences?
Participated by nine emerging artists from Southeast Asia, the project will simulate a
decentralized form of art exhibition where individual voices turns into a shared authority that an exhibition and it’s collaborating artist will function as a structure that facilitate interaction, discussion and art creation.
The exhibition will be generated from a set of intensive journey; discussion, research trip and production that take place in Indonesia from May – June 2017 done by participating artist and curators. The ‘production’ will be started by collective journey, followed by a research trip of participating artist and continued by artwork production at gallery space.
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