How do we demonstrate care for the next generation of makers?
The global art ecosystem, to which South East Asia is an increasing feature and activator, unevenly distributes access and opportunity. It fixates on the transnational consumption, exotification, and display of artworks over and above the support of its struggling contexts of artistic production (e.g. artists political rights, education, cultural visibility, habitats, and collaborators). In this discussion, speakers offer windows into their work and why we must
better argue the need to support our creative ecologies via nurturing the social worlds of artists.
Speakers
Alessio Antoniolli – Director of Gasworks and Triangle Network, London
Vibha Galhotra – Artist, Delhi
Chantal Wong – Convenor for AFIELD, Hong Kong
Moderated by:
Zoe Butt – Director/Founder, in-tangible institute, Chiang Mai
Alessio Antoniolli – Director of Gasworks and Triangle Network, London
Alessio Antoniolli is the Director of Gasworks, London, where he leads a programme of exhibitions, international residencies and participatory events. He is also the Director of Triangle Network, a world-wide network of visual art organisations that work together to create artists’ exchanges projects and to share knowledge with each other. He is also curator at Fondazione Memmo, Italy, where he programmes one international exhibition each year. He lectures widely and has been part of many juries including the UK’s Turner Prize in 2019.
Vibha Galhotra – Artist, Delhi
Vibha Galhotra (b. 1978, lives and works in Delhi, India) is a conceptual artist whose multimedia oeuvre―including sculptures, installations, photographs, videos, site-specific work, and public art interventions―addresses the shifting topography of a world radically transformed by climate change, consumerism, capitalism, and globalization. A Rockefeller Bellagio fellow, Asian Culture Council fellow, Jerusalem international fellow, as well as a fellow of the Philipp Otto Runge Foundation. Propelled by the constant negotiation between human beings and their ecosystem, Galhotra’s practice utilizes intensive research and intuitive imagination to investigate the social, economic, and political implications of human activity on the environment. She draws from varied disciplines, including the fine arts, ecology, economics, science, spirituality, and political activism to inform a poetic visual response to the environmental changes and restructuring of culture, society, and geography occurring in today’s world. Her work has been shown widely at national and international museums, foundations, and galleries.
Vibha has given lectures and presentations and served as a jury at many institutes. Her work is collected by several private and public collections.
Chantal Wong – Convenor for AFIELD, Hong Kong
Chantal is Convenor for AFIELD, an international network, advocacy and support platform for artists leading transformational change in their communities and society. She is the co-founder of three charities: Learning Together, an organisation empowering refugee and asylum-seeker youth to take on leadership roles through access to education, scholarships, and leadership training; Women’s Festival, a platform promoting gender awareness and equality through public discourse; and Things That Can Happen (2014–2017), an art space for responding to the changes in Hong Kong’s social, cultural and political context. From 2017-2021, she was the Director of Culture at Eaton in Hong Kong, a purpose-driven hospitality brand, where she led a culture and programming team that transformed the property into a champion for creativity, artistic experimentation, and safe spaces for intersectional and marginal communities. From 2006-2017, she was Head of Strategy at Asia Art Archive, a research centre and archive of modern and contemporary Asian art, helping to build an invaluable resource for the (re)writing of Hong Kong’s history from a post-colonial perspective. She is a Ford Global Fellow, a global community brought together by the Ford Foundation working together to combat inequality.
Zoe Butt – Director/Founder, in-tangible institute, Chiang Mai
Zoe Butt, Founder and Director of ‘in-tangible institute’, will curate bipartite sessions on critical issues within the Southeast Asian ecosystem, including the urgency of support for the next generation of artistic practitioners, and the role and relevance of collectors, curators and dealers within this support network. Also a curator and writer, Zoe is known for nurturing critically-thinking and historically-conscious artistic communities, as well as fostering dialogue among cultures of the globalizing souths. Possessing an extensive exhibition, publishing and public-speaking history globally, she founded ‘in-tangible institute’ in 2022 seeking a robust ecology for locally-responsive curatorial talent in Southeast Asia. Zoe holds a PhD from Published Works, Center for Research and Education in Art and Media, University of Westminster, London and is currently Lead Advisor (Southeast Asia and Oceania) at KADIST Art Foundation.