Histories Without Footnotes: Contemporary Art in Southeast Asia
Artists across South and Southeast Asia have turned to memory, storytelling, and embodied research to confront historical erasure, transforming the absence of archives into spaces of testimony, critique, and creative reconstruction.
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In many parts of South and Southeast Asia, the formation of modern and contemporary art history has been shaped not only by the absence of institutional archives and the persistence of censorship, but also by the broader political and economic transformations that accompanied postcolonial nation-building, authoritarian rule, and neoliberal reform. These structural conditions—state repression, cultural amnesia, and the uneven effects of globalization—have meant that vernacular, personal, and collective histories are often not officially recorded or are actively silenced. In response, artists, curators, and historians have developed alternative modes of preservation and narration, turning to oral histories, embodied memory, personal archives, and performative research as critical tools of engagement and resistance. Working through the concept of "no archive as method", considering the 'lack' as an opportunity to question dominant perceptions of knowledge production, this lessons looks at artists such as Nguyen Trinh Thi, Ho Tzu Nyen, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Roslisham Ismail (Ise), Amol K Patil and others to reflect on how contemporary art practices from the region act as both counter-histories and proposals for new modes of historicization. It also considers the evolving role of the curator and art historian as ethnographer, translator, and witness within these complex terrains.
March 25, 2026 - from 3 PM to 5 PM CET.
