Para Site

Panel Discussion on The World is Our Home. A Poem on Abstraction

Date
Mar 3, 2016
Time
7:00 pm – 9:00 pm

As the final event in the series of public programmes for Para Site’s exhibition The World is Our Home. A Poem on Abstraction, this panel discusses the works of Robert Motherwell, Tomie Ohtake, and Tang Chang as well as the international and national circumstances in the US, Brazil, and Thailand during the Cold War, in which abstraction was a key cultural pawn with ideological implications. The position, identity, and dislocations of the three painters in the exhibition, their political allegiances, intellectual influences, levels of reception and inscription in art histories, as well as their formal choices will be discussed by curators Cosmin Costinas and Inti Guerrero, independent curator and art historian David Teh and moderated by M+ Ink Art curator Lesley Ma.

 

 

Para/Site Art Space is financially supported by Springboard Grant under the Arts Capacity Development Funding Scheme of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

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The content of this programme does not reflect the views of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

About the panelists

Cosmin Costinas is Executive Director/Curator of Para Site. He co-curated A Hundred Years of Shame – Songs of Resistance and Scenarios for Chinese Nations (2015),  Islands Off the Shores of Asia (2014), Ten Million Rooms of Yearning (2014), and A Journal of the Plague Year (2013), among others. He co-curated the 10th Shanghai Biennial: Social Factory  (2014-15), and the First Ural Industrail Biennial:  Shockworkers of the Mobile Image in Ekaterinburg (2010). Prior to Para Site, he was Curator of BAK, Utrecht (2008-11) where he organized several group and one-person exhibitions (including the first solo presentation of Rabih Mroué). Costinas was Editor of documenta 12 magazines, based in Vienna and Kassel (2006-07).

 

Inti Guerrero is a curator based in Hong Kong. He is the Estrellita B. Brodsky Adjunct Curator of Latin American Art at Tate in London and Co-curator of Aún(Yet) the 44th Salón Nacional de Artistas. From 2011-2014 he was the Associate Artistic Director and Curator at TEOR/éTica, an independent not-for-profit art space founded in 1999 in San José, Costa Rica.
He has curated exhibitions at Tate Modern (London), Para Site, Asia Art Archive and Spring Workshop (Hong Kong), Minsheng Musuem (Shanghai), FRAC-Lorraine (Metz), Kadist Foundation (San Francisco), the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo-MAMSP (Sao Paulo) and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Torino), amongst other institutions in Latin America, as well as in Europe and Asia. He is currently a desk editor on Latin American art for Art Asia Pacific magazine.

 

Lesley Ma is Curator in Ink Art at M+, Hong Kong and former managing editor of Para Site. A guest co-curator of the Para Site exhibition Great Crescent: Art and Agitation in the 1960s–Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan  (2013-2016), she is a PhD candidate in Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the University of California San Diego with a research focus on postwar abstract painting in Taiwan.

 

David Teh is a curator, art advisor and researcher based in Singapore, with a research focus on Southeast Asian contemporary art. After receiving his PhD in critical theory from the University of Sydney, Australia, Teh worked as an independent curator and critic in Thailand (2005-09). He was the curator of The More Things Change… (5th Bangkok Experimental Film Festival, 2008), co-curator of Unreal Asia (55. Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Germany, 2009), and convenor of Video Vortex #7  (Yogyakarta, Indonesia, 2011). His most recent exhibition was TRANSMISSION  (Jim Thompson Art Center, Bangkok, 2014). He is a director of the Singapore gallery and project platform, Future Perfect, where he has produced solo exhibitions with a range of artists, including Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Charles Lim and Arin Rungjang. Teh’s writings can be found in Third Text, Afterall and Theory, Culture and Society and his first book about Thai contemporary art will be published by MIT Press in 2017.