Temporary School for Emergent Curators | Vietnam

Uncommon Pursuits: A Temporary School for Emergent Curators in Southeast Asia

Deadline for Application is 16 June 2018, 11:59pm (GMT+7)
Successful candidates will be notified from 25 June 2018.
The course begins on 20 July 2018.

Uncommon Pursuits is open to Southeast Asian nationals who possess 1- 2 years of organizational experience in the visual arts. The programme is held in Ho Chi Minh City from 20 July to 10 August 2018.

An evolved culture of self-organized and artist-initiated projects exist in Vietnam. These projects typically function within energetic but circumstantially fragile contexts with unpredictable futures. Uncommon Pursuits: A Temporary School for Emergent Curators in Southeast Asia has been organized as a result of questions of how best to systematically address the needs of local artists and begin to build and consolidate local, regional and international conversations, platforms and exchanges.

Contemporary curatorial practices run a range of activities in exhibition-making, programming, and discursive projects within an expanding field of publishing. All emerge from research and writing. To date, regional training in curatorial work has been slight, with a concentration in Singapore, while curatorial programmes in Europe and North America proliferate. Furthermore, there is a growing cultural and academic concern with decolonial art histories, histories of contemporary art, and intra-Asia networks. These concerns are usually discussed under the metaphor of the Global South.

Uncommon Pursuits acknowledges and links these insights. The school was developed out of initial research by the curator Qinyi Lim, a curator at the National Gallery Singapore, who identified ambiguity and anxiety in Vietnam in regard to the figure of the curator and the processes of writing and curating ‘contemporary art.’ The school addresses these concerns by shaping a particular contemporaneity to curatorial practice – what it means to work now – and introduces skills based on an expansive understanding of curatorial practice.

Applications are restricted to nationals of Southeast Asian countries. The course is held in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Successful participants who live outside of Ho Chi Minh City will receive a subsidy for their travel and accommodation, to be reimbursed upon course completion.

Participants are required to submit a finalized curatorial proposal within 8 weeks of completion. These proposals will be used in a planned publication about Uncommon Pursuits. Further, Sàn Art will maintain a dialogue with all participants and aim to support the realisation of these proposals in the near future.

For more information and to apply, please visit: http://san-art.org/uncommon-pursuits/