Post Presents: Assemblies in Uncertain Times
MoMA Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP) Seminar.
Session One: 11 June 2025
“This public program brought together Nancy Adajania, May Adadol Ingawanij, and Frida Muenala from Mullu for an evening of inquiry into forms and practices of gathering. The speakers, who represent diverse practices in the cultural fields—from art making to curation to institutional leadership—and operate across vast geographies, unpacked their different approaches to assemblies.
Among the topics that were discussed were assemblies of the human and other-than-human as collectives, assemblies of materials into collections, and assemblies of spaces and places into shared worlds. The speakers drew from their engagement with exhibitions, films, public programs, and cultural institutions to map how these forms of assemblies realized the poetic potential of coming together through difference. Assemblies in Uncertain Times offered an opportunity to imagine other futures together, complicating established linearities and teleologies.” MoMA
Developed in collaboration with C-MAP Fellow Carlos Quijon, jr., the theme of my talk, ‘The curator as…’, concerns the possibilities and the ambiguities of curatorial agency drawing on insights and examples from Southeast Asian and Southeast Asia-related contexts. What is curatorial agency in Southeast Asian artworlds? When these are shaped by hegemonic global and oligarchic institutions, market, infrastructural and symbolic aspirations, translocal dynamism, regional asymmetries, and multiplicity of art histories and practices, how does the curator figure, mediate, relate, institute, or transact? Is the curator exclusively a maker of exhibitions and champion of art’s publicness? How do we imagine the curator’s agency to be akin to that of the animist, the bureaucrat, or…? (May Adadol Ingawanij)
Session Two: 12 June
C-MAP Seminar: Assemblies Otherwise panel, with Nancy Adajania (Bombay-based cultural theorist and curator) and May Adadol Ingawanij, moderated by Stuart Comer (The Lonti Ebers Chief Curator of Media and Performance)
‘The curatorial-as-animistic practice’: My talk draws on two ongoing curatorial projects involving kin (Julian Ross and others), teachers, hosts, and a multiplicity of beings, To Commune, the 69th Flaherty Film Seminar (2024 – ) and Animistic Apparatus (2018 – ). Both are experiments in moving image curation as relational practicing and infrastructure making. Both relearn curating by drawing inspiration from an animistic cinematic and cosmological genealogy of film culture in Thailand: the practice of outdoor film projection as ritualistic efforts in spirit ecologies of people in precarious circumstances to make time, future prospect, and relations with opaque powers.
Addressing the theme of “assemblies” from these curatorial experimentation and learning, I will draw attention to dynamics of improvisation, agency in existential vulnerability, and asymmetry of power in situations of transaction and exchange. Looking back on the experience of relocating the 2024 Flaherty Film Seminar to the Thai Film Archive instead of its customary North American university campus sites, I would like to use this presentation to think speculatively about curatorial-as-animistic practicing in cultural infrastructures of asymmetry, institutional fragility, desire for difference, and ambivalent entanglement with the historically dominant (May Adadol Ingawanij)