Two online screening programmes featuring works by Sriwhana Spong, Thảo Nguyên Phan, Grace Samboh and Tom Nicholson. Presented at Ibraaz Screening Room in September-October 2026.
Curatorial introduction:
In Southeast Asia, artists aren’t always just artists. In the previous century, the artist-intellectual, the artist-poet, the artist-teacher, or the artist-agitator were among those who contributed to the region’s art histories. Moreover, their expressive and organisational agencies were also part of broader histories of anti-colonial insurgency and postcolonial nation-building. In the present, many prominent Southeast Asian artists based in the region and the diaspora practise as artist-activists, artist-researchers, artist-writers, or artist-curators. The hyphenated mode is central to the dynamism and distinctiveness of their work.
This online screening series draws inspiration from the art historian Roger Nelson’s newly published book, Artistic Art Histories in Southeast Asia, which proposes that the region’s hyphenated artists play an important role in researching and expanding the possibilities of art history through diverse multimedia and experimental practices. Featuring four moving-image works by Sriwhana Spong, Thảo Nguyên Phan, Grace Samboh, and Tom Nicholson, this two-part screening programme shows the artists recalling, retracing, researching, and echoing historical methods and contexts of making art in Indonesia and Vietnam during periods of rupture. Spong’s double bill, an atmospheric animation video and an artist documentary, alchemises kinship with the painting of her Balinese painter-tailor grandfather, the late I Gusti Made Rundu. Phan’s poetic offering to the Mekong River shadows and displaces the expedition and the field trip, modes of travel that had been utilised by the colonisers and, later on, the nationalist state, to commission drawings and paintings for purposes of consolidating power. Samboh and Nicholson’s video essay records a conversation with the late Edhi Sunarso, the renowned sculptor and public artist commissioned by Sukarno, the first Indonesian President, to make a series of dioramas monumentalising the story of the birthing of the nation. Here, in one of the dioramas, art history brushes against the murkiness of a devastating moment in the country’s life.
This programme coincides with the Taring Padi’s exhibition Rakyat Pasti Menang at Ibraaz, London.