Six artist-educators and collectives from across Asia and the Asian diaspora have been selected through an Open Call for Artist Exercises. From February to June 2022, they will develop creative exercises for their communities of learners, drawing inspiration from AAA’s Collections. Throughout the process, the educators will work closely with AAA to explore the collections, and make meaningful connections between historical contexts, artistic practices, and their current needs in education.
In a hybrid model, the small cohort of artist-educators will gather online with AAA and spend time with the digitised art archives. At the same time, they will generate ideas individually and carry out exercises onsite with their group of learners. Through this programme, we hope to build a community of educators across geographies and create tools for students and teachers to engage with art archives for creative and inquiry-based learning. We are interested in building dialogue around the specific urgencies of the artist-educators in the programme and supporting each other through different teaching and learning needs.
AAA initiated Artist Exercises in 2020 in response to the pandemic—the first batch themed “Learning at Home,” which invited local and international artists to design a range of educational activities students can carry out at home during school suspension. Artist Exercises 2022 takes this further by collaborating with artist-educators to find connections between their work in their specific contexts, using resources on modern and contemporary art from Asia. At the end of this project, we will feature the new exercises on AAA’s website as part of our Educator’s Resources, freely accessible for teachers and learners.
Applications were open to both early-career and experienced artist-educators, as well as collectives involved with art education and pedagogy. The selection of proposals was based on the urgency and relevance of the exercise for the community of learners, and the potential to be applied to teachers and learners in varied geographical contexts. This cohort has been composed with the intention of representing diverse regions.
2022 Artist Exercise Cohort
Assam-based Anga Art Collective was formed in 2010 as a self-led studio space that explores the possibilities of freedom in art as well as in life. The collective thinks and works through regional and cultural specificities within a process of decolonisation in making and learning. They develop aesthetic responses, and host lectures, talks, and pedagogical reach-out events. Their collaborators include village communities, river communities, forest situations, folk artists, ecologists, social scientists, and activists. The collective has developed images, site-specific installations, murals, videos in cross-ethnic contexts, and has also co-founded kNOw school—a post-academic process to reconsider art pedagogy. Another initiative is Granary, which focuses on creating a multicultural repository through publications, productions, and a community library space at Panjabari, Guwahati. For their exercise, they are interested in exploring co-learning in communities and site-specific engagements and materials in the archives.
Anthony Miranti is a lecturer with the Faculty of Creative Industries (FCI) at Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR), Malaysia, where he teaches various audio and broadcasting courses. He has also led and developed curriculum for Social Media, Animation Theory, and Media Theory in his faculty. He is passionate about history, especially about stories of how people in different eras and cultures are connected via technologies of the time. His area of specialisation and research interests include the exploration of the various capacities of sound to influence people, capture historical information, preserve cultural heritage, and combine cultural identifiers with contemporary influences. For his exercise, he is interested in working with his colleagues to translate materials from our archival collections using sound and synesthetic techniques, and make them accessible for visually impaired users.
Czar Kristoff is a Laguna–based artist, designer, educator, and publisher, interested in (re)construction of space and memory, through concepts of nesting and temporary architecture, for (pedagogical) occupation, using cottage industry publishing—blueprints, xerox, and other low- fidelity printing methods—as his current media of interest. He has exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Showroom MAMA (Rotterdam), Jogja National Museum, C3 Artspace (Melbourne), Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, De Appel (Amsterdam), Dansehallerne (Copenhagen), and Vargas Museum (Manila). Kristoff runs Temporary UnReLearning (URL) Academy, a school with no permanent address interested in queering art and cultural production in the Philippines. For their exercise, they are interested in exploring photography, virtuality, and queerness in the archival collections.
Joey Chin is an artist and writer in Singapore. Her work is located at the intersections of text, narrative, and visual art, staged through poetry, acts and modes of reading, and various disruptions. Her key focus is in the development of personal communications between the self, markings of territoriality, and the inner conversations between the two. Joey holds an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from the City University of Hong Kong, and her work has received scholarships, grants, and awards from numerous organisations including Arthub Asia, the Asia–Europe Foundation, and the Royal Over-Seas League Arts (United Kingdom). For her exercise, she is interested in exploring how writing and text are embedded in contemporary art practice, and how speakers of different languages can communicate to each other through art.
Omnispace, together with Pupa and Lab Ngebon, merged into Omni Kolektif in 2021. Located in Bandung, Indonesia, Omni Kolektif is a contemporary art collective that focuses on education, knowledge exchange, and ideas. Their goal is to provide an inclusive space for actors in creative fields as well as for the general public, so as to create an environment conducive to collaboration, while considering the economic value needed to sustain the collective. Recently, Omnispace initiated the residency project Masa Subur: Awewe to support female artists in Bandung. The project facilitates young female artists to engage in intensive dialogue about critical thinking about art-making with the various contexts that accompany them, and to experiment in searching for fresh art practice forms. Omnispace also organises Perguruan Menengah Omni, a public class open to everyone who wants to learn about artistic practices. For their exercise, they are interested in locating histories of domestic spaces and the everyday lives of women and women artists in the archive, and engaging homemakers in their local communities.
Ponnapa Prakkamakul is a conceptual artist and landscape architect based in Massachusetts. As a third-generation Chinese born in Thailand, relocating to Hong Kong then the United States, her work explores the relationship between humans and their environment, focusing on cultural displacement and isolation among immigrants. Prakkamakul holds a master’s degree in Landscape Architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design, where she received the Lowthorpe Fellowship Award upon graduation. Her work has also been exhibited, published, and collected throughout the US and in Asia. Recently, Ponnapa has been engaging Asian American youth in Chinatown in Boston through programmes that explore the histories of their neighbourhood and diasporic cultural heritage. She will engage this demographic in her exercise, where she is interested in working with archival collections around urban heritage and how art responds to cities.
This is part of the AAA Learning & Participation Programme, supported by the S. H. Ho Foundation Limited.