AGENCY | URGENCY: Learning with the Global South

A multi-platform program organized by artist and art alum, Tiffany Chung

Department of Art, UC Santa Barbara and the UC Multicampus Placemaking Initiative

Tiffany Chung, reconstructing an exodus history: flight routes from camps and of ODP cases,  2017, embroidery on fabric, 140 x 350 cm.

AGENCY | URGENCY: Learning with the Global South

AGENCY | URGENCY: Learning with the Global South is a multi-platform program organized by artist and UCSB Department of Art Alum, Tiffany Chung as an academic alternative in response to the current and urgent demand drawing upon the imagination and agency of artists in social and political change. U.S. museums and academic institutions are confronting their own complicity in systemic racial inequality and socio-economic discrepancy that are rooted deeply within their existing structures and institutional operations. There remains a wide gap between acknowledgement and action, as the powerful resistance to change is palpable, yet inevitable. If artists were to play a more central role in transforming our institutions, they would be tasked with an enormous responsibility of filling such a ‘power vacuum’, without prior training or preparation. Within these challenges, AGENCY | URGENCY brings a cohort of contemporary artists, curators and arts presenters from across the globe to join the faculty, students and alums in the Art Department for the informal study and dialogue around the various de-colonizing strategies by art producers from the global south/south of powers – their works challenge established narratives and structures, unpack different forms of knowledge production and cultural dissemination, embrace collectivity and connectivity in interdisciplinary art practice, community engagement, and global solidarity. The program will be conducted in multiple ‘insertion points’ over the winter and spring quarters of 2021 at the University of California, Santa Barbara, with a series of thematic discussions and workshops to be facilitated by international guest artists and curators.

Tiffany Chung (Vietnam/USA)

UCSB Art MFA 2000

Tiffany Chung is internationally noted for her research-based installations and cartographic works that examine conflict, migration, urban transformation and environmental impact in relations to the history of specific places. Her work remaps historical and cultural memories of traumatized topographies, creates interventions into the political narratives produced through statecraft with people’s remembrance, and unpacks the root causes of forced migration and its inextricable link to political, social, economic and environmental processes. Chung was awarded the Sharjah Biennial Artist Prize (2013), named Jane Lombard Fellow for Art & Social Justice at the Vera List Center, New School (2018-2020), and honored with the 2020 Asia Arts Game Changer Awards India by Asia Society.

Selected museum exhibitions and biennials include: Tiffany Chung: Vietnam, Past Is Prologue, Smithsonian American Art Museum, D.C. (2019); Artists Reflect: Contemporary Views on the American War, Minneapolis Institute of Art (2019); New Cartographies, Asia Society, Houston (2018); 21st Biennale of Sydney (2018); Gwangju Biennale (2018); Detours, Nobel Peace Center, Oslo (2017); Insecurities: Tracing Displacement and Shelter, MoMA, New York (2016); XIII Bienal de Cuenca, (Ecuador, 2016); 10th Taipei Biennial (2016); EVA International – Ireland’s Biennial (2016); Illumination, Louisiana MoMA (Denmark, 2016); All The World’s Futures, 56th Venice Biennale (2015); Residual: Disrupted Choreographies, Carré d'Art – Musée d'Art Contemporain, Nimes (France, 2014); Sharjah Biennial (UAE, 2013); Asia Pacific Triennial, Brisbane (2012); Six Lines of Flight, San Francisco MoMA (2012).

[WINTER QUARTER 2021]

The Center Cannot Hold

The Center Cannot Hold is an alternative graduate forum, organized by art alum Tiffany Chung with her former professor and current art department chair, Kim Yasuda, to provide an in-depth look at critical issues in current global art practices by bringing in international artists and curators to share their expertise and experience producing exhibitions at home and on international platforms. Guest speakers will discuss their work from specific geographic locations and yet across cultural context, space and time. As curators are often the conduit between artists and host institutions, the forum will focus on independent curatorial and artistic practices to further understand what it takes to operate on the margins of financial sustainability, as the current pandemic has revealed more clearly the structural fragility of the art ecosystem.

The forum is conducted in five focus group sessions led by guest artists/curators and a culminating forum discussion. In each focus group session, speaker(s) will introduce their work and facilitate a discussion that allows UCSB participants to explore in-depth the presenters’ work and experience, as well as to share the participants’ concerns in regards to their own practices. UCSB participants will have the opportunity to research the guest speakers’ past projects in advance and prepare 5-minute presentations of their own work in relation to those of the presenting speakers. These focus group sessions provide an opportunity for UCSB participants to engage in relevant conversations with active players of the global contemporary art network.

Session 1:

Wednesday, January 20, 5:30-7:30PM PST

[Thursday, Jan 21, 10:30AM-12:30PM GMT+8]

Self-initiation and Cultural Dissemination:

Charwei Tsai in conversation with Merv Espina

Centering their conversation on independent publishing, Tsai and Espina will discuss its critical role in the dissemination of ideas and transmission of knowledge in art, culture, and politics. Tsai will talk about her self-published magazine Lovely Daze and similar art publications that present artworks and artists’ own writings, while Espina presents the D.I.Y zines that exemplify participatory culture and community engagement within a history of social activism in Asia. They will also discuss the use of radio broadcasting in art and cultural dissemination; which together with printed matter are employed by artists and cultural producers to carve out spaces for themselves.

Charwei Tsai was born in 1980 in Taipei, Taiwan where she currently lives and works. She has participated in international exhibitions and biennials at Jogja Biennale (2019); Charwei Tsai: Bulaubulau at CFCCA, Manchester (2018), Hear Hear Singing, Commissioned by Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, London and Water Moon, Institute of Contemporary Art, Villeurbanne / Rhône-Alpes, France, Biennale of Sydney (2016), Simple Shapes at Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2015) and at Centre Pompidou-Metz (2014), Sharjah Biennial (2013), Millennium Magazines at MoMA, New York (2012), Yokohama Triennial and Ruhrtriennale (2011), 6th Asia Pacific Triennial (2009), Traces of the Sacred at Centre Pompidou, Paris (2008), Thermocline of Art: New Asian Waves at ZKM Center of Art and Media, Karlsruhe (2007), and Singapore Biennale (2006). She has published an independent curatorial journal Lovely Daze since 2005. The complete sets of Lovely Daze are in the library collections of Tate Modern, London, Centre Pompidou, Paris, and MoMA, New York.

Merv Espina is an artist and researcher based in Metro Manila. His investigations capitalize on uncomfortable situations to poke holes in history, misrepresentation politics, and the anxieties of archives – resulting in installations and screenings, seminars and zines, music and writing anthologies, pirate radio hacks, noisy choreographies, food fiestas, perfume production, among other whatnots and processes. His less random art experiments have found themselves in the Jakarta Biennale 2015 and Yokohama Triennale 2020. He co-initiated the DIY platforms Kalampag Tracking Agency (2014) and Kamuning Public Radio (2016), janitorializes for the WSK Festival of the Recently Possible (founded in 2008), and was the program director at Green Papaya Art Projects (2010-2020). Besides gritty grassroots organizing, he was also in the more manicured curatorial teams of SUNSHOWER: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia 1980s to Now (Tokyo, 2017), the 15th biennial VIVA EXCON (Roxas, 2018), and Motions of this Kind (London, 2019).

Session 2:

Friday, Jan 29, 10AM-12PM PST [7-9PM Paris]

Curating global art and the world from an African perspective:

N’Goné Fall

Presenting several exhibitions that she has curated, including When things Fall Apart: Critical Voices on the Radars (2016) at the Trapholt Museum of Modern Art & Design, Denmark, and Saison Africa 2020, France, Fall will share her experience of organizing exhibitions globally – unpacking what it means to put together an international show for a very local and insular audience – as well as discussing the global concept of Saison Africa 2020 from an African perspective.

Bio:

N’Goné Fall is an independent curator, art writer and consultant in cultural policies. She graduated with distinction from the École Spéciale d'Architecture in Paris. She was the editorial director of the contemporary African art magazine Revue Noire (Paris, 1994-2001). She is the editor of: An Anthology of African Art: The Twentieth Century (Revue Noire/DAP, 2002) and Anthology of African and Indian Ocean Photography: a century of African photographers (Revue Noire, 1998). Fall was a guest curator of the 2001 Bamako Biennale, the 2002 Dakar Biennale, and exhibitions in Africa, Europe and the U.S. An author of strategic plans, orientation programs and evaluation reports for national and international cultural institutions and art foundations, Fall was also an associate professor at Senghor University, Alexandria, Egypt and a visiting professor at the Michaelis School of Arts, Cape Town, South Africa and Abdou Moumouni University of Niamey, Niger. N'Goné Fall was appointed by French President Emmanuel Macron as the General Commissioner of the Africa2020 Season, a series of events in culture, sciences and entrepreneurship to be held all over France from December 2020 to July 2021.

Session 3:

Friday, Feb 5, 10AM-12PM PST [7-9PM Berlin/Copenhagen]  

Artistic and Curatorial Response to the Refugee Crisis | Cultural Producers in Exile

Tone Olaf Nielsen in conversation with Khaled Barakeh

Our globe is currently facing a series of catastrophic crises that the international community has been unable to tackle: climate change, unequal wealth distribution, structural racism, extremism, terrorism, and mass migration to name some of them. With the examples of CAMP / Center for Art on Migration Politics and the refugee community center Trampoline House, Nielsen will discuss what potential public art institutions – educational and museological – hold to contribute to unpacking and producing resolutions to these global urgencies. Barakeh will talk about the nurturing relationship between his art studio and coculture, a non-profit organization he founded in 2017 that functions as an umbrella organization to a suite of socio-cultural projects, and how, through this constellation, he tries to redefine the need of the community from within, away from the dominant Western narrative and institution.

Bios:

Tone Olaf Nielsen is an independent curator based in Copenhagen, Denmark. She graduated from UCLA's Critical and Curatorial Studies Program in 2002. Nielsen uses curatorial practice to address the root causes of social, economic, and environmental injustices, with a firm belief in the ability of artistic and curatorial work to contribute to socio-political transformation. She formed the collective Kuratorisk Aktion / Curatorial Action (2005) with independent curator Frederikke Hansen, curating a number of projects probing into the complex relations between historical colonialism and capitalist globalization. In 2010, she co-founded the refugee justice community center, Trampoline House in Copenhagen, with Morten Goll, Joachim Hamou and a group of socially engaged artists, refugee rights advocates, and asylum seekers – as an antidote to Denmark’s tight asylum and immigration policies – where she was the program coordinator (2010–18) and program director (2018-20). She also co-founded and co-directed with Frederikke Hansen CAMP / Center for Art on Migration Politics (2015–2020), a nonprofit exhibition space for art discussing questions of displacement, migration, immigration, and asylum located in Trampoline House. Trampoline House has been invited to contribute to documenta15 in 2022 to share its unique mission, program, and methodology.

Khaled Barakeh graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Damascus (2005) and received his MFA from Funen Art Academy in Odense, Denmark (2010). In 2013, he completed a Meisterschuler study at the Städelschule Art Academy in Frankfurt, Germany.  Driven by what he has termed The Practice of Necessity, an ethos which dictates responses to the urgencies of current political and social issues, Khaled Barakeh works in the intersectionality between art, activism, and community building. He has exhibited at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe and Kunsthaus Hamburg (Hamburg, Germany), 2018 Busan Biennale (South Korea), among others. He recently founded coculture, a nonprofit organisation that tackles the many challenges faced by displaced cultural producers in the Middle East, Europe, and beyond.

Session 4:

Friday, Feb 12, 10AM-12PM PST [7-9PM Brussels / 3-5PM Buenos Aires]  

Seismic Shifts - geological, political, and social movements connecting the Global South

Diana Campbell Betancourt in conversation with Adriana Bustos

Diana Campbell Betancourt and Adriana Bustos will be in conversation about how their curatorial and artistic work and research aims to amplify and draw out, rather than drown out, histories which were obscured or reduced to footnotes to Western Art History. Taking examples of collaboration, cooperation, and collectivity, the seminar will consider alternative ways to mapping the world beyond politically imposed regional discourses.

Bios:

Diana Campbell Betancourt is the Founding Artistic Director of the Samdani Art Foundation and Chief Curator of the Dhaka Art Summit, the foremost research and exhibition platform for art in South Asia and the world’s highest daily visited contemporary art exhibition. She has been building the Samdani collection and developing Srihatta, an art centre and sculpture park that will soon be the foundation’s permanent home, commissioning site-specific installations while developing the foundation’s education and public programmes. She was curator of Frieze Projects in London (2018-2019) and the Founding Artistic Director of Bellas Artes Projects in the Philippines (2016-2018). Educated at Princeton, she has been living and working across Asia since 2010 and splits her time between Brussels and Dhaka.

Adriana Bustos graduated in Fine Arts and Psychology from the University of Córdoba, Argentina. Her work has been shown in Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy and France. Bustos has participated in numerous biennials and international exhibitions including: Dahka Art Summit (2020); Cosmopolis 2, Pompidou Center (2019); Sharjah Biennal (2019); Bienal Sur Global, Argentina; Site Santa Fé (USA); Biennal of Montevideo; Les Atelliers de Rennes; 11th Istanbul Biennal; MD11, Medellín; End of the World and 5th Biennal of Mercosur. Bustos has been the recipient of awards from the Azquy Prize (2020); First Prize Federico Klemm (2016); the Cultural Chandon, Cordóba (2004-2006), the OSDE Photography Award (2006) and the Andreani Foundation (2007). Public collections of her work include: Foundation Sharjah Biennal, Kadist Foundation, Reina Sofía Museum; Arco Ifema Foundation; Banco de la República de Colombia; Museo de Arte Latinoamerican and Museo de Arte Moderno of Buenos Aires; Aciacity Foundation, Singapur; Federico Klemm Foundation; OSDE Foundation; Museum of Contemporary Art Lisbon, Museum of Modern Art of Medellín; Fundación Cassa di Rizparmio, Modena, amongst others.

Session 5:

Friday, Feb 19, 10AM-12PM PST [7-9PM Amsterdam]

Who’s invited? Negotiating the roles of host and guest in curatorial practice

Christina Li

In this session, Li will share her experiences and challenges working within and outside of institutions in Asia and beyond. Her presentation will focus on artist commissions, which trace a particular set of conditions and politics that come with each context.

Bio:

Christina Li is an independent curator and writer working between Hong Kong and Amsterdam. She was the Curator-at-Large at Spring Workshop, Hong Kong, where she served as the Director between 2015 and 2017. At Spring, she curated, among other projects, A Collective Present (2017), Wu Tsang: Duilian (2016), and Wong Wai Yin: Without Trying(2016). Her exhibition Dismantling the Scaffold (2018) was the inaugural exhibition at Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong. As a writer, she has contributed to publications including Artforum, Art Review Asia, LEAP, Parkett, Spike, and Yishu Journal of Contemporary Art. She was the curator of Shirley Tse: Stakeholders, Hong Kong in Venice, Hong Kong’s participation at the 58th Venice Biennale (2019). Recently, she was named curator of the Pavilion of Finland at the 59th Venice Biennale (2022).

Session 6:

Friday, Feb 26, 10AM-12PM PST [7-9PM Europe]    

Forum Discussion between representatives of UCSB participants and guest speakers

At the conclusion of focus group sessions, this forum will culminate all the previous sharing and learning to address critical frameworks, tactics, or methodologies in art production, both in the U.S. and in the transnational context.

Participants: N’Goné Fall, Christina Li with UCSB Department of Art faculty: Alex Lukas, Sarita Zaleha, Elisa Ortega Montilla, Madeleine Ignon and Megan Koth

[SPRING QUARTER 2021]

Session 7:

Thursday, April 15, 5-7PM PDT

[12-2AM (GMT) / 8-10AM (GMT+8)]

[Art 1C – Visiting Artist Colloquium]

Collectivity | Connectivity

This panel discussion features artists with individual practices but also work collectively and collaboratively. The invited speakers will discuss different models of collectivity, collaboration or partnership across the global south and in the U.S., present their artworks as the visual reflection of their social engagement and civic responsibility, and unpack how commonality and mutual aid are forms of political participation that can transform and sustain communities including the arts. The speakers will trace the formation of their associated collectives/initiatives that responded to particular historical moments or specific needs of their communities, reflecting on the experiences that can be learned from and re-imagined in different cultural and socio-political contexts, across time and terrain.

Speakers: Naiza Khan, Merv Espina and Grupo Contrafilé

Bios:

Naiza Khan was trained in the UK and is based between London and Karachi. Khan’s visual practice is built on a process of critical research, documentation and mapping-based exploration. Through a range of media, including drawing, archival material and video, she brings together ideas of embodiment and ecology.    

In 2000, Khan co-founded the Vasl Artists’ Collective, Pakistan which has worked to foster creative collaborations between artists in Pakistan, South Asia and beyond over the last two decades. Khan represented Pakistan at the inaugural pavilion of Pakistan, 58th Venice Biennale, 2019. Her work has been exhibited widely, including her retrospective, Karachi Elegies, Broad Art Museum, Michigan (2013), the Lahore Biennale 02 (2020), the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane (2018); Kochi Muziris Biennale (2016); Shanghai Biennale (2012); and Cairo Biennale (2010). Khan received the Prince Claus Award (2013) in recognition of her work in the field of art and culture. She is currently a research candidate at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths and works between London and Karachi.

Merv Espina is an artist and researcher based in Metro Manila. His investigations capitalize on uncomfortable situations to poke holes in history, misrepresentation politics, and the anxieties of archives – resulting in installations and screenings, seminars and zines, music and writing anthologies, pirate radio hacks, noisy choreographies, food fiestas, perfume production, among other whatnots and processes. His less random art experiments have found themselves in the Jakarta Biennale 2015 and Yokohama Triennale 2020. He co-initiated the DIY platforms Kalampag Tracking Agency (2014) and Kamuning Public Radio (2016), janitorializes for the WSK Festival of the Recently Possible (founded in 2008), and was the program director at Green Papaya Art Projects (2010-2020). Besides gritty grassroots organizing, he was also in the more manicured curatorial teams of SUNSHOWER: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia 1980s to Now (Tokyo, 2017), the 15th biennial VIVA EXCON (Roxas, 2018), and Motions of this Kind (London, 2019).

Grupo Contrafilé was formed in São Paulo, Brazil, in the year 2000, Grupo Contrafilé is a collective of art-politics-education production focused on encounters with different people, groups and communities, always from a critical and cartographic perspective and having as main subject of its work listening and performing affections and urgencies. Among its projects are Program for the De-turnstilization of Life itself (2004) and The Children's Rebellion (2005) - which gave rise to Park to Play and Think (2011) and Backyard (2013); The Tree-School (2014) and The Battle of the Living (2016). Currently, Contrafilé develops the School of Testimonies project (2019-2021). The group participated in several exhibitions, such as: Meta-Archive 1964-1985 - Space for Listening and Reading Dictatorship Stories (Memorial of the Resistance/Sesc, 2019), Talking to Action - Art, Pedagogy and Activism in the Americas (USA, different locations, 2017-2019), Playgrounds 2016 (MASP), 31st São Paulo Art Biennial (2014), Radical Education (Slovenia, 2008), If You See Something Say Something (Australia, 2007), La Normalidad (Argentina, 2006), Collective Creativity (Germany, 2005).

Session 8:

Thursday, April 22, 5-7PM PDT

[Art 1C – Spring 2021 Visiting Artist Colloquium]

Tiffany Chung in conversation with Zoe Butt  

For the first part of the event, Chung will present her diverse repertoire of projects that both utilize and subvert some of the institutions of power – the map, archive, and official history – to unpack and remap memories of wars, nation building, progress, and disasters that induce displacement and forced migration. Tiffany Chung and Zoe Butt will then discuss Chung’s biographical journey of transformative events that shaped her visual language, interdisciplinary and research-based practice, and commitment to amplifying the memories and histories of disenfranchised and invisible groups. They will also delve into the conundrums of figuring out the roles of aesthetics in civic work, as well as questioning whether art ceases to exist when it yields to functioning as social practice.  

Bio:

Tiffany Chung (Vietnam/USA) is internationally noted for her research-based installations and cartographic works that examine conflict, migration, urban transformation and environmental impact in relations to the history of specific places. Her work remaps historical and cultural memories of traumatized topographies, creates interventions into the political narratives produced through statecraft with people’s remembrance, and unpacks the root causes of forced migration and its inextricable link to political, social, economic and environmental processes. Chung was awarded the Sharjah Biennial Artist Prize (2013), named Jane Lombard Fellow for Art & Social Justice at the Vera List Center, New School (2018-2020), and honored with the 2020 Asia Arts Game Changer Awards India by Asia Society.

Selected museum exhibitions and biennials include: Tiffany Chung: Vietnam, Past Is Prologue, Smithsonian American Art Museum, D.C. (2019); Artists Reflect: Contemporary Views on the American War, Minneapolis Institute of Art (2019); New Cartographies, Asia Society, Houston (2018); 21st Biennale of Sydney (2018); Gwangju Biennale (2018); Detours, Nobel Peace Center, Oslo (2017); Insecurities: Tracing Displacement and Shelter, MoMA, New York (2016); XIII Bienal de Cuenca, (Ecuador, 2016); 10th Taipei Biennial (2016); EVA International – Ireland’s Biennial (2016); Illumination, Louisiana MoMA (Denmark, 2016); All The World’s Futures, 56th Venice Biennale (2015); Residual: Disrupted Choreographies, Carré d'Art – Musée d'Art Contemporain, Nimes (France, 2014); Sharjah Biennial (UAE, 2013); Asia Pacific Triennial, Brisbane (2012); Six Lines of Flight, San Francisco MoMA (2012).

Zoe Butt is a curator and writer who lives in Ho Chi Minh City. Her practice centres on building critically thinking and historically conscious artistic communities, fostering dialogue among cultures of the globalizing souths. Currently Artistic Director of the Factory Contemporary Arts Centre, Ho Chi Minh City, Zoe formerly served as Executive Director and Curator, Sàn Art, Ho Chi Minh City (2009–2016); Director, International Programs, Long March Project, Beijing (2007–2009); and Assistant Curator, Contemporary Asian Art, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane (2001–2007) – this latter post particularly focused on the development of its Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art. Her work has been published by Hatje Cantz; ArtReview; ArtAsiaPacific; Lalit Kala Akademi; JRP-Ringier; Routledge; and Sternberg Press, among others. Notable endeavours include Realigning the Cosmos (2020-); Pollination (2018-); Sharjah Biennial 14: Leaving the Echo Chamber - Journey Beyond the Arrow, (2019); Conscious Realities (2013-2016); Embedded South(s) (2016) and San Art Laboratory (2012-2015). Zoe is a member of the Asia Society’s ‘Asia 21’ initiative; a member of the Asian Art Council for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; and in 2015 was named a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum.