Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative South and Southeast Asia

South / Southeast Asia

No Country: An Introduction

No Country’s curator June Yap reveals some of the exhibition’s themes and aims, and discusses a selection of the featured artworks. Artists Truong Tan, Wah Nu and Tun Win Aung, and Arin Dwihartanto Sunaryo explain more about the inspirations for and meanings of their contributions.

No Country Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia is on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum through May 22, 2013.

About the Exhibition | Tickets | Brochure | Multimedia Guide

News

Video

Highlights

About the Region

Iftikhar Dadi
“Curating South Asia” by Iftikhar Dadi

Patrick D. Flores
“Southeast Asia: Art History, Art Today” by Patrick D. Flores

Videos


Wah Nu and Tun Win Aung Playlist


Curator's Vision 3:06


No Country: Trailer 0:31


Educational Goals 1:44


MAP: Regarding South and Southeast Asia

Artworks

Perspectives

Read, watch, listen to, and discuss essays, stories, and interviews by international artists, writers, and curators.

Miyuki Okuyama

Dear Japanese: Children of War

Dear Japanese: Children of WarNetherlands-based artist Miyuki Okuyama describes the genesis of her photographic project Dear Japanese, in which she portrays the offspring of Japanese fathers and Dutch-Indonesian mothers as a way to reflect on the complexities of identity.

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Biljana Ciric

What Can Art Tell Us about the World? Southeast Asia, China, the West, and the Rest

Tiffany Chung, Enokiberry Tree in Wonderland, 2008Recalling various key projects of the past 25 years, curator Biljana Ciric examines the status of China within a globalized contemporary art world, reflecting on its changing relationships with communities within and beyond the region.

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Naeem Mohaiemen

Cheragee Pahar: Far from the Madding Crowd

Satabdi Shome, Reality, 2012Naeem Mohaimen experiences public reactions to an outdoor art event in Chittagong and reflects on the cultural makeup of Bangladesh’s contemporary art scene, which has flourished largely without the intervention of visiting critics and curators.

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Sharmini Pereira

Books and Mortar

Books and Mortar

Can books have the impact of an exhibition? That’s the question posed by Sharmini Pereira in this account of Mobile Library, which brought publications from Hong Kong’s Asia Art Archive to Jaffna in Sri Lanka.

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Roslisham Ismail a.k.a. Ise

Kedai Pati @ Pigeon Shop

Kedai Pati @ Pigeon Shop

In this documentary video, Roslisham Ismail, a.k.a. Ise, visits a popular Kelantanese pati street food stall, run by the gregarious Shamsul, and observes the preparation of some local favorites for a group of loyal customers.

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Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez

Parts and (W)holes

Parts and (W)holes

Casting a critical eye over the Guggenheim UBS MAP project itself, Philippine critic and curator Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez poses challenging questions about the purpose of transnational curating and the meanings of “Asia” from an American perspective.

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Donna Miranda

Abandoned in Favor of the Philippine Government

Abandoned in Favor of the Philippine Government

When art and officialdom collide, the results can be frustrating but also revealing. Choreographer and critic Donna Miranda tracks the fate of Working Artist Group, a portfolio held up in customs en route to Manila.

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Abhishek Hazra

Samplings from the Zhadhya Archive Centre

Samplings from the Zhadhya Archive Centre

Fusing speculative fiction with historical fact, Bangalore-based artist Abhishek Hazra presents a series of extracts from the diary of a member of the Kankurgachi Balloonists Society, fragments that appear to detail an unusual scientific experiment.

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Hammad Nasar

Karachi Pop: Vernacular Visualities in 1990s Karachi

Karachi Pop: Vernacular Visualities in 1990s Karachi

Curator Hammad Nasar examines the work of Durriya Kazi, David Alesworth, Iftikhar Dadi, and Elizabeth Dadi, four artists who, in 1990s Karachi, reworked Pop art tropes to explore themes of the popular and the everyday.

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Murad Khan Mumtaz

Miniature Painting in Pakistan: Divergences Between Traditional and Contemporary Practice

Imran Qureshi, Moderate Enlightenment (detail), 2007

Lahore-based artist and researcher Murad Khan Mumtaz plots the unique historical trajectory of miniature painting in Pakistan, detailing its roots in sixteenth-century India, the aesthetic influence of European colonialism, and the technique’s latter-day “modernized” reemergence.

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Nancy Adajania

Beyond the Commodity Fetish: Art and the Public Sphere in India

Beyond the Commodity Fetish: Art and the Public Sphere in India

Revisiting the histories of two Indian art-world institutions, Gallery Chemould and the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, theorist and curator Nancy Adajania demonstrates the universal and continuing vitality of alternative models for exhibiting.

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Zoe Butt

Dinh Q. Lê in conversation with Zoe Butt

Dinh Q. Lê in conversation with Zoe Butt

Talking to Vietnamese artist Dinh Q. Lê, curator Zoe Butt uncovers a creative practice rooted in the reclamation of an officially “erased” cultural identity through the retrieval of shared memories embedded in objects and images.

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Jason Wee

Reading Spaces, Spaces for Reading

Reading Spaces, Spaces for Reading

Even as an increasing amount of writing occupies digital space, print publications, bookstores, and libraries remain significant. Jason Wee looks at the culture of reading in Singapore and discovers a complex and developing “cultural ecology.”

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Susan Hapgood

Bombay from the Ground Up, Performance Included

Bombay from the Ground Up, Performance Included

Performance art in Bombay is experiencing a growth spurt. But while the scene is attracting increasing attention, it is also, as curator Susan Hapgood relates, the victim of underfunding and the subject of religious repression.

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Veronika Radulovic

One Size Fits All; or, Whose Public Space?

One Size Fits All; or, Whose Public Space?

Weary of officialdom, young Vietnamese artists are taking to the streets, reconfiguring public space in a way that artist and curator Veronika Radulovic characterizes as “a resourceful and humorous understanding of a reductio ad absurdum.”

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Aung Min

The Story of Myanmar Documentary Film

The Story of Myanmar Documentary FilmMyanmar boasts a rich history of moviemaking and moviegoing, a narrative in which documentaries continue to play an important role, both culturally and politically. Filmmaker Aung Min surveys the past decade’s key artists and works.

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Lee Weng Choy

Publics, Intellectuals, and Singapore

Publics, Intellectuals, and Singapore“The problem is not that there are too few intellectuals in Singapore, but rather that the country suffers from a prevailing climate of anti-intellectualism.” Critic Lee Weng Choy discusses the need for thoughtful public debate.

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Leonhard Bartolomeus

Street Art in Indonesian Social and Political Life

Street Art in Indonesian Social and Political LifeAttempting to trace the history of street art in Indonesia beginning with sloganeering graffiti in the mid-1940s, Leonhard Bartolomeus uncovers an underdocumented but important and still-growing form that has often been intertwined with political activism.

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Roger McDonald

Laughter, Boos, and Silence: Duto Hardono in Conversation with Roger McDonald

From left: Duto Hardono and Roger McDonald.In this audio recording, curator and lecturer Roger McDonald talks to Indonesian sound artist Duto Hardono in Tokyo about the evolution of Hardono’s practice and the multiplicity of audience responses to experimental sound art performance.

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Gridthiya Gaweewong

Decentralizing the Bangkok-centric Art Scene

Decentralizing the Bangkok-centric Art SceneIn her dissection of the contemporary art scene in Thailand, Gridthiya Gaweewong, Artistic Director of the Jim Thompson Art House, finds practitioners continuing to establish independent projects away from the expense and overcrowding Bangkok.

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Yee I-Lann

Wild Place

Wild PlaceRevisiting her homeland of Labuan Island in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo, Yee I-Lann finds a young country still searching for its own distinct history and identity from within a tangled agglomeration of colonial and postcolonial influences.

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Ma Thanegi

Rural Life in Myanmar

Rural Life in MyanmarThree-quarters of the population of Myanmar live in rural areas. As painter and writer Ma Thanegi reports, many of their traditional ways of life remain, at least for now, untouched by the march of progress.

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Russell Storer

Australia/Asia

Australia/AsiaAustralia’s links with Asia are currently the subject of particularly intense activity and debate. Yet as curator Russell Storer points out, political, economic, and cultural relations between the two regions are long-established, complex, and mercurial.

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Patrick D. Flores

Southeast Asia: Art History, Art Today

Patrick D. FloresIdentifying a number of “entry points” into Southeast Asian art history—and into the region’s diverse contemporary contexts—Manila-based art historian and curator Patrick D. Flores presents a reconsidered vision of the region’s cultural makeup.

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Iftikhar Dadi

Curating South Asia

Iftikhar DadiFocusing on curatorial practice in South Asia, writer, curator, and artist Iftikhar Dadi looks at existing and potential structures for exhibition making in the region, situating them in a rich but vast and complex milieu.

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Guggenheim Staff

Interview with June Yap

Interview with June Yap

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Programs

Date Program Type / Description Venue Tickets
02/23/13 - 05/22/13

Film Program

Exhibition Films

Guggenheim Museum

Free with admission
05/19/13

Family Program

Open Studio

Guggenheim Museum

Free with admission
05/19/13

Family Program

Just Drop In!

Guggenheim Museum

Free with admission