South-East Asia and Germany: Collecting Entanglements and Embodied Histories

The embodiment of history/ies in the diverse social contexts of South-East Asia and the West is at the heart of “Collecting Entanglements and Embodied Histories”.

For this project, four museums in Germany, Singapore, Thailand and Indonesia have formed a collaborative venture. The goal is to create a sustainable network for curatorial dialogue based on cooperative work processes. Collections – and therefore museum politics – are framed within a greater social and historical context.

Partners in the project initiated by the Goethe-Institut are the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin, the MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum (Chiang Mai, Thailand), the Singapore Art Museum as well as the Galeri Nasional Indonesia (Jakarta, Indonesia). A launch conference in the Hamburger Bahnhof in June 2019, at which the links between curatorial and artistic practice were interrogated, will be followed by a variety of exhibitions in 2021 hosted by the institutions involved within the scope of the research and investigation project.

At each location a different focus will be addressed, under the leadership of one of the four participating curators from the research and exhibition team – Anna Catharina Gebbers (Berlin), Grace Samboh (Jakarta), June Yap (Singapore), Gridthiya Gaweewong (Chiang Mai) – in an interactive display of works from the four participating collections, taking the social and institutional context into account in each case.