Passionate about an exhibition idea but unsure where to begin, or how to get the most out of your research? Join curator and PhD candidate Vera Mey and writer and artist Vanessa Mei in a discussion on learned knowledge including tips and guidance to support in-depth research and reading. Vera and Vanessa will converse about different approaches to exhibition-making and in translating diaspora knowledge into academic and arts frameworks, with reference to looking at Vera’s first-hand experience undertaking fieldwork in Southeast Asia. This event is free for all but tangata whenua and Asian artists and curators are highly encouraged to attend.

Vera will present guideline tips on how to get the most out of independent research practices, followed by open floor dialogue. Alongside former Enjoy Contemporary Art Space director Vanessa Mei, Vera will discuss her curatorial work in Southeast Asia and the role of the diaspora/foreigner as a key to modernist ideas of building worldliness. A starting point in her research is the rhetorical question “what is Southeast Asian about ‘Southeast Asian art’?”. Examining ideas of critical regionalism within the art of Southeast Asia during the Cold War era, she explores visual materials and practices in Cambodia, Indonesia and Singapore, paying particular attention to intersections of racial plurality within regionalism.

Register on Eventbrite to attend.  A Zoom meeting link and password will be emailed to you.

ABOUT THE PRESENTER

Vera Mey is an independent curator currently finishing her PhD at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. She was assistant director at AUT University’s ST PAUL St Gallery, Auckland and was a co-founder of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore led by Prof. Ute Meta Bauer. More recently as an independent curator Vera has co-curated and curated exhibitions in New Zealand, Bangkok, Paris, Phnom Penh, Shanghai, Singapore, and Tokyo. This includes working on SUNSHOWER: Contemporary art from Southeast Asia 1980s to now (2017) at the Mori Art Museum and National Art Centre Tokyo the largest survey of Southeast Asian artists to be exhibited.

In 2015-16 Vera Mey was a scholar on Ambitious Alignments: New Histories of Southeast Asian Art, a research initiative of the Getty Foundation and is now on a Getty Foundation initiative through the research project Art Schools of Asia hosted out of the Asia Art Archive Hong Kong. Mey co-founded the scholarly journal Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia (National University of Singapore Press) and was part of the research colloquium The Color Curtain and the Promise of Bandung organized by the Hochschule für Bildende Künste–Städelschule, Frankfurt, and the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, California.