FIELD MEETING Take 6: Thinking Collections

Curated by ACAW Director & Independent Curator Leeza Ahmady

This January, Asia Contemporary Art Week (ACAW) curatorial & educational platform, joins forces with the prominent arts neighborhood Alserkal Avenue to stage the 6th iteration of ACAW’s acclaimed annual art forum FIELD MEETING in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (Jan 25-26, 2019).

Seeking to replicate the intimate experience of a studio visit on a communal scale, the experimental and energetically charged two-day art forum is once again exclusively curated to connect hundreds of arts professionals directly with some of today’s most outstanding artists, curators and creative thinkers travelling from various cities in Afghanistan, China, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Pakistan, Malaysia, Iran, Lebanon, Kazakhstan, India, Tibet, Taiwan, Turkey, United States, Germany, Australia and beyond. Invited presenters will share their most significant and recent projects through newly commissioned performances, lecture-performances, curatorial talks, and a string of pop-up exhibitions encompassing multiple mediums.

Premiering for the first time in Asia in the MENASA (Middle East, North Africa & South Asia) region, FIELD MEETING Take 6: Thinking Collections (Jan 25-26, 2019) is presented in collaboration with ACAW Consortium Partner, Alserkal Avenue, at their coveted multi-purpose space, Concrete, designed by Rem Koolhaas’ OMA.

As a global metropolis that is a crossroads for multiple regions and home to a number of expatriates, Dubai yields a special opportunity for ACAW to fulfill its longstanding commitment to promoting a more robust future for inner-Asia collaborations, particularly between the artistic communities of East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the MENASA regions.

Viewing Asia as a collection of cities, languages, ideologies, aesthetics and other philosophical and conceptual interconnectivities, this year’s FIELD MEETING expands upon the term collection to examine its significance in closer and broader strokes beyond the rigid art market lens.

Despite the field’s proliferating growth with hundreds of biennials, art fairs, and festivals, FIELD MEETING Take 6 asks why the art scenes in Asia continue to operate in isolation from each other or as clusters of nations connected mainly through economic and political forces? Have any contemporary art events or art collections inside of Asia attempted to truly represent the vibrancy, complexity, and interrelatedness of the continent in its entirety? FIELD MEETING Take 6 addresses the possibility of this endeavor while simultaneously questioning the relevance of such a vision today.

This larger question, which poses Asia as a collection in and of itself is juxtaposed with ACAW Director Leeza Ahmady’s proclamation of “seeing the artist as the first collector and artists’ studios as primary collections.” Driving such an unprecedented notion forward, FIELD MEETING Take 6 challenges presenters and attendees to consider how their activities contribute to the making of the art world and its ecology. What are we collecting as artists and arts professionals through our personal practice of selection and discrimination on a daily basis? How do we decide what is included and what is excluded? How do our attachments to public and private collections taint our perception about what is truly collectible?

In contextualizing collections, FIELD MEETING participants are invited to stage a dynamic string of presentations in reference to subjects and inquiries they are accumulating every day. These inferences in regard to collections expand upon ancestry and heritage, racial riots, migration, alienation, subaltern narratives, psychoanalysis and the infiltration of traditional boundaries of geography, religion, and class. Emerging themes in the forum are counterbalanced with the advancement of technology in relation to virtual reality, DNA technology, mythology, and 2D & 3D animation sequences. Ultimately, through these personal investigations, FIELD MEETING Take 6: Thinking Collections aims to celebrate how artists and creative practitioners accumulate bodies or containers for the collection of their own ideas, insights, and mechanisms that at some point become identified as art objects in the world.

Advance registration is required for arts professionals. For registration, click here.

For ACAW 2018 full agenda and FIELD MEETING updates, visit acaw.info
Press inquiries: acawpr@asiasociety.org

ACAW is also pleased to partner with Curagenda, to present a tailormade art and culture travel experience to Dubai, Sharjah and Abu Dhabi as an extension of the FIELD MEETING Take 6 experience.

Presenting Artists & Professionals
Amina Ahmed (New York, Tehran & London), Khadim Ali (Sydney & Kabul), Stephanie Bailey (Hong Kong, London & Athens), Burcak Bingol (Istanbul), Bingyi (Beijing), Heman Chong (Singapore), Zheng Chongbin (San Francisco & Shanghai), Lara Day & Pi Li (Hong Kong), Alexis Destoop (Sydney & Brussels), Arahmaiani Feisal (Yogyakarta, Bandung & Tibet), Wang Haiyang (Shanghai), Nadira Husain (Berlin), Hasanul Isyraf Idris (Kuala Lumpur), Ranbir Kaleka (New Delhi), Anthony Lee (New York), ST Luk (New York & Tokyo), Bahman Mohammadi (Tehran), Francesca Recchia (Kabul), Chen Ronghui (Shanghai), Bassem Saad & Edwin Nasr (Beirut), Sam Samiee (Tehran), Zolaykha Sherzad (Kabul & New York), Sandra Skurvida & Natasha Degen (New York) Ali Wong (Hong Kong & New York), Gao Yuan (Shanghai) & more to be confirmed! 

Presenting Institutions & *Consortium Partners 
Alserkal Avenue (Dubai) / Capsule Shanghai (Shanghai) / Clark House Initiative (Mumbai) / Curagenda (New York) / Dastan Gallery (Tehran) / Eurasian Cultural Alliance (Almaty) / Ink Studio (Beijing) / Mah Art Gallery (Tehran) / M+ (Hong Kong) / PSM Gallery (Berlin) / Richard Koh Fine Art (Kuala Lumpur) / Ronin Gallery (New York) / Turquoise Mountain (Kabul) / *Asia Society Museum / *ArteEast / *ArtAsiaPacific / *Asia Art Archive in America / *Japan Society / *The Metropolitan Museum of Art / *The Museum of Modern Art / *Queens Museum / *Reversible Destiny Foundation / *Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum / *SVA MA Curatorial Practice / *Twelve Gates Arts / *Wald & Kim Foundation / *+91 Foundation / *Christie’s / *DAG / *DOOSAN Gallery / *Eli Klein Gallery / *Mana Contemporary / *Owen James Gallery / *Ronin Gallery / *Roya Khadjavi Projects / *Sundaram Tagore Gallery / *Tyler Rollins Fine Art

About Alserkal Avenue
Located in Al Quoz, Dubai and established in 2007, Alserkal Avenue is the region’s foremost contemporary arts and culture neighborhood. Alserkal Avenue hosts 16 contemporary art galleries and not-for-profit spaces and over 40 creative businesses, cultivating a vibrant community of visual and performing arts organizations, designers, and artisanal spaces that has become an essential platform for the development of the creative industries in the United Arab Emirates.

More info: alserkalavenue.ae | concrete.ae

About Asia Contemporary Art Week
Asia Contemporary Art Week (ACAW) is a dynamic platform that brings together leading New York and Asia-based art institutions, museums and galleries to present the largest showcase of cutting-edge exhibitions, innovative projects, provocative dialogues on current topics, and networking opportunities. For past FIELD MEETING archives, presenter profiles and more, click here.