The rewriting of modernist art history and the re-worlding of postwar contemporaneity would lead Okwui Enwezor to conceptualize the “constellation,” the conjuncture of relations, formations, and processes characterizing the space of contemporary time. I return to Enwezor’s postcolonial concept and technique through two projects that he helmed: the presentation of the artist-curator at the Gwangju Biennale in 2008, and the inclusion of David Medalla in the exhibition “Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic (1945–1965)” at Haus der Kunst in Munich in 2016–17. I contributed a module within the “Position Papers” section of the Gwangju Biennale involving four artist-curators from Southeast Asia, and a kinetic sculpture by Medalla was part of the sprawling exhibition on postwar art. These instances offer ways to loosen the constellative emplacements through the polytropic artist-curator and the bubble-machine technological ethos, or ethical technology, of Medalla, who thought of organizing the London Biennale in 2000 as he assessed what he deemed his privileged participation in Enwezor’s Johannesburg Biennale in 1997. These art-historical and curatorial maneuvers not only spur us to review Enwezor’s methodological capacity of the constellative, but to consider as well other types of forming, such as concatenation (to link things together in a chain) and effervescence (fizz, vitality, exuberance). While Enwezor’s constellation maps entangled power relations across postcolonial space, I propose that concatenation and effervescence allude to equivalent modes for understanding artistic and curatorial practice—modes embodied in Medalla’s participatory, queer methodologies and the multifaceted commitments of the Southeast Asian artist-curator.
Medalla’s artistic practice demonstrates both principles in action. The Philippine artist began making his “bubble machines” in the early sixties, kinetic sculptures that combine practical engineering and playful interaction with substance to emit frothy essence. Upon contact with the atmosphere, the bubbles often regain, as if in a cycle, a delicate constitution of membrane and air that can be fleetingly iridescent and fizzy though present enough to be touched. For their part, the iterations of Medalla’s kindred series Stitch in Time from the end of the sixties onward evoke this effervescence with concatenation in which the audience, of both friends and strangers, are invited to sew materials into a suspended piece of fabric to form a socially created embroidery. The lineage of this polymorphous project, it is important to state, was queer polyamory between Medalla’s lovers.
The postcolonial constellation, wrote Enwezor, acknowledges “global relations between the so-called local and the global, center and margin, nation-state and the individual, transnational and diasporic communities.” But he qualifies that the constellation should not be “made up solely of the dichotomies named above. Overall, it is a set of arrangements of deeply entangled relations and forces … of power.”1 This entanglement creates space for necessary interventions: “The current artistic context is constellated around the norms of the postcolonial, those based on discontinuous, aleatory forms, on creolization, hybridization, and so forth, all of these tendencies operating with a specific cosmopolitan accent.”2 I layer Enwezor’s description with concatenation and effervescence, extending his framework to stress both the linking procedures (concatenation) and the energetic, ephemeral qualities (effervescence) of postcolonial artistic practice.
I speak to Enwezor’s proposition through fragments of a talk I presented in 2022 at “Shifting Grounds, New Horizons: Thinking and Doing Contemporary Southeast Asian Art Now.” Convened by Monash University in Melbourne and the National Taipei University of Education, it was an online symposium
intended as a space for renewing knowledge and conversations around critical developments in art and curatorial practice, projects of art history and exhibition history, and the ever-shifting coordinates of contemporary Southeast Asian art itself—all within a context of the expanded art-worlds for, and public engagement with, the region’s art over the last few decades.3
This symposium provided an occasion to gauge whether Enwezor’s constellative method—and my proposed supplements of concatenation and effervescence—could illuminate the multilateral relationship between artistic production, historical documentation, and public engagement.
The symposium braided three analytical contexts: first, artistic production and curatorial practice; second, art history and exhibition history; and third, expanded art worlds and public engagement. I was struck by this braiding, which imagines a thick ecology of what we persist to call art in contemporary time, a fascination which may have been worn away by either art history or the art world in their most reductive bureaucratic forms. I am sure that the schemata of the field has been reconstructed in many different ways over time: either by way of the critique of the dominant system, or via an inauguration of another cosmology; either by animating contemporary art in retroaction, anachronism, and futurist speculation, or by investing in vernacular and ancestral wisdom as living traditions of a deliberative aesthetic community in the present.
In thinking about my keynote for the symposium, I thought that I would look at a longer duration of the impetus underlying these braided contexts and create a conceptual site for reciprocity—the vital relationality between materialities and subjectivities, be they persons, things, nature, or spirits. What I wished to do was to find a passage or a meridian from the recent past that could help explicate what is happening today. In a way, this was a genealogical project, but it is also a constellative one, perhaps in the vein of Enwezor, and perhaps ultimately an interruption of radical fantasies of reforming the hegemonic biennial structure that need to play out in, say, a city in Germany such as Kassel. These radical fantasies are mystified and idealized, as if to elide the everyday struggles of cultural work and the incremental institutionality that go beyond well-meaning gestures of the exemplary alternative, or better still, of an exceptionalist horizontality and heterogeneity. The latter are prized globally by a curatorium that is faux-fascinated by alterity. Enwezor was the artistic director of Documenta in 2002. Between that time of a robust postcolonial modernity within an emerging contemporaneity and the tumult of 2022, when the Indonesian collective ruangrupa steered the million-euro enterprise, many projects have been initiated that cannot be simply scripted into the choreographies of ruangrupa, or assimilated into their styled bonhomie.
It was, therefore, productive to see how the symposium would arrange these contexts as a way to register what is currently taking place, or as an aspiration of what could be done to remake and unmake the very structure and agency of curatorial production. The title of the keynote was “Artist-Curator and Manifesto in Southeast Asia: Prefiguring Contemporary Reciprocities.” The term “reciprocity” is not construed in this formulation as alignment or agreement; rather, it is seen to rest on co-passages4 and the exchange of risks, and therefore attracts assembly and affiliation, alongside contentions and asymmetries.
The impulses of the “artist” and “curator” have been substantially reorganized in recent years, so it is timely to situate their effects—the artist-effect and the curator-effect—within a brisker dynamic of imbrication and not a reified alternativeness. The hyphenated personage of the artist-curator, emblematic of concatenation, seeks to overcome the binarism of the artist and the curator, instead redistributing the talents of the artist and the curator across each other. In a context in which the artist and the curator have become polytropic, where art is being shaped by a vast matrix of sensible species (persons, things, spirits), and the curatorial has radically complexified beyond the custodianship and display of precious objects, the contradictions arising from creative choices can no longer be reduced to either the artist or the curator. Both artistic and curatorial prerogatives cease to be independently disavowed even as they cannot also be characterized strictly as a consolidation.
This double movement—particularizing while imbricating—must be inscribed in the mediation of the artist-curator. Artistic work and curatorial labor need to be imbricated at the same time that they need to be particularized, a movement that must unfold in an alternating rhythm that generates agonistic intervals through the projects of Jim Supangkat of Indonesia, Redza Piyadasa of Malaysia, Raymundo Albano of the Philippines, and Apinan Poshyananda of Thailand. Without such a movement, the tendency is to renounce the role of curatorial intervention and to privilege artistic judgement as organic and authentic, or to overinvest in the hyperflexible curatorial intelligence as the nerve center of the contemporary. Both inclinations lose sight of the pedagogical legacy of the mindful and tactical artist-curator of the 1970s in Southeast Asia. They also tend to prompt artists with curatorial access to carelessly release responsibility to their fellow artists in the name of autonomy, as if their being artists and the power they dispense to muster and summon had not been enabled and constrained always-already curatorially in terms of privileges within the art world. Equivalently, the alacritous artist-curator may amalgamate overwhelming artistic and curatorial authority to the point that there would seem to be nothing outside of the enterprise because everything has become internalized or absorbed curatorially. Or artists with curatorial opportunity may negligently diminish the very curatorial potential that actually affords them the opportunity in the first place to be progressively different.
The second point I would like to pursue pertains to art history and exhibition history. In this regard, the question of method is fundamental. How to distinguish one from the other (art history and exhibition history) is an obvious concern, but might be only initially instructive. Apart from difference in terms of procedure, how should we make sense of exhibitions and their histories? Are they to be isolated and foregrounded as central modes of rendering the production and circulation of art visible and recognizable? What happens to art that is not exhibited, that resists, or is denied exhibition? And what about art that is uneasy about exhibitions and flourishes precisely because it is elsewhere, away from, or even against, exhibitions? To become saliently translocal, can it just be accumulated in a purportedly uber-inclusive biennial?
The third point arising from this symposium concerned expansion and engagement. These are cogent issues for challenging the limits of art-historical and art-world knowing as well as the independence of the artistic object or agent that is threatened by difference, otherness, and the responses of a volatile community. Is expansion merely moving beyond familiar vicinities like the nation-state to integrate a region, an inter-nation, a globality? Can expansion be a movement inward too, away from the metropolis to encompass the microecologies of island, village, mangrove, street, or cyberspace? In this configuration, can there be a theory of non-identification or strategic belonging in spite of substantial assimilation? How can expansion not be extraction or encroachment? In terms of engagement, what is the technique of creating ties with the social body and how can artistic and curatorial acumen form the subjectivity of a public that is not simply gathered but is given the chance to take part? What is the afterlife of this public vis-à-vis the liquid careers of artists, curators, and artist-curators?
My early research on artist-curators stemmed from my work with the Asian Public Intellectuals program on the history of curation in Indonesia and Thailand, a part of which I rearticulated as an exhibition for the Gwangju Biennale in 2008, directed by Okwui Enwezor. The translation of research into an exhibition was in itself interesting, particularly because the exhibition centered on figures who were invested in figurations (representations in space) or figurings (reflections on space). Thus, the title “Turns in Tropics: Artist-Curator” signaled a swerve in trope from the discrete rubrics of artistry and curation to the concatenated artist-curator.5 “Turns in tropics” suggests a series of turns in both material and practice, and also location, which is the tropics—the tropical being both a place and a poetics. In Gwangju, I presented the work of the aforesaid artist-curators. By “work” I meant their art, the documentation of their exhibitions, and their textual production. The term “artist-curator” might in the long term be an imprecise phrase because built into this permutation are the prerogatives of interpretation and translation, criticism, theory, journalism, polemics, and so on. In other words, the coinage that is “artist-curator” may well be a shorthand for the other functions inhering in a dissipating modernity or whirling contemporaneity.
My research on manifestos came partly from my research on curation, as the artist-curator and the manifesto were intertwined. But it was more proximate to the project of the art historian Hans Belting on the global contemporary for the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe. I published my research in the book of the project “Global Art Studies in 2012.” The manifestos I examined were written contemporaneously, from 1974 to 1976, in Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Malaysia. They largely touched on an amply conceived social critique directed at academic and state institutions; the historical structure of colonialism and the attendant class inequities it bred; the ascendancy of philosophical systems coming from the West and its underlying metaphysics; and other topics.
In light of this revisitation of past research, I offered the following five provisional theses for discussion in the symposium:
1) The trope of the artist-curator and the politics of the manifesto anticipated a specific kind of energy for both the Southeast Asian modern and the Southeast Asian contemporary. In fact, inscribed in the practice of the artist-curator was the shift itself from the modern to the contemporary at the contact zone of artistic and curatorial practice. On the other hand, the shift may have been complicated by the politics of the manifesto and the cultural production it generated in which the avant-garde would be rearticulated not only via conceptualism, for instance, but also through social realism, surrealism, post-sculpture, and agitprop. Conceptualism’s reconsideration of artistic language, the site-specificity of installation, the intense critique of institutions, and the interaction between realism and leftist movements configured a particular modernity and contemporaneity and a subjectivity that enhanced the persuasiveness of local praxis embodied by the artist-curator or manifesto-maker—and at times condensing into one persona such as Jim Supangkat or Redza Piyadasa.
2) A different sociality and methodology of public engagement—an inflection of a democratic ethos amid authoritarian rule and monarchies—emerged from the artist-curator and manifesto production. It was one built on criticality, simultaneity, and collectivity, proposing a practice that required multiple dexterities, constant improvisations, timely action, and broad sympathies within a democratic ambience.
3) The necessity of representation within the nation and beyond was addressed by the artist-curator, who signified the art of a place and its annotation in art criticism, theory, and history. Moreover, the artist-curator participated in rearing an art world that was more representative of the global majority and became the interlocutor of the national, the global, and other traces of the supposed outside, such as the international and the regional. The manifesto as an organism of dissent was for its part linked to other global formations such as socialism, the interrogation of colonial institutions, social philosophies of equality, third world solidarities, and the displacement of the universalizing criteria of rationality and empiricism by foundational mystical realities putatively of the South, the East, and the civilized non-West. Representation also pertained to carving out spaces for the repressed subjectivities of women, ethnic peoples, queer communities, and so on.
4) The tenor and the persuasion of the language of critique were sharpened through the artist-curator and the manifesto writers who produced not only urgent responses to immediate social issues but highly mediated artistic and curatorial work. In many ways, institutional critique in the West was redefined as critical institutionality as the artist-curators who ingested their own bureaucracies and the artists involved in the dissemination of manifestos continued to work within institutions and became institutions in themselves. Should projects of difference and transformation always begin with and speak to critique, the negation of the dominant?
5) The efficacy of the interventions of the artist-curator and the interlocution of the manifesto may have provided the basis for a kind of curatorial and political structure of feeling within the Southeast Asian modern and contemporary. They may well be the condition of possibility for a different kind of artistic practice and art history, which will have been informed, if not inspired, by the decisiveness and thrill of the convergence of the artistic and the curatorial and the ability to speak through a manifesto in the first person plural. Art, curation, and manifesto are productive speech acts that may be able to supplement the potency of the hyphen in the artist-curator, the third moment beyond certain aporias of the modern and the contemporary. Surely, the practices of ruangrupa and Raqs Media Collective come to mind and deserve to be remarked upon in terms of this genealogy and speculation.
In light of the emergencies that confront us at a time when the so-called globalizing alternative is besieged by counter-mythologies of rightfulness in the form of critique and alternatives, we turn to the artist-curators and the agents of the manifesto in Southeast Asia in the seventies and closely read their strategies. As I probe their simultaneous embeddedness and emergence within institutions, and their internal and adjacent criticality, these strategies seem to say that fantasies of formation are bound to fall apart in an activism without critical institutionality; in decentralization without deconstruction; and in conviviality without play-within-structure or ludic, if not queer, dissidence. It is from these tensions that reciprocities figure beyond the costly performances of assembly, or specifically beyond the accumulation of alternatives within an overdetermining biennial structure that fails to mediate tenacious modernities or to consider patient practical reflection on emancipation that is shaped by stamina and not by spectacle.
It might be fitting to end with an artist-curator and manifesto maker himself, David Medalla, whose presence in London in the sixties and seventies shaped an instinct and an aesthetics of queer relationality, in his effervescent, aleatory, transmedia, and kinetic forms, or in his words, “cosmic propulsions.” In 2000, he founded the insistently inchoate, exceptionally open London Biennale, which encouraged everyone to take part and belong. Medalla confides that it was during the 2nd Johannesburg Biennial, directed by Okwui Enwezor in 1997, that he thought of the London Biennale:
Over the years as an artist I have participated in many international cultural events … and in many art festivals and exhibitions all over the world. I felt that the nature of a famous cultural event such as the Venice Biennale, because of its rigid structure of selecting artists through national institutions, did not make it possible for artists who are citizens of countries without national pavilions in Venice, or artists who live the lives of exiles, migrants or refugees, artists with little or no “profiles” in the art market … [Such artists] have very little chance to show their works and participate in the most prestigious of art biennales … At Cape Town in 1997 I thought it was time to create a viable and memorable platform for the world’s “marginal artists,” and that, initially, was the inspiration for the London Biennale, a biennale that would be open to every artist regardless of age, sex, ethnic origin, and artistic language or style.6
It was only within the ambit of his previous work for the Centre for Advanced Creative Study (Signals London, 1964), Artists for Democracy (1974), and Exploding Galaxy (1967) that the premise of this biennial would be cogent and resonant. It is at this convergence in Medalla that I foreground a foil to Enwezor’s constellation through the possibilities of concatenation and effervescence, as gleaned in how Medalla enlists people to participate, and how he would see himself not really as a migrant but as a cloud that is at home anywhere.
A 1965 manifesto by Medalla demonstrates how poetic speculation can itself be a form of formal experimentation—one that neither supplants nor replicates institutional frameworks, but prospects entirely different sources of sculpture—beyond, I surmise, the contemplation of Beuysian social sculpture or Kraussian sculpture in an expanded field. The manifesto is itself poetry that is more sonic than textual, something that precedes or even preempts thought. It is the sound of conjecturing, hesitating, suspecting, or confounding:
MMMMMMM … MANIFESTO (a fragment)
Mmmmmmm … Mmmedalla! What do you dream of?
I dream of the day when I shall create sculptures that breathe, perspire, cough, laugh, yawn, smirk, wink, pant, dance, walk, crawl, … and move among people as shadows move among people … Sculptures that will retain a shadow’s secret dimensions without a shadow’s obsequious behaviour … Sculptures without hope, with waking and sleeping hours … Sculptures that, on certain seasons, will migrate en masse to the North Pole. Sculptures with a mirror’s translucency minus the memory of a mirror!
Mmmmmmm … Mmmedalla! What do you dream of?
I dream of the day when I shall go to the centre of the earth and in the earth’s core place a flower-sculpture … Not a lotus, nor a rose, nor a flower of metal, … nor yet a flower of ice and fire … But a mohole-flower, its petals curled like the crest of a tidal wave approaching the shore …
Mmmmmmm … Mmmedalla! What do you dream of?
I dream of a day when, from the capitals of the world, London Paris New York Madrid Rome, I shall release missile-sculptures … to fly—at nine times the speed of sound … to fall—slim as a stork on a square in Peking … bent, crushed—like a soldier’s boot after an explosion—on an airport in Ecuador … in splinters—on the fields of Ohama … A few—to cross interstellar space … accumulating, as they wing along, asteroids, meteorites, magnetic fields, interstellar germs … of a new life … on their way from our galaxy to the Spiral Nebula … Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm …7
Four years after this manifesto was written, Medalla unfurled a banner in his blitzkrieg protest of the opening of the Cultural Center of the Philippines in Manila, the brainchild of First Lady Imelda Marcos. The banner cried: “A bas la mystification.” The concept of mystification has a Marxist inheritance, the laying bare of the ideological apparatus that finesses or naturalizes social contradictions. In the spirit of the opposition to mystification, I insinuate a conceptual frisson within Enwezor’s constellation. Medalla reminds us that the political itself is experimental, like the artistic work; or the experiment of the political renders the work artistic; or it is the experimental work of the political that produces the art. Whichever way, the political and the artistic become experimental productions.8
I remember a conversation I had with Enwezor in New York in 2010. I was in the United States to observe, through a grant from the Asian Cultural Council, how art institutions collected and curated modern and contemporary art. I told him that I was interested in museums with specific foci such as the Hispanic Society and the Studio Museum in Harlem; university museums like the Harvard Art Museums in Boston and a Cold War museum in Culver City, California; idiosyncratic museums based on personal taste such as the Barnes Museum in Philadelphia and the Menil Collection in Houston; and so on. He thought that this attentiveness to the cellular might be the sensibility of the method I am attracted to, an archipelagic sensing that disperses the encyclopedic and the continental. This archipelagic method—modular, cellular, dispersed—enacts the concatenation I propose as a supplement to Enwezor’s constellation, replacing unified mapping with serial relays. That insight stayed with me. Years later, I would chance upon a quote from Medalla that gathers the pieces of a possible postcolonial, tropic form; and I recall and supplement Enwezor through Medalla, who “wings along”: “When I was nine years old I did a work … I invited farmers and fishermen to sculpt an island.”9
Okwui Enwezor, “The Postcolonial Constellation: Contemporary Art in a State of Permanent Transition,” in Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity, ed. Okwui Enwezor et al. (Duke University Press), 208.
Enwezor, “Postcolonial Constellation,” 209.
Patrick Flores, keynote address at “Shifting Grounds, New Horizons: Thinking and Doing Contemporary Southeast Asian Art Now,” Monash University, November 3, 2022. For a video of the lecture, see →.
See the works of the poet-theorist Merlinda Bobis on passage: “‘Weeping is Singing’: After the War, a Transnational Lament,” in At the Limits of Justice: Women of Colour on Terror, ed. Suvendrini Perera and Sharlene H. Razack (University of Toronto Press, 2014); Accidents of Composition (Spinifex Press, 2017); and The Kindness of Birds (Spinifex Press, 2021).
Patrick Flores, “Turns in Tropics: Artist-Curator,” The 7th Gwangju Biennale: Annual Report—A Year in Exhibitions (Gwangju Biennale Foundation, 2008).
David Medalla, “London Biennale: The Beginning,” 1F mediaproject, February 2, 2010 →.
Aicon, MMMMMMM … MANIFESTO (David Medalla, 1965, giclee print on canvas), photograph of the transcript, 2010.
I benefitted here from a conversation with the artist Latipa, September 11, 2024.
Quoted in Guy Brett, Exploding Galaxies: The Art of David Medalla (Third Text Publications, 1995), 31.
