VERA MEY
THE CURRENT EDITION of South Korea’s Busan Biennale, which opened on August 17 and closes on October 20, is titled “Seeing in the Dark.” Drawing inspiration from both pirates and Buddhist monks, the show focuses on alternatives to the European Enlightenment. Its artistic directors are New Zealand–born, UK-based independent curator Vera Mey and Belgian art historian Philippe Pirotte; the pair also cocurated (with Zippora Elders) the exhibition “Spectres of Bandung: A Political Imagination of Asia-Africa,” which was to be presented last year at Berlin’s Gropius Bau before it was canceled. Previously, Mey was cocurator of the 2017 survey “Sunshower: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia 1980s to Now” at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo and served as a curator at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art in Singapore from 2014 to 2016. She also cofounded the Singapore-based journal Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia. Mey currently lives in London, where she is a lecturer at the University of York.
—the Editors
HOW WOULD YOU DEFINE CURATING?
I am inspired by Nicholas Mirzoeff’s idea of “the right to look” from his 2011 book The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. He writes that vision is not just a physical process but rather is “formed by a set of relations combining information, imagination, and insight into a rendition of physical and psychic space.” Surely, in the process of organizing artists, artworks, ideas and history, curators are practicing a similar form of assemblage?
WHAT WAS THE LAST SHOW YOU TRAVELED TO SEE?
“REONCILIATION” by Julian Abraham “Togar” at England’s Nottingham Contemporary, which closes September 8. It is a wonderfully haptic, animated, and humorous assemblage of the Indonesian artist’s instruments and performances, as well as video works and many community gatherings centered around the human predilection toward noise and rhythm. I mainly know Togar’s sound and fermentation installations, yet in this exhibition, I became more acquainted with his videos. Drummer’s Gonna Drum #01 and #02, 2017 and 2023, sees the artist drumming on all sorts of surfaces in nature (such as trees and rocks) in historically pertinent locations in Indonesia and beyond. In Rocker’s Gonna Rock, 2021, he acts as the boom operator for the noise produced by a rock in the Southern Sea of Yogyakarta. When I visited, it was warming to see people interacting with the instruments laid out: For some, it was their first experience making sounds and music.
WHAT UPCOMING EXHIBITION ARE YOU MOST EXCITED ABOUT?
A large-scale survey of the incredible Thai artist Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook with ambitious new commissions opens in June 2025 at the MAIIAM contemporary art museum in Chiang Mai, Thailand; it also will be shown later that year at the Jameel Arts Centre in Dubai. I learned about her video series “The Two Planets,” 2008, and “Village and Elsewhere,” 2011—in which different Thai rural communities interact with reproductions of canonical Western artworks—before I moved to Southeast Asia in 2013. Her work has been so formative in helping me think through the specific, the universal, and the pedagogical.
WHAT IS ONE SHOW THAT HAD A BIG INFLUENCE ON YOU?
Documenta 15(or actually, lumbung #1) was memorable for being daring not only aesthetically but also methodologically. It’s one thing to represent ideas of equality and communalism and another thing entirely to embed resource redistribution through the mechanics of the exhibition itself. The artistic directors ruangrupa dared to go where no others would. After the opening up of the pandemic restrictions, it was energizing to be there, to see an ever-expanding group of artists proposing a genuine difference in the conception of what art is. It was like witnessing a joyful reverse pyramid scheme.
From Documenta 15, the installation at St. Kunigundis Church by Haitian group Atis Rezistans is burned into my memory for its visceral handling of sculptural material that included found scrap objects and human remains. At the Stadtmuseum Kassel, the installation by Nhà Sàn Collective, and in particular the sculptural work of Nguyễn Phương Linh and Truong Que Chi, was cutting and disquieting in its sculptural elegance. Can’t wait for lumbung #2!
WHAT IS THE BEST PIECE OF CRITICISM YOU’VE READ RECENTLY?
I keep returning to Another Art World by the late anarchist anthropologist David Graeber and brilliant artist Nika Dubrovsky. Published in three parts across 2019 and 2020, before and during the pandemic, it’s a stunning indictment of an art world centered around occasions, being seen, and exclusivity. Graeber and Dubrovsky generously propose an alternative world where anyone can be an artist, pointing to how far big exhibitions have strayed from where art lives.
IS THERE A PARTICULAR IDEA THAT IS INSPIRING YOUR WORK NOW?
So many! I was fortunate to be trained in art history in a cohort alongside archaeologists who introduced me to understanding time more deeply in relation to aesthetic material. I’m currently reading The Diamond Sutra, from 868 CE, which is the world’s earliest dated printed book and the first printed Buddhist sutra, to think about the nature of illusion and reality and how this might relate to desire and representation.
WHAT DO YOU THINK IS THE MOST IMPORTANT CONVERSATION HAPPENING NOW WITHIN THE CURATORIAL FIELD OR IN THE ARTS MORE BROADLY?
We should all be worried about the McCarthyism that seems to permeate even the most experimental and “liberal” of cultural spaces. Furthermore, there’s a disturbing link between this kind of thought-policing and the total erosion of public funding that has created a dependency on private sources of money. An unsettling overlap seems to exist between the market and exhibition making, which is becoming more obvious. In the UK, where I live, there is an alarming figure: Fewer than one in ten arts workers have working-class backgrounds. This demands the field as a whole reassess whose perspectives are valued and celebrated.
WHAT DO YOU WISH PEOPLE BETTER UNDERSTOOD ABOUT CURATING?
The perception is that it’s a position of gatekeeping. However, it is and should be about bringing ideas, frameworks, and artworks together in an attempt to think through existing zeitgeists differently. It’s about questioning a canon, rather than creating or being part of one.
Although curating is often touted as an extension of its etymological origins in the concept of “care,” the field has unfortunately strayed far from what could be considered part of what Graeber called the “caring classes,” or those who work in jobs related to care.
WHAT PIECE OF ADVICE WOULD YOU GIVE TO AN ASPIRING CURATOR?
To understand how exhibition making is a craft, and to try and learn the different facets of that craft. Recently, within the field, curatorial education has veered toward emphasizing the development of ideas, professionalization, and educating the public, rather than forming knowledge through the process of crafting and doing. I am still learning this myself, of course. Also, it helps to religiously read Gilda Williams’s 2014 book How to Write About Contemporary Art and use it as an instruction manual! Even if you want to break the rules, it’s easier to do that when you actually know what they are.
WHAT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING A CURATOR CAN DO FOR AN ARTIST?
Think with rather than for art and artists, and think of curating and exhibition making as a form of common-ing—or the forming of a commons—rather than a service.
