CRITICAL CONVERSATION: What Exhibitions Leave Behind

​About the Speakers:

​KWOK KIAN CHOW: Writer and curator, founding director of the Singapore Art Museum

​ADRIAN TAN: Co-curator, CLEANSE: Asia Pacific Now; Assistant Professor, Visual & Performing Arts, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

​Adrian Tan is an artist-curator whose practice investigates archives, artistic communities, and the publicness of art in Singapore. Recent projects include OPEN END: Resonate, Re-Read and Re-Trace The Substation Archive (National Gallery Singapore, 2024) and the research platform The Strange Archive. He is co-curator of CLEANSE: Asia Pacific Now and author of the forthcoming Routledge monograph Art and Everyday Life in Contemporary Singapore: Public Space and Memories.

​Every exhibition leaves something behind — in the works it presents, and in the writing it produces. In this Critical Conversations dialogue, Kwok Kian Chow speaks with Adrian Tan about Tan's essay Organised Memory: What Remains, written for CLEANSE: Asia Pacific Now. Drawing on ideas from archival practices, and dialogues between twenty artists from across the Asia-Pacific, the conversation asks what it means to write an exhibition, how curatorial language shapes what an artwork is allowed to say, and where the act of organising memory — in an institution, an archive, or a catalogue essay — leaves its own residue behind.

​Audrey Zhang of Prestige Gallery will moderate the dialogue. An audience Q&A will follow the talk.