Number eight in an occasional series highlighting the best of Australian and international art writing…
“ROUNDTABLE is best understood as a series of overlapping modalities, rather than a unified polemic. Reflecting the diversity of its six Co-Artistic Directors—Nancy Adajania, Wassan Al-Khudhairi, Mami Kataoka, Sunjung Kim, Carol Yinghua Lu, and Alia Swastika—ROUNDTABLE is articulated by six subthemes: Logging In and Out of Collectivity /Re-visiting History /Transient Encounters /Intimacy, Autonomy and Anonymity /Back to the Individual Experience /Impact of Mobility on Space and Time. Its structure acknowledges the impossibility of unconditional collaboration and the potential for non-hierarchical exchange. Drawn from over 44 countries, ROUNDTABLE’s participants are not delineated by any presumed geographic, thematic or material approach. Their work presents overlapping and contrary perspectives on ROUNDTABLE’s subthemes, exploring issues of isolation, migration, mass communication, and the relationship between group trauma, memory, and history, effectively expressing divergent riffs on a central hypernym. This is an intentional result of the Co-Artistic Directors’ ongoing conversations and the influence they have had on each other’s thinking, a quality that will likewise shape their approach to the exhibition’s conceptual and physical space. ROUNDTABLE will feature 43 new commissions and 15 residencies—including many process-based installations and performances—as well as a series of Workstations and E-Journals.”
