Comparative Contemporaries, 10-13 October, 2006/Singapore

In 2003, The Substation organised a one-day public symposium and two-day workshop called "Comparative Contemporaries". For that workshop, we brought together about 30 artwriters and curators from the region to discuss contemporary artwriting in Southeast Asia. The 2006 event is a follow-up, and is being done in collaboration with Singapore AICA, the Asia Art Archive, Forum On Contemporary Art & Society, and other partners.

While there already is a substantial body of diverse writing on contemporary art from Southeast Asia, this body of writing remains largely uncollated, insufficiently analysed and poorly disseminated. The purview of the Comparative Contemporaries 2006 conference is focused on the same question which framed the 2003 project: how would one produce an anthology of existing writing on art from Southeast Asia of the last twenty years? The workshop of 2003 did not aim to lead directly to the production of such a publication, but to set the stage for the project by bringing together writers and curators from around the region.

For the 2006 follow-up, what we aim, this time, is to initiate a website project that will then become an open platform to intensively discuss and debate the questions concerning such a project. Our aim is to privilege the process of debating and developing an anthology project, and to establish a regional community of thinkers, rather than to fixate on producing a publication. A publication is not out of the question, but is a long-term rather than immediate goal. We are interested in mainly participants who are active in organising and curating as well researching and writing — that is, persons who have worked on "the ground" level to link practice and discourse, rather than those whose work is mainly academic.

The plan is to single out about five "editors" to initiate the web project. Each of these editors will select what they believe are ten key texts of contemporary artwriting from Southeast Asia, and we'll ask each of them to write an introduction essay to discuss their selections. These selections and introductions will then be posted on the Asia Art Archive website. The desired outcome of Comparative Contemporaries is to develop the website project as an important open-ended regional platform to further debate and expand the anthology project. Over time, new editors, and new "proto-anthologies" will be added to the website, and existing editors will expand their own anthologies. The Comparative Contemporaries Southeast Asia web project can serve as a model for other regions in Asia to be developed in the near future.

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Notes:
This event is being co-organized by The Substation and the Singapore Section of the International Art Critics Association (AICA). Also, on October 12, the Documenta 12 Magazine will be discussed. Ctrl+p, the journal of contemporary art co-founded by Judy Freya Sibayan and Flaudette May V. Datuin has been invited to participate in that magazine.

ON DOCUMENTA 12
Documenta 12 Magazine is a project that will involve more than 70 print and online periodicals throughout the world. The aim is to discuss the main themes and theories behind Documenta 12, with particular emphasis on reflecting the interests and specific knowledge of the respective local contexts in dialogue with Documenta 12. These debates will be compiled and published in a series of publications, a "journal of journals", so to speak, which will represent a forum for the contemporary art discourse. On Day 3 of the "Comparative Contemporaries" conference, there will be a Documenta 12 Magazine workshop led by Keiko Sei, coordinator for Southeast Asia.

Dr. Patrick D. Flores, on the other hand, is one of the website anthology editors. He will discuss his selections on October 10.