Scratching on photographs to see with our hearts by yasmine eid-sabbagh
Time: 10am - 11.15am

 

About yasmine eid-sabbagh
Visual artist | Member of the Arab Image Foundation, Beirut
In her practice yasmine eid-sabbagh explores potentials of human agency by engaging in experimental, collective work processes. These include (counter-)archiving practices such as the negotiation around a digital repository(re)assembled in collaboration with inhabitants of Burj al-Shamali, a Palestinian refugee camp near Tyr, Lebanon, and radical pedagogical projects such as Ses Milanes-créixer a la natura, a self-organized educational project in the forest in Bunyola, Spain, using nature as its main infrastructure. Photography often acts as a medium for her to communally investigate notions of collectivity, power, and endurance; for example, in her engagement as a member of the Arab Image Foundation, a practitioner-led archival institution, and as a focus in her PhD in Art Theory and Cultural Studies from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (2018).

 

yasmin eid-sabbagh, Image courtesy of artist.

Archives Speaking Nearby by Bernardo Mosqueira and Sneha Ragavan
Time: 11.30am - 12.45pm

 

This panel will take a material focus to the archive, foregrounding the decolonial approaches taken by independent institutions around the world.

 

Sneha Ragavan - The Workshop, the Street, and the Assembly: Thinking with Archives of the Women’s Movement in South Asia
Exhibitions do more than ‘activate’ archives; they free archives from their institutional constraints of provenance and original order. Exhibitions carry the potential to forge uncanny connections across time and space; to stage research-as-practice; and to push disciplinary limits. Rather than conceiving of them as an aftermath of archival collection-building activity, exhibitions may also be imagined as sites for testing propositions regarding archives, artists, and art history.

 

I unpack these and other ideas and questions by taking up as my case study In Our Own Backyard, a recent exhibition that I was involved with at Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong (2025). The exhibition explored the creative impulses and forms of gathering within the women’s movement from the 1980s onwards in South Asia. It drew materials predominantly from the personal archives of artist-activists Sheba Chhachhi (b. 1958, presently based in New Delhi, India) and Lala Rukh (1948 – 2017, Lahore) who both used photography as a means to document the movement. The exhibition was not ‘about’ the artists, but foregrounded the complex, intersecting, milieus and fields that they were part of, thus becoming a way to re-think histories of creative practice in the expanded field.

 

About Bernardo Mosqueira
Curator, Writer, Researcher | Former Chief Curator at the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA)
Bernardo Mosqueira is a curator, writer, and researcher based in New York. He is the founder and artistic director of Solar in Rio de Janeiro and director of Prêmio FOCO ArtRio. From 2023 to 2025, he served as Chief Curator at the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA), following his tenure on the curatorial team at the New Museum (2021–2023). Between 2011 and 2014, Mosqueira organized the performance festival Vênus Terra, and from 2011 to 2015 he was a curator at Galeria de Arte Ibeu. In 2020, he co-founded Fundo Colaborativo, the first emergency fund dedicated to artists and art workers in Brazil. Recent exhibitions include Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro: Eterno Vulnerável (Solar, 2025); Diana Dowek: Uprising in the Mirror (ISLAA, 2025); Luis Fernando Benedit: Invisible Labyrinths (ISLAA, 2024); Korakrit Arunanondchai: but the words make worlds (Solar, 2024); Wynnie Mynerva: The Original Riot and Pepón Osorio: My Beating Heart / Mi corazón latiente (New Museum, 2023). He was part of the curatorial team for the fifth New Museum Triennial, Soft Water Hard Stone (2021). He received the Premio Lorenzo Bonaldi in 2017 and the Vilcek Foundation Prize in Curatorial Work in 2025. Mosqueira holds a master’s degree in curatorial studies from CCS Bard (2021).

 

About Sneha Ragavan
Senior Researcher and Head of Asia Art Archive, India
Sneha Ragavan is Senior Researcher and Head of Asia Art Archive in India, a New Delhi-based independent arts organisation dedicated to re-imagining modern and contemporary art historical narratives in the region through the framework of the archive. Sneha holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, for her work on the discourse of the national modern in twentieth century architecture in India, and an MVA in Art History and Aesthetics from the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University of Baroda, India. Her areas of research interest include cultural historiography, feminist practice, and critical archival studies.

 

Bernardo Mosqueira, Image courtesy of Vilcek Foundation. (left)
Sneha Ragavan. Image courtesy of artist. (right)

Archives Speaking From a Distance by Priyankar Bahadur Chand, Catherine Ortega-Sandow & MJ Flamiano
Time: 2pm - 3.15pm

 

This panel attends to how some archives can be intangible and immaterial—in particular how some archives are embedded in the body, and how at times it is only through their activation that they are recorded and remembered.

 

Priyankar Bahadur Chand: Until today—to enjoy this land: on mobilities or lack thereof
How do we speak of movements defined by transience and cyclicity? The continued migration of Nepalis to and from Southeast Asia reveals a history of enduring communities shaped by mobility amid political turbulence: the deployment of Gurkha soldiers under the British Empire; the settlement and displacement of communities in Myanmar; and today’s mass labor migration to Malaysia and across Asia’s emerging markets. How can contemporary artistic practice question ideas of nation, belonging, and placemaking while situating "informal" histories, economies, and identities that emerged parallel to the fractures of modern state formation?

 

Catherine Ortega-Sandow & MJ Flamiano: The illogical impulse to archive
Positioning the archive as a site of permutation and flux, Saluhan Collective and Pagbasa Archive ask: why do artists persist in archiving? Amid conditions of economic precarity, material scarcity, and institutional censorship, this paper examines an approach to archiving that operates in direct tension with these constraints. It traces how these practices are continually reconfigured across contexts, from seafaring headquarters to university institutions, arguing that this persistence exceeds logic, emerging instead from impulse, necessity, and survival.

 

 

About Priyankar Bahadur Chand
Curator, Writer, Researcher | Co-founder of Kalā Kulo

Priyankar Bahadur Chand is a curator, researcher, and writer incorporating archival and field-based methodologies in his works. His ongoing study involves assembling and contextualizing the Muktik Dagar archives, looking at the long history of disease and territory in the Tarai, recording body marking traditions along the Indo-Nepal borderlands, andexploring the visual historiography of cultures across the Himalayas. He is also a co-founder of Kalā Kulo, a collective arts space based in Kathmandu.

 

About Catherine Ortega-Sandow & MJ Flamiano
Saluhan Collective / Pagbasa Archive

Saluhan Collective, established in 2019, is a Filipino-Australiancreative collaboration founded by Aida Azin and led by Catherine Ortega-Sandow and MJ Flamiano. The collective has produced a diverse body of work spanning exhibitions, events, workshops, community gatherings, and film screenings, in partnership with organisations such as Monash University, Arts House, Next Wave, Footscray Community Arts, and Testing Grounds. Their practice is grounded in Filipino concepts of kinship and reciprocity, with a focus on creating spaces that interweave artistry and community engagement.

Pagbasa Archive is an experimental archive of contemporary Filipino art, design, text, sound, ephemera, performance, andvideo, based in Naarm/Melbourne. Established in 2023, it is led by Catherine Ortega-Sandow. The archive’s model is informed by roundtable discussions with Filipino artists and community members living and working on the Kulin and Eora Nations. These conversations invited participants to reimagine the possibilities of a cultural collection and a knowledge paradigm led by and for our communities.

 

Priyankar Bahadur Chand, Image courtesy of artist. (left)
Catherine Ortega-Sandow & MJ Flamiano, Photograph by Lucy Foster.(right)

Visions in the Dark: A Table Read by Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn
Time: 4pm – 5.30pm

 

Visions in the Dark is a screenplay rooted in archival research and intergenerational memory, tracing the life of early Vietnamese photographer Khánh Ký (1885–1946) across colonial French Indochina and 20th-century Paris. The work follows his transformation from an aspiring image-maker to a sought-after portraitist of the Parisian elite and Vietnamese bourgeoisie, while quietly entangled in anti-colonial networks. As ambition and political conviction converge, he is forced to navigate a fragile balance between visibility and concealment, recognition and resistance. This table read presents the introductory section of the feature-length screenplay co-written with Barbara Tran, performed live by theatre actress, Karen Tan, and accompanied by a newly composed musical score by Oscar Tillman. Emphasizing the sonic dimension of the narrative, the reading invites audiences into an atmospheric encounter with a transnational history of photography, where voice and sound intertwine to evoke the unseen tensions shaping Khánh Ký’s journey, a body of work produced in secrecy and in the red glow of the darkroom.

 

About Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn
Visual Artist | Doctoral Fellow, Konstfack and the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH)
Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn is a visual artist and doctoral fellow in the Art, Technology, and Design program at Konstfack and the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Sweden (expected completion in 2026). Her research has gained significant attention as part of the growing global discussion on a more nuanced understanding of photography and its production in local contexts outside the Western world. She has given lectures at the Saigon Social Sciences Hub (Ho Chi Minh City, 2023); Matca in Hanoi & IC Visual Labs in Bristol (online, 2023); National Gallery Singapore (online,2022); Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (Paris, 2022); and the Musée du quai Branly (Paris, 2022), where she co-authored an article with Édouard de Saint-Ours in the exhibition catalog Les débuts de la Photographie (2023, by Musée du quai Branly & Actes Sud). Nguyễn's work has been exhibited internationally, including at Mo Art Space (Hanoi, Vietnam, 2025); Vin Gallery (Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, 2025);Agnes Etherington Art Centre (Kingston, Ontario, 2022); the Borås Art Biennial (Borås, Sweden, 2021); Bonniers Konsthall (Stockholm, Sweden, 2021); MA*GA Museum (Gallarate, Italy,2021); Trinity Square Video (Toronto, 2019); CAMPLE LINE(Thornhill, Scotland, 2019); and the Sharjah Art Foundation(Sharjah, UAE 2018), among others.

 

About Karen Tan
Performer
Karen Tan is a Singapore theatre actor.

 

About Oscar Tillman
Composer & Audiovisual Artist
Oscar Tillman is a composer and audiovisual artist working across music, film and performance. His work is shaped through improvisation and exploratory processes, both independently and in collaboration, allowing structure and emotion to emerge through play and curiosity. Alongside his commissioned work, he creates and performs music as Thunder Tillman, with releases on labels including E.S.P. Institute and Edizione Mondo. He has performed internationally across North America, Europe and Asia, with recent appearances at Wonderfruit and Dover Street Market Ginza. His work has been featured in outlets such as Pitchfork, Nowness and Boiler Room.

 

About Barbara Tran
Writer
Finalist for Canada’s 2024 Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry, Barbara Tran authored the titular character’s narration of Madame Pirate: Becoming a Legend, a virtual reality short film, which was nominated for Best VR Story at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. Barbara’s short fiction has garnered two National Magazine Award nominations, and a lyric essay was longlisted for the CBC Nonfiction Prize. Her writing has been recognized with awards and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, MacDowell, Ontario Arts Council, Pushcart Prize Fellowships, and the Canada Council for the Arts, amongst others.

 

Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn, Photograph by Micke Lundström.

An Expanded Edit by Pixie Tan
(Interactive zine-making station)
Time: 9am - 5.30pm

 

Commissioned Zine Response

 

Within Assembly, artist Pixie Tan created An Expanded Edit, a participatory installation that attempts to capture the unspoken thoughts that arises across the duration of the symposium. As an experiment in collaborative publishing, this space invites attendees to jot and share reflections that often go unrecorded.

 

By penning, photocopying, and sharing these fragments, attendees collectively build a living, shifting index of their time at the symposium. Attendees are invited to act as an editor of their own experience: browse the contributions of others and select what resonates to bind into a unique zine, bringing away a personal archive of their time at Lost & Found: Assembly.

 

About Pixie Tan
Pixie Tan is an artist and researcher whose practice sits at the intersection of social engagement and collective imagination. Informed by her background in fashion, spatial, and graphic design, she builds collaborative frameworks that invite new ways of seeing, playing and making meaning together.

 

Pixie Tan, Image courtesy of the artist.

"Fujita-san, Can You Hear Me?” War Archives: On the War Paintings of Tsuguharu Foujita by Hikaru Fujii
Time: 10am - 11.15am

 

This lecture performance explores the war paintings of Japanese artist Tsuguharu Foujita (1886–1968), tracing how the archive of war — what is recorded, what is preserved, and what is deliberately hidden — intersects with the aestheticization of violence and the politics of invisibility.

 

During the Second World War, Foujita was deeply involved in a state-driven archival project: documenting Japan's military campaigns for the Imperial Army and Navy. His paintings transformed acts of invasion and destruction into images of aesthetic beauty, serving as both official archive and propaganda. Taking as its starting point his recently discovered work "The Bombing of Singapore" (1942), this performance asks how an archive can make war visible in certain ways ― while rendering its violence, and its victims, invisible.

 

After the war, 153 of these war record paintings were confiscated by the American occupation forces and removed from public view in Japan ― placing the archival memory of Japan's war in Asia under foreign control. This performance re-stages the 1946 exhibition held by the US military in Tokyo, presenting 153 flat objects made from discarded materials used in art transport and exhibition. These objects were made by young refugees of Middle Eastern origin who grew up in Japan ― people whose ancestral lands have been repeatedly turned into battlegrounds since the Cold War, and whose own histories remain unarchived and excluded from Japanese society today.

 

Whose archive survives ― and whose is erased? This work brings that question into the present, connecting the suppressed war archives of 1940s Japan to the conflicts and displacements that continue across the world today.

 

About Hikaru Fujii
Artist
Hikaru Fujii is an artist who lives and works in Tokyo. He creates works that explore the relationship between art and society, using various methods including installation, video, and workshops. His works take as their starting point specific historical moments or social issues, and through research and fieldwork he attempts artistic and social practice. He examines the structures and backgrounds of violence, crisis and change, and visualizes their impact and meaning on society. Their methodology is to form a team for each work that includes not only experts in each field, but also people of various attributes, such as adults and children, and to emphasize cross-disciplinary and transnational collaboration in the production process. Recent major exhibitions include the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA), M+, the Centre Pompidou-Metz, Kadist (Paris), and HKW (Berlin), as well as participated in many international art festivals, including the Arles International Photography Festival (2024) and the Asia Pacific Triennale (2021). He was awarded the Tokyo Contemporary Art Award 2020–2022. He is an associate professor at Tokyo University of Arts.

 

Hikaru Fujii, Photograph by Shunta Ishinami_WORKSIGHT.

Archives Speaking in Whispers by Kulagu Tu Buvongan and Doris Poon
Time: 11.30am – 12.45pm

 

This panel deals with close listening to histories that speak in hushed whispers, are pushed to the edge of oblivion or are constantly under siege.

 

About Kulagu Tu Buvongan
Collective
Kulagu Tu Buvongan is a collective of majority Manobo and Tinananun people of the Central Cordillera region of Mindanao. Their projects focus on environmental justice and indigenous struggles in the Pantaron Mountain Range. They have exhibited in SAVVY Contemporary (Berlin), Estación Terrena (Bogota), ParaSite (Hong Kong), FONTE (São Paulo), 421 (Abu Dhabi) and Colomboscope 2024.

 

About Doris Poon
Programme Director, Videotage
Doris Poon is the Programme Director at Videotage. With over a decade of experience in the arts and cultural sector, including roles at Para Site, Asia Society Hong Kong Center, and the School of Creative Media at City University of Hong Kong, she considers organisation-led initiatives a vital form of curatorial practice and is committed to advancing the media art community by creating commissioning and exhibition opportunities for artists and by stimulating critical discussion around technology.

 

Poon graduated from the School of Creative Media at City University of Hong Kong in 2011 and earned her master’s degree in Visual Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2019.

 

Kulagu Tu Buvongan, Image courtesy of artist. (left)
Doris Poon, Image courtesy of artist. (right)

The Womb, the Whisper and The Feral Things: Asia’s Largest Open-Pit Mine as a Geo Archive by Mia Yu
Time: 2pm - 3.15pm

 

Centered on Asia’s largest open‑pit mine in Fushun, the research behind my recent film Eme Cosmos adopts a speculative approach by reactivating the site as a living geo‑archive. This colossal “archival site” encompasses an interconnected network of adjacent landscapes: the mine pit itself, subsidence zones, slag mountains, the ruins of Asia’s first modern oil refinery, and a range of recently constructed renewable energy infrastructures. By employing a geo‑archive framework, I seek to dislocate the mine from its anthropocentric industrial narrative and relocate it within a non‑linear spatio‑temporal field where deep‑time geological formations, colonial violence, marginalized histories, repressed personal memories, and local mythologies become densely entangled. From this framework, I conceive the mine pit as the Earth Goddess’s womb—the central imaginative trope of the film. In this presentation, I trace the process of geo‑archiving and speculative mythmaking surrounding Asia’s largest open‑pit mine, and reflect on how such an approach might act as a “soft technology” for healing geo‑trauma and imagining post‑extractive ecological futures.

 

About Mia Yu
Artist, Art Historian, Independent Curator
Mia Yu is an artist, art historian, and independent curator working between Paris and Beijing. Her practice is built on long-term field research at large-scale infrastructures and extractive sites, and examines the complex relationships between post-extractive nature, cosmology, and geopolitics in the Asian context. Her works have been exhibited and screened at the Centre Pompidou, Palais des Beaux-Arts de Paris, Photografiska, the Goethe-Institut, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Times Museum, CAFA Art Museum, Kunstverein Hamburg, Toronto Reel Asian Film Festival, European Media Art Festival and Serendipity Arts Festival. Her writings have appeared in Artforum, Oxford Art Review, Art Monthly, and the Afterall Exhibition Histories book series. Mia Yu has taught at the China Art Academy and is currently a visiting researcher at the École normale supérieure in Paris.

 

Mia Yu, Image courtesy of the artist.

Queer Archiving Otherwise: Mapping Ways of Working by Aziz Sohail
Time: 4pm – 5.30pm

 

In this collaborator workshop, curator Aziz Sohail draws upon their own experience of archiving and curating queerly to reflect on the proceedings of the weekend. With the participants, we process what proposals have been presented, and how it may dovetail with our own background and methodologies. Thinking through the trouble and tensions between institutional and non-institutional archiving, region-specific challenges, and emergent ways of working, we draw upon queer strategies to simultaneously map already known epistemologies and propose further solidarities and connections. In doing so, we produce a messy blueprint/map - a rhizome of sorts, which builds new connections within the rings of this project - and which also acts as a further evolving archive.

 

About Aziz Sohail
Curator, Writer

Aziz Sohail is a Pakistan-passport holding curator and writer whose work builds interdisciplinary connections between art, history, archives, literature, theory, and biography and supports new cultural and pedagogical infrastructures. Their research and resultant projects honour and recognise the power of queer and feminist collectivity, sociability, joy, and wayward encounter and unfold through slowness, collaboration, and tentacularity. From 2020-2023, with The Many Headed Hydra, they co-led a language where yesterday are the same word. Kal., a trans-oceanic platform supporting practices enacting queer pasts/futures and de-colonial ecologies in South Asia and post-migrant Europe. The platform had residencies and presentations in Berlin, Karachi, Colombo and Philadelphia as well as a radio channel and a series of workshops and publications.

 

Aziz Sohail, Image Courtesy of the artist.

 

Station of Refreshment for Travellers on the Straits by Kiều-Anh Nguyễn
Time: 7pm - 9pm
Venue: Level 1, The Engine Room, SAM at Tanjong Pagar Distripark
Ticketed
*Ticketed separately; seats are limited. Please note that that this tasting experience does not entail full dinner portions and will not be halal. Attendees can expect a light multi-course of ice-cream offerings featuring unique flavour infusions developed by the artist in collaboration with a local partner.

 

Register here

 

About Kiều-Anh Nguyễn
Interdisciplinary Artist | Co-founder, ba-bau collective
Kiều-Anh Nguyễn is an interdisciplinary artist focusing on visual and olfactory & thinking about alternative archives to decentralize narratives, as it has taken the forms of participation, soft sculpture and often suggests travels between time, spaces, and sensory experiences. Her work was exhibited in various spaces, including daadgalerie, VIVA ExCon, Vietnamese Women’s Museum, Asia Art Archive and documenta fifteen. She joined ba-bau AIR in 2019 and co-founded ba-bau collective in 2021. In 2023, she founded olfactory archives - where Nguyen focuses on using olfactory as an alternative form to reexamine archives. In 2024, she received Prince Claus SEED Award. Along with her art practice, she churns collective memory into ice cream and olfactory experiences wherever she goes.

 

Kiều-Anh Nguyễn, Image courtesy of artist.

An Expanded Edit by Pixie Tan
(Interactive zine-making station)
Time: 9am - 6pm

 

Commissioned Zine Response

 

Within Assembly, artist Pixie Tan created An Expanded Edit, a participatory installation that attempts to capture the unspoken thoughts that arises across the duration of the symposium. As an experiment in collaborative publishing, this space invites attendees to jot and share reflections that often go unrecorded.

 

By penning, photocopying, and sharing these fragments, attendees collectively build a living, shifting index of their time at the symposium. Attendees are invited to act as an editor of their own experience: browse the contributions of others and select what resonates to bind into a unique zine, bringing away a personal archive of their time at Lost & Found: Assembly.

 

About Pixie Tan
Pixie Tan is an artist and researcher whose practice sits at the intersection of social engagement and collective imagination. Informed by her background in fashion, spatial, and graphic design, she builds collaborative frameworks that invite new ways of seeing, playing and making meaning together.

 

Pixie Tan, Image courtesy of the artist.