Escape Trajectories: Art History’s Runaways

How might modern art's outsiders illuminate the biases, limitations and blind spots of Art History? Such reflection should not be aimed at restoring such figures to their rightful place in an existing canon, but at a transformative critique of the canon itself. For they rarely issued plaintive cries for inclusion from the margins—more often they deliberately rejected the terms of institutional validation, or were indifferent to it. With this in mind, the 2-day discourse program will look specifically at the critical contributions of women artists, and those who have shirked the straitjacket of national identification. What do these “fugitive” positions reveal about the visibility and legitimacy brokered by curators, historians, and collecting institutions? What can be learned from the withdrawals of Art History's runaways, and from their returns? A dialogical gathering of artists and researchers exploring the fringes, byways and badlands of Asian modern and contemporary art.

With Merv Espina, Arnika Fuhrmann, May Adadol Ingawanij, Christoph Janetzko, Yin Ker, Rox Lee, Sohl Lee, Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez, Lani Maestro, Shabbir Hussain Mustafa, David Teh, Reiko Tomii