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Dr. Eva Bentcheva is an art historian and curator with a focus on transcultural art histories between Europe and South/Southeast Asia. She is currently the Maria Reiche Postdoctoral Fellow at the Technical University of Dresden, where she is developing a research project on German-Asian relations in art. She has previously held research and curatorial positions at Haus der Kunst in Munich and the Tate in London, and has had academic positions at Heidelberg University, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (Yale University) and SOAS, University of London. She is currently the Managing Editor of the open-access book series, Worlding Public Cultures published by ICI Berlin Press. Annie Jael Kwan is an independent curator and researcher whose practice is located at the intersection of contemporary art and cultural and pedagogical activism. She has an interest in archives, feminist, queer and alternative knowledge, collective relations, solidarity, and spirituality. She is the Director of Something Human, leads Asia-Art-Activism, and is the founding council member of Asia Forum. She was co-editor of the special issues of Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art: Archives (2019) and Pathways of Performativity (2022), and the publication Asia-Art-Activism: Experiments in Care and Collective Disobedience. Ming Tiampo is Professor of Art History and co-director of the Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis at Carleton University. Her current projects include Mobile Subjects: Contrapuntal Modernisms, which critically examines post-Imperial histories of migration in the former French and British Empires, and Intersecting Modernisms, a co-edited sourcebook on global modernisms. Her research collaborations include Asia Forum, the Canadian BIPOC Artists Rolodex, and Worlding Public Cultures, for which she is the co-lead. Tiampo's previous books and projects include Jin-me Yoon (Art Canada Institute, 2023), Gutai: Splendid Playground (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2013), and Gutai: Decentering Modernism (University of Chicago Press, 2011).
Looking out from some of the experimental methods of documenta fifteen, Thinking Collectives / Collective Thinking is a marvellously exploratory book. From its insightful essays on past and current collectivity in Asia, to its image chapters that act as records of playful brainstorms in workshops in Kassel and Gwangju, this book is a generous invitation to reimagine art's futures sustainably and together. - Anthony Gardner, Professor of Contemporary Art History, University of Oxford Documenta 15 was, in many ways, a cautionary tale about the dangers of transplanting a localized paradigm of collaborative production into a scale that was not simply 'international' but also imbricated at the deepest levels with currents of global cultural and economic capital. This publication, drawn from a workshop held by Asia Forum and Worlding Public Cultures during documenta 15, offers a salutary correction, by re-grounding the insights that are unique to the experience of Asian engaged art in their specific context. This grounding isn't necessary because these insights aren't also relevant at a broader scale, but because the relationship between the local, or the regional, and the global can't be induced through a simple act of spatial displacement. Rather, this relationship requires its own forms of creative, dialogical mediation. This book marks an important contribution towards that creative process. - Grant Kester, Professor of Art History at the University of California, San Diego, and the founding editor of FIELD: A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism If one were to write a history of curating, it would be clear that self-organized artist collectives have had a significant influence on what we understand today as curatorial practice - and this history of the present would have to be written across different positionalities. With this in mind, Thinking Collectives / Collective Thinking is dedicated to the possibilities, dreams, actions, and strategies of thinking and working together artistically, but also to the dangers and difficulties of such practices. Versatile, thoughtful, and situated, this book offers an insight into collectivity in the context of global Asia as an essential part of artistic and curatorial work today. - Nora Sternfeld, Professor of art education HFBK Hamburg
