Book Launch - Rebordering the Archipelago: Asia Pacific Exchanges

Edited by Danny Butt and Kurniawan Adi Saputro

Perimeter Editions CoVA series 2024. In English and Bahasa Indonesia.

Rebordering the Archipelago will be launched with a talk by contributor Helly Minarti.

The efforts of oppressed peoples to survive in settler-colonial and postcolonial nations build on regional alliances that precede and exceed the colonial imaginary. The late Tongan artist and scholar Epeli Hau’ofa proposed that the Pacific is best understood as a “sea of islands” — an oceanic continent, rather than small island states, sorted by Europeans into Micronesia, Melanesia and Polynesia (small, black, many). He notes that Pacific peoples have traversed the Pacific for hundreds of generations in tune with its winds and currents. Such critical interrogation of how taxonomies shape our intergenerational experience forms an important part of research methods in the arts today, with artists critiquing both extractive neo-colonial economies and isolating neoliberal aesthetics in their rethinking of borders.

This publication brings together dialogues and essays from the Rebordering the Archipelago, symposium presented by the Asia Pacific Artistic Research Network. The core of the publication are edited transcripts and presentations from four panels of artists and curators from across the Asia Pacific region:
Raqs Media Collective and Moonis Ahmad; Léuli Eshrāghi and Victoria Hunt;Yuki Kihara and Natalie King; Helly Minarti and Tamarra, Ginoe Ojoy, Mark Teh, and Iriano Yedija Petrus Awom.

Introduced by Danny Butt and Kurniawan Adi Saputro, with essays on critical regionalism by Léuli Eshrāghi and Helly Minarti.

Rebordering the Archipelago is published by Perimeter Editions as part of the Postnational Art Histories series developed with CoVA at the University of Melbourne.

Helly Minarti is a Jakarta-born who relocated to Yogyakarta in late 2018 and continues working as an independent curator/dramaturg/scholar in the field of contemporary performance. She seeks to align her politics/practice of the arts by rethinking radical strategies to connect it with theory grounded in the experiential as well as historical. Applying curating-as-research, one of her core interests is looking at the historiographies of choreography as discursive practice vis-á-vis the eclectic knowledge that infuses the understanding of human body, consciousness and nature. She has co-curated a number of festivals and co-facilitated artistic platforms. Her most recent curatorial projects include Jejak-旅 Tabi Exchange: Wandering Asian Contemporary Performance (2018-2021) in four Asian cities and The Sea Within, being the first to do Cruising of Taipei Arts Festival, a curator residency that deals with the notions of island/archipelago.

Image: Victoria Hunt, Hinemihi o te Ao Tawhito, Onslow Estate, Clandon Park, Surrey, England, 2013. Photo courtesy: Manuel Vason

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Book Launch - Rebordering the Archipelago: Asia Pacific Exchanges

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