Thanavi Chotpradit / Curator as Editor: Re-Imagining Asian Futurism

This seminar focuses on the role of curator Thanavi Chotpradit in the 2021 Asian Art Biennial ("Phantasmapolis") at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (NTMoFA), Taichung, Taiwan. As part of the curatorial team, Thanavi presented two curatorial projects in non-exhibition format: the two-day forum "Songs from the Moon Rabbit" and the bilingual READER "Midnight Sun and the Owl". Both projects serve as sites for exploring Asian Futurism and sci-fi culture in verbal and textual form. Writers, researchers, and artists from across Asia, both within and beyond the biennial, interpreted the Biennial theme "Phantasmapolis" (Spectral City) and shared their works addressing issues of futurism, futurist architecture, mega Asian cities, urbanization, new technology, religion, and indigenous folklore. This seminar considers the role of curator as an editor and knowledge facilitator, bringing together writing, meaning-making, and curating. We will focus on the possibilities of writing as forms and agents of representation and giving voice to diverse perspectives.

Thanavi Chotpradit is a lecturer of history of modern and contemporary art in Thailand at the Department of Art History, Faculty of Archaeology, Silpakorn University, Bangkok. She is an independent curator, a member of the editorial collective of a peer-review journal Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia and a co-founder of “readtherunes”, a Bangkok-based publisher. She participated in a cross-regional research program, “Ambitious Alignments: New Histories of Southeast Asian Art,” developed by the Power Institute Foundation for Art and Visual Culture, University of Sydney, Australia, and funded by the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories initiative (2015-2016). Her research on the photographs of the 6th October Massacre (1976) is funded by the National Research Council of Thailand (2019-2022). She is a co-curator of Phantasmapolis: 2021 Asian Art Biennial at National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts. Her latest article “Shattering Glass Ceiling: Art and Activism in Thailand since 2020” is published in The Routledge Companion to Art and Activism in the Twenty-First Century, (Routledge, New York and London, 2023). Her areas of interest include modern and Thai contemporary art in relation to memory studies, war commemoration, Thai politics and archival practices.