The exhibition plots out the place of the “south” in the world. It is conceived as a geography and a geopolis, a formation of nature and power. It is an index of the sphere supposedly beyond the center. It may be a growth region or a flash point, a province or a threshold. The angle of this south is further sharpened by another coordinate and orientation, and that is the “east.” Taken together, the “southeast” shapes the “south” through the contemporary art of Southeast Asia and Southeast Europe.

The exploration of the Southeastern condition from a spatial perspective has politicized the visuality stemming from this realm, usually zeroing in on the model of revolutions, social distress, the repressed body or the shifting conditions of the self. Using the instruments of contemporary knowledge, it is essential to resist the Leviathan texture that surrounds the Southeastern condition.

The socio-political tension in Southeast Asia and Southeast Europe has often cast the works produced in this configured space, in the same way that the profusion of certain ideas nurtured in the artistic environment has raised questions that would later prove essential to the social policies at a global level – like the interpretation of history, the use of archives or the importance of registering memory.

The projects in this exhibition dwell on intersecting themes such as the critique of the political imagination; the process of inscribing the body in the fictions of the social; and the figuring of history in the discourse and feeling of origin…

…Where and what is the southeast of these points of reference? How are they related to the north and the west of the same points? This exhibition does not merely confirm the norms underlying what the southeast consists of and inevitably constitutes, thus the inclusion, for instance, of countries like Sri Lanka, Taiwan, and Turkey in this cartography that is not so much a fixed, fully formed configuration as a proposition to gather places together within a wider latitude of relations. Hong Kong, the locus of this effort, becomes part of the extensive vicinity, too.

About the Curators
Patrick D. Flores is Professor of Art Studies at the Department of Art Studies at the University of the Philippines and Curator of the Vargas Museum in Manila. He is Adjunct Curator at the National Art Gallery, Singapore. Flores is the curator of the Philippine Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015). He was one of the curators of Under Construction: New Dimensions in Asian Art in 2000 and the Gwangju Biennale in 2008. He was a Visiting Fellow at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 1999 and an Asian Public Intellectuals Fellow in 2004. Among his publications are Painting History: Revisions in Philippine Colonial Art (1999); Remarkable Collection: Art, History, and the National Museum (2006); and Past Peripheral: Curation in Southeast Asia (2008). He was a grantee of the Asian Cultural Council (2010).

Anca Verona Mihulet is a freelance curator based in Sibiu and Bucharest (RO). As a curator, Anca Verona Mihuleţ has been supporting young Romanian artists to research on topics such as the implications of knowledge, history, margins or landscape, and produce new works of art that talk about these issues. Starting with 2011, Anca Verona Mihuleţ has been interested in questioning and theorizing various curatorial contexts, by participating in several fellowhips and residencies - at the National Museum of Contemporary Art Seoul (KR), at the Seoul Art Space Geumcheon (KR) or the Curatorial Intensive seminar on curating institutions held by Independent Curators International at the Ullens Art Center, Beijing (CN). Between 2006 and 2013, together with Liviana Dan, Anca Verona Mihuleţ has curated the exhibition program of the The Contemporary Art Gallery of the Brukenthal National Museum in Sibiu, with projects such as: Teodor Graur - 3 X The Totalitarian, The Modernist, The Balkanian Museum; Adi Matei - Moon Shuffle; Napoleon Tiron – solo exhibition; The Congress Dances. The Elephants Have Gone Crazy – a collective project of Micha Payer & Martin Gabriel, Katharina Gruzei, Andrea Winkler; Matei Bejenaru - Projects 2008 – 2010; Mihai Olos – solo exhibition; Pavel Brăila - Chișinău – Sibiu – Brăila. In 2011, together with Apparatus 22 and Olivia Mihălţianu, she worked on the research project and exhibition Situated Knowledge. I Follow Rivers of Thoughts at the Romanian Institute for Culture and Humanist Research in Venice (IT). In 2013, she was the curator of the exhibition Reflection Center for Suspended Histories. An Attempt, presented as one of the two Romanian Pavilions at the 55th edition of the Venice Biennale. In 2014, she organized, in collaboration with S-AIR Sapporo and Japan Foundation, an artistic residency in Sibiu under the title Conditional Landscape.

About Osage Art Foundation
The Osage Art Foundation was established in 2004 with three main goals - Creative Communities, Cultural Cooperation and Creative Capacity and has since played an active role in developing education and training of young people, broadening cultural awareness and participation in artistic endeavours, nurturing creativity and critical thinking and fostering international cultural exchange. The Osage Art Foundation is now widely recognised by the local community and internationally as having initiated many pioneering projects of international calibre.

The current focus of the Osage Art Foundation is on developing deeper discourse in and around the arts in the wider community. We believe that research, analysis, examination and promulgation of issues pertaining to society, contemporary culture and value by artists, writers, critics, curators and commentators will build better understanding of regional perspectives throughout Asia and beyond.

In order to better contextualize the work of the current generation of Asian contemporary artists, the Osage Art Foundation has helped to introduce a number of seminal contemporary Asian masters to the wider international art world. For example, Roberto Chabet (1937 - 2013) made an unparalleled contribution to Philippine contemporary art as an educator, mentor, visionary, conceptualist, innovator, alchemist, poet and tireless promoter of younger talents, but until recently was not as well known internationally.

In 2014, Osage Art Foundation co-presented Market Forces | Erasure: From Conceptualism to Abstraction, curated by Charles Merewether with the City University of Hong Kong, and Just as money is the paper, the gallery is the room, curated by Biljana Ciric. In 2013, OAF presented It’s Me, Goodbye: Andy Warhol’s Cinema, jointly presented by The Andy Warhol Museum, one of the four Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh. Osage also presented the second in its series of non-profit Market Forces exhibitions that draw attention to the non-commercial intrinsic values of art: The Friction of Opposites, which opened in Hong Kong in May 2013, coinciding with the commercial art fair Art Basel Hong Kong. In May 2013, The Osage Art Foundation was honoured at the Hong Kong Arts Development Awards with an Award for Arts Sponsorship.


For more information, please visit the website www.oaf.cc.