THINKING LIKE AN ISLAND

18 April 2024, 4pm – 5pm
Palazzo delle Prigioni
Castello 4209, San Marco, Venice

“Thinking Like an Island” considers islands as sites of sanctuary, connection, exchange, and transformation as well as spaces as conflict, spatial negotiations, and otherness. Fostering and highlighting island-thinking as a methodology for survival, this event touches on what it is to be an island in a time of the reality of rising tides. 

“Thinking Like an Island” will respond to the Taipei Fine Arts Museum of Taiwan Collateral Event on “map politics, war in the everyday, and the everyday in war” for further discussion. Naz Cuguoğlu (Asian Art Museum) will first open the conversation with Hera Chan (Tate), Birde Tang (Guggenheim Abu Dhabi), Abby Chen, and Yuan Goang-Ming, followed by “Go Tell It To The Mountain,” a performance by artists Joud Al-Tamimi and Ali Yass.

An impossible settling of scores with an empire of some sort. A tribute to witnesses and witnessing. A reckoning with the image. A communion with past-present yearnings and unfinished political projects.

NAZ CUGUOĞLU
Naz Cuguoğlu is the Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at the Asian Art Museum. Originally from Istanbul, she has curated exhibitions and programs internationally at documenta fifteen, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, the 15th Istanbul Biennial, the Wattis institute, and more. She previously held positions at KADIST, the de Young Museum, and SFMOMA. She edited and contributed to numerous exhibition catalogs; her writings were featured in SFMOMA Open Space, Art Asia Pacific,
Hyperallergic, and Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art. In 2024, she was awarded the Andy Warhol Foundation’s Curatorial Research fellowship.

HERA CHAN
Hera Chan is a cultural worker living in Hong Kong. She is Adjunct Curator, Asia-Pacific at Tate. Formerly, she was a participant of De Appel’s Curatorial Programme and co-producer of KomBIJ1 TV leading up to the Dutch Parliament elections in 2021. In Hong Kong, she was associate curator of public programmes at Tai Kwun Contemporary and director/curator of Videotage from 2017 to 2018. She co-founded Atelier Céladon in Montreal, speaking with diasporic peoples. Otherwise, she has worked as a researcher and community journalist. Hera was a finalist in Miss Chinese Montreal 2017.

BIRDE TANG
Birde Tang is a Hong-Kong-born curator and researcher based in Abu Dhabi. Her research focuses in post-war abstraction, spiritual dynamics in artistic practices and post-colonial ideologies. She was part of the inaugural curatorial team of M+, museum of visual culture and is currently a curator at Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. Her writings are published in “M+ Collections Highlights”, “Chinese Art since 1970 – The Sigg collection”, Ming Pao and Artco Monthly. She received MA in Art Theory from Chelsea College of Art and Design, University of the Arts, London, and a degree in Design from Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

ALI YASS
Ali Yass is a painter and filmmaker. His work entangles personal and collective memory in its interrogation of power within the realm of the psycho- affective. He received his BA in Visual Arts from The University of Jordan in 2015. His work was exhibited in Amman, Manama, Abu Dhabi, Amsterdam, Istanbul, Berlin, Nottingham, Gera, New York City, Frankfurt, Washington, D.C. and Essen. He currently lives in Berlin, where he continues his studies at Berlin University of the Arts (UdK Berlin).

JOUD AL-TAMIMI
Joud Al-Tamimi is an artist and curator. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Politics and Economics (2015) and a master’s degree in Near and Middle Eastern Studies (2016) from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. She worked as a curator at Darat al Funun from 2019–2021. Her work explores value systems, insurgent economies and anticolonial futurities.