Please note: this event is fully booked. There are no spots left.

The Keynote 2023, with ruangrupa artist collective members Reza Afisina and Iswanto Hartono and curator and writer Tirdad Zolghadr, will center around working with the practice of lumbung in curatorial and artistic work. The lumbung is a practice which ruangrupa have been working with for the past twenty years. It is rooted in rural Indonesia and is also an architectural model based on the collective distribution and management of the rice harvest. The lumbung is also the cosmology and relationships produced by this collective practice of resource sharing. During documenta fifteen it also came to refer to the many different models of sharing resources which are practiced by the participating collectives and ecosystems.

The conversation will center around ruangrupa’s practice of the lumbung in Jakarta, during documenta fifteen and after. Asking questions such as: how we can extend the lumbung further as a model for collective curating and the practice of art? In what ways was the lumbung form of curating, where collective governance takes center stage invisible? Does the curatorial act change when it is on the level of infrastructure, transforming the institution and exhibition into an art work? How does it lead to the development of alternative models of art production and distribution? Tirdad Zolghadr will be engaging with ruangrupa through his experience of documenta fifteen, its echoes in Berlin, and his own curatorial work; questioning the discussion around curatorial authorship in documenta fifteen.

The Keynote is organized in partnership with Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, where ruangrupa was founded by Ade Darmawan in 2000, and where Tirdad Zolghadr is advisor for several years now.

Please note: Everyone is welcome to join us for the Keynote. However, spots are limited. Please register via reservations [​at​] deappel.nl. This event will be in English.

Reza Afisina is a new media artist who utilizes performance art in his practice. Iswanto Hartono is an artist and architect. They are both members of ruangrupa, a Jakarta-based collective established in 2000. It is also a non-profit organization that strives to support the idea of art within urban and cultural context by involving artists and other disciplines such as social sciences, politics, technol- ogy, media, etc, to give critical observation and views towards Indonesian urban contemporary issues. ruangrupa also produce collaborative works in the form of art projects such as exhibition, festival, art lab, workshop, research, as well as book, magazine and online-journal publication. As an artists’ collective, ruangrupa has been involved in many collaborative and exchange projects, including participating in big exhibitions such as Gwangju Biennale (2002 & 2018), Istanbul Biennial (2005), Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (Brisbane, 2012), Singapore Biennale (2011), São Paulo Biennial (2014), Aichi Triennale (Nagoya, 2016) and Cosmopolis at Centre Pompidou (Paris, 2017). In 2016, ruangrupa curated TRANSaction: Sonsbeek 2016 in Arnhem, NL, and most recently documenta fifteen, Kassel, Germany.

In 2018, learning from their experience establishing Gudang Sarinah Ekosistem and together with Serrum and Grafis Huru Hara, ruangrupa co-initiated GUD- SKUL: contemporary art collective and ecosystem studies (or Gudskul, in short, pronounced similarly like “good school” in English). It is a public learning space established to practice an expanded understanding of collective values, such as equality, sharing, solidarity, friendship and togetherness.

Tirdad Zolghadr is a curator and writer. He teaches at the Graduiertenschule UdK Berlin. Writing includes fiction as well as curatorial research, e.g. REALTY: Beyond the Traditional Blueprints of Art & Gentrification (Hatje Cantz 2022). Curating includes an Associate Curatorship at KW Institute of Contemporary Art (2016-20) as well as biennial settings and long-term collective efforts.