Talk

Thinking Collectives

Eva Bentcheva, Annie Jael Kwan, and Ming Tiampo

Mai Ling, still from *Becoming Stickiness (*2023).

Date and Time:: Saturday 20 June, 3–5pm
Location:: Minassa

Join co-editors Eva Bentcheva, Annie Jael Kwan, and Ming Tiampo for the London launch of Thinking Collectives / Collective Thinking (ICI Berlin Press, 2026), a collaboration between Asia Forum and the Worlding Public Cultures project.

Bringing together art-historical inquiry, theoretical reflections, and first-hand perspectives from artists, curators, and activists, the book draws on practices of collectivity from East and Southeast Asia. It asks how we can discuss collaboration, community-building, joint publishing and knowledge-making beyond Euro-American frameworks.

The editors will share a toolbox of strategies drawn from the book's research, and guide participants through a collective exercise designed to test, extend, and world its findings. This is an invitation to think not only about collectives, but as one, with all its rich, messy, and hopeful multiplicities.

Doors open at 2.30pm; event starts at 3pm and ends at 5pm.

Eva Bentcheva is an art historian and curator with a focus on transcultural art histories between Europe and South/Southeast Asia. She is currently the Maria Reiche Postdoctoral Fellow with the Chair of Visual Culture in the Global Context at the TUD Dresden University of Technology, where she is developing a research project on German-Asian relations in art. She has previously held research and curatorial positions at Haus der Kunst in Munich and the Tate in London, and has had academic positions at Heidelberg University, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (Yale University) and SOAS, University of London. She is currently the Managing Editor of the open-access book series, Worlding Public Cultures published by ICI Berlin Press.

Annie Jael Kwan is an independent curator, researcher and educator whose exhibition-making, programming, publication and teaching practice is located at the intersection of contemporary art, art history and cultural activism, with interest in archives, feminist, queer and alternative knowledges, collective practices, solidarity, sisterhood and spirituality. She is director of Something Human, a curatorial initiative, that launched the pioneering Southeast Asia Performance Collection (SAPC) in 2017 at the Live Art Development Agency. She leads Asia-Art-Activism, a research network, and Asia Forum, a platform for gathering the practices and discourses of Global Asias. She was the co-editor of Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia’s guest issues: Archives (2019) and Performativity (2022), the publication Asia-Art-Activism: Experiments in Care and Collective Disobedience (2022), and recently published Thinking Collectives: Collective Thinking (Berlin ICI) (2025). She currently teaches Critical Studies at Central St Martins, University of the Arts, London, and Writing and Curating at KASK, School of Art, in Gent, Belgium.

Ming Tiampo is Professor of Art History and co-director of the Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis at Carleton University. Her current projects include Mobile Subjects: Contrapuntal Modernisms, which critically examines post-Imperial histories of migration in the former French and British Empires, and Intersecting Modernisms, a co-edited sourcebook on global modernisms. Her research collaborations include Asia Forum, the Canadian BIPOC Artists Rolodex, and Worlding Public Cultures, for which she is the co-lead. Tiampo’s previous books and projects include Jin-me Yoon (Art Canada Institute, 2023), Gutai: Splendid Playground(Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2013), and Gutai: Decentering Modernism (University of Chicago Press, 2011).