Experimental Institutionalism: Education with Emily Floyd and Gridthiya Gaweewong

Education: Alternatives and the Academy with Emily Floyd and Gridthiya Gaweewong

This program is part of ACCA’s 2021 Lecture Series, Experimental Institutionalism: Contemporary Art and Curatorial Ecologies and features two short lectures by Emily Floyd and Gridthiya Gaweewong, followed by a conversation with ACCA’s Artistic Director and CEO Max Delany.

Loose Objects and Situated Knowledge, a lecture by Emily Floyd:

Emily Floyd’s practice activates spatial and material strategies of child-centred learning, exploring possibilities and limitations for navigating the casualised realm of Contemporary Art’s critical classroom. Emily will discuss the concept of Loose Objects, an institutional experimentalism used in Montessori classrooms, referring to objects that can be moved around and manipulated by children as they play and explore. Like utopian artworks, Loose Objects play the role of itinerant, post-human educators; freely circulating across institutional frameworks. Yet, what happens when these haptic distractions can no longer deflect from the flaking paint on the kindergarten walls?

What’s missing with the Art School in Thailand (and beyond)? a lecture by Gridthiya Gaweewong:

Gridthiya Gaweewong founded arts organisation Project 304 in 1996, and is currently Artistic Director of the Jim Thompson Art Center, Bangkok. Her curatorial projects have addressed issues of social transformation confronting artists from Thailand and beyond since the Cold War. Gaweewong has organized exhibitions and events including Underconstruction, Tokyo (2000 – 2002), Politics of Fun at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2005), the Bangkok Experimental Film Festival (1997–2007) (co-founded with Apichatpong Weerasethakul), Saigon Open City in Saigon, Vietnam (2006-07) (with Rirkrit Tiravanija) and Unreal Asia, Oberhausen International Short Film Festival (2010). Gaweewong is on the curatorial team for the 2018, 12th Gwangju Biennale, Imagined Borders. She is also the head curator of ICI’s traveling exhibition Apichatpong Weerasethakul: The Serenity in Madness.

Lecture Production by Gatherer Media.