AAA Public Programmes Curator Ingrid Chu explored the international phenomenon of the ‘art book bag’ in a short history of the art book bag (and the things that go in them). Using the last 15 years as a guide, the exhibition featured ‘the things that go in them’—art publications, magazines, and related ephemera—alongside a vast array of these popular totes in the AAA Library. Chu invited artists, curators, art book fair organisers, and print and online publishers to provide insight into the changing modes of knowledge production and circulation, and their influence on recent art of Asia. An associated public talk, ...

Hong Kong-based artist Samson Young moved through various locations in and around AAA by way of a roving sound station— doubling as a bookmobile and deejay booth—to generate a series of public broadcasts. His project AAAFM99.3 invoked classic radio programmes with news announcements, interview segments, and commercials incorporating ambient noise sourced from AAA’s audio collection.

Catastrophe arrives, traditionally, in the manner of an accident: from the Latin accidens, meaning accident or chance; from accido, to fall out, come to pass, happen, occur. The accident is, in short, that which happens to us: it comes from without, and takes us by surprise.3 “We are passive with respect to the disaster,” writes Blanchot in The Writing of the Disaster, “but the disaster is perhaps passivity.” To experience catastrophe is to enter into the condition of passivity. This passivity is directly linked to the externality of the catastrophe: that it appears to arrive from outside the system. That ...

She, a dancer, is attuned to my in-sync silence: the concordance between the motionlessness of my lips and the absence of an interior monologue in my head; I, an aphoristic writer, find her occasional out-of- sync silence in the realm of altered body, movement, time, sound, and silence into which dance projects her, as her lips continue briefly to move before the falling silence-over freezes her, arresting. A woman dancing alone is the figure of fidelity—of the music to her. The dancer practices assiduously each movement. These rehearsals to the music are to release a subtle body that moves perfectly without any ...

Solomon Benjamin and Wing Shing Tang, Hong Kong and Bangalore-based scholars of critical geography and urban studies led a set of workshops and walks in Framing Spatial Stories: Life Beyond the Plan, Survey, and Grid to consider the politics of contested urban settings through the lens of recent art of Asia.

Recognised for her work in ‘immersive journalism’, Nonny de la Peña drew from the Asia Art Archive collection to create a new iteration of an earlier performance by Lin Yilin that pushes the boundaries of virtual reality and digital technology.

Zoe Butt formerly of Sàn Art in Ho Chi Minh City, and facilitator of AAA’s 2011 Mobile Library programme in Vietnam, contributed a text to AAA’s e-journal Field Notes. Butt looks at Practising Friendship as a platform that is integral to the longevity of particular kinds of arts infrastructures. Concentrating on those considered independent, ‘alternative,’ and archival in spirit, Butt also investigates a method of working strategically under conditions with political or cultural restrictions.

Pakistan-based artist Rashid Rana inquired into the possibilities of fiction to construct multiple pasts through notes, images, and schematic representations of his collaborative work-in- progress Present Elsewhere.

Artist Marysia Lewandowska, 2014/15 AAA resident contributed Property, Protest, Commons, and the Alternative Economies of Art, a series of public workshops co-organized with curator Esther Lu, and co-presented with Taipei Contemporary Art Center (TCAC). Leading towards Made in Public, a collectively generated project and publication, participants interrogated the relationship between art, property, protest, and the commons in the context of recent cultural and political events in Asia. A third workshop took place at TCAC from 18–20 September 2015.

Following his 2014 residency at AAA, New York-based artist Walid Raad developed Section 39_Index XXXVII: Traboulsi. The project stemmed from his research into AAA’s Ha Bik Chuen Archive and consisted of several ‘sculptural spaces’ built by Raad’s fictional collaborator, Suha Traboulsi, who creates reproductions of canonical modern paintings by Arab artists.

Hong Kong-born British poet Sarah Howe gave a talk to present Six Windows, new poems based on her research of the Asia Art Archive collection and to share her experience and discoveries during the process.

Wong Wai Yin, the Hong Kong-based artist and 2011 AAA resident, presented Talking Archive to uncover the ‘true opinions’ behind the material in AAA’s collection by inviting a psychic medium to speak to them. The Medium’s findings were shown in the form of a video and site-specific installation.