BANGKOK ART BIENNALE 2024
Curators and Advisors
24 October 2024 - 25 February 2025
The Bangkok Art Biennale 2024's team includes 7 advisors and 5 curators.
BANGKOK ART BIENNALE 2024 CURATORS
Prof. Dr. Apinan Poshyananda
Chief Executive and Artistic Director, Bangkok Art Biennale
Image courtesy of Bangkok Art Biennale
Professor Dr. Apinan Poshyananda was born in 1956. He received his Bachelor and Master Degree in Fine Arts from Edinburgh University, Scotland, and Doctor of Philosophy Degree in History of Art from Cornell University, USA. As an artist, he won three medals at the National Exhibition of Art, Thailand, and has held solo exhibitions at the Johnson Museum, Cornell University, Bhirasri Institute of Modern Art, and the National Gallery, Thailand. Between 1981-2002, Poshyananda taught at the Faculty of Fine and Applied Arts, and held the position of Director at The Art Centre of Academic Resources, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand. He was awarded outstanding researcher from the National Research Council, Bangkok, and was a recipient of the Bellagio Fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation. He served as the Director-General of the Office of Contemporary Art and Culture (2003-2009), Director-General of the Cultural Promotion Department (2010-2011), and the Permanent Secretary, the Ministry of Culture, Thailand (2014-2016). During his time at the Ministry, Poshyananda was the commissioner of the Thai Pavilion at the 50th, 51st, 52nd Venice Biennale (2003, 2005 and 2008).
Apinan Poshyananda has curated works by Thai and international artists exhibitions across Asia, Europe, USA and Oceania including The 9th Sydney Biennale (1992); The 1st and 2nd Asia-Pacific Triennial (1993 and 1996, Australia), The 1st Johannesburg Biennale (1995); Contemporary Art in Asia: Traditions/Tensions (1996-1998, Grey Art Gallery, Queens Museum of Art, and Asia Society Galleries, New York, Art Gallery, Vancouver Art Gallery, Western Australia Art Gallery, Perth, Taipei Fine Arts Museum); major retrospective show Montien Boonma: Temple of the Mind (2003, 2004, Asia Society and Museum, New York, Asian Art Museum, San Francisco and the National Gallery of Australia); Traces of Siamese Smile: Art + Faith + Politic + Love (2008, the inaugural exhibition of Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (BACC)); Thai Transience (2013, Singapore Art Museum); Thailand Eye (2015, Saatchi Gallery, London and BACC); and most recently three editions of Bangkok Art Biennale (2018, 2020, 2022). Poshyananda is the author to several seminal books on Thai and Asian art including Modern Art in Thailand in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1992); Western-style Painting and Sculpture in the Royal Thai Court (1993); Behind Thai Smiles Selected Writings: 1991-2007 (2007); Playing with Slippery Lubricants Selected Writings: 1993-2004 (2010), among others.
He is a committee member of the Asian Art Council, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Research committee of the National Gallery Singapore; and Advisor to the President and CEO of Thai Beverage Plc. He was conferred Knight Grand Cordon (Special Class) of the Most Exalted Order of the White Elephant, Thailand; Knight First Class of Royal Order of the Polar Star, Sweden; Knight, Order of the Star of Italian Solidarity, Italy and Officer of the French Arts and Letters Order, France.
Pojai Akratanakul
Curator, Bangkok Art Biennale 2024
Photo courtesy of Bangkok Art Biennale
Pojai Akratanakul is a curator based in Bangkok, and was Assistant Curator for two editions of the Bangkok Art Biennale in 2020 and 2022. She holds an MA in Visual Arts Administration in Curatorial Concentration and Non-profit Management from New York University. Her research interests include the history and study of different models of art institutions in Thailand, and the development of the Thai art ecosystem.
Recent independent curatorial experience includes exhibitions Area 721,346 and Footnotes on Institution at Gallery VER (2023, 2019) and Almost Nature at 3RD Fl alternative space (2019). She is also a member of collective Charoen Contemporaries, with whom she curated exhibitions PostScripts, a site-responsive and public art project at Praisaneeyakarn (2018) and co-juried Early Years Project 4: Praxis Makes Perfect at Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (2019). Prior to joining the Bangkok Art Biennale, Akratanakul had experience working in exhibitions and publications in Bangkok and New York City, as well as managing a private collection, The Petch Osathanugrah Collection.
She has been a guest lecturer on curatorial studies, art history, and issues in contemporary art at many institutions, including the Faculty of Fine and Applied Arts, Chulalongkorn University, Faculty of Archeology and Faculty of Painting, Sculpture and Graphic Arts at Silpakorn University, School of Fine and Applied Arts, Bangkok University, School of Architecture, Art, and Design, King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology Ladkrabang, among others.
Brian Curtin
Curator, Bangkok Art Biennale 2024
Brian Curtin
Photo courtesy of Bangkok Art Biennale
Brian Curtin is an Irish-born art critic and educator. He was very active as a curator between 2007-18, mounting exhibitions internationally and managing the experimental venue H Project Space in Bangkok. Trained as an artist, BrianCurtin holds a Ph.D. from the University of Bristol, UK, and his writings have been published in Art Journal, Artforum, Craft Research, Frieze, Journal of Curatorial Studies, and Parachute, amongst others. His monograph Essential Desires: Contemporary Art in Thailand was published by Reaktion Books in 2021. Influenced by dialogues between queer theories, contemporary art, and critical inquiries into visual and material cultures, publications include studies of the art-historical marginalizing of ‘decoration’ and issues of national identity as a frame for recent art. His published profiles of artists include Paul Pfeiffer, Collier Schorr, Jakkai Siributr, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. In 2018 Brian led Uncommon Pursuits: A Temporary School for Emergent Curators in Southeast Asia at Sàn Art, a non-profit in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. A regular consultant, commissions include Alphawood Foundation Chicago, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and De Gruyter publishers. Brian Curtin lectures on the International Programme in Communication Design (CommDe and CommMA) at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok where he has lived since 2000.
Akiko Miki
Curator, Bangkok Art Biennale 2024
Photo courtesy of Bangkok Art Biennale
Former Chief and Senior curator, Palais de Tokyo (Paris, 2000-2014), Co-director, Yokohama Triennale 2017 and Artistic Director of its 2011 edition among others. She has curated many international exhibitions including 1998 Taipei Biennial as well as served guest curator for number of large-scaled exhibitions of Japanese artists such as Nobuyoshi Araki, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Takashi Murakami at major museums in Asia and Europe including Barbican Art Gallery (London), Taipei Fine Art Museum, National Museum of Contemporary Art (Seoul), Mori Art Museum (Tokyo), Yokohama Museum of Art and Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art. She is also Director of Naoshima New Museum of Art (provisional) to be opened in 2025.
Paramaporn Sirikulchayanont
Curator, Bangkok Art Biennale 2024
Photo courtesy of Bangkok Art Biennale
Paramaporn Sirikulchayanont (PhD) has extensive experience managing a nonprofit art institution as the Director of the Art Centre, Silpakorn University, for ten years between 2013 and 2023. Her background in the art and cultural management fields, together with her contemporary vision, has distinguishably turned the traditional image of the Art Centre, Silpakorn University, into an entire connecting point of contemporary art by focusing on building a standard curatorial and educational system with the aim to strengthen the significance of university’s art centre role in the art ecosystem. She is interested in creating contemporary art spaces, exhibitions and art projects that interrelate to humans, society, diverse cultures and various fields of knowledge. Apart from her extended background in organizing contemporary art exhibition projects, she has regularly been invited as a guest lecturer, an art and cultural juror, and an advisor for both state and private art and cultural projects. Sirikulchayanont is currently a full-time lecturer at the Department of Art Theory, Faculty of Painting, Sculpture and Graphic Arts, Silpakorn University.
BANGKOK ART BIENNALE 2024 ADVISORS
Marina Abramović
Artist
Photo courtesy of Bangkok Art Biennale
Since the beginning of her career in Belgrade during the early 1970s, Marina Abramović has pioneered performance art, creating some of the form's most important early works. Exploring her physical and mental limits, she has withstood pain, exhaustion, and danger in her quest for emotional and spiritual transformation.
Marina Abramović was awarded the Golden Lion for Best Artist at the 1997 Venice Biennale. In 2010, Marina Abramović had her first major U.S. retrospective and simultaneously performed for over 700 hours in The Artist is Present at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Marina Abramović founded Marina Abramović Institute (MAI), a platform for immaterial and long durational work to create new possibilities for collaboration among thinkers of all fields.
Her most recent publication is Walk Through Walls: A Memoir, published by Crown Archetype on October 25, 2016. Her retrospective The Cleaner opened at Moderna Museet, Stockholm in February 2017 and has toured to seven additional European venues, ending at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, Serbia in 2019. In September 2020 the Bayerische Staatsoper presented the world premiere of 7 Deaths of Maria Callas, which will continue to tour to other venues. In 2023 she will present the solo exhibition After Life at the Royal Academy, and become the first female artist in the institution’s 250 year history to occupy the entire gallery space with her work.
Lito Camacho
Chairman, University of the Arts Singapore (UAS)
Photo courtesy of Bangkok Art Biennale
Lito Camacho is currently a Consultant for the Wealth Management Division of Credit Suisse, Chairman of SunLife of Canada (Philippines), and Board Member of STPI (Singapore). Lito was formerly Vice Chairman for Credit Suisse Asia Pacific. Lito joined Credit Suisse in March 2005 after a distinguished career in government and international banking. He was appointed Secretary of Finance for the Philippines in 2001, a position he held until November 2003. Prior to that, Lito was the Secretary of Energy for the Philippines. He was also Chairman of several government corporations and agencies.
Prior to joining the government, Lito Camacho was a Managing Director and Chief Country Officer for the Philippines at Deutsche Bank, AG in Manila. Before Deutsche Bank, Lito Camacho worked for Bankers Trust Company for over twenty years in New York, Japan, Hong Kong, Philippines and Singapore.
Lito Camacho is currently a Director of SymAsia Foundation (Singapore), a Founding Member of Asia Peace and Reconciliation Council (Thailand), a Member of Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank’s International Advisory Panel (China) and a Senior Advisor/Board Member of a number of other companies in the region. He was previously a board member of the National Gallery Singapore (2013-June 2021), the National Heritage Board of Singapore (2007-2013) and Sun Life Malaysia Takaful Bhd (2013-2019) and Sun Life Malaysia Assurance Bhd (2013-2022). Lito was also formerly a member of the Securities Industry Council of Singapore (2010-2017), the Securities Commission of Malaysia’s International Advisory Group (2008-2010) and the ASEAN Capital Markets Forum’s Group of Experts (2008-2012), and the Chief Executive Officer of Credit Suisse Singapore (2007-2016).
Lito obtained his Bachelor's degree in Mathematics (cum laude) from De La Salle University in 1975. He received his MBA with concentration in Finance from Harvard University in 1979. In 2017, Lito Camacho was awarded an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Business Administration from Thailand’s Eastern Asia University, and was a recipient of Singapore’s 2021 Public Service Medal (Pingat Bakti Masyarakat).
Kim Camacho
Art collector
Photo courtesy of Bangkok Art Biennale
Kim Camacho is a graduate of Harvard Business School, 1980 and an economics graduate, cum laude, from Radcliffe College, Harvard University, 1977. She trained in Seagrams Latin America in New York and worked for the National Development Company of the Philippines under the Minister of Trade and Industry. She then founded a fashion accessories business in 1984 before working briefly in property development. In 2001, she opened and ran the Sotheby's representative office in the Philippines.
She and her husband (banker and former Secretary of Energy and Secretary of Finance of the Philippines) Lito Camacho have been collecting art since 1981. Today, their collection has some of the most important works of one of the world's most popular artists, Yayoi Kusama. Their Gutai art collection is also well-known, having been started before Gutai was widely acclaimed in a Guggenheim New York retrospective. Both their Kusama and Gutai collections have been shown at the Ayala Museum. Their video art collection is considered to contain the largest private collection of digital video works of Japanese art collaborative, teamLab. Their collection also includes major works of American Abstract Expressionist, Alfonso Ossorio, and Filipino and Southeast Asian artworks. They regularly lend artworks to museums and art exhibitions around the world. She and Lito Camacho have 6 children, 2 of whom are artists- Bea, and Lorenzo. She now considers herself a full time art collector.
Mami Kataoka
Director of Mori Art Museum, Japan
Photo Credit Ito Akinori
Kataoka Mami joined the Mori Art Museum in 2003, taking on the role of Director in 2020. She has also taken on the position of Director of the National Center for Art Research since April 2023.
Beyond Tokyo, Mami Kataoka has held positions at the Hayward Gallery in London, where from 2007 to 2009 she was the institution’s first International Curator; she has also acted as Co-Artistic Director for the 9th Gwangju Biennale (2012), Artistic Director for the 21st Biennale of Sydney (2018) and Artistic Director for the Aichi Triennale 2022. Mami Kataoka served as a Board Member (2014-2022) and the President (2020-2022) of CIMAM [International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art].
Jean-Hubert Martin
Honorary director of the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou
Photo courtesy of Bangkok Art Biennale
Jean-Hubert Martin (born 1944 in Strasbourg) was curator at the Musée National d'Art Moderne Paris (1971-1982) and became then Director of the Kunsthalle Bern (1982-1985). During his directorship of the Musée National d‘Art Moderne Centre Pompidou (1987-1990), he curated the exhibition Magiciens de la Terre (1989), which for the first time showed the western avant-garde together with unknown artists from Africa, Asia and Oceania. Favoring a sensitive approach over knowledge, Jean-Hubert Martin strove to show art beyond historical and cultural categories first with the presentation of the collection at the Museum Kunstpalast in Dusseldorf in 2001. It was followed by several similar exhibitions in Paris in 2016 and in Moscow 2020.
Qiu Zhijie
Artist, Curator, Writer, President of the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts,
Professor at Central Academy of Fine Arts
Photo courtesy of Bangkok Art Biennale
Born in 1969, in Zhangzhou, Fujian Province, China, Qiu graduated in 1992 from the Printmaking Department of Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now China Academy of Art, CAA). He is the President of the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts and a Central Academy of Fine Arts professor. As an artist, Qiu Zhijie is known for his calligraphy and ink painting, photography, video, installation, performance, and works of Technology and Art.
As an art writer, Qiu Zhijie has published dozens of books including On Total Art, The Image and Post-Modernism, Give Me a Mask, The Limit of Freedom, Post-Photography Photography, Experimentalist, How to Become a Loser, How to Become Ignorant, The Spoiler, etc. His work's catalog includes Breaking Through the Ice, The Shape of Time, Archeology of Memory, etc.
He held dozens of solo exhibitions in art museums both domestically and internationally and participated in hundreds of group exhibitions. He was also the curator of the first video art exhibition Phenomena / Image in China in 1996. He curated a series of “Post-sense Sensibility” exhibitions between 1999 and 2005 promoting the young generation of Chinese artists. In 2012 he was the chief curator of the 9th Shanghai Biennale “Reactivation”, in 2017 he was the chief curator of the Chinese Pavilion of the 57th Venice Biennale. He also curated and launched the International Children’s Poetry Beach Project.
Dr. Eugene Tan
Director, National Gallery Singapore & Singapore Art Museum
Photo Courtesy of Singapore Art Museum
Eugene Tan is the Director of the National Gallery Singapore and Singapore Art Museum. He received his PhD in Art History from the University of Manchester. He has curated numerous exhibitions including the inaugural Singapore Biennale in 2006 and the Singapore Pavilion at the 2005 Venice Biennale. Recent exhibitions he has curated at the National Gallery Singapore include: Awakenings: Art in Society in Asia 1960s-1990s (2019), Minimalism: Space, Light and Object (2018); Reframing Modernism: Painting from Southeast Asia, Europe and Beyond (2016); Between Dreams and Declarations: Art of Southeast Asia since the 19th Century and Siapa Nama Kamu? Art from Singapore since the 19th Century (2015). Other selected exhibitions include: Of Human Scale and Beyond: Experience and Transcendence (2012) at the Hong Kong Art Centre, as well as solo exhibitions by Danh Vo (2016), Lee Mingwei (2010) and Jompet (2010). He is co-author of the publication Contemporary Art in Singapore (2007) and has written widely for exhibition catalogues and art publications, including Art Asia Pacific, Art Review, Broadsheet, among others. He was formerly a member of the Board of Governance of CIMAM, the International Association of Contemporary Art Museums and serves on the Board of the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (MuHKA) in Belgium and the International Advisory Board of the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan. He also lectures on Art History at the National University of Singapore.
BANGKOK ART BIENNALE
