“I don’t need to spell out everything that I feel, do I?” says Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook. Claiming that “artists don’t have to provoke everything,” she has also proposed that “there is no awareness, but only poetry.”  

But how do we respond to art? How do we articulate our individual and shared experiences of artworks and exhibitions?

In dialogue with artists, curators, and researchers Heman Chong, Grace Samboh, and Roger Nelson, this workshop will be inviting participants to experiment with a range of approaches to speaking, writing, or otherwise responding to artworks, by way of the exhibition, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook: The Bouquet and the Wreath. Join us on Sunday, February 15th at 03:00 pm for an exploration and exchange of the various possibilities for subjective storytelling. 

Participants are encouraged to arrive early and spend time with the exhibition. 

Roger Nelson is an art historian and curator, and Assistant Professor of Art History in the School of Humanities at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He researches modern and contemporary art in Southeast Asia, and is author of Artistic Art Histories in Southeast Asia: Modernisms in Contemporary Practices, to be published by Cornell University Press in 2026. He was previously a curator at National Gallery Singapore, and co-editor of the first book-length translation of the artist Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s writing. He is co-founding co-editor of Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, a scholarly journal published by NUS Press.

Grace Samboh believes that everyone needs at least three copies of themselves. Through research, writing, and curatorial work, she jigs within the existing elements of the arts scene around her for she considers the claim that Indonesia is lacking art infrastructure, especially the state-owned or state run as something outdated. She believes that curating is about understanding and making at the same time. She is attached to Hyphen — (a collective which has exhibited in the 58th Carnegie International and the Singapore Biennale) and affiliated with RUBANAH Underground Hub (an art space in Jakarta). She logs her writings at gracesamboh.net.

Heman Chong is an artist whose work is located at the intersection between image, performance, situations and writing. Characterised by acerbic wit, Chong’s art addresses contemporary geopolitics and the infrastructural ironies of our data-driven and networked society. His practice can be read as an imagining, interrogation and sometimes intervention into infrastructure as an everyday medium of politics. His work has been the subject of institutional solo exhibitions at Singapore Art Museum, UCCA Dune, STPI, Het Nieuwe Instituut, Weserburg Museum, Jameel Arts Center, Swiss Institute New York, Art in General, Artsonje Center, Rockbund Art Museum, South London Gallery, NUS Museum, amongst many others. Chong is the co-director and founder (with Renée Staal) of The Library of Unread Books, a library made up of donated books previously unread by their owners. It was recently installed in the Serpentine Pavilion 2024, designed by Minsuk Cho and previously installed in Jameel Arts Center in 2019.