Turba

For this sixth issue, TURBA has assembled thirteen narratives and conversations from multiple generations of institutional and independent curators, festival makers, artist-curators, art historians, dramaturg-curators, arts educators, and researchers. Various forms of dance, music, theater, circus arts, conceptual art and performance art are represented in this collection.

In the recent years, Singapore, which once dubbed “a cultural desert,” has produced performance curators who took important positions in the region. This essay explores what were behind such developments.

Since the late 1990s, curation, especially performance curation, was recognized as the key to turn the disadvantage of Singapore into its advantage by both artists and the government. Singapore's cultural rootlessness was reframed as its openness to any cultures, and the methodology to achieve it was concretized by theatre practitioner Keng Sen Ong through his curatorial projects. Ong developed the model of New Asia, a new reality for an urbanizing Asia where dynamic interaction between the traditional and modern, specificity and universality takes place.

The government of Singapore adopted Ong's vision of New Asia as the foundation of its cultural policy in the early 2000s. It was advocated that the ideal citizens in the new millennium should be attuned to his Asian roots and at the same time connected to the global market, and the artists with an ability of curating cultures were considered the role model of the new Singaporeans. Although the cooperation between the artists and the government emerged, their relationship is not straightforward. The ownership of the methodology of curation is still being contested between them.

In this article, I want to find a terminology for curating the indigenous and coastal peoples’ art in the Arctic and North Atlantic and give some examples. From an aesthetic viewpoint, these artistic expressions correspond to the question of identities in a perspective that can be defined as postcolonial. This means that by reworking our ideas concerning identities, we might discover a new source for the arts, which I think could replace inner or outer colonial gazes. I also want to show how dialogic spaces can solve the paradoxes of “blind spots” and how this relates to the question of ethno-aesthetics, in the sense given by Pia Arke in her essay Etnoæstetik (Ethno-Aesthetics) (1995, 2010). A substantial excerpt of this text will follow this article.

So, Western appropriation and marginalization of the alien is constantly at work. You may want to stress that postcolonialism is an intellectual invention combining postmodernism and anti-colonialism in a way that conceals the continuation of colonialism by other forms of suppression and exploitation of the Third World. However, this is not an insight that in itself will transcend the regime of Western intellectualism from which it has sprung.

In this article, the author, an Australian composer of European descent who has worked across film, television, theater, and concert music, will share aspects of her curation and compositional practice, focusing on her work with Indigenous collaborators and themes. In the fallout of the failed Australian referendum for a First Nations Voice to Parliament (October 14, 2023), she will share a series of thoughts or insights to reveal how, over the course of several decades her generation of artists has witnessed a cultural revolution that now sees First Nations creative expression as essential to any holistic concept of an Australian culture. The article will consider recent First Nations-led literature offering frameworks for respectful dealing with First Nations intellectual property, culture, and collaborators. The author will discuss how the Australian First Nations’ worldview has influenced her thinking, curating, and music making, and how First Nations collaborators have inspired and guided her own practice to its maturity.

This article proposes cura (sui) as an ethico-aesthetic technique for reconfiguring subjectivity in curatorial performance practice. Drawing on Michel Foucault's understanding of cura sui (care of the self), it argues that care of the self—as a critical and enmeshed process of self-transformation—can be enacted as a form of care for others. It elaborates the concept with Karen Barad's new materialism and proposes cura (sui) as a socially respons(able) practice that is accountable to the curatorial forces and entanglements it generates. As such, cura (sui) might offer an approach to curatorial practice that neither privileges the individual curator nor underestimates the very real ethico-aesthetic force of curatorial subjectivity. Located in the field of Western art music, this article examines the specific agential configurations of materiality and gender in experimental performer, musician, and curator Jennifer Torrence's performance Border Loss at the Frau* Musica Nova festival in Cologne.

A conversation with Deepa Nallappan (Bharata Natyam choreographer), Rahul Varma (playwright and theatre director), and Gabriel Dharmoo (composer, singer, performer, drag artist), three Montréal artists with biographical ties to India or Indian culture. This exchange about the role of Indian identities in their respective art practices took place on May 7, 2024, at Concordia University in Montréal. TURBA was represented by our co-editor Sandeep Bhagwati (composer, music researcher).

A story is told about the composer Tigran Mansurian, a living classic of contemporary Armenian music. He was born in Beirut to an Armenian family and moved with his parents to Soviet Armenia in 1947. They settled in a small mountain town, where Mansurian taught himself music, quickly falling under the spell of Anton Webern and postwar avant-garde. For the premiere of his first rather complex symphonic piece, he invited his fellow townspeople and neighbors. Seating them in the front row, he anxiously observed their faces. He knew that they had not only never heard such music before but had never even attended a symphony orchestra concert: most of his neighbors worked in the stone quarries. Mansurian's avant-garde composition, based on strict serial techniques, was listened to with very stern faces. Finally, one of them smiled and said, “I recognize Tigran!”

Gareis, Sigrid, Nicole Haitzinger, & Jay Pather, eds. 2023. Curating Dance: Decolonizing Dance, OnCurating Issue 55.