Art Meets Social: Curating for the 21st Century 'MRadio's latest podcast episode

Prior to February 2020 and the unfortunate onset of COVID-19 in Singapore and its related Safe Management Measures, the Museum Roundtable (MR), a network of more than 60 museums in Singapore, used to meet at least once a quarter to network, attend museum-specific workshops, and share best practices. It was at one of those meetings when my colleague Nalina Gopal from the Indian Heritage Centre (IHC) led me through IHC’s Bicentennial exhibition From the Coromandel Coast to the Straits – Revisiting Our Tamil Heritage. The exhibition introduced a commissioned artwork by Anurendra Jegadeva that was juxtaposed with paintings by Nanyang artists from the collection of National Gallery Singapore.

The exhibition at IHC showed how the history of migration of Tamils in the region had possibly excluded the voices of women, and featured artworks that highlighted the seldom told narratives of the female migrant. What struck me most was that the Nanyang paintings are typically understood as a style arising from male migrant Chinese painters in Singapore, and seeing their artworks in the context of Indian migrants was refreshing.

It was from these conversations that I got the idea for the MR to do a podcast episode bringing together Nalina and Seng Yu Jin, a senior curator at National Gallery Singapore, to share their experiences as curators in this difficult post-COVID-19 world. This podcast would also resume Art meets Social sharings in a way that is new for the MR.

The podcast episode that eventually resulted delved into urgent topics, such as how a curator in the 21st-century is expected to address audiences in both physical and digital spaces, adapt to demands for rigorous and quality research while competing for digital real estate, record community stories, and address gaps in the documentation of Singapore and the region’s history.  To borrow Nalina’s words, the 21st-century curator is more of a “knowledge broker” between communities, places, and artefacts, instead of the sole repository of knowledge. When such forms of knowledge are transposed to the digital space, they can have an extended shelf life through a digital archive, which can also be translated into different languages for research by scholars across Southeast Asia.  

This podcast is therefore a foray into the digital space for the MR, Nalina, Yu Jin and myself. It represents a more mindful approach to how museums can engage in conversations, and how the pandemic uncovered opportunities for curators to write new histories for the 21st century even when forced to stay at home. Listen in to our conversation on Spotify here:

Editor’s note: Want to hear more about the Gallery and Singapore and Southeast Asian modern art? You can download the Gallery Explorer app for audio tours that unlock insights to artworks currently on display, visit the Gallery’s Soundcloud page to access an archive of past audio tours, or head to Spotify to check out The Padang Sessions, the Gallery’s latest podcast showcasing conversations recorded live in our premises.