Open Call —
2 Issue/ Year

How to Survive in S.E.A. starts from a first principle: does an exhibition have to happen in a white cube? Contemporary art has developed many other ways of producing and circulating culture, yet the exhibition is still often imagined as a room where a relative group of people, operating within a relatively familiar system, come together and speak to one another. The practical side is less “fine art” than it looks; artists are often working within the requirements of galleries, their audiences and the markets around them, rather than necessarily encountering one another through a shared intellectual or aesthetic position.

Hand-Fetish-Projects (HFP) considers the artbook another form of exhibition space. It can hold works from different artistic practices, disciplines and cultural backgrounds within the same physical structure, allowing relationships to be constructed between things that may have had no chance to meet otherwise. The curator's role is not simply to gather artists, but to determine what happens when these works are placed beside one another; through selection, sequence, graphic language, scale and the physical limits of the book. In this sense, the publication becomes an exhibition in miniature that can circulate beyond a single venue, remain physically present regardless of how trends move through the world, and move across borders with little friction.

HFP approaches this possibility from a Southeast Asian condition*; not as a geographical label to be applied to the artists included, nor as an identity that needs to be represented. It is a cultural "coordinate" among many others.

This is where How to Survive in S.E.A. places its interest. The publication brings together works that may come from entirely different practices, places and cultural experiences, and places them on the same plane. The purpose is not to establish a common style or a single definition of the region, but to see what happens to its cultural DNA when different positions are no longer arranged in hierarchy. The exhibition is the relation itself.

Geographical connection to Southeast Asia is not a requirement. Artists do not need to be from Southeast Asia, based in Southeast Asia, or make work directly concerned with the region.