David Teh

Redundancy and the Museum

David Teh

Associate Professor, National University of Singapore, Singapore.

The premises of a universal knowledge – and of the encyclopedic collection – eroded by the assertion of other, non-imperial kinds, are looking shakier than ever. Yet our embracing knowledge of art, of the panoply once styled a “museum without walls,” continues to expand, as images become more plastic, mobile, and communicable, perhaps even autonomous. Social media deliver a glut of relevance but at the cost of veracity and concentration – a universal distraction. The algorithm does away with the editor and even, we suspect, with a long-cherished notion of the public.

Exhibiting institutions and curators are meanwhile pushed to be both more general in their programs and address, and at the same time more particular in the intelligence they impart and the ethical postures they adopt. As public and private interests become harder to separate, to whom are they responsible? One thing is certain: there will only be more art to show, more images, more museums, more concepts to iterate. There is redundancy in the air. Can contemporary art, with its mercurial vocabulary, generate the prompts necessary for institutional transformation? I will try to make sense of this paradoxical redundancy and what it means for the Museum.

Biography:

David Teh is a writer, curator and Associate Professor at the National University of Singapore, studying the histories and theory of contemporary art. His current research explores the curatorial function and the effects – both instrumental and aesthetic – of regionalism in Asian art and exhibition history.

Teh’s own curatorial projects have included Unreal Asia (55. Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, 2009), Video Vortex #7 (Yogyakarta, 2011), TRANSMISSION (Jim Thompson Art Center, Bangkok, 2014), Misfits: Pages from a Loose-leaf Modernity (HKW Berlin, 2017), Returns (12th Gwangju Biennale, 2018), and the 17th Istanbul Biennial (with Ute Meta Bauer and Amar Kanwar, 2022).

Most recently, he served as Artistic Co-director of Thailand Biennale Phuket, 2025-26. Teh has contributed catalogue essays on the work of Ho Tzu Nyen, Arahmaiani and Rirkrit Tiravanija, among many other artists. His critical essays have appeared in Third Text, Afterall, ArtAsiaPacific, ARTMargins, Theory, Culture and Society and Artforum. His book Thai Art: Currencies of the Contemporary was published in 2017 by the MIT Press, and he was co-editor (with David Morris) of 'Artist-to-Artist: Independent Art Festivals in Chiang Mai 1992-98' (2018) for Afterall’s Exhibition Histories series.