Christina Li
Conference Report. December 2024
Frank Lloyd Wright has famously said “Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.” Perhaps by design, CIMAM 2024 Annual Conference 2024 host city of Los Angeles – a sprawling horizontal urban landscape that is defined by the freedom of automobiles, open land and free market speculation – felt like a fittingly context for the three-day conference that stretched and drifted across vast geographies and proportions. Amidst the patchwork of practices brought together under the topic of sustainability, the most compelling ideas emerged from panellists and practitioners who worked antithetically to the gargantuan scales that are mirrored in the host city, but rather devoted their work on own places and communities by building, and revitalising knowledges and relationships with and already embedded within the land they are stewarding.
In the panel Economies of Sustainability: Ethics, Values and Resilience, keynote speaker and CEO, Co-Founder of Shorefast on Fogo Island, Zita Cobb, channelled economist E.F. Schumacher’s ideas from Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered (1973), foregrounding the importance of the working in a natural scale, and by looking at sustainability as care. Schumacher’s foundational quote “Our task is to look at the world and see it whole.” resonated in Mophradat’s Director Mai Abu ElDahab’s impassioned and critical self-questioning as she reflected on her organisation’s raison d’être, embracing “thinking as a technology of care,” and on how it can offer critical support and facilitate opportunities that respond to the harsh conditions of survival that artists from the Arab world currently are faced with.
Mophrdat’s nimble approach in assembling support structures and being the connective tissue for precarious practices is embodied in Ibrahim Mahama’s institutions, shining light on the power of art as outreach in his home country of Ghana where he describes as “a place of surplus of loss, collapse and failures”. The collective studio practice and exhibition spaces served to excavate his country’s cultural histories from the material remnants, such as British-colonial trains and soviet-era planes acquired from Ghana’s ministries and private owners, repurposed to connect children and young people to the world of art and creativity while deeply rooted within their own living environment and history.
Bookending the conference, the last session of the day offered practices that disentangled from dominant institutional models and practices, at the same time, rather than sustainability, privileged questions around ways to sustain. Keynote speaker, Candice Hopkins starts with an acute observation about tendencies of turning to indigenous knowledge during crisis in colonial serves as an important backdrop as the day’s proceedings unfolded. In her presentation, “On Not Being A Museum”, she continues by radically proposing to break away from institutions that we have (dis-)inherited, as well as giving ourselves the permission to follow other protocols in the process. Her hyper-local perspective underpins Forge Project, Native-led nonprofit organisation whose work is invested in upending systems formed through generations of settler colonialism and is a powerful example of how sustenance can be an embodied practice that can produce alternative models of institution building and programming.
The ensuing presentations revolved around dematerial practices and thinking. The speakers Edgar Calel, Maya-Kaqchikel artist and poet from Guatemala, Taloi Havini, artist from Bougainville Island and Aboriginal Australian artist, curator and activist, Djon Mundine, evoked the temporariness of objects as tokens of timekeeping (Calel), the importance of knowledge around and not on museums buildings (Havini) and the notion of things being so useful that they are ownerless (Mundine). These thoughts come as striking examples of how sustainability is a living philosophy, when reflected in tandem with observations posited by Chus Martinez, moderator of the afternoon panel of the first day. She deftly unpacked the ways sustainability has been being interpreted and reduced to a set of measures needed to be implemented from a capitalistic paradigm of efficiency, accountability and control, while highlighting the difference between sustainability as a reform of actions and transformation of philosophy and ethos.
How do we find our place within the problem of sustainability and the crisis of climate change afoot? Writing about the role of economics in Small is Beautiful, E.F Schumacher argued, “An entirely new system of thought is needed, a system based on attention to people, and not primarily attention to goods (…)” As we are confronted by pressing call for remedial solutions out of the sustainability conundrum, the profound generosity, care and love imbued within aforementioned projects thoroughly attuned to own scales and worlds show that embracing sustainability as a philosophy of sustaining and caring for people, rather than objects is the necessary ingredient to overhaul existing systems and imagine new models that better serve our communities and environment.
Biography
Christina Li (b. 1982) is a curator and writer based in Hong Kong. She has worked in various curatorial capacities in institutions across Asia and Europe such as Para Site, Hong Kong (2006-08), SKOR (Foundation Art in Public Space), Amsterdam (2009-10), and BAK, Utrecht (2011-12). Between 2015 and 2017, she was the director at Spring Workshop, Hong Kong, where she curated, among other commissions, A Collective Present: Tiffany Chung and Koki Tanaka (2017), and Wu Tsang: Duilian (2016).
She was artistic director of "Ghost2565: Live Without Dead Time", the 2nd edition of the triennial series of moving image and performance, Bangkok (2022). Her recent shows include Xinyi Cheng’s solo presentation "Seen Through Others", Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2022); "Pilvi Takala: Close Watch", Pavilion of Finland at the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia (2022); "…pausing barely, barely pausing…", A Tale of A Tub, Rotterdam (2021); "Palms, Palms, Palms", Z33, Hasselt (2020); "Shirley Tse: Stakeholders", Hong Kong’s presence at the 58th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (2019) and "Shirley Tse: Stakes and Holders", M+, Hong Kong (2020), and the inaugural exhibition "Dismantling the Scaffold", at Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2018). She has worked with Big Tail Elephant, Heman Chong, Stephanie Comilang, Elmgreen & Dragset, Sung Hwan Kim, Lee Kit, Pak Sheung Chuen, Pratchaya Printhong, and YOUNG HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES in her context-responsive projects.
Li's writing has been published in catalogues and other periodicals such as Artforum, Art Review Asia, LEAP, Parkett, Spike and Yishu Journal of Contemporary Art.
Christina Li, Independent Curator, Kowloon, Hong Kong, has been awarded by the Getty Foundation, Los Angeles.