Try to praise the mutilated world (wip title)

My proposed curatorial project will involve an outdoor public art exhibition alongside programming including music performances, a panel discussion, a reading group, and publication. The project offers cross-cultural dialogues to explore the ways in which identity and culture in diasporic experience is enmeshed in the folklore, religion, and wider culture of their adopted locales. At its core, the project is rooted in encouraging participation and bringing necessary dialogues into the public sphere(literally, in this case); cross-cultural conversations exploring diasporic experience and identity are foundational to building more accepting, understanding, and inclusive cultures and populations.

The proposed title for the project is try to praise the mutilated world. The title is inspired by a poem of the same title by Adam Zagajewski, a Polish poet whose work explores migration and the refugee experience. Whilst recognizing the fraught state of a world that remains divided by borders and conflicted immigration policies, Zagajewski’s work offers a rallying cry of hope, a necessary revolt to ever-present political atrocities.

Dalmeny Street Park, collage of images and Google Maps screenshot

I am tentatively planning on the exhibition taking place in Dalmeny Street Park, off of Leith Walk in Edinburgh, for many reasons: for one, the park is situated in one of the more diverse neighborhoods in the city, in which many diasporas interact and exist together. There is a near-constant flow of people walking by the site, whether to the tram on Leith Walk, walking their dogs in the dog-park, skateboarding/playing football in Dalmeny, or kids going to the playground.

Sunthorn Meesri, bot bat sommut (role play), 1993, performance at Tha Pae Gate, Chiang Mai. Image courtesy Uthit Atimana and Gridthiya Gaweewong

View of ‘APTART Behind the Fence’, 1983. Image via: https://www.afterall.org/articles/introduction-anti-shows-david-morris/

My inspiration for the exhibition taking place outside in the landscape came from both the Chiang Mai Social Installation festivals throughout the ‘90s and the APTART ‘anti-shows’ that existed in the natural landscape (whereas CMSI existed in urban fabric). Given the themes I am exploring in the project, a more traditional white cube or exhibition space could of course be at risk of becoming didactic, but crucially it opposes the project’s goal of encouraging dialogue and discourse. Bringing it out into the urban fabric further offers opportunities for passers-by to casually encounter the work, kids playing in the adjacent playground to bring their parents in, and the assemblage of forces at play around the site to inform and affect the work. 

ARTISTS

ihsan saad ihsan tahir – WESTERN SUNRISE

The exhibition will include a number of artists practicing in the UK who explore themes that expand upon my project theme, from diasporic identity, crosscultural dialogues, to drawing transnational kinship between folklore and the landscape. These artists work in a variety of media, though installative and sculptural works will be best suited for the space and ethos of the project.

Mengwei Chen – Ghost in the Shell

Nidhi Bodana – Nomadic Life

Mia Kokkoni – Travellers (2025)

Kato’one Koloamatangi – ‘To Pa’

Alvi Östgård – Savn 

http://www.kinaara.co.uk/

Alvi Östgård’s ‘Death in a Nutshell’ project incorporates endangered Scottish sheep wool and cast hazelnuts, and is inspired by a Scottish/Nordic folktale in which death is trapped in a nutshell.

Kato’one Koloamatangi’s practice explores cultural identity as a Tongan w/ sculpture & sound installations, inspired by a sculptural work which she describes as a ‘doorway to memory’, exploring family, history, and memory.

Mia Kokkoni’s paintings depict imagined landscapes equally inspired by the flora and landscapes of Greece alongside adopted landscape of Scotland, fusing Celtic and Greek folklore and culture.

Nidhi Bodana, an artist from India (state o/Madhya Pradesh) is a performance/installation artist whose “work seeks to heal, empower, and bring visibility to what has been silenced, overlooked, or rendered invisible”… “the work becomes a site of healing, visibility, and reclamation, inviting audiences to move from passive viewing to active witnessing, from silence to solidarity”(source: artist’s website). 

Mengwei Chen’s work Visitant reflects Chen’s practice which explores East Asian traditional art and folkloric themes as they intersect with contemporary narratives in literature, comics, and social media.

ihsan saad ihsan tahir explores notions of class, cross-cultural exchange, displacement and masculinity in sculpture and installation works, such as WESTERN SUNRISE which includes an installation in the landscape.

The band Kinaara fuses Punjabi and Celtic folk music to explore the richness of these musical traditions, that which on the surface may seem to be highly dissimilar, but the band exposes the intersections of these genres.

The exhibition would only exist over a weekend given the nature of the show existing outdoors, but a chapbook-style DIY publication would extend the longevity of the project. I intend on inviting participating artists to contribute writings about other artists’ works, interviews between artists, as well as including works of writing related to the themes of the project.

Questions:

• Concerns about exhibition taking place outside? (weather, accessibility, ‘security’ of works?)
• Perspectives on asking artists to create site-specific works?

References

Try To Praise the Mutilated World – Adam Zagajewski

Week 6: Curatorial Pitch / Preston Taylor / Curating (2025-2026)[SEM2] by is licensed under a