Rockbund Art Museum 上海外滩美术馆

For the third talk in a series related to “Second Assembly: Exhibition-Making Practice in China and Southeast Asia in the 1990s”, a curatorial project jointly curated by Biljana Ciric and the museum, RAM is delighted to invite Kuala Lumpur-based curator and writer Eric Goh to discuss the 1995 exhibition Skin Trilogy by the Malaysian arts collective Five Arts Centre.

Based on a play written by K. S. Maniam, the exhibition devised a series of interdisciplinary events combining visual and performing arts through collaborations between actors, dancers, musicians and visual artists together at the National Art Gallery in Kuala Lumpur. The exhibition encapsulated the anxious mood across the country that defined this period in the 1990s. Given its openly socio-political tone, its association with a public institution such as the National Art Gallery was all the more surprising especially during Mahathir’s notorious time as prime minister, which also added another layer of significance to this event. Rather than having an overarching curator, the Skin Trilogy was in fact actualised through a diffuse community of people instead.

Subsequently, we will look at how the exhibition was able to shed new light on exhibition-making and the notion of community. The talk presents a case study of the exhibition as it attempts to tease the curatorial while making sense of the ramifications of the exhibition’s influence in terms of its time, locality, and connections to the wider community.

此次讲座是上海外滩美术馆与比利安娜·思瑞克联合策划的“第二次集会：1990 年代中国及东南亚地区的策展实践”系列讲座的第三场。此次活动特别邀请了吉隆坡策展人及作家吴家仲，与观众探讨马来西亚艺术团体——五艺中心（Five Arts Centre）于 1995 年筹办的展览“肌肤三部曲”。

该展览以 K. S. Maniam所著剧本为基础，涵盖一系列结合视觉艺术和表演艺术的“跨界”活动，由演员、舞者、音乐家、视觉艺术家在吉隆坡国家美术馆共同呈现。展览还将马来西亚二十世纪九十年代最具时代标签的全民焦虑感囊括在内。考虑到其毫不隐晦的社会政治寓意，该展能得到国家美术馆这样的公共机构的支持实在出人意料，尤其是该展览发生于马哈蒂尔担任总理的那段颇具争议的时期，这更加为展览增添了一层特殊意义。“肌肤三部曲”的策展工作并非由一个策展人全权负责，而是由这个团体的所有成员共同策划。

讲者将从展览本身出发，对策展及社群概念作出新的诠释。他以“肌肤三部曲”展览为研究对象，试图梳理整个策展工作，并从时间、地点和社群三个维度挖掘该展览带来的后续影响。