How to talk about spiritual matters in a highly secularised, hyper-pragmatic society? This was the question artists exhibiting in the show “Pneuma: Of Spirituality in Contemporary Age” at the Stamford Art Centre in Singapore grappled with during the 2020 Singapore Art Week.
The webmagazine Qantara has just published my piece on the show.
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My new article “5 Thai Artists that Connect Us to Spirituality” has just been published on CoBo Social. Some of you may know my new research scope is Thailand, and I’m planning to visit for a reportage in 2019. My previous long-form reportage have been Indonesia (2013), Australia (2014), Singapore (2015-2017) and Cambodia (2018).
So what form do these reportage take in our multimedia world of information and “liquid society” (to quote Zygmunt Bauman)? Well, the form must also be flexible. The bulk of the Indonesia research ended up in a book. My Australian reportage took the shape of a series of articles and an exhibition in Rome. The Cambodian material has also come out as articles. The Singapore research has also become a book which is the process of being published as a web-series, every Monday on this blog and on Medium. For Thailand, I’m planning to realize some videos as well. Will see how it unfolds.
To go back to “5 Thai Artists that Connect Us to Spirituality”; I love to write these kind of pieces because they allow me to look deeply into the practice of artists thematically, and then summarize the essence of their work in few paragraphs. I learn so much from doing this work, and I’m so happy to have the chance to share it with you guys!
Here is the link to the article
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Thanks to the amazing CoBo, little by little I’m getting to interview all my favorite contemporary artists! This time I chatted with Arahmaiani, a legend and a model of badassery in contemporary art and in life. The piece is called: “The Superheroine of Indonesian Contemporary Art”.
I have interviewed her for her new show at Tyler Rollins in New York, from September 15 to October 29. We talked about many different subjects, but the aspect I decided to focus on for the piece was her shift from criticism to activism in her work.
Since I first started researching Indonesian art, the political and social aspect of the art was the one that struck me the most. Over time I have asked artists if it is really possible to have an impact on society with contemporary art alone. Overall, Indonesian artists seemed to me much less romantic and much more hands-on compared to some of their European counterparts.
Almost exactly one year ago in Paris, a dancer friend who had lived in Indonesia, told me of a great Indonesian artist who I should absolutely meet and interview. The artist was Ivan Sagita, a painter based in Yogyakarta whose work is charming and mysterious.
Ivan Sagita is one of the initiators of what has been called “Jogja surrealism”, a style that emerged in the 1980s in the Indonesian city of Yogyakarta. His painting and sculptures combine a strong social element to the spiritual realm – what the artist calls “the unreal”.
I finally met with the artists a few weeks ago and sat with him to discussed this concept, his background and the idea of spirituality in art. The interview has just been published on the webmagazine/platform Cobo.
Here’s the link to the interview
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Naima Morelli is an arts writer and journalist specialized in contemporary art from Asia-Pacific and the MENA region.
She has written for the Financial Times, Al-Jazeera, The Art Newspaper, ArtAsiaPacific, Internazionale and Il Manifesto, among others, and she is a regular contributor to Plural Art Mag, Middle East Monitor and Middle East Eye as well as writing curatorial texts for galleries.
She is the author of three books on Southeast Asian contemporary art.
Reach out: contact [at] naimamorelli.com
