Art Review Asia Vol. 14 No. 2

Are you worried about life? Having a hard time figuring out what’s going on in the world right now? If so, worry no more. ArtReview Asia’s summer issue is about entanglements and how to deal with them. Both in terms of untangling (for optimists) and acceptance of a certain amount of ‘entangulation’. Along the way, this issue looks at knotty clumps of colonialism, race, language, cultural tradition and a certain amount of armed conflict. Yep, just another day for ArtReview Asia.

Singaporean artist Priyageetha Dia’s work perpetually enquires after the spaces that remain for resistance against the boxes into which contemporary society wishes to place us. Or as Adeline Chia writes, it fights against ‘the oppressive and extractive structures under which modern life takes place’. Working largely with digital animation, sound design and installation, Dia’s recent work draws on the Black radical tradition, which she adapts in her unpicking of the Tamil diaspora in Southeast Asia and more broadly in the Indian Ocean world. From labourers on rubber plantations to migrant workers undertaking perilous sea journeys, Dia charts the logics and methodologies of colonial extraction through to the infrastructures and architecture of contemporary tech regimes.   

Art Review Founded in 1949, ArtReview is one of the world’s leading international contemporary art magazines, dedicated to expanding contemporary art’s audience and reach.