Abhijan X. (they/them) is an artist, curator and writer, interested in anarchist governance structures, indisciplinary research, decolonial worldbuilding and infrastructures. They have initiated collaborative indisciplinary projects such as the Exhaustion Project (since 2016) and the Forest Curriculum (with Pujita Guha and others, since 2018), and recently the Bureau for Improvised Governance, a speculative agency for anarchist cosmo-poetic choreographies. They were the Artistic Director of A House In Many Parts, a multi-disciplinary festival in Bangkok, supported by the Goethe-Institut and French Embassy, which they founded in 2020 and have been part of the curatorial team at Shedhalle, Zurich,  and Hosting Lands (with the Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology, Pujita Guha and Aziza Harmel) Denmark. They were also the curator, with Mari Spirito of A Few In Many Places (2021), Seoul, Bangkok, Istanbul, New York, San Juan, Guatemala City, a platform for international collaboration and collective practice, conceived by Protocinema.  They have previously worked with the Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh; Bellas Artes Projects, Manila and Bataan, the Philippines; Council, Paris, France and Asia Art Archive. Selected recent exhibitions include Foliage #4: How To Talk To Plants (with Do Tuong Linh), VCCA Foundation, Hanoi, Vietnam (2022); In The Forest, Even The Air Breathes, GAMeC, Bergamo, Italy (2020); Minor Infelicities, Ujeongkuk, Seoul, South Korea (2020); Southern Constellations (with Bojana Piškur), Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana (2019); The Exhaustion Project: There Is Still Work To Be Done, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2018). They have lectured at the HDK, Valand; Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen; the Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok; Monash University, Melbourne among others and are also part of the steering committee of the Artist-for-Artist Program. They were co-curator of the Goethe Institut’s Cultures d’Avenir, jointly presented by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, the Centre Pompidou, Paris and the CCCB, Barcelona. They have participated in the Independent Curators International Curatorial Intensive, the Gwangju Biennale Curators Course and the KfW Transcuratorial Academy and the National Center for Art Research International Symposium and Workshop 2024 in Tokyo. They participated in residencies with the Staatenkunstfonds, Denmark; the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul; Pro-Helvetia and the HSLU-University of Applied Arts and Sciences, Luzern, Switzerland. They have also exhibited in The Long Term You Cannot Afford, Savvy Contemporary, Berlin, Germany (2019); Weather Engines, Onassis Stegi, Athens, Greece (2022);  Nonhuman Assemblages, Busan Sea Art Festival, South Korea (2021), Nation, Narration, Narcosis, Hamburger Bahnhof Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Berlin, Germany (2021), Proposals for A Monument to Partition, Jameel Art Centre, Dubai (2022) and The School of Interspecies Diplomacy and Werewolfish Studies, Centrale Fies, Dro, Italy (2023). Their work is part of the Federal Contemporary Art Collection of Germany. They have been a regular contributor to Artforum, MOMUS, eflux, ArtAsiaPacific, Spike Magazine, Terremoto and others. They were nominated for the Digital Communities Prize of Ars Electronica in 2022 and featured in Apollo Magazine’s 40 Under 40 Asia Pacific List in the same year.  They were awarded the Premio Lorenzo Bonaldi X, at the GAMeC, Bergamo in 2019 and the Vision Exhibition Award of the Bikuben Foundation in 2022.

Interview with curator Andy Butler