The Forest Curriculum

2018 - ongoing

Bangkok/Yogyakarta/Manila/Seoul/Berlin/Santa Barbara

The Forest Curriculum is an itinerant and nomadic platform for anarchist indisciplinary research and mutual co-learning, based in Southeast Asia, and operating internationally. Co-founded in 2018 by curators Abhijan X. and Pujita Guha, the platform has a wide and ever-changing membership, and works with artists, collectives, researchers, indigenous organizations and thinkers, musicians, and activists. Past and present members and frequent collaborators include Jane Jin Kaisen, Sung Tieu, Joel Sherwood Spring, Fileona Dkhar, Omehen, the Harvest School, Dennis Dizon, the Rice Brewing Sisters’ Club, Zeke Sales, Yonaz Kristy and RAR Editions, Jenni Laiti, Sasha Shestakova among many other human and more-than-human entities. The Forest Curriculum have worked iteratively, and in the long term, with indigenous groups and artists from Southern China, Southeast Asia and Northeast India, building avenues for collaboration through solidarity and inter-local exchange with other indigenous and non-indigenous practitioners from regions such as the Australian continent, South and Central America and the Caribbean, the Nordic region and Northern Asia. This work expands from the understanding of non-stated forms of life in the forested highlands that have existed, and continue to exist, building on the intersecting, interjecting cosmologies of this region. The Forest Curriculum organizes exhibitions, public programs, performances, video and multimedia projects, as well as an annual intensive in a different location around the region, which gathers practitioners from all over the world to engage in collective research and shared methodologies: The Forest And The School, Bangkok (2019); The Forest Is In The City Is In The Forest I, Manila (2020) and II, Online (2020-2021). As a curatorial, pedagogic, and artistic collective, Forest Curriculum primarily operates through intersecting, or interweaving research streams. A stream connotes the process and flow of water, and on a similar premise, research streams infer an ongoing process of research that may manifest through multiple, inter-related outcomes; some of the ongoing research streams include How To Not Build A Nation, To Catch A Bird With A Cloud, and Imperialism Now. The Forest Curriculum was also awarded the Bikuben Vision Award in 2022, jointly with the Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology, Copenhagen, for the realization of the project Hosting Lands. The collective was nominated for the Digital Communities Prize of the 2022 edition of Ars Electronica with To Catch A Bird With A Cloud and received the the Sharjah Art Foundation’s Focal Point Grant in 2022 for How To Not Build A Nation. The platform collaborates with institutions and organizations internationally, and our work has been supported by the Australia Council for the Arts; the Sharjah Art Foundation; Ideas City, the New Museum, NTU CCA, Singapore, Nomina Nuda, Los Baños, and GAMeC, Bergamo among others. The collective has also exhibited in 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). The collective’s work is part of the Federal Contemporary Art Collection of Germany.  The collective was featured in Apollo Magazine’s 40 Under 40 Asia Pacific List in 2022.

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The Exhaustion Project (2016 - ongoing)