Public Programs @ The Institute

Series: Southeast Asia Initiative

The Shapes of Practice

Monday, March 30, 2026, 12:00pm

Curatorial workshop with Ho Tzu Nyen, Artist and Curator of the Gwangju Biennale
(Duke House, East Basement Seminar Room)

In-person only, open to the IFA community, NYU Department of Art History students, and area graduate students.

Join us to think about exhibitions as ways of engaging with artistic practice over time. Inspired by some of the key ideas behind the 16th Gwangju Biennale, You Must Change Your Life, the workshop begins from the proposition that change is not only produced through dramatic events or singular gestures, but also through repeated practices that unfold gradually across time.

Participants will be asked to explore three questions. First, what do we mean by practice? Second, what distinguishes artistic practice from other forms of practice? And third, how might an exhibition give shape to an artistic practice, making visible the processes, methods, and transformations that develop over the course of an artist’s life and work?

Working with specific artistic figures as case studies, students will be invited to examine how practices evolve through repetition, experimentation, and persistence. Rather than focusing on a single artwork, participants will consider how multiple works by an artist can form trajectories or vectors across time.

If a typical exhibition can be imagined as a picture composed of dots—each dot representing an individual artwork—this workshop asks students to think about how curatorial work might also draw lines. These lines trace the connections between works, revealing the movements, questions, and transformations that shape an artistic practice.

Through discussion and practical exercises, students will be asked to develop concrete curatorial proposals that attempt to give form to artistic practice: conceiving exhibition formats that make visible not only isolated works, but also the lines of thought, labor, and change that run through them. The workshop approaches curating itself as a practice—one that can shape how artistic practices are encountered, understood, and shared.

Ho Tzu Nyen is the Artistic Director of the 2026 Gwangju Biennale. One-person exhibitions of his work have been held at Hamburger Kunsthalle (2025), LUMA Arles (2025), Mudam Museum of Modern Art (2025), Hessel Museum of Art (2024), Art Sonje Center (2024), Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (2024), Singapore Art Museum (2023), Hammer Museum (2022), Toyota Municipal Museum of Art (2021), Crow Museum of Asian Arts (2021), Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media [YCAM] (2021), Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art (Oldenburg, 2019), Kunstverein in Hamburg (2018), Ming Contemporary Art Museum [McaM] (Shanghai, 2018), Asia Art Archive (2017), Guggenheim Bilbao (2015), Mori Art Museum, (2012), The Substation (Singapore, 2003). He represented the Singapore Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale (2011).