Speaker Shirley Surya
Date 3.10.2023
Time HKT 18:30
Location G/F, Atrium
When architecture is valued largely as a manifestation of the built, the practice of collecting and exhibiting architecture is invariably a conflicted one. As a historian and curator, as well as former journalist, the cause for curating architecture has therefore been inseparable from knowledge production. Unlike the role of academia or mass media, the curatorial realm contributes to the field of knowledge of architecture as a public concern with a kind of probing certainty – in the form of interpretive narratives and associations (or disassociations) spatially woven through a web of found (sometimes constructed) objects, images, texts, films, or/and other material evidence. This talk reflects on the potentials and limits of such aspiration through the lens of previous projects, namely Building M+: The Museum & Architecture Collection (2013), Incomplete Urbanism: Attempts of Critical Spatial Practice (2016), In Search of Southeast Asia through the M+ Collections (2018), and M+’s opening exhibitions Hong Kong: Here and Beyond and Things, Spaces, Interactions (2021).
Shirley Surya is Curator for Design and Architecture at M+. Since 2012, she contributed to building the M+ Collections through her research on plural modernities and inter-disciplinary knowledge networks in the design and architectural production across greater China and Southeast Asia. At M+, she co-curated Building M+: The Museum & Architecture Collection (2013), In Search of Southeast Asia through the M+ Collections (2018) and M+’s opening exhibitions Hong Kong: Here and Beyond and Things, Spaces, Interactions. Outside M+, she made curatorial and editorial contributions through exhibitions such as Yung Ho Chang & FCJZ: Material-ism (2012) and Incomplete Urbanism: Attempts of Critical Spatial Practice (2016), as well as publications including ARCH+, e-flux Architecture, and Geoffrey Bawa: Drawing from the Archives.
The lecture will be conducted in English. For non-CUHK participants, please register here.
