Practicing Friendship: Respecting Time as a Curator | Zoe Butt

A special programme series featuring exhibitions, projects, written works, performances, a blog, and publication marking Asia Art Archive's 15-year anniversary. AAA extends 15 Invitations to creative practitioners to look within and beyond the organisation as an archive, a collection of material, a digital platform, and a node in a wider collective network. The 15 Invitations take various sizes,forms, and directions—literary, polemic, political, sonic, physical, and digital—and function as a series of 'drop pins' to alternatively navigate where AAA originated and where it may be going.

ZOE BUTT is Executive Director and Curator of Sàn Art, based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. She is also the facilitator of AAA's 2011 Mobile Library programme in Vietnam, contributes a text looking at friendship. Citing this as a platform that is integral to the longevity of particular kinds of arts infrastructure, she invites others considered independent, 'alternative', and archival in spirit to speak among friends, while simultaneously investigating a method of working strategically under conditions with political or cultural restrictions.                                                                                                                                                                     Image: AAA Programme 'Open Edit:Mobile Library' at Sàn Art

At a too-early point in my career, I had grown oh-so-tired of the way neoliberal systems of institutional approval were dictating how artistic innovation was allowed to take form and be interpreted—a stance touted to respect the inspiration of artists from far-flung locales with differing determinations of 'contemporaneity', but sadly felt more like a colonisation of their productive processes.       "                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           -   Zoe Butt                                                                                                                                                                    Image: Friends of Vu Dan Tan, Hanoi, Vietnam, 1986. Courtesy of Salon Natasha Archive.