International Curators Program: Asia Pacific Triennial x TarraWarra Biennial

This program is for Australia-based curators, creative and cultural producers who identify as First Nations and/or of the Asia Pacific diaspora and meet the following requirements:

• at any stage of your career – with a minimum of five years experience
• are interested in implementing change in arts practice towards methodologies that embed reciprocity, sustainability and connection within and/or outside of institutional spaces
• desire to respond to shared global challenges to benefit Australian creative practices and self-determined international engagement
• wish to identify future projects or collaborations within the Asia Pacific region

We are committed to providing a program that offers inclusive, self-determined and safe participation.

Who can apply

You can apply if:

• you are based in Australia
• you are an individual or group
• you identify as First Nations and/or of the Asia Pacific diaspora

Who can’t apply

You can’t apply if:

• you have an overdue grant report to the Australia Council
• you owe money to the Australia Council
• you are an organisation

We encourage applications from Australia-based applicants regardless of your citizenship or residency status. For example, foreign nationals based in Australia on temporary visas are encouraged to apply.

Applications will be assessed by Australia Council staff and industry advisers against the following assessment criteria:

Relevance: The timeliness and impact of the program for the applicant.

Leadership: An active and/or reflective approach to Australian and international visual arts practice and/or sector development.

Applicants will be notified of the outcome of their application approximately four weeks after the closing date.

Prepare a single pdf file or a link to an audio file or a video file responding to the following three (3) questions:

1. Tell us about your practice and your lines of enquiry in the current moment. (250 words maximum)
2. Identify a contemporary current in the Asia Pacific you wish to explore. (250 words maximum)
3. What is the timeliness and relevance of this program and its imagined impacts on your practice, cultural work and/or career trajectory? (250 words maximum)

Audio and video submissions should be a maximum of three (3) minutes in length.

Please upload PDF, audio or video submissions under the support material section of the application form. Audio and video format submissions are not mandatory but encouraged.

You are also required to attach at least one of the following support material:

1. A one-page CV illustrating your work experience and involvement in relevant projects.
2. A link or single page of one example of a project or activity you have completed that is relevant to the program.

Please refer to our How to apply page for further information and guidance on support material upload requirements.

Priya Namana

Priya Namana is an Indian contemporary artist living and working on the unceded lands of the people of the Kulin Nations in Naarm. Her practice is enquiry-based and asks emergent questions in the present to probe into possible future ecologies. Led by the sensual and excited by the psychology and perception of image and sound as sensory modes for receiving information, her works are explorative and investigate the politics of what is unseen, intangible and unheard. Underpinned by feminist thinking, her world and meaning making embody decolonized speculative futures. These hybrid propositional spaces express rhizomatic structures that decentralize anthropocentric approaches.

She has applied this practice based and research framework within different collaborations and community engagement contexts in Australia and Asia.

Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) 

Tarun Nagesh, Curatorial Manager, Asian & Pacific Art

Tarun Nagesh is Curatorial Manager, Asian and Pacific Art, at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) in Brisbane, Australia. He is part of the lead curatorial team of the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT), and has worked on the 7th, 8^th, 9^th and 10th editions. Tarun also regularly curates exhibitions for QAGOMA, including recent projects Problem-Wisdom: Thai Art in the 1990s; A Fleeting Bloom: Japanese Art from the Collection; KalpaVriksha: Contemporary Indigenous and Vernacular Art of India (as part of APT8); Political Parody in Indonesian Art; and Indo Pop: Contemporary Indonesian Art.

Tarun regularly curates exhibitions outside of the APT, is actively involved in commissions and acquisitions for the QAGOMA collection and also oversees QAGOMA’s historical Asian Art collection and exhibitions. He is a regular contributor to journals and exhibition publications in Australia, is a state representative of the The Asian Arts Society of Australia, a member of the national Asian Art Provenance and is a Board member of the Institute of Modern Art (IMA) in Brisbane.

TarraWarra Museum of Art

Dr Léuli Eshrāghi, Curator, TarraWarra Biennial 2023

Léuli Eshrāghi is a Sāmoan/Persian/Cantonese interdisciplinary artist, writer, curator and researcher working between Australia and Canada. Ia/they intervene in display territories to centre global Indigenous and Asian diasporic visuality, sensual and spoken languages, and ceremonial-political practices. Through performance, moving image, writing and installation, la/they engage with Indigenous futurities as haunted by ongoing militourist and missionary violences that once erased faʻafafine-faʻatane people from kinship and knowledge structures. Ia/they contribute to growing international critical practice across the Great Ocean and North America through residencies, exhibitions, publications, courses and rights advocacy.