Alexandra Tsay
Based in Almaty, Kazakhstan and elsewhere, Alexandra Tsay is an independent curator and researcher interested in the conjunction between contemporary art and critical theory. Her research interests focus on the politics and aesthetics of contemporary art in transitional societies of Central Asia. Tsay has curated exhibitions and programmed festivals in Almaty.
Tsay is also a co-editor of the collective volume Stalinism in Kazakhstan: History, Memory, and Representation (Lexington Books, 2021). During her Spring 2017 fellowship at George Washington University, Tsay explored contemporary art as a cultural public sphere and space for alternative narratives in Kazakhstan, and her paper ‘Contemporary Art as a Public Forum in Kazakhstan’ was published in The Nazarbayev Generation: Youth in Kazakhstan (Lexington Books, 2019).
During her residency at CHAT and in Hong Kong in 2021, Tsay researched both traditional and contemporary ornaments and representational fabrics from Central Asia and Hong Kong to explore the connections and similarities between distant geographic locales of Asia, and reflect on life forces that guide and shape the complex structures and social fabrics in both areas.
Image courtesy: Alexandra Tsay
Slavs and Tatars
Slavs and Tatars is an internationally renowned art collective devoted to the area East of the former Berlin Wall and West of the Great Wall of China known as Eurasia. Since its inception in 2006, the collective has shown a keen grasp of polemical issues in society, clearing new paths for contemporary discourse via a wholly idiosyncratic form of knowledge production: including popular culture, spiritual and esoteric traditions, oral histories, modern myths, as well as scholarly research. The collective’s practice is based on three activities: exhibitions, publications and lecture-performances. Their work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Salt, Istanbul; Secession, Vienna; Kunsthalle Zurich and Albertinum, Dresden, among others. Imbued with humour and a generosity of spirit, their work commonly blends pop visuals with esoteric traditions, oral rituals with scholarly analysis in a way that challenges our often times one-dimensional way of seeing relationships between science, religion, power and identity. In addition to launching a residency and mentorship programme for young professionals from their region, Slavs and Tatars recently opened Pickle Bar, a slavic aperitivo bar-cum-project space a few doors down from their studio in Moabit.
Image courtesy: Slavs and Tatars
Wang Weiwei
Wang Weiwei is currently the Curator of Exhibitions and Collections at CHAT. From 2010 to 2017, Wang was the curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai (MoCA Shanghai). In 2017, Wang participated at the Curator-in-Residence Programme at the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts in Taiwan, and the International Researcher Programme at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, South Korea. Wang was then appointed as the co-curator at the 12th Shanghai Biennale and awarded an Individual Fellowship by Asian Cultural Council Hong Kong in 2018. She has conducted on a series of researches on East Asian Contemporary Arts since 2017.
