Something you should know

For this latest session of Something you should know, meet Mira Asriningtyas and Dito Yuwono, co-curators of the Djodjakarta Biennale and organizers of the forthcoming Sydney Biennale.

 Mira Asriningtyas is a curator and author, Dito Yuwono an artist and curator. Together they have formed the Yogyakarta-based curatorial collective LIR since 2011, a collective that is constantly reshaping itself as they reflect on curatorial responsibility, and whose activity extends throughout Southeast Asia, the USA and Europe.

• "Curated by LIR", a series of exhibitions proposed in Yogyakarta, Jakarta, Kaliurang, New York and Tapei between 2018 and 2023, retraces this curatorial journey that includes "Crossing Ecotones - Mountains Seen; No Mountain Being", "Rhinolophus Sinicus", "Worship to Power" and "Dream Express: Personalized History of Mysticism".
• "Of Hunters and Gatherers" is a long-term project that brings together several Southeast Asian art institutions in Chiang Mai (Thailand), Bandung (Indonesia) and Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam) for an exhibition, colloquia and a dedicated website. The project grew out of a walk by the collective and two guest artists at the foot of Mount Merapi, and on the roads along the lower Mekong, on the border between Thailand and Laos.

But each has developed a personal practice. Mira, who completed a research project on decolonial and polycentric modalities of learning and
knowledge at the De Appel Art Center in Amsterdam in 2017, has curate ◊numerous exhibitions and several seminar and symposium programs at
the De Appel Art Center (Amsterdam); Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam); Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Turin); KKF (Yogyakarta); ISCP (New
York); MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum (Chiang Mai); Our Museum (Taipei) among others. She has published numerous articles and essays in
international journals, catalogs and magazines such as PARSE Journal and Stedelijk Studies. In 2017 Mira launched the "900mdpl" project in
Kaliurang, a village at the foot of Mount Merapi, which addresses in all their complexity the post-colonial, environmental, political and memorial
issues that the region's seismic fragility and the eruptions of this highly active volcano come to reveal in a spectacular mode and in a hurry.

Dito Yuwono works on the same themes in his work as an artist who gives priority attention to collective memory, the inscription of singular lives in history, and environmental urgency, always anchored in site-specific practices. He has been invited by The Northern Centre for Contemporary Art (NCCA) Darwin (Australia), Ruangrupa (Jakarta); Jatiwangi Art Factory (Indonesia); GOLEB & Het Wilde Weten (Netherlands); TIFA Working Studios (India); and Collectif BONUS (Nantes). His work has been exhibited in numerous art centers in the United States (Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art) in Europe (Festival de la Photo, Arles, 2017), in Indonesia... Since 2020 he has been the co-director of Ruang MES56 and curated the first International Photography Festival in Jogja in 2023, "Mengukur Panjang dan Lebar Sebuah Bingkai" (A Strategy to Measure a Frame).

In 2024 Mira Asriningtyas and Dito Yuwono were appointed directors of CEMETI- Institut for Art and Society.

Created in 2006, Something you should know aims to welcome contemporary art into an institution of higher education and research, by placing itself firmly on the side of the practice of today's artists and producers.

At a time when globalization is overturning the flows and polarities of the art world, giving rise to new forms of activism and new collective ambitions, questioning the space and forms of political representation or the constitution of new national references stemming from the communist world and decolonization, reinscribing utopia at the heart of collective projects, questioning majoritarian legitimacies and the blind spots of democracy : These are just some of the issues that the seminar aims to explore, by giving a voice to artists, curators, critics, heads of institutions and activists working outside France, who come to EHESS/FMSH to share their experience with us.

Seminar organizers

• Patricia Falguières, Centre Georg Simmel | EHESS-CNRS
• Elisabeth Lebovici, critic and curator
• Natasa Petresin-Bachelez | Cité Internationale des Arts