A reflection on curating performance-based practice
How can one curate anything in the absence of an institution? Without a building, staff or funding—without a space to hold what is often already fleeting—what can an independent curator do?
When I left the structure that once defined my daily work, I found myself living by the sea. In moving homes, shifting routines and embracing a structure-free life, the beach became my open studio. As I walked along the shore, observing tourists, children and horses treading the long stretch of sand, I began to wonder how one might continue to curate without the safety of infrastructure and other people. The sensation of grit between my toes reminded me that grounding could come from movement itself.
After years of orchestrating large-scale participatory and immersive projects within a museum I had grown accustomed to the noise of production: the endless calls, negotiations, approvals, and the cycle of conceiving, managing and installing. Then suddenly there was nothing of it, only questions and a silence that produced a different kind of sound: a hum of possibilities. In that silence, new ideas emerged. I realised that the work could start precisely from this absence, from a place where structure is not provided but created.
Performance offered that opening. In conversations with artists whose practices dwell in gesture and presence, those who can transform the ordinary through movement, breath or gaze, I began to reimagine the curator’s role. These artists, through their own precarity, embodied a way of making visible what resists permanence. Their capacity to activate space through the body suggested a way forward—curating as an act of attention, of framing the ephemeral without freezing it.
This impulse became the seed of In Situ, Performance as Exhibition. It was not conceived in an office or an institution, but rather during walks, conversations and moments of uncertainty. Thanks to the support of the Danish Arts Foundation, the first iteration took root in Singapore through collaboration with LASALLE College of the Arts, University of the Arts Singapore, during the launch of the McNally School of Fine Arts BA in Art History and Curatorial Practices programme. Later, it found its grounding in the Philippines with additional support from the New Carlsberg Foundation and the Cultural Center of the Philippines as an organising partner. Now, in its concluding phase, it is being held in Malaysia, in collaboration with the George Town Literary Festival and Penang Art District.
The project unfolded like a series of crossings—between places and artistic and cultural sensibilities. It became a way of working that was nomadic, not only in geography but also in thought: echoing my own curatorial practice, intertwined with my personal reality. Each iteration required adaptation, humility and the willingness to let go of form. As Claire Bishop (2006) writes about participatory art, the challenge is how to produce art that both invites and resists, that opens space for agency while holding onto critique. This duality, inviting while resisting, mirrors what curating In Situ demanded.
In Singapore, the monumental architecture of the University of the Arts shaped the conditions of presentation. The works of the Danish artists Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen, Molly Haslund and Sophie Dupont engaged with the reflective surfaces of the built environment and its institutional framework. Cuenca Rasmussen’s A Void (2024) re-enacted twelve performance works from 1958 to the present, rereading art history through her own Filipina Danish body. Dupont’s Marking Breath, a twelve-hour durational performance from sunrise to sunset, situated her within the glass corridors of the university. Haslund’s People on the Ground, restaged with the Critical Craft Collective, brought together twenty-two bodies lying still in a public circulation space, an act of both surrender and assertion. Each work transformed the site into a living score. To curate here meant to listen—to the building, to the performers, to the audience, to the friction between control and vulnerability.
The Philippines demanded a different kind of listening. There, In Situ spanned over 700 kilometres, from the mountainous terrains of Mount Makiling to the shorelines of La Union to the dense urban zones of Manila. The heat, the humidity, the unpredictable weather—each became part of the choreography. Performances by artists such as Sophie Dupont, Molly Haslund, Filip Vest, Kai Merke and Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen, together with the Filipino collaborators Christine Crame, Ea Torrado, Daloy Dance Company, Jeremy Mayores, Kyle Confesor and Sasa Cabalquinto, transformed public spaces into temporary commons.
These sites and their audiences were collaborators, offering surprises despite the heat of the sun, occasional rain or the anticipation of a super typhoon. They provided artists with impetus to witness their work in the presence of a site-responsive, welcoming and inquisitive audience. Gestures such as breathing, walking, tracing, calculating, dropping, improvising, carrying, climbing, rolling, singing, restaging and marking were celebrated by audiences who followed the artists throughout their performances.
When Dupont delivered her half-day performance at Mount Makiling, students of Philippine High School for the Arts accompanied her from early morning until sunset, marking their breath with hers. Haslund’s Flower Drop, performed with Ea Torrado, led audiences across Intramuros as she ‘accidentally’ dropped flowers. Cuenca Rasmussen’s Magic, using chalk to mark her experience of number dyslexia, dyscalculia, became a participatory act that transformed the Cultural Center of the Philippines into a communal carpet of chalk markings over three and a half hours.
The Filipino adaptation of Filip Vest’s Bunk blurred the boundaries of performance and theatre, with an entirely Filipino cast, taking place in the rehearsal hall of the Philippine Philharmonic Orchestra. And when Haslund and I faced the arrival of Super Typhoon Kristine in La Union, improvisation became urgent. Her piece Infinite was realised in two days, with audiences, including their pet dogs, tracing the infinity sign across the beach as waves advanced—a gesture co-authored by the city, the sea, the artist and the community.
To curate under such conditions is to inhabit the fragile space between freedom and precarity. Freedom arises from the capacity to imagine and respond; precarity from knowing that everything—funding, permits, weather, audience—could vanish at any moment. Nicolas Bourriaud (1998) reminds us in Relational Aesthetics that art thrives in the ‘in-between,’ in the relations rather than the objects themselves. It is in this in-betweenness that In Situ found vitality. Patrick Flores (2012), writing on Southeast Asian practice, describes the “precarious infrastructures of practice,” highlighting contexts where art persists because of, not despite, fragility. Independence here is less a choice than a condition. As Hans Ulrich Obrist (2014) observes in Ways of Curating, “Curating is an ongoing experiment—a question rather than an answer, a dialogue rather than a monologue.” This openness resonates with my approach: each iteration of In Situ requires attentiveness to the unfolding of ideas, places and encounters, rather than reliance on fixed systems or outcomes.
As In Situ is about to reach Malaysia, it finds itself in yet another state of becoming—less a repetition, more an act of reimagining what an institution could be. Penang’s colonial facades, clan association temples (kongsi) and a repurposed transport hub, alongside Kuala Lumpur’s skyscrapers and urban corridors, offer a textured map of possibility. Together with the George Town Literary Festival and Penang Art District, I am collaborating with artists and partners to transform cultural and public spaces into vibrant stages.
This edition introduces a hybrid model, merging the ephemerality of live performance with the persistence of exhibition-making. Working again with Molly Haslund, the only artist present in all three editions, we will explore once more how meaning shifts when a performance travels across time and space. Her work Teenagers Eating Ice Cream Cones will be staged across contrasting sites—Penang’s Hin Bus Depot and Ilham Gallery in Kuala Lumpur—each offering its own atmosphere, audience and temporal rhythm.
Christian Falsnaes’s Front, presented at Cheah kongsi, is part of a series of works in which the artist explores the creation of artworks as a collective rather than an individual process. At this site, he allows the audience to become part of the work; the resulting piece relates directly to their situation instead of to his as an artist. The work begins with a blank white wall—a metaphorical starting point representing existing structures that can be dismantled to make space for something new. The artist guides participants to engage with the structure in their own way, yet ultimately towards a shared objective. Without their active collaboration, the work cannot exist.
Hesselholdt & Mejlvang, whose practice centres on participation, activate audiences through textiles. Local people contribute personal fabrics at a COEX workshop, each carrying its own memories and stories. These textiles are transformed into large-scale banners for a participatory performance at Hin Bus Depot and an exhibition at ChinaHouse. Through movement, music and collective action, the work celebrates diversity, communal identity and the creative energy that emerges when people come together to co-create.
Across these sites, the artists’ work activates audiences as co-creators, revealing the city itself as a stage. By situating performances within the rhythms of daily life, the Malaysian edition blurs the distinctions between art, community and site. Culture here is not held within walls but carried through encounters—improvised, porous and communal. Each site, whether a heritage house, urban facade or resort, becomes a living stage where meaning is co-authored and ephemeral, emerging in the shared presence of artist, audience and space.
When combined with exhibition elements, these gestures allow performances to linger, existing both in the moment and as traces within a broader archive. This hybrid approach affirms the project’s underlying principle—what disappears can still leave resonance, and the invisible can pulse with presence.
What happens after a performance ends? The answer is not in the image or the document but in the body that remembers—the spectator who carries the vibration forward. Each gesture reconfigures space, reshapes time and reorients perception. Curating becomes an act of care: attending to what vanishes, framing what resists possession. It demands patience, humility and a willingness to dwell in uncertainty. It is about creating spaces of encounter rather than display, continuity rather than collection.
As I look back, the absence I once feared has become a form of grounding. Without walls, the work can move between mountains, cities and coastlines. The sea, once a metaphor for silence, now feels like a companion: fluid, unpredictable, alive. To be nomadic is not merely to wander, but to root oneself in motion—to find continuity in impermanence. Each project, each collaboration, is a temporary mooring before the next tide. Between freedom and fragility, between appearance and disappearance, lies the true pulse of curating the ephemeral.
Curating without an institution is not an act of lack but of invention. It calls for imagining new architectures of connection, for believing that even without walls we can build worlds—momentary, porous and alive. This is the space where my spirit moves.