Festivity and the contemporary: Worldly affinities in Southeast Asian art1

What is the place of the festival in the global system of contemporary art, and in that system’s history? Can the large, recurring surveys that are its most prominent exhibitions today even be considered festivals? Such questions become more pressing as sites newly embraced by that system take their place on a global event calendar, and as the events increasingly resemble those held elsewhere or merge with the market in the form of art fairs. What becomes of community and locality, of spontaneity and participation, as that market ‐ and art history ‐ takes up the uncommodified fringes and untold stories of contemporary art’s ever widening geography? This article stems from my research for a recent volume entitled Artist-to-Artist: Independent Art Festivals in Chiang Mai 1992‐98, concerning a series of artist-initiated festivals held in northern Thailand in the 1990s known as the Chiang Mai Social Installation. These gatherings, and others like them, suggest that while national representation was the usual ticket to participation on a global circuit, the agencies and currency of national representation were not essential determinants of contemporaneity; and that it was localism, rather than any internationalism, that underpinned the worldly affinities discovered amongst artists in Southeast Asia at that time. The sites of this becoming contemporary were festive, sites of celebration and expenditure rather than work and accumulation. What does this mean for contemporary art’s history and theory, and how might it change our understanding of the region’s art and its international currency today?