Annie Jael Kwan

Associate Curator

Based in London and working across Europe and Asia, Annie Jael Kwan is an independent curator and researcher whose exhibition-making, programming, publication and teaching practice is located at the intersection of contemporary art, art history and cultural activism, with interest in archives, histories, feminist, queer and alternative knowledges, collective practices, and solidarity. 

She is director of Something Human, a curatorial initiative that launched the pioneering Southeast Asia Performance Collection (SAPC) at the Live Art Development Agency in 2017. The SAPC represents 50 artists from the region. She curated UnAuthorised Medium at FramerFramed, Netherlands (2018), and co-curated the Archive-in-Residence exhibition, Southeast Asia Performance Collection at Haus der Kunst, Munich (2019). She was curator-in-residence at FACT Liverpool (2021-2022) where she has curated the exhibition, Futures Ages Will Wonder, and at Digital Curator-in-Residence at the Barbican Centre for Noguchi: Resonances (September 2021 – January 2022).

In 2019 she was the co-editor of Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia’s guest issue: Archives, and for its forthcoming issue on Performativity. She contributes to ArtReview Asia and other publications, and is a member of the Associations of International Art Critics (Singapore). She was a recipient of a Diverse Actions Leadership Award in 2019. She currently teaches Critical Studies at Central St Martins, University of the Arts, London, and Writing and Curating at KASK, School of Art, in Gent, Belgium. 

She leads Asia-Art-Activism, the interdisciplinary, intergenerational research network, and she is the instigating council member of Asia Forum launched in 2021, that will present a programme at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice alongside the 59th Venice Biennale.