Camping and Tramping Through the Colonial Archive: The Museum in Malaya, NUS Museum, Singapore, 2010. Courtesy of NUS Museum.
Shabbir Hussain Mustafa
How Easily Modernism Could Be Disturbed
Join us for the next event in the NYUAD Art Gallery series CURATORS TALK.
Since 2007, Shabbir Hussain Mustafa has curated exhibitions across various institutions that take modernism not as a universalist category, but as a site of tension deeply entangled with the formation of the postcolonial and the imaginative life of the museum. In this dialogue with curator and art historian Duygu Demir, he will revisit a selection of these curatorial projects to reflect on the exhibition as a field of struggle: where forms of storytelling, archival dissonance, and epistemic tension gather. The exhibitionary form, in these instances, becomes a space–however fragile–for inhabiting contradictions without the pressure of resolution, and for undertaking the necessary work of unhousing modernism from within the museum.
About the speaker
Shabbir Hussain Mustafa is Senior Curator and Head of Exhibitions at the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. He has previously held senior curatorial positions at the Singapore Art Museum, National Gallery Singapore, and the National University of Singapore Museum, where he forged connections between Southeast Asia and the wider world. From 2016 to 2022, he led Between Declarations and Dreams, a multi-year exhibition at the National Gallery Singapore surveying 20th-century Southeast Asian perspectives. At SAM, he also oversaw the International Residencies and Learning programs.
In 2017, Mustafa was awarded the DAAD Artist-in-Berlin Award for his curatorial work. He co-curated the Dhaka Art Summit in 2018 and served on the Programmes Advisory Board of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt from 2017 to 2022.
His notable exhibitions include Camping and Tramping through the Colonial Archive: The Museum in Malaya (2010-2013); The Sufi and the Bearded Man: Re-membering a Keramat in Contemporary Singapore (2010-2013); SEA STATE: Charles Lim Vi long (2015); Latiff Mohidin: Pago Pago (1960-1969) (2018); Suddenly Turning Visible: Art and Architecture in Southeast Asia (2019); The Mistaken Ancestor: Mohammad Din Mohammad (2021); and, most recently, Tropical: Stories from Southeast Asia and Latin America (2023) and Ho Tzu Nyen: Time and the Tiger (2023).
