Curating Collections with Art et al.

#BehindInterest

The Roberts Institute of Art has partnered with Art et al. for their fourth edition of Curating Collections. Curating Collections commissions disabled artists to curate online projects with works drawn from established international art collections.

An important part of managing the David and Indrė Roberts Collection is encouraging different routes into it and inviting fresh perspectives and voices to engage with the works.

For this edition of Curating Collections, we collaborated with Indonesian artist and activist Butong (Sukri Budi Dharma), based in Yogyakarta, whose own work is rooted in advocating for access for disabled people in art practices.

Through a series of virtual conversations live-translated by Ketemu Project’s Sidhi Vhisatya, Butong explored and examined works from the David and Indrė Roberts Collection. Out of this collaborative look at the collection has come an insightful curated selection and dialogue, which you can explore below.

‘I took this collaboration as an opportunity to observe how international artists examine themes that might be considered either taboo or too subversive if they were shown in Indonesia — the place I grew up as a person and as an artist... During this collaboration, I was introduced and reintroduced to a diverse range of issues addressed by artists in the David and Indrė Roberts Collection.’

Butong

‘I was privileged to observe our first Curating Collections under the Art et al. x Ketemu programming, a collaboration between Butong (Sukri Budi Dharma) and the Roberts Institute of Art. […] This selection of works from the David and Indrė Roberts Collection, told through Butong’s journey of exploring ‘the self’, presents an inquisitive contemporary examination of the human condition.’

Lisa Slominski, Art et al.