Curator Lumi Tan from The Kitchen in New York will be the first guest speaker in the Curating in Context lecture series this year.

Lumi Tan will reflect on the shifting role of small-scale non-profit organizations in the ecosystem of the New York art world. She uses The Kitchen, a non-profit presenting exhibitions and performance with equal regard since 1971, as an example to examine what constitutes support for artists in the current landscape through the lens of interdisciplinarity as well as to look at the institution as a site of production.

She will also discuss how feminist approaches to curating can contribute to a more holistic vision of institutional support and push experimental approaches beyond the established statements of the 1970s avant-garde, speaking about recent and upcoming projects with Anicka Yi, Sondra Perry, and The Racial Imaginary Institute.

The event is organised by Frame Contemporary Art Finland in collaboration with Publics. The lecture and discussion will be in English, introduced by Paul O’Neill, Director of Publics, and moderated by Taru Elfving, Head of Programme at Frame.

Lumi Tan is Curator at The Kitchen in New York, where she organizes exhibitions and produces performances with artists across disciplines and generations. Most recently, Tan has worked with Meriem Bennani, Half Straddle, Sara Magenheimer, and Sondra Perry. Previously she co-curated From Minimalism into Algorithm (2016), a year-long performance and exhibition series, as well as projects with artists including Ed Atkins, Gretchen Bender, Glasser, George Lewis, Anicka Yi, and Danh Vo and Xiu Xiu. Prior to The Kitchen, Tan was Guest Curator at the Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain Nord Pas-de-Calais in France, director at Zach Feuer Gallery, and curatorial assistant at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Artforum, Frieze, The Exhibitionist, and numerous exhibition catalogues.