Curating at the Edge of Collapse

Curating at the Edge of Collapse
With Tawanda Appiah, Patricia Bentancur, Caroline Ricca Lee & Khairullah Rahim

What practices surface in the aftermath of structural exhaustion?
When the ground shifts beneath our feet, what remains — and what insists on being reimagined?

Photo: Jean-Baptiste Béranger

Installation by Caroline Ricca Lee for IASPIS Open Studios Spring 2025.

Curator and writer Tawanda Appiah offers a curatorial reflection titled Curating at the Edge of Collapse — a meditation on the limits of institutional repair and the possibilities of disruption, adaptive strategy, and working within fracture.

Engaging directly with this provocation, IASPIS residents Patricia Bentancur, Caroline Ricca Lee, and Khairullah Rahim offer situated responses through their own practices.  Their contributions anchor the conversation in material, embodied, and speculative forms of knowing — insisting on art as a mode of survival, disruption, and transformation.

Patricia Bentancur is an artist-curator based in Uruguay. Her practice employs conceptual strategies, combining objects, videos, texts, publications, and the curatorship of participatory projects. Engaging the audience as co-creators, Bentancur aims to foster dialogue through works that inspire new questions about contemporary issues that are often overlooked or underestimated. Read more about Patricia Bentancur >>

Photo: Jean-Baptiste Béranger

Patricia Bentancur

Caroline Ricca Lee is an artist and researcher born in São Paulo, Brazil. Their work explores the archiving and memory of East Asian narratives in Brazil through decolonial, queer, and feminist epistemologies. They work across sculpture, installation, critical writing, performance, and video. Read more about Caroline Ricca Lee >>

Photo: Jean-Baptiste Béranger

Caroline Ricca Lee

Khairullah Rahim is a Singapore-based artist whose multidisciplinary practice spans installation, object-making, painting, photography, and time-based media. His work explores themes of queerness, POZ resilience, and working-class experiences, with a focus on strategies of resourcefulness and survival in systems of pervasive surveillance. Read more about Khairullah Rahim >>

Photo: Jean-Baptiste Béranger

Khairullah Rahim

Tawanda Appiah is a Zimbabwean curator, writer and researcher based in Malmö, Sweden. His research-centred practice often revisits history to make sense of the contemporary milieu. He is the curator at Skånes konstförening, alongside his independent practice, and previously held the position of Curator of Education & Public Programming at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe. Appiah has curated several exhibitions, public programmes and interventions including FLIGHT (Malmö Konsthall, 2023) which featured works by Kudzanai Chiurai, Frida Orupabo and Eric Magassa. Appiah sits on various boards including Paletten Art Journal.

Photo: Ikram Abdulkadir

Tawanda Appiah