The Solomon R Guggenheim Museum and Foundation and the UBS, signed a collaboration agreement to support artists and gallery owners from Latin America, South and Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa, with the objective of expanding the borders of art.
The five-year long Guggenheim and UBS Map Global project will offer curators residencies in New York City. It will also promote the purchase of works, international exhibitions, and other cultural activities, to catalyze creative exchange between Latin America, South and Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa.
Over its five-year period, the project will focus successively on the selected regions, beginning with South and Southeast Asia. The Guggenheim will invite one curator from each of the regions to participate in simultaneous two-year residencies in New York. During this period, they will work alongside the Guggenheim staff to identify new or recent artworks that reflect the most relevant cultural practices and intellectual discourses of each region.
The first phase of the project will focus on the art of South and Southeast Asia. June Yap has been selected as the Curator of Guggenheim UBS MAP for South and Southeast Asia, having been nominated by a committee of five prominent experts on these regions: Patrick Flores, Professor at the Department of Art Studies of the University of the Philippines; Kwok Kian Chow, Senior Advisor to the Board and General Director of the National Art Gallery in Singapore; Alexandra Munroe, Samsung Senior Curator of Asian Art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, in New York; Sandhini Poddar, Associate Curator of Asian Art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, in New York; and Kavita Singh, Associate Professor at the School of Arts and Aesthetics of the Jawaharlal Nehru University, in New Delhi. June Yap has begun her two-year residency at the Guggenheim in New York.
The works selected for the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative will be presented in traveling exhibitions, each of which will be inaugurated at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and will become part of the museum's permanent collection. The exhibition will then be presented in the targeted regions and in some major cities around the world.