As part of the Tanoto Art Foundation’s core program, TAF Conversation Series is collaborating with the Bienal de São Paulo and the Singapore Biennale this fall to stage two events.

Taking place on the opening weekend in September, TAF Conversation: in São Paulo is part of the Bienal’s Conjugations program. It brings together five artists from Southeast Asia—Korakrit Arunanondchai, Murni (in spirit), Trinh Thi Nguyễn, Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn, and Trương Công Tùng—whose works are featured in the exhibition, alongside their collaborators, writer and art historian Putu Sridiniari and scholar Julia Bryan-Wilson. Conceived as a syncretic and hybrid gathering, the event unfolds through a series of screenings, a talk, a panel discussion, and a performance that explore the relationships between memory-making and material traditions. The thoughts, sounds, words, and movements presented in this space offer a deep meditation on humanity and the sensory intelligence it shares with the living world and its many beings.

Back home in Singapore, artists Cui Jie and Ayesha Singh will join TAF Artistic Director Xiaoyu Weng in conversation during the Singapore Biennale’s opening week in October. Working with different mediums, both artists examine the materiality of architecture and space, making visible the power structures and political histories embedded in the built environment and urban infrastructure. Through spatial interventions that offer heterogeneous perspectives and layered viewpoints, their works invite viewers to reflect on complex relationships—such as displacement, collective memory, and nation-building.

These two conversations will mark the third and fourth iterations of TAF’s Conversation Series, continuing the organization’s 2025 research theme, which departs from the histories, traditions and social contexts that shape our diverse understanding of materiality. Here, materiality is not merely concerned with physical substance, texture, technique in art-making, but with how our engagement with materials can center presence, awaken tactile attention, and align with the rhythms of the body. In a world increasingly dominated by immateriality—mediated through digital technology—artistic explorations of materiality offer poetic, embodied, and intimate ways of imagining life otherwise. The contemplative process of making becomes a quiet form of resistance: a way to reinhabit time and reconnect with the sensory intelligence of the body. Early this year, the TAF Conversation Series featured artists Lotus L. Kang, Heidi Lau and Puangsoi Rose Aksornsawang in events held in Hong Kong and Singapore.