New Currents: Indian Ocean FuturesNew Currents: Indian Ocean Futures

Lou Mo is a Chinese-Canadian art professional, artist, and curator. She lives and works in Taipei. She graduated from Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris with a degree in Asian Studies. Her research is focused on modern and contemporary Afro-Asian connections and Third World artists’ creative practices. She is also interested in issues of diaspora, identity, and perception in relation to post-colonial history and the centre-periphery model. She was invited curator of the 14th Dakar Biennial in Senegal where she presented Havana, Forging the Souths exhibition at the Musée Théodore Monod – IFAN. Recently, she curated Hot Flux: Modern and Contemporary Photography in Taiwan and Africa’ at Tainan Art Museum. As a member of the School of Mutants collective, her works have been exhibited in venues such as the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Centre Pompidou Metz, the 12th Berlin Biennial, autostrada biennale and Glasgow International. Her other research-based works have recently been exhibited at the Hong-Gah Museum in Taipei and the Kochi-Muziris Biennial in India. She has participated in residencies at the A4 Art Foundation in South Africa and the the Nieuwe Instituut in the Netherlands. Her articles, translations, and exhibition reviews have appeared in Something we Africans got, the Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Modern Art (TFAM), with Nanjing’s Yilin Press, e-flux and Ocula.

Musquiqui Chihying is a filmmaker and visual artist based in Taipei and Berlin. He explores the cultural and social identities constructed through the flow and circulation of audiovisual elements in physical and virtual spacetime. Specialising in the use of multimedia such as film and sound, he investigates the human condition and environmental system in the age of global capitalisation and engages in the inquiry of and research on issues of subjectivity in con- temporary social culture in the Global South. His works have been shown in several international institutions and film festivals, such as 72nd Berlinale (2022), Art Sonje Center in Seoul (2021), Centre Pompidou in Paris (2020), International Film Festival Rotterdam (2020), 2016 Taipei Biennial, 10th Shanghai Biennale (2014) etc. He is shortlisted for the 2019 Berlin Art Prize and the winner of the Loop Barcelona Video Art Production Award 2019 from Han Nefkens Foundation in collaboration with the Fundació Joan Miró.

Hajra Haider Karrar is a curator and writer invested in articulating questions that destabilise and reconfigure colonial and capital paradigms that lay at the foundations of knowledge production by working through ancestral and affective epistemes. Since 2021, she is Curator at SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin. Formerly, she was the Chief Curator of the IVS Gallery and Faculty of Visual Arts at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, Karachi and a core member of the Tentative Collective. Karrar’s curatorial and collaborative projects have been featured at cultural institutions and biennales including Tate Research Centre: Asia, London; Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester; Yarat Contemporary Art Space, Baku; Akademie der Künst, Berlin; Lahore Biennale 02, IV Moscow Biennale for Young Art, 5th International Biennale of Contemporary Art Azerbaijan, and Kochi – Muziris Biennale 2022. She has edited multiple publications and regularly contributes essays on artistic practice, visual and media cultures to publications, journals, and monographs.

Ain Contractor is an architect, researcher and water justice advocate from Mumbai. She is currently pursuing a PhD in water governance from the IHE Delft Institute for Water Education. She spent her early career engaging with grassroots community organisations in rural India, working with women’s groups on social enterprise development and indigenous farmers’ groups on rainwater harvesting. In 2020, she began working on advocacy with the right to water campaign in Mumbai led by Pani Haq Samiti (Water Rights Committee), and continues to do so. Her work has documented perspectives of fisherwomen collectivising to resist port expansions, industrial encroachments and pollution in Chennai’s coastal wetlands through ethnographic research and a film called Fight with Care, made in collaboration with filmmaker Bhargav Prasad. Her current research explores irrigation practices of marginalised groups involved in agro-ecology to understand the meaning(s) of water care

Naima Hassan is a researcher and curator based in Berlin. Since 2022, she has led the development of the Picton Archive at G.A.S. Foundation (Lagos) as Associate Archivist and Curator. Her practice moves between the visual, sonic and textual, to inform transnational and situated actions on African archive collections. With a background working with international foundations and cultural institutions, her current engagements include the HKW in Berlin, Nieuwe Instituut's Indian Ocean Working Group and TheMuseumsLab's 2024 Steering Committee. Hassan holds an education spanning the University of Oxford, BIEA in Nairobi and Goldsmiths, University of London. She is the co-founder of the platform SITAAD, and between 2023-24 is a Liberal Arts Engagement Hub Fellow at the University of Minnesota.

Setareh Noorani is an architect, researcher and curator at the Nieuwe Instituut, and an independent artist. Setareh Noorani’s current (curatorial) research at the Nieuwe Instituut (Rotterdam, NL) focuses on the paradigm-shifting notions of decoloniality, feminisms, queer ecologies, non-institutional and collective representations in contemporary architecture, its heritage and future scenarios. She leads the projects Collecting Otherwise (2020–2025) and New Currents: Indian Ocean Futures, co-initiated the Open Call Hidden Histories (with Creative Industries Fund NL), co-curated the exhibition Designing the Netherlands (2023), co-led the project and exhibited space Feminist Design Strategies (2021–2023), and has been part of Appropriation as Collective Resistance. Noorani co-edited the book Women in Architecture (nai010, 2023), and has been published in Footprint Journal, and Radical Housing Journal, amongst others. Setareh Noorani received the Museum Talent Prize 2021, awarded by the Dutch Ministry of Culture and Science and the Mondriaan Fund.