Counter Strike: Art and Museums in Times of Conflict

🗓️ Thursday, September 18, 2025

• 🕖 8.00 PM Beijing, China (CST)
• 🕖 5.30 PM Delhi, India (IST)
• 🕖 2.00 PM Amsterdam, The Netherlands (CEST)
• 🕖 Noon Dakar, Senegal (GMT)
• 🕖 9.00 AM Buenos Aires, Argentina (ART)
• 🕖 8.00 AM New York, USA (EDT)

Counter Strike: Art and Museums in Times of Conflict

Abstract:

Are museums and exhibitions politically neutral? This is an urgent and timely question Laura Raicovich, a curator and art writer explores in her book, Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest published in 2021. Museums and art spaces face profound dilemmas when confronting urgent social and political issues of the 21st century: wars, genocide, racism, sustainability, climate change. The core tension lies between the traditional roles of museums as seemingly ‘neutral’ cultural institutions and growing expectations to take a stand and serve as platforms for social justice. These challenges ask that curators, museums and its directors must develop more nuanced approaches to programming while maintaining (scholarly) rigor and ethical integrity in their curatorial practices.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ How do curators, artists and museum professionals navigate an increasingly polarised world amidst calls for social justice, inclusion, accessibility and diversity? What strategies, approaches and culturally sensitive language can museum workers and artists use when it is not possible to avoid confrontation with the ideology of the neutral and universal museum?

Guest Panelists:

Carol Yinghua LU, Director of Beijing Inside-Out Art Museum, Beijing, China.

Laura Raicovich, writer and curator, New York City, USA.

Shabbir Hussain Mustafa, Chief Curator at the Singapore Art Museum (SAM), Singapore.

Moderated by CIMAM Board members Joselina Cruz, Director/Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD), Manila, Philippines, and Yu Jin Seng, Director (Curatorial, Research & Exhibitions), National Gallery Singapore, Singapore.

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Biographies:

Carol Yinghua LU is an art historian and a curator. She holds a Doctorate in art history from University of Melbourne. She is the director of Beijing Inside-Out Art Museum. She was the artistic director and senior curator of OCAT, Shenzhen (2012-2015), guest curator at Museion, Bolzano (2013) and the China researcher for Asia Art Archive (2005-2007). She has contributed to artist monologues, catalogues as well as a number of art journals, including e-flux journal, frieze, the Exhibitionist, Yishu, Flash Art, Contemporary, and so on. She was a contributing editor for frieze magazine (2008-2018), Chief editor for Chinese edition of Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art (2012-2013), co-founder and co-editor of Contemporary Art and Investment magazine (2007-2010). She received Yishu Awards for Critical Writing and Curating on Contemporary Chinese Art (2016).

She was a recipient of the ARIAH (Association of Research Institute in Art History) East Asia Fellowship (2017) and visiting fellow in the Asia-Pacific Fellowship Program at the Tate Research Centre (2013). She was the co-artistic director of Gwangju Biennale (2012) and was the co-artistic director of the 8th Yokohama Triennale with Liu Ding (2024).

She has acted as a jury member for Hyundai Blue Prize Art + Tech (2022, 2021), Tokyo Contemporary Art Award (2022-2019), The Choi Foundation Prize for Contemporary Art (2022, 2021), Gallery Weekend Beijing Prize for Best Exhibition (2022, 2020-2017), Han Nefkens Foundation – Loop Barcelona Video Art Award Production (2024-2020), abC Art Book Award (2021), Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative (2019), Hugo Boss Asia (2019), International Award for Art Criticism (2014), the Future Generation Art Prize (2012), and the Golden Lion Award at Venice Biennale (2011).

Laura Raicovich is a New York City-based writer and curator known for her critical work on cultural institutions and dedication to more equitable cultural production. She is curator of the inaugural Counterpublic Convening: CIRCUS OF LIFE, taking place in St. Louis, MO in October 2025. Her recent book, Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest, was published by Verso Books and is being translated into Italian, Arabic, French, Polish, and Portuguese. In 2023, with a collective of artists, musicians, and culture workers, Raicovich opened The Francis Kite Club, a public social club in NYC’s East Village. She served as editor and curator of Protodispatch, a digital publication featuring artists’ takes on the local and global conditions that make their work necessary; she initiated the forum with Mari Spirito and Protocinema in 2022. In 2020, Raicovich co-founded Urban Front, a transcontinental consultancy addressing the challenges facing cities through a progressive cultural and activist lens. Prior to these projects, Raicovich served as Director of the Queens Museum and Interim Director of the Leslie Lohman Museum of Art; she was a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow at the Bellagio Center, and the Tremaine Curatorial Fellow for Journalism at Hyperallergic. She is the author and editor of several books, lectures internationally, and continues to work on projects that explore art, freedom of speech, and equity.

Shabbir Hussain Mustafa is Chief Curator at the Singapore Art Museum (SAM), where he oversees the museum’s programming at its new post-industrial spaces, together with the Singapore Biennale Office. From 2023 to 2025, he was Senior Curator and Head of Exhibitions at the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, contributing to the development of the museum’s curatorial framework for its exhibitions and collection strategy. He has also held senior curatorial roles at National Gallery Singapore, where from 2016 to 2022 he led Between Declarations and Dreams, a multi-year exhibition on Southeast Asian modernisms. He curated SEA STATE: Charles Lim Yi Yong for the Singapore Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), co-curated the Dhaka Art Summit (2018), and received the DAAD Artist-in-Berlin Award in 2017 for his curatorial work. Recent projects include Tropical: Stories from Southeast Asia and Latin America (2023), which reimagined the 20th century through entangled solidarities and cross-regional affinities, and Ho Tzu Nyen: Time and the Tiger (2023), a mid-career survey focused on algorithmic imaginaries and speculative histories. Both exhibitions have since been presented at partner institutions internationally.

Recommended readings:

Books:

Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest, by Laura Raicovich and published by Verso Books, 2021.

Articles:

This Is the Story of My Resignation From the Queens Museum, Op-ed by Laura Raicovich, published on Hyperallergic, June 24, 2025.  

How to Be a Culture Worker in Times Like These, by Laura Raicovich, published on Art in America, May 30, 2025

CIMAM 2025 Rapid Response Webinars are made possible with the support from the Getty Foundation through its Connecting Professionals/Sharing Expertise initiative.