Creative Expression and Artistic Collaboration

In conversations with curators, we might hear the fascinating stories behind exhibitions: in “Asian Bronze,” the team behind the blockbuster exhibition at the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam recount how they brought objects that are rarely seen outside of their countries of origin to The Netherlands. In “Home and the World,” the curator of an exhibition of contemporary artists from Asia at Museum Van Loon in Amsterdam, elaborates on how artists can play a role in open-source environments for research (Figs. 2-3). Creativity and art are almost always collaborative projects, and all articles in this category are collections of voices: in an article on the Museum of Material Memory, for instance, its founder discusses this crowdsourced digital repository of objects that had migrated with refugees during the Partition of the Indian subcontinent (Fig. 4). Similarly, in Japan, and while referring to her art installation for a tactile exhibition for people with disabilities, artist Sahoko Aki emphasizes the role of archeological and cultural heritage in community-building and the importance of making participation in heritage as accessible and inclusive as possible (Figs. 5-6). Articles by art historians might take us back to the 11th century (as in the collection “Turks, Texts, and Territory”) (Fig. 7), but we are just as driven to publish contemporary artists’ responses to current issues, such as an interview with Issam Kourbaj on the Syrian refugee crisis (Fig. 8).