Grace Samboh (b. Jakarta) lives and works either in Yogyakarta, Jakarta, or wherever her friends are. She is in search of what comprises a curatorial work within her surrounding scene. She jigs within the existing elements of the arts scene around her for she considers the claim that Indonesia is lacking art infrastructure especially the state-owned or state run as something outdated. She believes that curating is about understanding and making at the same time. With Hyphen — (f. 2011), her concern is to encourage Indonesian arts and artistic research projects and publications. Her research looks at contemporary practices outside the existing centers of the Indonesian art scene and slowly reconnects them all with the past and central narratives. With Enin Supriyanto, Yustina Neni & Ratna Mufida, she used to run Equator Symposium (Yogyakarta Biennale Foundation, 2010-2018) where they explored the possibility of connecting equatorial countries through current life situation with an admiration to the past and optimism towards the future. In 2019, she joined a gallery-based initiative in Jakarta, RUBANAH Underground Hub.
Her recent endeavors are “Jakarta Biennale 2021: ESOK”; “Collecting Entanglements and Embodied Histories” a joint venture between Galeri Nasional Indonesia, MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum, Singapore Art Museum, Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, and Goethe-Institut (2021-2022); “Rewinding Internationalism: Scenes from the 1990s, today” organised by L’Internationale, and Van Abbemuseum (2022-2023), “Color Curtain and the Promise of Bandung” a series of roundtables reappraising Asian-African political imagination (2020-ongoing), and “Jejaring, Rimpang” in Pekan Kebudayaan Nasional 2023 (National Culture Week), Indonesia.
