Practicing Decoloniality: A Curator's Perspective

Nico Heller in Conversation with Lou Mo.

Lou Mo is a leading Taipei-based artist and curator, specialising in her curatorial practice in contemporary Asian and African art. She read Art History at McGill University (2009-2013), graduating with a BA, and later studied Chinese Art in the Asian Studies division of the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris (2014-2017).

In 2022 Lou was selected as one of four guest curators of the 14th Dakar Bienniale in Senegal (2022) and in 2023-24 she curated Hot Flux: Modern and Contemporary Photography in Taiwan and Africa at the 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, the Centre Pompidou Metz, the 12th Berlin Bienniale, the autostrada biennale, and the Glasgow International. Her other research-based works have recently been exhibited at the Hong-Gah Museum and The Cube Space in Taipei, and the Kochi Bienniale in India.

In this dialogue, we explore how Lou, as a Chinese-Canadian female curator and artist, engages with, frames, and presents the practices and work of different African and Asian artists through a decolonial lens, centring non-European artistic approaches rather than relating them primarily to Western conventions.

Further information about Lou Mo is available via LinkedIn. Her blog can be found on WordPress. To ensure you never miss an Annotations Dialogue, do subscribe to our YouTube channel and our newsletter at www.annotations.art. If you are already a free subscriber and like what we do, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription.