This workshop explores how objects produce meaning not as isolated units, but through their interpreted relationships and modes of display. This workshop carries out a shared, evolving installation in which objects are continuously rearranged and reinterpreted. A series of tables and wall-shelves will be provided for display, which operate like a kind of frame, or system, or a site of encounter. NOIR ROW ART SPACE will install a selection of their own objects, demonstrating how such a display suggests possible readings without giving fixed definition.

Open Studio participants are invited to bring a small number of objects to contribute to their own display. These objects may be personal, found, functional, or ambiguous in meaning. All objects must not exceed 30 × 30 × 30 cm (W × H × D) and 3 kg in weight.

Throughout the workshop, participants are encouraged to actively rearrange their objects within the structures. This process emphasizes ongoing transformation rather than a fixed outcome. Objects may be grouped, separated, or aligned, allowing meanings to emerge through proximity, contrast, and repetition.

During the session, NOIR ROW ART SPACE will hold a focused discussion by selecting specific groupings of objects. They will examine how juxtaposition produces alternative readings that may not be visible when an object is considered alone. In this way, objects do not simply contain meaning; they produce and reveal it relationally through context and arrangement.

The installation of this workshop thus remains open-ended,an evolving display shaped by multiple hands, perspectives, and temporalities.

Notes:

• Objects must be suitable for handling and able to be repositioned by other participants.
• Objects must not pose any risk of harm to participants, the environment, or the display structures.

*Please note, if you are interested in joining this workshop, complete the Registration Form in full. Registrations (first-come, first-served) must be received by 5 August in order to be considered. You will be notified by 10 August if your registration is successful.

This presentation explores the evolving practice of 900mdpl, an independent perennial art institution initiated in 2017 in Kaliurang, Indonesia—an aging historical resort village located only 7 km from the caldera of Mount Merapi, one of the most active volcanoes in the Pacific Ring of Fire. Emerging from the understanding that nothing is permanent on moving ground, 900mdpl examines how artistic and institutional practices can grow within conditions of instability, ecological vulnerability, and continuous transformation.

Structured through residency programs, biennial exhibitions, public programs, publications, and a traveling museum, 900mdpl has developed as a site-responsive institution shaped by the cultural and geological realities of Kaliurang. Focusing on the three editions of 900mdpl (2017, 2019, and 2022), LIR will trace how each cycle unfolded through small events, collaborative encounters, and newly commissioned artworks by Indonesian and international artists. It will highlight how the 2022 edition of 900mdpl - when it shifted from working with society to working within society - transformed the role of the curator, expanded community participation in artistic and organizational decision-making, and dissolved boundaries between artists, organizers, and “the neighbors.” Through this process, 900mdpl became increasingly porous, allowing projects, collaborations, and social relations to intersect and bleed into one another.

Drawing from concepts such as creolization and ‘laku’ (a Javanese embodied way of learning), the presentation proposes 900mdpl as a living model for decolonizing how we build institutions for contemporary art. Through visual documentation, curatorial reflections, and selected artistic projects, this session invites participants to rethink the institution not as a fixed structure, but as an adaptive, relational, and site-responsive cultural practice continuously shaped by the ground on which it stands.

This presentation discusses — Ripple Ripple Rippling and Tracing Sand — two long-term projects which are situated inquiries, shaped through years of fieldwork across rural China and Southeast Asia.

Ripple Ripple Rippling shares a decade-long relationship with a village on the outskirts of Wuhan, China, beginning in 2015. The project attends to the transformations of rural life that enable the 300-million rural migrant workforce underpinning China’s rapid urbanisation. With both field-0 members coming from Wuhan, this project is also a reconnection with the people whose labour supported their upbringing, yet whom they had never truly encountered. Focusing on their home village, this project asks how villagers make worlds—from the opportunistic reparation of scarred landscapes to networks of care that extend and transgress familial bonds. Over the past decade, Ripple Ripple Rippling has become a living project, gradually expanding across architecture, anthropology, filmmaking, and performance.

In contrast, Tracing Sand moves across Southeast Asia, beyond the boundaries of nation-states, tracing hidden dependencies embedded within supply chains, infrastructures, and ecosystems. Since 2023, field-0 have been following the movement of sand and water across the Mekong River Basin, from the Tibetan Plateau in China through Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam, and onward to Singapore via resource extraction. For field-0, this journey has become a pilgrimage of the recovering architect: an attempt to unbuild the built environment by attending to its substrata. To unbuild is to reveal how sites come into being: their materials, energy flows, and the socio-cultural imaginaries that sustain them. Through a nomadic mode of research—moving across iconic sites, riverine landscapes, borderlands, dam reservoirs, dredging sites, marginal communities, and ecologies in ruins— the act of journeying becomes part of the method itself.

Moving between sustained proximity and nomadic research, these projects ask how practice emerges through lived entanglements with communities, landscapes, infrastructures, and material flows. Together, they explore how long-term field practice can reconnect distant sites and communities through relations of care, reciprocity, and repair.

Open Studio #4 presents the ideas of Monsoon School #1 Open Call participants, who will share their own projects and practices alongside materials, prototypes, conversations, and forms of documentation generated throughout the School; drawing from study groups, workshops, exercises, discussions, and the collective making process developed together with Exutoire and Sher Maker Studio. Open Studio #4 marks the conclusion of the ten-day journey of Monsoon School #1.

As a temporary gathering shaped by encounters, conviviality, collaboration, and shared experiences, ‘Monsoon School’ is an invitation to the wider artistic, architectural, cultural, and creative communities of Chiang Mai, and beyond, to come together in conversation. Through presentations, displays, and conversations, Monsoon School participants and co-facilitators open up the methods, questions, observations, and reflections that have developed over the course of the programme, inviting visitors into informal exchanges around these ongoing inquiries.

The Open Studio serves as both a moment of return and a point of departure: a space to reflect on what has been learned, what remains unresolved, and how new conversations and relationships might continue beyond Monsoon School.

Open Studio #4 and its visual material will remain open to the public as a community library until October 30, 2026. Visitors are welcome to spend time in the space, browse its collection of books and materials, read, work, reflect, and exchange with others.

Opening hours are 10.00–17.00, Monday to Friday; 08.00–17.00 on weekends.