Lives, Care, and Political Echoes: Curating Family History Today
Images courtesy of Binghuang Xu and Making Space
02 pm — 04 pm, Sat 27 Sep 2025 (GMT +7)
Location: Online, meeting link will be sent after registration
Registration link
Language: English only
From the organizer:
In this talk, Binghuang Xu—an independent curator, writer, and director of Making Space (Guangzhou, China), will introduce how their research-driven, socially engaged space uses family history as a curatorial method. Moving beyond genealogy or proof, they treat the home as a living archive where gender, class, migration, and state power are inscribed—and can be critically rewritten. Binghuang will map key projects of Making Space’s Family History Program from 2023–2025 including Zhu Xiang’s The Seaside Cemetery; A trio exhibition by Lan Yi, Da Xi, Huang Xiaoxing, Questioning Silence, and its public program Family Feast; Karen Lin Keshi’s A Letter Never Arrived (letters, factory relocations, and fieldwork with Vietnamese Chinese); and the residency Moonlight Returns to the Ancestral Home with British-Chinese artist Dinu Li, supported by the British Council.
Making Space is a contemporary art space located in Guangzhou, China. It was founded in 2017 by artist Piao You and is now co-directed with Binghuang Xu. They regard space as the connection of the art scene and society, emphasising the significance of long-term and in-depth research, care-driven collaboration relationships and companionship.
This talk is a part of “Groundwork-Đất cũ đãi người mới”, is a series of talks and discussions featuring practitioners whose artistic and curatorial projects are deeply engaged with specific sites and places addressing the issues of displacement—of people, communities, and species—in the face of modernisation and urbanisation.
About speaker
Binghuang Xu is a curator, writer, and director of Making Space (Guangzhou, China), born and based in China. Her practice primarily focuses on socially engaged art, ecological art, folk history and alternative education. In recent years, she has curated several projects that put effort into diverse areas, such as ‘Resounding Hands’- a project that emphasizes the power of alternative education and accessible practices; Xiang Li Lao Re, an open-call project that seeks voices from the countryside, and the ‘Family History Programme’, which critically engaged with family history as a method to critique and re-create the structure of history and society.
She was the panelist of ‘Environmental Justice in China’ at Brown University and a speaker on ‘Overlooked Cities in Asia’ at the Urban Studies Foundation Seminar Series in Bandung, Indonesia. She is a recipient of the Fellows Award for Cultural & Artistic Responses to the Environmental Crisis by the Prince Claus Fund, Netherlands, and the Connections Through Culture grant by the British Council, UK.
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