Along with independent curator Aziza Harmel, and independent curatorial and publishing house Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology, I now am one of the co-curators of Hosting Lands. Hosting Lands (2022-2025) is a slow-growing, decentral exhibition movement unfolding around land, the relationship between host and guest, and the link between the hyper-local and the global. Over the course of three years, the exhibition will move between six locations throughout Denmark and engage local and international artists, activists and communities. Hosting Lands explores how we can steward and care for land differently through legal commoning of conventional farmlands and by working in collective and regenerative site-responsive manners. Hosting Lands orients itself towards futures beyond the exhibition movement itself by offering possibilities to inhabit artistic spaces as architecture of the everyday and creating lasting change in the landscapes and the worlds at stake.
Hosting Lands has no linear timeline. It is a scattered, “drip by drip” exhibition project with many different, big and small, “exhibitionary moments” popping up across the sites, communities and engagements in the project. It hosts both on-site and digital activities - such as workshops, gatherings, performances, online sessions, letters, guest/host notes, residencies, artworks, etc.
Hosting Lands emphasizes participatory and durational, site-specific art practices that cultivate deep and sustained relations to land, its communities and its stories. It wishes to support artworks that become, or weave, into the infrastructures of everyday life and work.Hosting Lands is an experiment and an attempt to practice and challenge some of the usual production modes of (the Western) art world. With this project, we wish to engage with, support and do radical bridge work between art and community practices engaged in land politics that inhabit communal, self-organized artistic spaces as alternative architectures of everyday life.
Hosting Lands is supported by The Bikuben Foundation,
Vision Exhibition Award, Nordisk Kulturfond, Statens Kunstfond amongst others.
You can read more about Hosting Lands here
Between 2018-2023 I co-founded and co-directed a curatorial and artistic platform, The Forest Curriculum. Below is a bio from the portfolio.
“The Forest Curriculum (Bangkok/Yogyakarta/Manila/Seoul/Berlin/Santa Barbara) is an itinerant and nomadic platform for indisciplinary research and mutual co-learning, based in Southeast Asia, and operating internationally. Founded and co-directed by curators Abhijan Toto and Pujita Guha, and with Rosalia Namsai Engchuan, it works with artists, collectives, researchers, indigenous organizations and thinkers, musicians, and activists, to assemble a located critique of the Anthropocene via the naturecultures of the forested belt that connects South and Southeast Asia. The Forest Curriculum organizes exhibitions, public programs, performances, video and multimedia projects, as well as an annual intensive in a different location around the region, which gathers practitioners from all over the world to engage in collective research and shared methodologies: The Forest And The School, Bangkok (2019); The Forest Is In The City Is In The Forest I, Manila (2020) and II, Online (2020-2021). The platform collaborates with institutions and organizations internationally, and our work has been supported by the Australia Council for the Arts; the Sharjah Art Foundation; Ideas City, the New Museum, NTU CCA, Singapore, Nomina Nuda, Los Baños, and GAMeC, Bergamo among others. The collective has also exhibited in Nonhuman Assemblages, Busan Sea Art Festival, South Korea (2021), Nation, Narration, Narcosis, Nationalgalerie - Hamburger Bahnhof, Germany (2021), and will exhibit in Proposals for A Monument to Partition, Jameel Art Centre, Sharjah (2022). The collective was named as one of the emerging thinkers in Apollo Magazine’s 40 Under 40 Asia Pacific List. “
The Forest Curriculum’s bio, or more details, to be made available upon request.
pujita@ucsb.edu
pujita.guha90@gmail.com