Healing: Art and Institutional Care
Curatorial — 2025
La Trobe Art Institute, Dja Dja Wurrung Country/Bendigo
Overview: A group exhibition of contemporary and historic artworks that takes as its starting point the contested space of institutional care. Artists include Fayen d’Evie, Carol Dobson, Jenny Hickinbotham, Helen Johnson, Alecia Neo, Sue Robertson, Finnegan Shannon and Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, and Grace Wood. Curated by Amelia Wallin and Jacina Leong.
The Multiplatform Mobile Museum: Dis/Entangling Digital, Social and Material Museum Worlds at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image
Book Chapter — 2025
The Routledge Companion to Mobile Media Second Edition
Abstract: One of the biggest priorities facing the contemporary museum sector is finding new ways to develop, support and sustain relevant and responsive engagement with diverse and intergenerational audiences, through digital and non-digital engagements. Informed by a four-week pilot study at ACMI (Narrm/Melbourne, Australia), this chapter explores how understanding the digital wayfaring practices enacted by audiences can inform not only a better understanding of the needs and wants of diverse audiences but also the museum as a node within a multiplatformed network of mobile socialities. Co-authored by Jacina Leong, Indigo Holcombe-James and Seb Chan.
Some Like it Hot
Conference Panel — 2025
PARSE, University of Gothenburg
Overview: The 6th biennial PARSE conference (November 12-14, 2025) hosted by the Artistic Faculty at the University of Gothenburg addressed the topic of HEAT. In an era of escalating ecological crises and ever-increasing intensities, heat has global but unequal impacts. Driven by advanced capitalism, fossil-fuel dependency, and digital consumption, heat is a literal threat to the lives of many. Yet heat can also be the manifestation of embodied exuberance, generative pressure, and a catalyst for transformation. As such, heat is a tangible warning, a symbol of urgency, an ingredient of change, and an attribute of pleasure. In this panel, convened by Cathryn Klasto (University of Gothenburg) and Onkar Kular (University of Gothenburg), Jacina Leong (RMIT University), Simonetta Mignano (Anchorage Museum) and Erin Marbarger (Anchorage Museum) discussed the topic of burnout and artistic labour.
So hot right now: Cultures in rising temperature
Conference Paper — 2025
Cultural Studies Association of Australasia Conference
Conference overview: This conference, So hot right now: Cultures in rising temperature, explores the intersections, divergences, conflicts, and convergences of ‘heat’ in cultures, practices, media, environments, and forms of governance.
Paper overview: As temperatures rise—politically, environmentally, and emotionally—the climate crisis is increasingly lived through the body. Ecological grief, anxiety, and despair are not only persona responses to environmental collapse but collective emotional states that call for new cultural an creative strategies. This paper, Creative Practice at boiling point: Responding to climate and cultural heat, explores climate emotions—particularly grief and hope—through creative practice collaborations that centre care, relationality, and more -than-human kinship. Drawing on Judith Butler’s concept of grievability and Lesley Head’s notion of hope entangled wit ecological grief, we consider how participatory art offers embodied, social, and speculative responses. These practices cultivate creative resilience: holding space for mourning while also imagining alternative futures. We situate this discussion in The Mourning After, an interdisciplinary exhibition and workshop series engaging ecological loss and mourning as cultural practice. Across its works, grief emerges not
only as aftermath but as a generative force —fueling public engagement, political attention, and collective world -building in a time of planetary precarity. Presented by Larissa Hjorth and Jacina Leong.
disobedience
Conference Paper — 2025
ACUADS
Conference overview: This conference invited contributions that showcase projects, pedagogies, and initiatives that explore how we navigate current authoritarian trajectories in the political exosphere.
Paper overview: This performance-lecture engages with complaint as disobedience and a call to action to complain more as a crucial action of collectivity and allyship. Following Sara Ahmed (2021), we approach complaint as a shared practice of survival, solidarity and refusal. Within art schools and cultural institutions, especially for BIPOC, speaking up often carries risk: complaints are reframed as personal negativity, absorbed into bureaucracy, or ignored. We approach complaints as gestures of refusal and creativity: a refusal to normalise harm, a method of unsettling institutional scripts of civility, and a way of exposing how power operates through pedagogy, research and governance. Complaint interrupts defaults of silence, individualisation and institutional complicity, insisting on other ways of knowing, teaching and creating. Performed, complaint becomes more than documentation. It becomes relation, interruption, insistence. By staging complaint as a creative method, we ask: what possibilities for resistance, repair and solidarity might emerge if complaint were recognised as creative practice research? How might institutions respond differently if disobedience was understood not as a threat but as a generative force for change? As artists, researchers and arts workers, we claim the figure of the ‘complainer’ not as deficit but as methodmaker. Complaint in this sense is not an end but an opening, always in progress, connected to injustices that extend beyond any one of us. Presented by Nguyễn Ngọc Thảo and Jacina Leong.
Ecological Grief, Hope, and Creative Forms of Resilience: A Creative Practice Approach
Journal Article — 2025
Open Cultural Studies
Abstract: With the effects of the climate emergency increasingly shaping our daily lives, feelings of ecological distress – particularly ecogrief and anxiety – have become palpable. In this article, we focus on these affective responses and examine how creative practice collaborations are curating possibilities for hope and resilience. We argue for the importance of such creative engagement, as ecological distress can lead to paralysis, nihilism, or despair, making it imperative to explore how creative practices open pathways for collective healing and actionable hope in the face of crisis. Following Lesley Head’s proposition that grief and hope are intrinsically entwined – hope as an embodied act within the affective fabric of everyday life – we consider how these emotional registers are navigated through artistic and collaborative processes. Increasingly, contemporary practitioners are turning to creative methods to make space for emotional complexity and to cultivate new strategies for connecting grief with hope. This article brings together insights from the environmental humanities and creative practice research to consider how such approaches can support resilience and social change. Through examples where creative practice operates as method, approach, and intervention, we explore the affective terrain of climate justice, arguing that creativity and art are essential for fostering empathetic engagement and imagining more hopeful, liveable futures. Co-authored by Tamara Borovica, Jacina Leong, Jen Rae and Larissa Hjorth.
Labour’s Worth Saying Yes To
Symposium Paper — 2025
A Climate for Art, Narrm/Melbourne
Symposium overview: In February 2025, in partnership with Next Wave, City of Melbourne and George Paton Gallery, A Climate for Art (ACFA) held a symposium which aimed to build relationships and extend a vocabulary around how culture underpins the climate crisis. ACFA brought together a range of speakers to survey past and current key projects, ongoing practices, and thinkers from the arts, academia, activism and climate campaigning.
Paper overview: What are labours worth sustaining in times of ecological, social and political crisis? In this talk, Jacina Leong speaks about ‘caring in and through our practices’, an online resource she developed through a series of iterative workshops with arts workers. Through this model, Jacina facilitates shared reflection on the purposes, values, and ethics of (creative) practice to explore the possibilities for attuning to institutional habits, systemic inequalities in the arts, and interconnected issues of burnout and colonial-capitalist structures.
What still sustains
Curatorial — 2025
The Mourning After, Narrm/Melbourne
Overview: What still sustains is a workshop led by Jacina Leong. This workshop offers arts workers space to pause and recalibrate amidst burnout, grief, and exhaustion—not to fix what’s broken, but to hold what feels unspeakable, to sit with what we may be grieving, and to explore forms of creativity, refusal, and regeneration that can sustain us within systems that won’t. This workshop was presented as part of The Mourning After exhibition.
Leaking, haunting, resisting, redefining: Rethinking the parameters and functions of therapeutic objects
Conference Panel — 2025
AAANZ, Boorloo/Perth
Conference overview: The 2025 conference looks at the uncontrollable, excessive, surplus and unruly qualities of objects that we attempt to study, curate, discipline and subject to discourse. Thinking beyond simply the agency of objects, we turn specifically to their rowdy, disruptive, and ungovernable aspects – whether they be leaking out of unwieldy collections, unexhibitable or unthinkable, fugitive or lost, or brimming with vitality, power or ancestral subjectivity.
Panel overview: This panel invites dialogue on art objects produced under, and in response to, institutional conditions, such as the hospital, prison or asylum. We’re interested in the ways in which these objects, both historic and contemporary, resist simple classification and continue to act in the present. This session takes its starting point from Healing: Art and Institutional Care (La Trobe Art Institute, Aug–Nov 2025), which revisits the Art Access Studio (1989–1996), a pioneering artist-led initiative within Melbourne’s former Larundel Mental Hospital (1953–1999). Rather than producing work within a diagnostic or clinical framework, artists and patients at Larundel explored art as a collaborative and selfdirected process of healing and creative expression. Exhibition co-curators, Amelia Wallin and Jacina Leong, will open this panel with a brief overview of the exhibition and its curatorial framing. The panel then turns to artists and researcher working with and in response to other former sites of care, control and containment, to consider the lingering presence of therapeutic objects and spaces. Kate Moss (UWA) performs Breeze Logged a voice weather-log linking archival traces, breath and silence at WA’s former Heathcote Reception Centre. Briony Galligan (VCA) and Abbra Kotlarczyk (independent) share queer and neurodivergent practices of care, illness and leakage from sites of toxicity and memory. Shannon Lyons and Lisa Liebetrau (independents) reflect on The beautiful is useful, their exhibition also responding to the Heathcote archive, built environment and share rituals of rest and labour. Together, these contributions reflect on how institutional objects / spaces and their echoes leak, haunt, resist and reshape contemporary engagements with care, disability justice and institutional critique. Panel co-convenors: Jacina Leong and Amelia Wallin.
A Toolkit for qualitative audience engagement: gathering, analysing and translating impact
Research — 2025 (forthcoming)
RMIT
‘Together, to gather, to get there’
Cultural Response — 2025
A Climate for Art
Overview: A written reflection on the A Climate for Art symposium.
ReShaping Worlds: Thinking with and through positionality for thriving futures
Journal Article — 2024
Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education
Abstract: Art theory as taught in Australian higher education still predominantly focuses on Eurocentric artistic practices, methodologies and histories, with practices by First Nations artists and artists of colour often relegated to tokenistic one-off lectures. This approach to syllabus fails to reflect the depth and breadth of contemporary art and creates an inherently imbalanced perspective disconnected from the diverse experiences of students. Simultaneously, students are expressing their own expectations for an empowered and critically reflexive art education. Using the undergraduate art theory course, ReShaping Worlds, as a case study, this collaborative article discusses the importance of developing curriculum that provides students with an expanded perspective on artistic and curatorial practices by decentring hegemonic Eurocentric art narratives and reflecting on positionality. In doing so, we also highlight our roles as arts educators in facilitating and supporting reflexive and critical practice amid climates of political, social and ecological uncertainty. Co-authored by Nguyễn Ngọc Thảo, Jacina Leong and Kristen Sharp.
All School LAB
Curatorial — 2024
Next Wave, Narrm/Melbourne
Overview: ALL School Lab is a multi-day event of activities and workshops collected under a common theme. Labs create opportunities for learning, experimentation and creative development—led by artists, for artists. Curated and produced by Anna Nalpantidis (Senior Creative Producer), Emma McManus (Creative Producer – Public Programs), Frances Robinson (Lead Program Producer), Nickila De Silva (Associate Producer: Communications & Engagement) and the Young Artistic Directorate (Banda, Matisse Laida, MaggZ and Lydia Tesema), with support from Maddie Lakos (Communications Manager), Natalia Sledz (Venue Producer & Operations Coordinator) Chas Maher (Senior Technician) and Cameron Harris (Technician) and oversight by Jacina Leong (Acting CEO/Director).
Web Working Bee
Artist Talk — 2024
WORLDWIDEWORMS.NET, Narrm/Melbourne
Overview: WORLDWIDEWORMS.NET is an online space for peer-led publishing. In this event, collaborators and contributors to WORLDWIDEWORMS.NET share works in progress, including video screenings, readings, and a garden tour of the back-end of the website. A work in progress is not necessarily about an end point, but is open to development: an idea, a practice, a friendship. Through their contributions, artists share different approaches to collective publishing, and extend an invitation to future artists to access, publish with, and caretake the website in their own way. Contributing artists: Alrey Batol, Eric Jong, Jacina Leong, Ella Peck and Emily Simek.
Caring in and through our practices: towards shared and reflexive communities of curatorial care
Doctoral Thesis — 2023
RMIT University
Abstract: For post-representational curatorial practice, to explore and respond to the many globally implicated and radically situated crises occurring at this moment is a weighted undertaking. Post-representational curatorial practice is not about staging or producing exhibitions, but a lively practice of actively and deliberately bringing people together through social and transdisciplinary approaches to knowledge production, translation and transmission. It is a practice that shares its origins with the dematerialisation of the art as object, new institutionalism, and the educational turn, and has expanded across cultural and civic spaces—for collectively thinking about and making sense of how human and more-than-human worlds are shifting. This is a practice where different kinds of stories and imaginaries, experiences and capabilities can become meaningful ways to gather, to contemplate and think through converging crises—from climate collapse to global pandemics—and learn to live well with uncertain and possible futures. This creative practice-led research project demonstrates that to care within relational and differently affected worlds also activates a range of tensions about our practices, which we as curatorial practitioners increasingly find ourselves grappling with. These are tensions that prompt us to reconsider how neoliberal capitalism, systems and structures inextricably linked to colonialism, shape the (temporal, hierarchical, extractive, inequitable) organising logics of the organisations in which our practices occur. In turn, they rub against the choices we make in deciding for whom do we care, what for, why and how, in and through our practices. In a pandemic-impacted world, in which a crisis of care has highlighted the very real need for redressing caring imbalances, including within the arts sector, where do we as curators—whose discipline shares an etymological link with the Latin word curare, meaning to take care of—begin? Full abstract and dissertation available here.
Caring In and Through Our Practices
Pedagogical — 2023
Online
Overview: An online pedagogical resource developed for creative practitioners (artists, arts workers, curators, producers) to think with the ethics of their practices.
Composting our practices (and organisations) through artist-led pedagogy
Journal Article — 2023
Journal of Public Pedagogies
Abstract: Composting as a pedagogy is about cultivating a transformative practice, in and with community — fo relational and affective assembly. Thinking with composting as a pedagogic (and more-than-human) metaphoric device, this article introduces composting our practices, an online pedagogical exchang developed and facilitated by the author for the 2021 disorganising project. Included are conversation shared between the author and practitioners who gathered to compost their practices — to ingest, digest, and churn their practices — by collectively attuning to the rhythms and temporalities of practice, including the chronic stress and cumulative impacts of operating under capitalist, neoliberal logics of productivity, growth and expansion, job casualisation and precarity, and competitive and scarce funding models. Our shared conversations are an offering to readers to forage what is useful to their thinking. In doing so, we propose that you ask yourself: what aspects of your practice are transforming? What needs to transform? And how might we be able to do this, at different scales, through shared practices of reflexivity? Composting as a pedagogy is a situated, practical, and ongoing labour towards the maintenance, repair, and where necessary and possible, decomposition and transmogrification of our institutionalised habits and behaviours — including those we enact, knowingly or otherwise, through the organisations in which our practices operate.
Care is ...
Video Essay — 2023
Co-Publishing
Overview: Written and presented by Jacina Leong, and informed by her doctoral research on creative practice and care ethics, this video essay offers a reflection on the complexities and nuances of care. What does it mean to give care, to care for, and to care with, in and through our practices, and in times of crisis?
Thinking With, and Acting From, This Place
Book Chapter — 2023
Dystopian and Utopian Impulses in Art Making: The World We Want
Curating and Creating in Digital Flux (BLEED Echo)
Symposium Panel — 2022
Arts House, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Taipei Performing Arts Center and Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei (online)
Overview: Bringing together curators and creators whose practice blurs the boundaries and intersections between institutional and artistic practice, this panel looks at the methods and ethos of creating work in this mid/post-pandemic era of digital flux, where the edges and borders of the digital, the live, the real and unreal have bumped up against the power dynamics inherent in the institution>artist relationship. Panelists: Akil Ahamet, Jacina Leong, River Lin and Betty Apple.
ACMI CEO Digital Mentoring Program
Mentor — 2022
ACMI, Narrm/Melbourne and Djilang/Geelong
Composting our disorganising
Curatorial — 2021
West Space, Liquid Architecture and Bus Projects, Narrm/Melbourne and online
Overview: ‘Twice we met to compost our practices. To churn and digest our disorganising, to think with and alongside slow infrastructures and dominant productionist timelines, deep time, and container logics. To ask what needs to be transformed, what is transforming, individually and collectively, in and through our practices. Physically dispersed, we gathered online, between and across lockdowns, towards the end of the Waring season and the beginning of the Guling, and as our meridians and body clocks moved through heart time.’ This excerpt, prepared by Jacina, is drawn from a longer transcript that includes the conversations and questions shared across breakout rooms and group chats during the composting workshops she curated for disorganising.
Concentric Curriculum
Curatorial — 2020
Bus Projects, online
Curated and facilitated by Jacina for the Concentric Curriculum program, developed by Nina Mulhall, this workshop series invited creative practitioners to engage in shared reflection and group discussion about how, as practitioners who bring people together to explore and respond to complex challenges, we might take up Natalie Osborne’s call to ‘think-with and act from this place.’
Inventive Approaches to Data Tracking in More-Than-Human Worlds
Book Chapter — 2020
The Routledge Companion to Mobile Media Art
Abstract: The tracking and recording of everyday personal data (for example, steps, calories, sleeping habits) has gained momentum in recent years with the rise of smart technologies. However, as a new and evolving practice, the espoused benefits of self-tracking practices (such as self-care and the redistribution of expertise) remain largely speculative and promissory. There are also parallel concerns in scholarly literature about the relationship between voluntary modes of self-tracking and a growing awareness of the ways in which people are being surveyed, more than in any other time in history, by security, government and commercial organizations, through such tracking technologies. This chapter expands on these debates in and around self-tracking practices by focusing on how creative interventions in the space are addressing and exploring these concerns—especially around providing more complexity around discussions that consider human and more-than-human entanglements. We begin with a pioneer in the space of locative media, Hajime Ishikawa, who began self-tracking nearly 20 years ago with the introduction of GPS devices. Ishikawa not only uses his tracking data to think creatively about his surrounds but also, by tracking his cat, he began to think differently about how he and his more-than-human counterpart companions move in and through the environment. We then look at creative practice interventions by contemporary artists, which allow us to think through alternative modes of techniques, translation and knowledge transmission around the omniscient and omnipresent advancement of self-tracking practices. Co-authored by Jacina Leong, Larissa Hjorth and Jaz Hee-jeong Choi.
Becoming Alexa
Interview — 2020
The Routledge Companion to Mobile Media Art
Abstract: Lauren McCarthy is an LA-based artist examining social relationships in the midst of surveillance, automation, and algorithmic living. She is the creator of p5.js, an open source programming language with over 1.5 million users, for learning creative expression through code online. Curator Jacina Leong interviews McCarthy, who talks about her play with automated, sensing technologies such as Amazon’s virtual home assistant Alexa in her project SOMEONE (2019), becoming a human version of Alexa in LAUREN (2018), and FOLLOWER (2018), a participatory service that provides a real-life follower for a day. McCarthy contemplates how these works create visibility for the range of attitudes and levels of comfort that people have with contemporary surveillance technology.
Social Media, Digital Wayfaring and the Future of Museum Audiences
Research — 2019
ACMI and RMIT, Narrm/Melbourne
The Future of Museum Engagement, Data and Older Audiences
Research — 2019
ACMI and RMIT, Narrm/Melbourne
Deaccessioning Salty Memories
Curatorial — 2019
Aarhus University, Aarhus
Doing Digital Methods: Interdisciplinary Interventions
Research — 2018
RMIT and Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto
Critical Connections
Curatorial — 2017
QUT and UTAS, Meanjin/Brisbane
Overview: The Critical Connections symposium was held at QUT’s Creative Industries Precinct, in partnership with UTAS. The symposium provided a platform for thinkers working across art, design and STEM to articulate key issues and share interdisciplinary strategies, via four panels: Research, Learning & Teaching, Ethics, and Cultural Engagement. This article provides an overview of each panellist’s key arguments and insight into current viewpoints that require further scrutiny. Co-convened and curated by Jacina Leong and Svenja Kratz.
Guerrilla Knowledge Unit
Curatorial — 2017
Ars Electronica Festival, Linz
Overview: Together with Linda Knight, Jacina is a founding member of the Guerrilla Knowledge Unit, an artist collective that curates interface jamming performances between the public and AI technologies. In 2017, the Guerilla Knowledge Unit performed at Ars Electronica Festival, explore the ethics of AI and access.
Creative Lab
Curatorial — 2015
QUT, Queensland Museum and kuril dhagun - State Library of QLD, Meanjin/Brisbane
Overview: Creative Lab was a Queensland Museum initiative developed in partnership with QUT The Cube, the State Library of Queensland and kuril dhagun. The inaugural program invited educators to investigate how a STEAM-based creative learning framework might open up new possibilities for project-based learning.
Off the Shelf
Curatorial — 2015
QUT, Brisbane City Council Libraries and Watson Road State School, Meanjin/Brisbane
Overview: Off The Shelf was a program initiated by QUT The Cube, in partnership with Brisbane City Council Libraries. Working with students from Watson Road State School, the project involved a series of workshops exploring the changing role of libraries as social and educational hubs, with the school library serving as a starting point for their ideas.
Curatorial — 2025
La Trobe Art Institute, Dja Dja Wurrung Country/Bendigo
Overview: A group exhibition of contemporary and historic artworks that takes as its starting point the contested space of institutional care. Artists include Fayen d’Evie, Carol Dobson, Jenny Hickinbotham, Helen Johnson, Alecia Neo, Sue Robertson, Finnegan Shannon and Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, and Grace Wood. Curated by Amelia Wallin and Jacina Leong.
The Multiplatform Mobile Museum: Dis/Entangling Digital, Social and Material Museum Worlds at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image
Book Chapter — 2025
The Routledge Companion to Mobile Media Second Edition
Abstract: One of the biggest priorities facing the contemporary museum sector is finding new ways to develop, support and sustain relevant and responsive engagement with diverse and intergenerational audiences, through digital and non-digital engagements. Informed by a four-week pilot study at ACMI (Narrm/Melbourne, Australia), this chapter explores how understanding the digital wayfaring practices enacted by audiences can inform not only a better understanding of the needs and wants of diverse audiences but also the museum as a node within a multiplatformed network of mobile socialities. Co-authored by Jacina Leong, Indigo Holcombe-James and Seb Chan.
Some Like it Hot
Conference Panel — 2025
PARSE, University of Gothenburg
Overview: The 6th biennial PARSE conference (November 12-14, 2025) hosted by the Artistic Faculty at the University of Gothenburg addressed the topic of HEAT. In an era of escalating ecological crises and ever-increasing intensities, heat has global but unequal impacts. Driven by advanced capitalism, fossil-fuel dependency, and digital consumption, heat is a literal threat to the lives of many. Yet heat can also be the manifestation of embodied exuberance, generative pressure, and a catalyst for transformation. As such, heat is a tangible warning, a symbol of urgency, an ingredient of change, and an attribute of pleasure. In this panel, convened by Cathryn Klasto (University of Gothenburg) and Onkar Kular (University of Gothenburg), Jacina Leong (RMIT University), Simonetta Mignano (Anchorage Museum) and Erin Marbarger (Anchorage Museum) discussed the topic of burnout and artistic labour.
So hot right now: Cultures in rising temperature
Conference Paper — 2025
Cultural Studies Association of Australasia Conference
Conference overview: This conference, So hot right now: Cultures in rising temperature, explores the intersections, divergences, conflicts, and convergences of ‘heat’ in cultures, practices, media, environments, and forms of governance.
Paper overview: As temperatures rise—politically, environmentally, and emotionally—the climate crisis is increasingly lived through the body. Ecological grief, anxiety, and despair are not only persona responses to environmental collapse but collective emotional states that call for new cultural an creative strategies. This paper, Creative Practice at boiling point: Responding to climate and cultural heat, explores climate emotions—particularly grief and hope—through creative practice collaborations that centre care, relationality, and more -than-human kinship. Drawing on Judith Butler’s concept of grievability and Lesley Head’s notion of hope entangled wit ecological grief, we consider how participatory art offers embodied, social, and speculative responses. These practices cultivate creative resilience: holding space for mourning while also imagining alternative futures. We situate this discussion in The Mourning After, an interdisciplinary exhibition and workshop series engaging ecological loss and mourning as cultural practice. Across its works, grief emerges not
only as aftermath but as a generative force —fueling public engagement, political attention, and collective world -building in a time of planetary precarity. Presented by Larissa Hjorth and Jacina Leong.
disobedience
Conference Paper — 2025
ACUADS
Conference overview: This conference invited contributions that showcase projects, pedagogies, and initiatives that explore how we navigate current authoritarian trajectories in the political exosphere.
Paper overview: This performance-lecture engages with complaint as disobedience and a call to action to complain more as a crucial action of collectivity and allyship. Following Sara Ahmed (2021), we approach complaint as a shared practice of survival, solidarity and refusal. Within art schools and cultural institutions, especially for BIPOC, speaking up often carries risk: complaints are reframed as personal negativity, absorbed into bureaucracy, or ignored. We approach complaints as gestures of refusal and creativity: a refusal to normalise harm, a method of unsettling institutional scripts of civility, and a way of exposing how power operates through pedagogy, research and governance. Complaint interrupts defaults of silence, individualisation and institutional complicity, insisting on other ways of knowing, teaching and creating. Performed, complaint becomes more than documentation. It becomes relation, interruption, insistence. By staging complaint as a creative method, we ask: what possibilities for resistance, repair and solidarity might emerge if complaint were recognised as creative practice research? How might institutions respond differently if disobedience was understood not as a threat but as a generative force for change? As artists, researchers and arts workers, we claim the figure of the ‘complainer’ not as deficit but as methodmaker. Complaint in this sense is not an end but an opening, always in progress, connected to injustices that extend beyond any one of us. Presented by Nguyễn Ngọc Thảo and Jacina Leong.
Ecological Grief, Hope, and Creative Forms of Resilience: A Creative Practice Approach
Journal Article — 2025
Open Cultural Studies
Abstract: With the effects of the climate emergency increasingly shaping our daily lives, feelings of ecological distress – particularly ecogrief and anxiety – have become palpable. In this article, we focus on these affective responses and examine how creative practice collaborations are curating possibilities for hope and resilience. We argue for the importance of such creative engagement, as ecological distress can lead to paralysis, nihilism, or despair, making it imperative to explore how creative practices open pathways for collective healing and actionable hope in the face of crisis. Following Lesley Head’s proposition that grief and hope are intrinsically entwined – hope as an embodied act within the affective fabric of everyday life – we consider how these emotional registers are navigated through artistic and collaborative processes. Increasingly, contemporary practitioners are turning to creative methods to make space for emotional complexity and to cultivate new strategies for connecting grief with hope. This article brings together insights from the environmental humanities and creative practice research to consider how such approaches can support resilience and social change. Through examples where creative practice operates as method, approach, and intervention, we explore the affective terrain of climate justice, arguing that creativity and art are essential for fostering empathetic engagement and imagining more hopeful, liveable futures. Co-authored by Tamara Borovica, Jacina Leong, Jen Rae and Larissa Hjorth.
Labour’s Worth Saying Yes To
Symposium Paper — 2025
A Climate for Art, Narrm/Melbourne
Symposium overview: In February 2025, in partnership with Next Wave, City of Melbourne and George Paton Gallery, A Climate for Art (ACFA) held a symposium which aimed to build relationships and extend a vocabulary around how culture underpins the climate crisis. ACFA brought together a range of speakers to survey past and current key projects, ongoing practices, and thinkers from the arts, academia, activism and climate campaigning.
Paper overview: What are labours worth sustaining in times of ecological, social and political crisis? In this talk, Jacina Leong speaks about ‘caring in and through our practices’, an online resource she developed through a series of iterative workshops with arts workers. Through this model, Jacina facilitates shared reflection on the purposes, values, and ethics of (creative) practice to explore the possibilities for attuning to institutional habits, systemic inequalities in the arts, and interconnected issues of burnout and colonial-capitalist structures.
What still sustains
Curatorial — 2025
The Mourning After, Narrm/Melbourne
Overview: What still sustains is a workshop led by Jacina Leong. This workshop offers arts workers space to pause and recalibrate amidst burnout, grief, and exhaustion—not to fix what’s broken, but to hold what feels unspeakable, to sit with what we may be grieving, and to explore forms of creativity, refusal, and regeneration that can sustain us within systems that won’t. This workshop was presented as part of The Mourning After exhibition.
Leaking, haunting, resisting, redefining: Rethinking the parameters and functions of therapeutic objects
Conference Panel — 2025
AAANZ, Boorloo/Perth
Conference overview: The 2025 conference looks at the uncontrollable, excessive, surplus and unruly qualities of objects that we attempt to study, curate, discipline and subject to discourse. Thinking beyond simply the agency of objects, we turn specifically to their rowdy, disruptive, and ungovernable aspects – whether they be leaking out of unwieldy collections, unexhibitable or unthinkable, fugitive or lost, or brimming with vitality, power or ancestral subjectivity.
Panel overview: This panel invites dialogue on art objects produced under, and in response to, institutional conditions, such as the hospital, prison or asylum. We’re interested in the ways in which these objects, both historic and contemporary, resist simple classification and continue to act in the present. This session takes its starting point from Healing: Art and Institutional Care (La Trobe Art Institute, Aug–Nov 2025), which revisits the Art Access Studio (1989–1996), a pioneering artist-led initiative within Melbourne’s former Larundel Mental Hospital (1953–1999). Rather than producing work within a diagnostic or clinical framework, artists and patients at Larundel explored art as a collaborative and selfdirected process of healing and creative expression. Exhibition co-curators, Amelia Wallin and Jacina Leong, will open this panel with a brief overview of the exhibition and its curatorial framing. The panel then turns to artists and researcher working with and in response to other former sites of care, control and containment, to consider the lingering presence of therapeutic objects and spaces. Kate Moss (UWA) performs Breeze Logged a voice weather-log linking archival traces, breath and silence at WA’s former Heathcote Reception Centre. Briony Galligan (VCA) and Abbra Kotlarczyk (independent) share queer and neurodivergent practices of care, illness and leakage from sites of toxicity and memory. Shannon Lyons and Lisa Liebetrau (independents) reflect on The beautiful is useful, their exhibition also responding to the Heathcote archive, built environment and share rituals of rest and labour. Together, these contributions reflect on how institutional objects / spaces and their echoes leak, haunt, resist and reshape contemporary engagements with care, disability justice and institutional critique. Panel co-convenors: Jacina Leong and Amelia Wallin.
A Toolkit for qualitative audience engagement: gathering, analysing and translating impact
Research — 2025 (forthcoming)
RMIT
‘Together, to gather, to get there’
Cultural Response — 2025
A Climate for Art
Overview: A written reflection on the A Climate for Art symposium.
ReShaping Worlds: Thinking with and through positionality for thriving futures
Journal Article — 2024
Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education
Abstract: Art theory as taught in Australian higher education still predominantly focuses on Eurocentric artistic practices, methodologies and histories, with practices by First Nations artists and artists of colour often relegated to tokenistic one-off lectures. This approach to syllabus fails to reflect the depth and breadth of contemporary art and creates an inherently imbalanced perspective disconnected from the diverse experiences of students. Simultaneously, students are expressing their own expectations for an empowered and critically reflexive art education. Using the undergraduate art theory course, ReShaping Worlds, as a case study, this collaborative article discusses the importance of developing curriculum that provides students with an expanded perspective on artistic and curatorial practices by decentring hegemonic Eurocentric art narratives and reflecting on positionality. In doing so, we also highlight our roles as arts educators in facilitating and supporting reflexive and critical practice amid climates of political, social and ecological uncertainty. Co-authored by Nguyễn Ngọc Thảo, Jacina Leong and Kristen Sharp.
All School LAB
Curatorial — 2024
Next Wave, Narrm/Melbourne
Overview: ALL School Lab is a multi-day event of activities and workshops collected under a common theme. Labs create opportunities for learning, experimentation and creative development—led by artists, for artists. Curated and produced by Anna Nalpantidis (Senior Creative Producer), Emma McManus (Creative Producer – Public Programs), Frances Robinson (Lead Program Producer), Nickila De Silva (Associate Producer: Communications & Engagement) and the Young Artistic Directorate (Banda, Matisse Laida, MaggZ and Lydia Tesema), with support from Maddie Lakos (Communications Manager), Natalia Sledz (Venue Producer & Operations Coordinator) Chas Maher (Senior Technician) and Cameron Harris (Technician) and oversight by Jacina Leong (Acting CEO/Director).
Web Working Bee
Artist Talk — 2024
WORLDWIDEWORMS.NET, Narrm/Melbourne
Overview: WORLDWIDEWORMS.NET is an online space for peer-led publishing. In this event, collaborators and contributors to WORLDWIDEWORMS.NET share works in progress, including video screenings, readings, and a garden tour of the back-end of the website. A work in progress is not necessarily about an end point, but is open to development: an idea, a practice, a friendship. Through their contributions, artists share different approaches to collective publishing, and extend an invitation to future artists to access, publish with, and caretake the website in their own way. Contributing artists: Alrey Batol, Eric Jong, Jacina Leong, Ella Peck and Emily Simek.
Caring in and through our practices: towards shared and reflexive communities of curatorial care
Doctoral Thesis — 2023
RMIT University
Abstract: For post-representational curatorial practice, to explore and respond to the many globally implicated and radically situated crises occurring at this moment is a weighted undertaking. Post-representational curatorial practice is not about staging or producing exhibitions, but a lively practice of actively and deliberately bringing people together through social and transdisciplinary approaches to knowledge production, translation and transmission. It is a practice that shares its origins with the dematerialisation of the art as object, new institutionalism, and the educational turn, and has expanded across cultural and civic spaces—for collectively thinking about and making sense of how human and more-than-human worlds are shifting. This is a practice where different kinds of stories and imaginaries, experiences and capabilities can become meaningful ways to gather, to contemplate and think through converging crises—from climate collapse to global pandemics—and learn to live well with uncertain and possible futures. This creative practice-led research project demonstrates that to care within relational and differently affected worlds also activates a range of tensions about our practices, which we as curatorial practitioners increasingly find ourselves grappling with. These are tensions that prompt us to reconsider how neoliberal capitalism, systems and structures inextricably linked to colonialism, shape the (temporal, hierarchical, extractive, inequitable) organising logics of the organisations in which our practices occur. In turn, they rub against the choices we make in deciding for whom do we care, what for, why and how, in and through our practices. In a pandemic-impacted world, in which a crisis of care has highlighted the very real need for redressing caring imbalances, including within the arts sector, where do we as curators—whose discipline shares an etymological link with the Latin word curare, meaning to take care of—begin? Full abstract and dissertation available here.
Caring In and Through Our Practices
Pedagogical — 2023
Online
Overview: An online pedagogical resource developed for creative practitioners (artists, arts workers, curators, producers) to think with the ethics of their practices.
Composting our practices (and organisations) through artist-led pedagogy
Journal Article — 2023
Journal of Public Pedagogies
Abstract: Composting as a pedagogy is about cultivating a transformative practice, in and with community — fo relational and affective assembly. Thinking with composting as a pedagogic (and more-than-human) metaphoric device, this article introduces composting our practices, an online pedagogical exchang developed and facilitated by the author for the 2021 disorganising project. Included are conversation shared between the author and practitioners who gathered to compost their practices — to ingest, digest, and churn their practices — by collectively attuning to the rhythms and temporalities of practice, including the chronic stress and cumulative impacts of operating under capitalist, neoliberal logics of productivity, growth and expansion, job casualisation and precarity, and competitive and scarce funding models. Our shared conversations are an offering to readers to forage what is useful to their thinking. In doing so, we propose that you ask yourself: what aspects of your practice are transforming? What needs to transform? And how might we be able to do this, at different scales, through shared practices of reflexivity? Composting as a pedagogy is a situated, practical, and ongoing labour towards the maintenance, repair, and where necessary and possible, decomposition and transmogrification of our institutionalised habits and behaviours — including those we enact, knowingly or otherwise, through the organisations in which our practices operate.
Care is ...
Video Essay — 2023
Co-Publishing
Overview: Written and presented by Jacina Leong, and informed by her doctoral research on creative practice and care ethics, this video essay offers a reflection on the complexities and nuances of care. What does it mean to give care, to care for, and to care with, in and through our practices, and in times of crisis?
Thinking With, and Acting From, This Place
Book Chapter — 2023
Dystopian and Utopian Impulses in Art Making: The World We Want
Curating and Creating in Digital Flux (BLEED Echo)
Symposium Panel — 2022
Arts House, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Taipei Performing Arts Center and Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei (online)
Overview: Bringing together curators and creators whose practice blurs the boundaries and intersections between institutional and artistic practice, this panel looks at the methods and ethos of creating work in this mid/post-pandemic era of digital flux, where the edges and borders of the digital, the live, the real and unreal have bumped up against the power dynamics inherent in the institution>artist relationship. Panelists: Akil Ahamet, Jacina Leong, River Lin and Betty Apple.
ACMI CEO Digital Mentoring Program
Mentor — 2022
ACMI, Narrm/Melbourne and Djilang/Geelong
Composting our disorganising
Curatorial — 2021
West Space, Liquid Architecture and Bus Projects, Narrm/Melbourne and online
Overview: ‘Twice we met to compost our practices. To churn and digest our disorganising, to think with and alongside slow infrastructures and dominant productionist timelines, deep time, and container logics. To ask what needs to be transformed, what is transforming, individually and collectively, in and through our practices. Physically dispersed, we gathered online, between and across lockdowns, towards the end of the Waring season and the beginning of the Guling, and as our meridians and body clocks moved through heart time.’ This excerpt, prepared by Jacina, is drawn from a longer transcript that includes the conversations and questions shared across breakout rooms and group chats during the composting workshops she curated for disorganising.
Concentric Curriculum
Curatorial — 2020
Bus Projects, online
Curated and facilitated by Jacina for the Concentric Curriculum program, developed by Nina Mulhall, this workshop series invited creative practitioners to engage in shared reflection and group discussion about how, as practitioners who bring people together to explore and respond to complex challenges, we might take up Natalie Osborne’s call to ‘think-with and act from this place.’
Inventive Approaches to Data Tracking in More-Than-Human Worlds
Book Chapter — 2020
The Routledge Companion to Mobile Media Art
Abstract: The tracking and recording of everyday personal data (for example, steps, calories, sleeping habits) has gained momentum in recent years with the rise of smart technologies. However, as a new and evolving practice, the espoused benefits of self-tracking practices (such as self-care and the redistribution of expertise) remain largely speculative and promissory. There are also parallel concerns in scholarly literature about the relationship between voluntary modes of self-tracking and a growing awareness of the ways in which people are being surveyed, more than in any other time in history, by security, government and commercial organizations, through such tracking technologies. This chapter expands on these debates in and around self-tracking practices by focusing on how creative interventions in the space are addressing and exploring these concerns—especially around providing more complexity around discussions that consider human and more-than-human entanglements. We begin with a pioneer in the space of locative media, Hajime Ishikawa, who began self-tracking nearly 20 years ago with the introduction of GPS devices. Ishikawa not only uses his tracking data to think creatively about his surrounds but also, by tracking his cat, he began to think differently about how he and his more-than-human counterpart companions move in and through the environment. We then look at creative practice interventions by contemporary artists, which allow us to think through alternative modes of techniques, translation and knowledge transmission around the omniscient and omnipresent advancement of self-tracking practices. Co-authored by Jacina Leong, Larissa Hjorth and Jaz Hee-jeong Choi.
Becoming Alexa
Interview — 2020
The Routledge Companion to Mobile Media Art
Abstract: Lauren McCarthy is an LA-based artist examining social relationships in the midst of surveillance, automation, and algorithmic living. She is the creator of p5.js, an open source programming language with over 1.5 million users, for learning creative expression through code online. Curator Jacina Leong interviews McCarthy, who talks about her play with automated, sensing technologies such as Amazon’s virtual home assistant Alexa in her project SOMEONE (2019), becoming a human version of Alexa in LAUREN (2018), and FOLLOWER (2018), a participatory service that provides a real-life follower for a day. McCarthy contemplates how these works create visibility for the range of attitudes and levels of comfort that people have with contemporary surveillance technology.
Social Media, Digital Wayfaring and the Future of Museum Audiences
Research — 2019
ACMI and RMIT, Narrm/Melbourne
The Future of Museum Engagement, Data and Older Audiences
Research — 2019
ACMI and RMIT, Narrm/Melbourne
Deaccessioning Salty Memories
Curatorial — 2019
Aarhus University, Aarhus
Doing Digital Methods: Interdisciplinary Interventions
Research — 2018
RMIT and Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto
Critical Connections
Curatorial — 2017
QUT and UTAS, Meanjin/Brisbane
Overview: The Critical Connections symposium was held at QUT’s Creative Industries Precinct, in partnership with UTAS. The symposium provided a platform for thinkers working across art, design and STEM to articulate key issues and share interdisciplinary strategies, via four panels: Research, Learning & Teaching, Ethics, and Cultural Engagement. This article provides an overview of each panellist’s key arguments and insight into current viewpoints that require further scrutiny. Co-convened and curated by Jacina Leong and Svenja Kratz.
Guerrilla Knowledge Unit
Curatorial — 2017
Ars Electronica Festival, Linz
Overview: Together with Linda Knight, Jacina is a founding member of the Guerrilla Knowledge Unit, an artist collective that curates interface jamming performances between the public and AI technologies. In 2017, the Guerilla Knowledge Unit performed at Ars Electronica Festival, explore the ethics of AI and access.
Creative Lab
Curatorial — 2015
QUT, Queensland Museum and kuril dhagun - State Library of QLD, Meanjin/Brisbane
Overview: Creative Lab was a Queensland Museum initiative developed in partnership with QUT The Cube, the State Library of Queensland and kuril dhagun. The inaugural program invited educators to investigate how a STEAM-based creative learning framework might open up new possibilities for project-based learning.
Off the Shelf
Curatorial — 2015
QUT, Brisbane City Council Libraries and Watson Road State School, Meanjin/Brisbane
Overview: Off The Shelf was a program initiated by QUT The Cube, in partnership with Brisbane City Council Libraries. Working with students from Watson Road State School, the project involved a series of workshops exploring the changing role of libraries as social and educational hubs, with the school library serving as a starting point for their ideas.