Joella Kiu, a visual arts curator and art historian from Singapore, spent a month at Rimbun Dahan in November 2025, experimenting with writing with a more personal voice and pushing past the thorny exterior of the durian.
About the Curator
Joella Kiu is a curator and art historian based in Singapore. She studies how artists employ the visual, textual, counter-cartographic, speculative and mythological to communicate urgent ecological conditions and contemporary lived realities.
Her writing has been published in AAA Like A Fever, Field Journal, The February Journal and PR&TA. Forthcoming written contributions include a chapter within Tastes of Justice: The Aesthetics and Politics of Food-Art Practices in Asia and Australia (Routledge, 2025).
In terms of independent initiatives, Joella started the discursive online platform, Object Lessons Space, and was host, writer and producer of Mushroomed, a podcast about the visual arts produced in collaboration with Singapore Community Radio. She holds an MA in History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art (2017), and a BA in History of Art from the University of York (2015).
https://www.instagram.com/joellaqkiu
About the Residency
For the Open Day programme on Sunday 30 November, I’ll be presenting a new text. A Prickly Affair was written over the short time I spent at Rimbun Dahan, but it has been fermenting in my mind for a long time.
The first iteration of this research was presented in a conference in 2022. That paper was then turned into a chapter, which will be published in an edited volume that’s scheduled to hit the shelves in a month or so. That book, unfortunately, is woefully expensive (£150) and therefore largely inaccessible.
This new text is a spin-off of that research, and is largely borne out of my interest in experimenting more pointedly with a personal voice or embodied perspective within academic or curatorial research. A Prickly Affair is interested in pushing past the thorny exterior of the durian (its exotic stereotype, its reputation) towards a quieter and hopefully more attentive understanding of the fruit.
The text will be printed as physical booklets that will be free to take (while stocks last!) on Open Day. A digital copy will also be available.
