Curatorial
Mentorships.

Lala Nurlala X Matt Burrows

This was an amazing opportunity to meet and work with an artist I might never have met otherwise on a brilliant international project, supported by an amazing team from Art Et Al and Ketemu. As with the best mentoring relationships, it offered the chance to explore new ideas in new ways and to learn, grow and develop from the partnership as much as I hope Lala has.

- Matt Burrows

Let us introduce you to the first Curatorial Mentorship as part of Art et al. X Ketemu. This Curatorial Mentorship pairs an Indonesian disabled artist with a British professional curator as a mentor to produce and contextualise a digital project.

Over the months of May, June and July 2022, British curator Matt Burrows worked with Indonesian artist, Lala Nurlala for the first Curatorial Mentorship part of our Art et al. X Ketemu partnership, funded by the British Council’s International Collaboration Grant.

Lala and Matt met virtually for mentorship sessions discussing the process of selecting artists for a project and forming a theme of ideas. Expanding the scope of professional development the mentorship, they developed a multi-media project around the ideas of pop culture and subversion, while also learning about curatorial texts.

The outcome is Lala’s curated project FANDOMINIUM presenting a diverse group of international artists that explore fandom and pop culture through the lens of fan-art, appropriation, subversion, and cross-cultural exchange.

I’m Lala Nurlala, who doesn’t know where to come, or where to go. I have lived in the United States and Indonesia, but I don’t truly belong to any of them. Because there’s no culture I can completely identify with, I just watch them as an outside observer. I mainly observe pop culture and Indonesian traditional culture, though I can delve into other cultures as well.

One thing I can attach to is a character from Milo Murphy’s Law named Dr. Zone. With my art practice I often want to ask the question: what happens when a character isn’t regarded as important in the source material, but is then uplifted as the centerpiece in a different field and audience? This is part of why I’m interested in appropriation art. One’s interpretation of a medium can be vastly different from another, and it’s very interesting to see one’s dramatic take on another person’s work.

Matt Burrows is the Curator and Gallery Manager at Exeter Phoenix, a multi-artform contemporary arts venue in Devon, UK that specialises in working with emerging and mid-career artists. He has previously held project management roles at Spacex, Exeter and Victoria Miro Gallery, London, as well as working on a variety of freelance consultancy projects, mentoring and lecturing roles.