Natsagsuren Mangalam is the founder of Lkham, one of Mongolia’s leading contemporary art galleries. Opened in 2022, after she left her career in finance, the gallery supports a range of artists, both established and emerging from across Central Asia. Lkham has quickly built a reputation for its strong exhibitions and original education and events programme. Natsagsuren’s motivation is for the region’s artists to be recognised both at home and on a global stage. As such, she has brought in...

Episode 29 meets Baatarzorig Batjargal, an artist based in Mongolia’s capital, Ulaanbaatar, who is revered for his fastidious paintings that capture the country’s shifting character and values. Drawing on the zurag style, associated with Mongolia’s independence movement in the early 20th century, his works evoke the contradictions of a nomadic society exposed to socialism now contending with rapid urbanisation and global capitalism. In scenes somewhat reminiscent of Tibetan Buddhist painting,...

In episode 28, Art Worlds visits Mongolia. Gantuya Badamgarav, a curator based in the country's capital Ulaanbaatar, has been integral to the development of the country’s contemporary art. With a macroeconomic policy background, Gantuya established 976 Art Gallery and the Mongolian Contemporary Art Support Association in 2012. She has organized over 100 exhibitions and was the first-ever Commissioner of the Mongolia Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2015. Since she has been the project...

Episode 27 meets Raphael Chikukwa, a curator based in Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, who is the Executive Director of the country’s National Gallery. He first joined the institution in 2010 as chief curator, following ten years of working independently and instigating a range of exhibitions including at the Imperial War Museum North and Manchester Art Gallery.  Raphael’s commitment to enhancing the visibility of Zimbabwe’s artists saw him become the founding Curator of the Zimbabwe Pavilion at...

Episode 26 features Richard Mudariki, an artist based between Harare and Cape Town. Known for his satirical figurative paintings, Richard addresses political reform in Zimbabwe, state corruption and social conditions in South Africa. In 2020 he founded artHARARE as an online platform to experience contemporary art by established, mid-career and emerging visual artists from Zimbabwe and its diaspora. The initiative has since developed with artHARARE participating in international art fairs...

Episode 25 meets artist Misheck Masamvu who considers Zimbabwe’s post-independence character through painting, drawing and sculpture. Sensitive to the country’s economic and political turmoil, he uses frenetic mark making with elements of figuration lurking beneath to go some way to capturing and articulating the experiences of Zimbabweans. Misheck’s civic spiritedness is similarly felt at Village Unhu, an art space he co-founded in the capital Harare to nurture young artistic...

In episode 24, Hana El-Beblawy, an artist and curator, discusses the organisation Ard Art she founded in 2022. Situated in central Cairo, in one of the city’s oldest neighbourhoods, the space provides opportunities for artists to experiment through a varied programme of residencies, workshops, exhibitions and more. With an open and inclusive ethos, Ard Art develops according to artists’ needs and places value on being away from the pressures of the commercial gallery system. Hana’s own...

In episode 23, Art Worlds meets artist and academic Huda Lutfi who integrates her specialism in Islamic culture and history with her multimedia practice. Having taught at the American University of Cairo, her work is suffused with historical references, including symbols from Pharaonic and Coptic cultures, that are recontextualised to highlight Egypt’s contemporary social and political issues. Female archetypes, like the image of the iconic singer Umm Kulthum along with found mannequin parts,...

Episode 21 meets Daisuke Miyatsu, a collector based in Japan, who has amassed an enviable art collection famously on his modest salary. Working in advertising by day and as a hotel receptionist at night, he has made art his life, collecting widely and inventively since the early 1990s. His collection is founded on the close relationships he’s built with artists and has been shared with public exhibitions at institutions including the Kasama Nichido Museum of Art and Tokyo Opera City Art...

teamLab, an international art collective, are world renowned for creating immersive environments through digital technology. Exploring the intersection of art, technology, science and natural worlds, in Hiroshima they’ve created an interactive ‘Future Park’ where audiences are encouraged to co-create and make drawings that are transformed into installations.  In Sao Paulo, they’ve filled rooms with eternal cycles of budding and blossoming flowers. Last year teamLab made their scenographic...

Episode 19 visits Japan and speaks with Mami Kataoka, director of Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum, a space dedicated to contemporary art and architecture. Part of the founding team, Mami has earned international renown for her curatorial approach, teaching and writing. She’s been consistently listed in ArtReview’s Power 100 and was the first Asian curator to direct Sydney’s Biennale in 2018. Last year saw her open the Aichi Triennale, one of Japan’s largest international art events. Mami joined me...

Episode 18 meets Natasha Marie Llorens, an academic and curator focused on North African and Middle Eastern contemporary art and film. She has written for numerous publications including ArtReview, ArtForum and Frieze. In 2019, Llorens opened a significant group exhibition at Columbia University’s Wallach Art Gallery that addressed contemporary art from Algeria and its diaspora. The exhibition has since seen iterations at the Friche la Belle de Mai in Marseille and will soon open in Grenoble....

Episode 17 features artist Massinissa Selmani. He is known for his seemingly irreverent pencil drawings and animations that converge documentary and fiction, often starting with a press cutting taken from his long standing personal archive. Massinissa leaves his figures and objects stranded in large areas of white space as an invitation for the viewer to fill in the gaps and consider how the circulation of media images affect our perception of events. Massinissa’s work has been shown...

Episode 16 visits Algeria to speak with Myriam Amroun and Khaled Bouzidi who established rhizome, an arts organisation in 2017. Their model has developed and now, with a space in a Haussmannian apartment block in downtown Algiers, they combine being both a commercial gallery and independent art entity. Rhizome’s programming focuses on supporting artists in Algeria and its diaspora with emphasis on intergenerational exchange. They’ve had a busy year showing at Art Dubai, Liste Art Fair Basel...

Episode 15 visits Dubai to meet Vilma Jurkute, the executive director of Alserkal Initiatives, a Dubai-based arts and culture enterprise that comprises the cultural district Alserkal Avenue, Alserkal Advisory, and Alserkal Arts Foundation. First founded in 2007 by patron and businessman Abdelmonem Bin Eisa Alserkal, Vilma joined the team in 2012 and has driven both the organisation’s physical expansion and the breadth of its programming. From supporting research and scholarship to...

Artist Maitha Abdalla is a consummate storyteller. Inspired by theatre, folklore, tradition and ritual, her multidisciplinary practice is underpinned by her fictional writing. Paintings, typically worked on with her fingers, feature fantastical creatures and figures often angst ridden and vulnerable. Maitha studied at the Zayed University in Abu Dhabi after which she came together with fellow artists to establish an artist-run studio and exhibition space called BAIT 15. Since then she has...

Art Worlds is back!  The second series starts in the United Arab Emirates with Maya Allison, the founding executive director of The NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery and chief curator at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD). Integrated within the NYU campus, the gallery has at its forefront an educational mission to expand scholarship of the area’s long tradition of artistic practice.  As part of this remit, Allison has delved into the art communities that pre-date the international focus on the...

Art Worlds meets Adeline Gregoire, an artist and curator who co-founded CultureGo, a platform dedicated to showcasing art and design from Trinidad & Tobago. She’s made it her mission to amplify the work of Trinbagonian creatives and over the last year has been developing Hot Sun, an online community of Caribbean contemporary artists. On the website you’ll find artworks, recorded talks and articles. She talks about Hot Sun's inception and how she's energised by T&T's artists. See...

Christopher Cozier, one of Trinidad and Tobago’s leading artists, speaks to Art Worlds. His practice is grounded in the island’s post independence conditions. This context provides an entry point to exposing wider cultural shifts, historical erasures and international economic policies that have affected the broader Caribbean region. Aside from his artwork, which has been shown most recently at Liverpool Biennale and Sharjah Biennale, Christopher also writes, teaches and co-founded Alice...

In Episode 10, Art Worlds visits Trinidad and Tobago and speaks with Nimah Muwakil-Zakuri, curator of the the Central Bank of Trinidad and Tobago's Money Museum and Art Collection. The collection was the vision of the island country's artists and now includes over 200 works of art brought together since 1965. It is an unparalleled collection. From her office in Port of Spain, the country's capital, Nimah discusses the array of art works including those by pioneering artist Sybil Atteck. See...

Art Worlds speaks with ruangrupa, a collective founded in 2000 and based in the south of Indonesia’s capital Jakarta, who along with two other collectives, Serrum and Grafis Huru Hara, have formed Gudskul, a public learning space and educational platform. They see the project as an ecosystem and founded on the idea of collectivism, all resources are pooled and shared. This includes equipment, money and books. From their vast warehouse complex, ruangrupa’s Farhid Rakun, an architect and...

Aaron Seeto, the director of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Nusantara (Museum Macan) talks to Art Worlds about this ambitious private initiative. Masterminded by businessman and major art collector Haryanto Adikoesoemo, Museum Macan opened in 2017 in Jakarta. It’s Adikoesoemo's collection of around 800 works, built over two decades, that forms the museum’s holdings. As the first institution of its kind in Indonesia, there's been a lot of planning around cultivating a local...

Tromarama—a collective composed of Febie Babyrose, Herbert Hans and Ruddy Hatumena—speak to Art Worlds from their studios in Bandung and Jakarta, Indonesia. They first came together to produce a music video for a local rock band that ended up as a stop motion animation film comprising hundreds of woodcut boards and was simultaneously displayed as an installation. They’ve gone on to continue working with video, sculptural forms and digital technologies in inventive and humorous ways, showing...