lumbung calling: Humor by Jumana Emil Abboud, Sourabh Phadke

The seven-part conversation series lumbung calling launches documenta fifteen’s Public Program, activated under the title Meydan. Each edition of the series is dedicated to one of the lumbung values: Local Anchor, Humor, Generosity, Independence, Transparency, Sufficiency, and Regeneration. The format dives deeper into the background of the artistic concept for documenta fifteen and illuminates the idea of lumbung from many different angles. Through conversations with a variety of guests, lumbung calling will explore the rich meaning of lumbung across multiple disciplines, points of view, and contexts within an artistic framing.

lumbung calling takes place on the first Saturday of every month over seven sessions, from April to October 2021. It is hosted by the artist Jumana Emil Abboud and ruangrupa member Mirwan Andan.

The second edition of lumbung calling focuses on the lumbung value of Humor. Often taken for granted, and therefore overlooked, humor is inherently strategic. It can even be turned into a method, a mechanism, a lifeline to survival—whether as a self-defense tool or a powerful weapon. Humor allows us to laugh; it also allows us to release tension and make our lives bearable. It enables us to forget, albeit for a fleeting moment, so we can move on, live on. It helps us to render the hopeless hopeful. Perhaps humor is an element that makes us different from automatons and machines?

Humor allows to connect the dots, neglecting our individual self-centered existence in favor of collective, shared and intertwined dynamics. In this edition, the curator Gridthiya Gaweewong and architect and schoolteacher Sourabh Phadke will share what humor represents to them and how they incorporate it into their social lives and artistic practices. By joining them, we can hopefully share a laugh or two together.

Guests

Gridthiya Gaweewong co-founded the Bangkok-based independent art organization Project 304 in 1996. Gaweewong lives and works in Chiang Mai and Bangkok and is Artistic Director of the Jim Thompson Art Center, Bangkok. She co-curated Politics of Fun, an exhibition of artists from Southeast Asia, with Ong Keng Sen at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2005). Gaweewong was part of the curatorial team for Imagined Borders, the 12th Gwangju Biennale (2018). She is currently preparing an exhibition entitled Errata, Collecting Entanglements and Embodied Histories at MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum, Chiang Mai, initiated by the Goethe-Institut Jakarta in partnership with Singapore Art Museum, National Gallery, Jakarta, and Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2021–22).

Sourabh Phadke is a mason and architect from India, designing and building with earth and allied traditional materials, and a schoolteacher, teaching science and social studies to children. He works with communities on aspects of building crafts, sustainable sanitation, appropriate technologies, and design. Phadke is editor of illustrated booklets, such as Make your own: Encaustic Tiles or How to Make Chappals. Multivitamin Supplement for Soleful Peeps, in which he humorously addresses everyday situations.

Hosts

Jumana Emil Abboud’s creative interests lie in oral histories, personal and collective stories, and mythologies, particularly folk tales and their sites of being and unbeing. Abboud uses storytelling, performative elements, and workshop methodologies in her artistic practice to investigate our relationship to time and place, to the human and non-human, exploring tools of memory, attachment, and dispossession amid the challenge for continuity within political, ecological, and cultural struggles. Her work has been shown at The Jerusalem Show (2018); BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (2016); Sharjah Biennale (2017); Biennale di Venezia (2015); and Istanbul Biennale (2009), among many others. She has participated in art residencies, including Sakiya – Art/Science/Agriculture, Ramallah; Delfina Foundation, London; Arts Initiative Tokyo; and Gästeatelier Krone, Aarau. Abboud is currently pursuing a practice-led PhD at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London.

Mirwan Andan is a member of ruangrupa, Artistic Direction of documenta fifteen.

Directions