Sineenart Meena (Mina) is an emerging Thai curator who recently completed the Masters of Curating and Cultural Leadership at UNSW Art & Design. She graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Art in Jewellery Design at Srinakharinwirot University, Bangkok, Thailand and is accomplished as a jewellery designer as well as working on her own business. As a curator practising within the gallery and independently she focuses on creating opportunities, contexts and expanding engagement with contemporary art for cultural exchange across Asia-Pacific region. Her curatorial work examines the complexity within Asian voices, emphasising histories and diasporic experiences to questions representation of Asian identities and lived experiences. During study, she worked as an intern at 16albermarle Project Space (presenting contemporary art in Southeast Asia), where she has developed her curatorial skills and knowledge. In 2021 she was selected to curate the first show under the emerging curator program at Firstdraft, Sydney, and also committed a range of proposals across Australia and Thailand. Recently, Mina has been undertaking volunteer work as a curator assistant at 16albermarle Project Space, Newtown.

TRAVERSED DIFFERENCES 2.0

Traversed Differences 2.0 is an ongoing exhibition that explores the way we can express and represent identity, spirituality, as humans irrespective of cultural differences. The project presents the voices of four emerging women artists, selected for how they explore their identity and the representation of self through their shared perspective as artists of mixed Asian heritage living in Australia. Through reading text, video performance, portraiture, sculpture and representation, they focus on the body as a contested site to consider alternative ways of thinking about self-representation, personal history and cultural hybridity.

Throughout the online and offline space, I propose a range of works focusing on its intimation with audiences. The works focus on the body. Lisa's performative drawings using both hands simultaneously, exploring the duality of her Korean - Australian identity. Natalie's video performances and often abject installations involve material experimentation generated from bodily memories discovered on the skin manifests the notion of cleaning to subsume the warfare of cultural erasure and assimilation in both her native Hong Kong and Australia. Tanaporn's enticing drawing of hair explores ideas of origins connected to her Thai heritage and the exoticisation of the Asian body. The drawing presents her story as a vector for reconnection in a post-migratory context. Jana's portraiture paintings overlay and multiply the image of the self to speak of the complexity of the idea of 'origins'. Her works use vibrant traditional Filipino colours in her layered painting.