This presentation by Silke Schmickl, titled ‘Redefining the Role of Art Institutions’, evaluates the role of the National Gallery of Singapore in researching, presenting and conserving the world’s largest collection of South East Asian, modern and contemporary art.

The talk presents research published in an essay of the same title that was commissioned for the March Meeting Papers. Selected through the March Meeting 2021 open call, the essays included in the March Meeting Papers expand on curator Okwui Enwezor’s influential thinking about the Biennial as a platform to engage with history, politics and society. Taken together, these essays reveal the extent to which the biennial model, such as the Sharjah Biennial, has contributed to the realisation of new narratives and experiences of modern and contemporary art.