POLLINATION ed. 2

Curators 

Khatijah Rahmat (Berlin) 

Khatijah (Kat) Rahmat is a scholar in animal studies with a background in visual arts and cross-sector communications. Her academic work examines the tension between human imaginaries of time and the temporal possibilities within animal lifeworlds, with a particular focus on elephants as historical and vocal subjects. She holds a PhD in Geography from the University of Oxford (2025), an MFA from the Ruskin School of Art, and an MA in Philosophy and Politics from the University of Edinburgh. Currently based at the MPIWG, her research asks whether bioacoustics can serve as testimonial record — and the foundation for a history of elephants through sound. She is co-editor of Composing Worlds with Elephants (IRD Éditions, 2023). Before transitioning to academia, Kat worked across the arts sector as both a curator and practicing artist, her practice animated by questions of inheritance, haunting, and the unseen languages through which trauma passes between generations.

Lê Thuận Uyên (Hanoi)

Lê Thuận Uyên is a curator based in Hanoi. She is currently the Artistic director of The Outpost – a Hanoi-based organisation dedicated to the collection and presentation of contemporary art in Vietnam. Informed by her former training in political science, Uyên is interested in the psychological and tactile latency of alternative, micro narratives that are rendered absent, neglected by the mainstream record. Her curatorial practice is concerned with formal articulations that are rooted in the social context and aesthetic traditions of Vietnam. Uyên increasingly focuses on exploring modes of presentation that respond to the art historical gaps, absences, and memory. She often works with artists in close collaboration, seeking to stimulate critical, creative enquiries in the process. 

Her past curatorial projects include: A choreography in Resonance, Setouchi Triennale, 2025 (Kagawa Museum, Japan, 2025); Vietnam Pavilion, Gwangju Biennale 15 (Gwangju, Korea, 2024); Nostalgia for the Future, Hanoi Festival of Creative and Design 2024 (Hanoi Children’s Palace, 2024); Peculiar Interfaces (The Outpost, Hanoi, 2023); And they die another death (Nguyen Trinh Thi for Documenta fifteen, 2022); Domestic Bliss (Ilham Gallery, KL, 2019); Gang of Five Chancing Modern (Hanoi, 2017).

Artists

Izat Arif (Kuala Lumpur)

Izat Arif (b. 1986, Kuala Lumpur) is an artist whose works range from drawings and installations to videos and objects.In Izat’s work, power structures are given their own personal identities, with him cheekily role-playing the characters of some of our puppet masters in property development, bureaucracy, and art criticism. Recent exhibitions include The Plantation Plot, KADIST & ILHAM Gallery, Kuala Lumpur and Pure Intentions, Singapore Biennale. He also has exhibited at A+ Works of Art, Kuala Lumpur; NTU CCA, Singapore; ArtJog, Jogjakarta; Domestic Bliss The Factory and Ilham Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, and other sites. Izat was a recipient of the Leipzig International Artist Programme, Leipzig, Germany in 2024 and the ACME-Khazanah Artist Residency in London in 2022.

Hoàng Minh Đức (Melbourne)

Hoàng Minh Đức is a visual artist who currently lives in Melbourne, Australia. He graduated from the Vietnam University of Fine Art in 2008. The primary language of his practice is performance, whereby the artist uses local objects referencing his personal upbringing as props to engage in durational, repetitive and at times nonsensical works, in order to reference social issues or concerns. 

Hoàng Minh Đức participated in various exhibition and performance art festivals including B19.05 at MoTplus (2018), Sounds of dust (somniloquy) at 943 Studio Kunming (2011), “IN:ACT” international performance art festival (2010), “Longan” at Nhà Sàn Studio (2009).

Curatorial Advisors 

Zoe Butt (Chiang Mai)

Zoe Butt is a curator, writer and educator focusing on critically thinking and historically conscious artistic communities, fostering dialogue among cultures of the globalizing souths. In 2022, she founded ‘in-tangible institute’, a curatorial platform nurturing locally responsive infrastructure for the arts across Southeast Asia. In 2025, she was appointed Artistic Director of ‘deCentral’, a forthcoming social enterprise for the arts, opening in Thailand in 2027. You can read more about her here.

Rahel Joseph (Kuala Lumpur)

Rahel Joseph is Gallery Director of ILHAM. She has over 20 years’ experience working in arts and culture, specifically in developing infrastructures and capacity building. As Gallery Director of ILHAM (www.ilhamgallery.com), a position she has held since ILHAM’s inception, she is responsible for the gallery’s overall strategic direction and curatorial programming. She has co-curated various exhibitions for ILHAM, most recently Boom Boom Bang: Play & Parody in 90s K.L. (2023) and Nirmala Dutt: Statements (2022). She has written extensively for print, media, and the stage. She wrote a regular column at both the New Straits Times and The Nut

Graph and is co-editor of Narratives in Malaysian Art Volume 3: Infrastructures (ed. Rogue Art).

Sponsors and Institutional Partners

POLLINATION ed. 2 was initiated and co-organized by The Factory Contemporary Arts Centre and co-organized and co-sponsored by ILHAM Gallery. With support from CENDANA (Cultural Economy Development Agency).