Binna Choi

Binna Choi is a South Korean curator whose practice interconnect art, the curatorial, and the (sovereign) commons based on politics of decolonisation, indigenous practice and epistemology, and institutional change with unlearning. She directed Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons in the Utrecht, the Netherlands over a decade where she curated projects such as Grand Domestic Revolution (2009–2012 with Maiko Tanaka and Yolande van der Heide), Site for Unlearning (Art Organization) (2014–2018 with Annette Krauss and the evolving Casco Team), Travelling Farm Museum of Forgotten Skills (2018–2022 with The Outsiders), next to a number of individual commissions and experimental collective works. Together with You Mi, she also maintains a study platform Unmapping Eurasia. Besides, Choi also served as a curator/co/artistic director for biennials such as the 2025 Hawai‘i Triennial, the 2022 Singapore Biennale, and the 2016 Gwangju Biennale. For the 2026 Venice Biennale, she curates the Korean Pavilion. In the context of pedagogy, she served as the faculty for Dutch Art Institute over a decade and the guest professor for the Gwangju Biennial International Curator Course 2025. Since 2024, Choi also works as the supervisor for Doosan Curator Workshop.

“No Hea Mai ʻOe?” (Where are you from?)
– Curatorial Position, Protocol and Dilemma

“No Hea Mai ʻOe?”, meaning where are you from, it’s a question often asked to strangers in a gathering in Hawaii. Distinct from the question of “who are you?,” which is centered on an individual identity, “where are you from?” instead asks you to address genealogy and familial connection and it “serves as a feeler seeking to identify any possible relations between a kupa o ka ʻaina (native born) and a malihini (newcomer, stranger).” (Hawai‘i Triennial 2022 catalogue). I started applying this question to the Doosan Curatorial Workshop in Seoul, which I have been supervising since 2024 in middle of my work for Hawai‘i Triennial 2025. While the question functions as a protocol in the Indigenous Hawaiian context, it’s also helping curators to find out their own curatorial inquiry, learning and unlearning as a pathway, embedded in life practice as intertwined with art. Furthermore it helps to recognize the singularity of each own inquiry as much as the relationality. The latter aspect seems to be relevant especially for the accelerationist and competitive culture of the curatorial, enabling to position oneself with truth speaking and responsibility, away from pseudo professionalism. I will share my own answer to this question, touching upon my pathway from “working on/for the commons” with an art organization to a series of biennales that I have been engaging with for the last decade. The talk of this journey will be punctuated by a set of curatorial dilemma, another curatorial exercises I have been rehearsing.

Business not-as-usual? : An art startup exercise beyond profit versus free

The field of art, unlike other fields, operates largely through a binary system of the private and the public. On the one hand, there are galleries, fairs, consulting firms, individual art advisors, and private foundations. On the other, there are public institutions of different scales, governed by public authorities, such as museums, art centers, and public agencies. Overwhelming and often stifling, these existing models do not always seem particularly life-affirming.
One might then ask: is there nothing in between? There are, of course, familiar models of small, independent initiatives, often taking the form of independent art spaces or bookstores.

I would like to propose that we imagine something else within this in-between space: entrepreneurial platforms that are run by and for the commons, operating according to the logic of the commons.

By “the commons,” I want to emphasize collective re/sourcing—which includes production without extraction and circularity rather than focusing primarily on re/distribution—alongside a shared ethics of relationality and difference, without reducing these to horizontalist politics, and a shared vision of ways of living.

The questions to be asked include: What is lacking, marginalized, or needed in our field of art? What values do these things create? How can they be used and maintained? What mechanisms, systems, and cultures can facilitate their use and maintenance? How might we work with or without the existing private and public sectors? What kind of economy, governance, and cultural practices might support this?

A warning: Please know that I am not experienced in this. I am proposing this out of a huge thirst for it, and from a conviction that we need it, alongside some knowledge of people who are already modeling alternative ways of working. With this in mind, I am proposing a workshop to imagine a start-up art company by and for the commons.
While I will prepare a participatory method, I ask you to come and join me with your imagination: to imagine running a company together, drawing from your most satisfying and dissatisfying experiences of art and life that have led you to this workshop and its questions.

Please feel free to bring any references, examples, or other materials that you find helpful.