At the Brentwood Arts Exchange at the Gateway Arts Center in Brentwood, Maryland—less than a mile from the United State’s capital—the sounds of Katakhali, a small community on Barobaishdia Island in South-western Bangladesh, can be heard. Following the sounds, and turning a corner, one is led to Bangladeshi-American artist-activist, Monica Jahan Bose’s exhibition “Layer By Layer: Storytelling with Saris,” which is part of an ongoing conversation about literacy and eco-empowerment for the women of her home village of Katakhali.

“What’s left of the Left in Italy?” This question led Emily Jacir through archives in Italy, where she discovered little-seen films made in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle.

A mask can serve many purposes—disguise, restraint, identity, totem—but in the hands of Indonesian artist Eko Nugroho, it becomes something more: a wry avatar of the artist’s private mythos and an insightful rejoinder to sociopolitical absurdity. Since the 1990s, he has parodied the political issues that emerged following the collapse of the Suharto regime. Nugroho’s solo exhibit at Singapore Tyler Print Institute, “We Are What We Mask,” includes over 70 handmade paper works, all produced during the artist’s six-week residency, including some 20 mask-based incarnations of outrage and dissent.

More than 28,000 visitors flocked to the inaugural Sydney Contemporary art fair at Carriageworks, an inner-city art space housed in a historic warehouse. On the opening night alone, 14,000 crowded into venue, causing acute crowd-control problems and nearly exceeding the overall number of visitors projected to visit the harbor city’s first major international art fair.

Hong Kong streets have a deafening chatter, of the visual kind. Every night, the ICC Tower projects an LED light show in Central and down in the urban canopy hundreds of neon signs chart the alleys. “Visual culture is a fuzzily defined thing. But one can say for sure that neon signs are a very important part” said curator Aric Chen recently after an infamous Sai Ying Pun eatery sign was deemed illegal and subsequently claimed as an objet d’art in M+ Museum for Visual Culture’s permanent collection.

The New York-based artist Patty Chang has been making daring forays in performance art since the late 1990s. She once captivated viewers onscreen, appearing to be somewhere between throws of ecstasy and pain—but irreducible to neither—later attributing this to the live eels that filled her blouse and wriggled uncontrollably against her skin. In another work, Chang came uncomfortably close to incest by making chewing movements against the lips of her own parents which, at first glance, looked like awkward make-out sessions. Teetering precariously between humor and embarrassment, Chang’s early works push the body to its limits, alluding to the fluidity of identity by confounding any attempt at characterization. 

The works of Iranian performance artist Ghazel can best be characterized by her dry humor. From very early on, she has insouciantly focused on the depiction of Iranian women both in Iran and abroad—her approach to this contested discourse revealing intricacies and tensions surrounding the themes she chooses to engage with.

With a reputation for being less than accommodating to notions of free speech – approaching, at times, a caricature of regimented utilitarianism – Singapore is perhaps not the first place one would look to when seeking an open dialogue. “Between Conversations,” curated by Louis Ho at Yavuz Fine Art—which features the work of 20 Singaporean artists variously engaging the subject of conversational process—therefore acquires greater significance as a timely exploration advocating speaking with one another rather than speaking to.

If you haven’t been to Istanbul in a while—or even just in the past two years—it might not be quite the city you remember. The Gezi Park protest movement that began in May, and the subsequent social unrest across Turkey, followed a decade of economic growth and massive urban transformation. The demonstrations prevented the construction of an Ottoman-style shopping mall in place of the park (at least for now) but the city will proceed with its plans to demolish poorer neighborhoods, relocating their communities to peripheral high-rises. Vast infrastructure projects that threaten the city’s ecology—including a third Bosporus bridge, the world’s largest airport and a new canal—are also in the works

Photos by Yuanyuan Yang for Untitled Selection, a bi-weekly post of photography from ArtAsiaPacific’s areas of coverage. Created by photo editor, Ann Woo.