"In this talk, curator and art historian Amanda Pinatih reflects on her practice at the intersection of contemporary art and design, exploring how museums can move beyond fixed categories toward more fluid, relational approaches. Drawing on her work with the Stedelijk Museum’s collection, she introduces the concept of “in-betweenness” as a lens to understand artistic practices shaped by migration, hybridity, and layered identities.
Through case studies of contemporary artists, the talk examines how artworks can resist classification and instead function as nodes within a broader network of cultural, social, and historical contexts. It also addresses the tensions between contextualizing art and avoiding the pitfalls of essentializing identity. Ultimately, the lecture asks what it means to curate, collect, and exhibit from an in-between perspective, and what a museum might look like if it fully embraced multiplicity, movement, and transformation as its guiding principles.
Amanda Pinatih is an art historian, (independent) curator and PhD candidate. As Curator at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, she brings new perspectives to the museum’s vast collection. Her experimental working method is driven by a deep interest in developing new formats for knowledge transfer, while her exhibitions and projects explore the intersections of social, political, (de)colonial, environmental and economic issues. Recent exhibitions are: Unravel – The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art and Formafantasma – Oltre Terra. Last, she also served as the Curator of the Dutch Pavilion for the Venice Architecture Biennale with the exhibition SIDELINED: A Space to Rethink Togetherness."