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72 and miniaturist Shahzia Sikander; Antonia Carver, Director of new Dubai arts centre Art Jameel; and Dr. Apinan Poshyananda, Chief Executive and Artistic Director of the Bangkok Art Biennale. For Ms Nanibush, a member of the Anishinaabe First Nation, her indigenous sense of spirituality and temporality afford a profoundly different perspective on time, history, museums and curating. “I start from thinking of the future, and from the edges of things, always the marginal, the oppressed, the excluded,” Ms Nanibush explained. “If you sit inside there and make that the centre then you are thinking from a future, maybe beyond colonialism.” Whenever a chronology is made, she continued, “it always centres on another nation’s history, or a global history that still centres western Modernism.” Different traditions, spirituality and the tensions that can arise from these have long played a key role in the thinking of Dr Poshyananda, a Thai artist and curator. “We’re still struggling with the straightjacketing and pigeonholing of what I call the ‘pale white’ discourse of curatorship,” he said, reflecting on his experience of mounting the exhibition ‘Traditions/Tensions’ in New York in 1996. “People couldn’t understand why these artists were showing in New York,” he said. “Names became problematic, even writing them, pronouncing them, let alone trying to understand \[the artist’s\] faith or belief.” Dr Poshyananda credited the biennales that emerged in Australia and Japan in the 1990s for providing contemporary Asian artists with the space to work and exhibit, and also in helping to establish alternative chronologies that have only more recently been engaged with in the West. “Everyone who has come from abroad may understand that the UAE is incredibly focused on the future,” Ms Carver explained. “So we have a choice about what we want to inherit and what we choose to inherit from