The Unstable Institution

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Update on 3 November 2025

The Building a 'non-institution' institution publication is now available for purchase here!

The Unstable Institution is an online series of visual and written research fragments that document Shooshie Sulaiman's Fellowship from the curators' point of view. Posted to Samplings, the series draws from the experiences of working closely with Shooshie to consider how we document, archive, and make connections between fragmented ideas and lived experiences. Each post explores a different aspect of Shooshie's mode of working to interrogate ways to build alternative curatorial frameworks centred around process-driven modes of thinking and artmaking.

The Unstable Institution is a part of "Building a 'non-institution' institution" with Shooshie Sulaiman. A process-centred Fellowship that follows Shooshie’s intention to house a second iteration of an earlier work, Emotional Library (2007), in a shophouse based in Malacca. Shooshie’s artistic practice has never shied away from embracing the personal, intuitive and emotive. All of which Emotional Library (2007) exemplifies as the entry point to this Fellowship.

With this philosophy in mind, the Fellowship works towards developing Tadika Kura-kura (The Kindergarten of Slow Curating), a "curatorial software" grounded in generating and refining new knowledge systems, while building networks that expand the peripheries of artmaking through community and kinships that extend beyond the human. Working with the artist, Tadika Kura-kura serves as the prelude to how a new landscape may be realised. Using Tadika Kura-kura as a ‘curatorial software’, the Fellowship follows the artist’s construction of Emotional Library (A House), other related sites in Japan and Sulawesi as well as creative centers that not only engage with Shooshie’s practice but considers the public’s encounter with contemporary art. Through a series of curatorial labs and programmes in both SAM and sites in Malaysia, the Fellowship’s underlying ethos is guided by incubating alternative curatorial models outside the museum while building critical museology around Shooshie’s practice.

Introduced in 2021, SAM Fellowship is designed to support deep, open-ended inquiry by developing artistic practices with a intensive curatorial engagement over an extended period. "Building a 'non-institution' institution" with Shooshie Sulaiman is the third artist in the programme, following the inaugural Fellowship, The Sea Is a Field, by Charles Lim and Simryn Gill.

More information about Shooshie Sulaiman’s Fellowship and its associated programmes can be found on SAM’s website here.

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