The Asian Contemporary Art Week San Francisco (ACAW-SF) features 27 programs—from exhibitions to screenings, conferences, talks, and performances at numerous venues across the Bay Area. ACAW-SF 2013 celebrates the dynamics of Asian contemporary art practices.

This year’s highlight programs focus on specific locations in Asia. The intent is to contribute to ongoing reexaminations of cultural and historical specificity when positioning Asia in relation to the San Francisco Bay Area and the global context. This idea is exemplified by the daylong presentation-conversation In Dialogue: Drop a Pin, which draws attention to four distinct places: Hong Kong, Zhejiang, Kabul, and the fictional Xijing. The program foregrounds alternative narratives and proposes new associations and connections among different sites in Asia and the world at large.

Another new initiative that launches in the context of ACAW-SF 2013 is Alter-Circuit, a long-term collaboration with Et. al., a project-based gallery in San Francisco. Alter-Circuit focuses on diasporic practices, particularly those coming into conflict and contact with Asia, where context and identity are always in a state of becoming. Alter-Circuit draws paths into and out of one individual artist’s practice through durational endeavors that last for more than six months and are composed of exhibitions, events, research, writing, publishing, blogging, and more. The Berlin-based artist Virlani Hallberg will inaugurate Alter-Circuit.

Other highlight programmes include Visions of Urban Change in China: A Conversation with Daniel Brook and Hu Fang at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, History of Histories: 50 Years of Afghan Films at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts (guest programmed by Mariam Ghani and Leeza Ahmady), and Yanagi Sōetsu Comes Here, Without Invitation at the Kadist Art Foundation.

http://www.asiancontemporarysf.org/acaw/