Jo-Lene Ong is a Malaysian curator working across Asia and Europe. Her practice engages with counter-colonial worldviews and aesthetic strategies. Currently she is Curator of esea contemporary, the UK’s only non-profit art centre dedicated to East and Southeast Asian contemporary art. She was Program Advisor for THIS TOO, IS A MAP 12th Seoul Mediacity Biennale (2023)

Previous curatorial roles include Hartwig Production | Collection Grant; Beautiful Soup online exhibition (2022); Other Futures Festival Amsterdam (2020);Elsewheres Within Here (2019), Framer Framed Amsterdam; SUNSHOWER: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia 1980s to Now (2017) National Art Center Tokyo and Mori Art Museum. Jo-Lene initiated CounterArchive in 2024, a recurring program proposing alternatives to the record of official history.

COMING SOON
I’ll be convening with Alia Swastika, a Curatorial Exchange: Unpacking Infrastructures of Sharjah Biennale 16 APRIL ACTS 18-20 April

Contributed an essay Awakening Shimmering Circuits: plural technological worlds by asian artists to soon to be printed annual MMCA Residency catalogue.

RECENT
Review: Moe Satt, Rest the Thumbs on the Cheekbones, Delfina Foundation
for Art Review Oxford, Issue 10.

Steph Huang: There is nothing old under the sun
Limited publication out now!

CounterArchive: Sharing & Screening
Gasworks, London 13 Dec, 13:00

Awakening Shimmering Circuits

  • 2025
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  • Curatorial, Writing & Editorial

This research explores how Asian artists are reimagining technology through the lens of technodiversity, challenging dominant Western narratives of progress and modernity. Engaging with indigenous knowledge, non-linear temporalities, digital embodiment, and spiritual cosmologies, artists like Natasha Tontey, Kent Chan, Charmaine Poh, and Im Youngzoo propose multiple technological futures that are locally rooted, historically entailed, and speculative in nature. Through their works, technology is not merely mechanical tools of efficiency and control but a space of care, resistance, and interconnectedness–revealing pathways to futures beyond colonial and capitalist paradigms.

Demilitarised Goddesses 비무장 여신

  • 2024
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  • Curatorial, Public Programs & Education

The 12th Seoul Mediacity Biennale THIS TOO, IS A MAPDemilitarized Goddesses2023. 09. 23 In 2015, artist Youngjoo Cho created DMG: Demilitarized Goddesses, an ajumma dance-film project with DMZ tour guides. Here, the artist and two participants in the project return to discuss symbolic acts of healing and the intergenerational layerings of internal conflicts and external relationships […]

Domestic Resistance

  • 2023
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  • Curatorial, Public Programs & Education

Domestic Resistance is a two-part program forging alliances around domestic work and labour diasporas. The event brings artists, activists, and workers from East and Southeast Asia together in critical conversation, exchange, and communal activity.

Program Advisor, 12th Seoul Mediacity Biennale: THIS TOO, IS A MAP

  • 2023
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  • Curatorial, Public Programs & Education

I was invited by Artistic Director, Rachael Rakes to join the 12th Seoul Mediacity Biennale, THIS TOO, IS A MAP as a Program Advisor.

Still We Thrive

  • 2023
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  • Curatorial

A film program presenting different enactments of refuge and sanctuary through thinking communally, dancing collectively, dreaming with future ancestors, and staying slippery between categories. The programme is curated for Refuge: fleeing, flowing, leaking edition of the Studium Generale Gerrit Rietveld Academie.The selected shorts use various film techniques and narrative structures, alongside human and beyond-human actors. […]

Slippery Tongues Sliding Horizons

  • 2023
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  • Curatorial

part of 5 Inclusion Tactics for 7 Curatorsat beautifulsoup.org / De Appel, Amsterdam / LAB111, Amsterdam An exhibition on the experiences of navigating multiple languages and existing between fixed categories. Bringing together works that perform a poetry of inclusion—gestures of opening up singular narratives and attending to porous boundaries—by Sung Hwan Kim (in musical collaboration […]

Other Futures Festival 2021

  • 2022
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  • Curatorial

Other Futures is a multidisciplinary festival and exhibition that presents speculative visions of the future. The visual art exhibition Spectres from Beyond featured Jason Wee (SG),Natasha Tontey (ID), Bie Michels (BE), and new commissions from Mehraneh Atashi (IR/NL) and Müge Yilmaz (TR/NL). Natasha Tontey, The Epoch of Mapalucene Indigenous Knowledge and Non-Modern Aesthetics In The […]

Warm Fronts by Kent Chan

  • 2021
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  • Curatorial

Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam Curated by Rosa de Graaf (Melly) and Jo-Lene Ong (HAF) Link to exhibition webpageLink to Hartwig Production | Collection Grant Technodiversity & Climate Temporalities What if global warming leads to a future where half the world’s population resides in tropical climates? Warm Fronts is a series of transmissions from across the tropics, […]

Untitled XXXI/I – babhi-manyɛp/ babhi-bawɛt, (mbaŋ) by Em’kal Eyongakpa

  • 2021
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  • Curatorial

Oude Kerk, Amsterdam Hartwig Art Foundation Oude Kerk Amsterdam

Zandra Rhodes’ Bedroom, Or A Room to Read Auden by Maria Pask

  • 2021
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  • Curatorial

Kunstinstituut Melly, RotterdamHartwig Art Foundation 2020-21

Hartwig Art Foundation

  • 2020-21
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  • Curatorial

Art Production | Collection Fund Special Project 2020-21 The Hartwig Art Production | Collection Fund was initiated in 2020 to support artists in the realisation of ambitious productions. Artworks acquired through the Fund will be donated to the Dutch state. They become an integral part of the national art collection (‘Rijkscollectie’), available for institutions in the Netherlands […]

Elsewheres Within Here

  • 2021
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  • Curatorial

Elsewheres Within Here, curated by Jo-Lene Ong, will be the first exhibition Framer Framed presents in its new location. After being in Amsterdam-Noord for five years, Framer Framed has recently moved to the former Oostergasfabriek in Amsterdam-Oost. Participating artistsMehraneh Atashi, Milena Bonilla, Irene de Craen, Rumiko Hagiwara, Aram Lee, Arvo Leo, Natasha Papadopoulou, Thomas Swinkels, Remco […]

Brace for Impact

  • 2020
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  • Curatorial

“Technology’s influence on our individual and collective bodies is not always apparently dramatic or immediately mobilising. Instead, in anticipating its potential dangers and misfortunes, we find that its impact often lies in the bracing itself.” Brace For Impact, the final project of the De Appel Curatorial Programme 2017-18, critically investigates the relationship between technology and affect. […]

Unpacking the 3Package Deal

  • 2020
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  • Curatorial

Een zeer intieme kennismaking met 15 jonge, talentvolle (internationale) kunstenaars. Presenteren zij hun eindpresentatie tijdens ‘Unpacking the 3Package Deal’. De editie 2019-20 en 2018-19 is samengesteld door curator Jo-Lene Ong. Betaalbare woon- en werkruimte en een individueel ontwikkelbudget bieden aan talenten, en begeleiding van een interessant en handig netwerk, bestaande uit 50 belangrijke Amsterdamse instellingen – dat is de 3PackageDeal. Dit succesvolle programma van het […]

SUNSHOWER: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia 1980s to Now

  • 2020
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  • Curatorial

The the largest-ever in scale, SUNSHOWER seeks to explore the many practices of contemporary art in Southeast Asia since 1980s. It aims to showcase its inconceivable dynamism of Southeast Asia that is somewhat nostalgic yet extraordinarily new. The “sunshower” – rain falling from clear skies – is an intriguing yet frequently-seen meteorological phenomenon in Southeast […]

My Story My Strength

  • 2020
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  • Curatorial

Women’s Centre for Change (WCC), Penang, Malaysia MediaThe Star: Survivors of violence tell their stories through artThe Star: Share your story via doodling

ILHAM CONTEMPORARY FORUM: Malaysia 2009-2017

  • 2020
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  • Curatorial

ILHAM CONTEMPORARY FORUM is an experimental programme that aims to explore what is currently happening in Malaysian arts and culture by inviting a range of professionals from various fields and positions, all younger than 39, to collaboratively curate an exhibition of recent artworks and cultural projects. ILHAM selected seven Project Curators, who in turn were tasked […]

Khabar dan Angin: Excursus on Faith in Kelantan

  • 2020
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  • Curatorial

An exhibition of artists’ field-notes from encounters with various faith communities across the Northeastern peninsular state straddling the Malaysia-Thai border. 8 artists and 2 curators went on field-trip to the largely rural Kelantan to engage in a circumstance whereby religious conviction pervades everyday life under the watchful moral investment of the state’s long ruling Islamic political party. […]

M_KNG SP_CE: We Are Where We Aren’t

  • 2020
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  • Curatorial

@wearewherewearent Okui Lala with Mostofa Kamal, As If Home, (2015)  Video 6.26min | Penang, MalaysiaAs If, Home explores the idea of home through the process of building a house. In this video, Mostofa, a skilled construction worker from Bangladesh, guides Okui, a local in building a model house together. “Whenever I look at a newly […]

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