MAP Arts Festival

MAP is opening its doors on the 27th of March 2010 with a 2-day arts festival. Activities include music, art, sculpture, performances, installations, talks, workshops and art markets alongside social and individual empowerment activities. The festival will introduce MAP’s two spaces: a 6,000 sq ft gallery and a 200-seater experimental theatre named the White Box and Black Box respectively.

In the works is an exciting program of community oriented activities that encompasses the widest possible diversity of creative content. MAP will provide opportunities for arts and cultural producers from multidisciplinary backgrounds. As a meeting point between artists, curators, critics and the public, it will serve as a catalyst for the exchange and exploration of contemporary ideas.

Lostgens’ collective is committed to spaces that are critical and accessible to people regardless of social status. With numerous art collectives and spaces mushrooming in the Kuala Lumpur art scene, we align ourselves with progressive art spaces such as Central Market Annexe Gallery, FINDARS, SICKL and NGOs KBU, formerly Universiti Bangsar Utama.

OPEN – an installation artwork by Lostgens’ collective

Participating in this opening show Map Arts Festival , we aim to create a dialogue between Lostgens’ artist-run space with newly opened MAP Publika Gallery. This newly open gallery located in a bourgeois neighbourhood is inaccessible to public transport. Our artwork – Open proposes that this new gallery maintain an open and welcoming attitude both in discourse and audience. Interpreting the piece’s concept of openness (开), curators Simon Soon and Eva McGovern proposed the Artists Statement of this piece to be rewritten by the audience. However, we at Lostgens’ decide to maintain the original statement to focus on the artwork and the gallery space. Perhaps this is a degree to what openness can mean.