Hosted by Steven Henry Madoff, Founding Chair of the MA Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
The Curatorial Roundtable, an international forum for curators and institutional leaders to discuss formative and current projects, is hosted by Steven Henry Madoff, Founding Chair of the MA Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
Jo-Lene Ong is Curator of Buro Stedelijk, the independently managed, multidisciplinary experimental platform situated within the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Her curatorial practice centers on collaboration, research, and long-term projects that reconsider how institutions work with artists and publics. She develops programs emphasizing shared authorship, sustained dialogue, and public engagement, while drawing upon counter-colonial ways of sensing, remembering, and organizing. She began her three-year appointment at Buro Stedelijk in March 2026. Previously, Ong was Curator at esea contemporary in Manchester and Program Advisor for the 12th Seoul Mediacity Biennale. Her exhibitions and projects have been presented at institutions including Framer Framed, Kunstinstituut Melly, ILHAM Gallery, the National Art Center Tokyo, and the Mori Art Museum. Her practice frequently engages counter-colonial worldviews, speculative histories, ecological questions, and aesthetic strategies of resistance.
For this session of the Curatorial Roundtable, she will speak about two projects: The development of the three-year curatorial framework for Buro Stedelijk, an independently curated and managed project space inside the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. which acts as an interface between artistic developments in the city and the museum: connecting communities, bridging generations, and bringing the freshest ideas emerging around the museum into the space. Ong will follow this by delving into CounterArchive (2022 - present), a project she initiated that experiments with collective filmmaking as a way of countering the omissions and constructed fictions of colonial archives.