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This curatorial essay discusses an experimental performance programme, Being Present, which included three works by three artists from the Asia-Art-Activism Research Network. The performances occurred as part of an exhibition, Speech Acts, held at the Manchester Art Gallery in 2018-2019, and in conjunction with a scholarly symposium titled "The LYC Museum & Art Gallery and the Museum as Practice". This essay reflects on the origins of the commission, the mission, and ethos of Asia-Art-Activism (AAA), and how each artist's bodily explorations of identity connected to Speech Acts, the wider theme of solidarity, and the significant yet somewhat forgotten contributions of diaspora and immigrant artists such as Li Yuan-chia in histories of British art. Finally, with reference to the virtual and digital after-archive, it discusses the implications of AAA artists extending their performances as interventions on the digital platform of British Art Studies.

In many Southeast Asian languages, as in English, the terms used in discussions of modern art-such as nghệ sĩ, a Vietnamese word for "artist", or silpa, a Khmer word for "art"-can refer both to visual arts such as painting and sculpture, and also to performing arts such as dance, music and sculpture. Moreover, the terms used when discussing contemporary art-such as khit pyaing, a Burmese word for "contemporary", or seni kontemporari and seni kontemporer, Malay and Indonesian words for "contemporary art"-often connote artists' embracing of "alternative idioms" including performance art. 1 These linguistic accommodations make clear the proximity between the visual and the performative in Southeast Asia's modern and contemporary art worlds. Built into the very words used to discuss art in the region are the conditions of possibility for slippery, inter-animating and transmedial exchanges between visuality and performativity.Yet performativity has been substantially less well studied than other artistic phenomena in the region. One of the aims of this special issue of Southeast of Now is to gather together new writing that may enlarge our understanding of performativity, as a concept or category for research or practice. The five peer-reviewed articles and fourteen shorter responses that follow propose not one but multiple approaches to performativity.

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