Cici Peng

Cici Peng is a Chinese-Ugandan freelance moving image curator who, for the last two years, has primarily worked with Sine Screen, a female-led London collective that exhibits experimental and independent cinema from East and South East Asia. Cinema is the root of Peng’s interest in the arts, particularly ‘the formal potential of cinema to disrupt the way we interpret aesthetics and traditional image-making’.

Inspired by artists such as Ed Atkins, Kevin Jerome Everson, Rose Lowder and Marguerite Duras, Peng began her own artistic journey as a writer and critic before becoming ‘frustrated with the lack of wider programming of innovative works on screen’. Community and ‘the potential for community engagement’ is hugely important in Peng’s work, and she is drawn to the way curation, discussion and conversation can change an entire discourse – particularly around cinema and film.

‘I love going to the Hayward Gallery – I was a huge fan of the Louise Bourgeois exhibition – so I hope to spend more time at the Southbank Centre and its surroundings through this project’

Peng’s curatorial highlights to date include a cinema and sound performance series around ecology and landscapes in South East Asia for The Barbican; Pop: Contagion, Infection, Revolution!, a guest programme for the 2025 London Short Film Festival; an experimental programme about queer ghosts and another about peripheral Asian islands for Queer East; and working as a preselector for the currents shorts section of the New York Film Festival.

For Peng, her involvement in Southbank Centre Presents arrives at a point when she is looking to scale up her work, ‘curating more ambitious, collaborative projects… while continually foregrounding underrepresented East and South East Asian voices.’ And so she is ‘particularly eager to learn from mentors like Resolve Collective, whose approach to communal spatial practice’, notably how they ‘bridge curation, criticism, and community’ has long inspired her. Peng sees the project as a chance to collaborate, learn, and realise ambitions, as well as creating programmes that will ‘challenge traditional modes of spectatorship’.