Curatorial Studies and Practice

This book starts from this simple premise: thinking the activity of curating. To do that, it distinguishes between 'curating' and 'the curatorial'. If 'curating' is a gamut of professional practices for setting up exhibitions, then 'the curatorial' explores what takes place on the stage set up, both intentionally and unintentionally, by the curator. It therefore refers not to the staging of an event, but to the event of knowledge itself.

This Ph.D. by Published Work examines five projects that took place over ten years, between 2007 and 2016, that were curated as part of the artistic programme of Arts Catalyst, an independent interdisciplinary arts commissioning organisation of which the author is the founding director. This programme of work sought to understand what form of curatorial model and interpretative framework could generate new artworks and co-produce interdisciplinary knowledge across areas of specialist research and geopolitical urgency.

The projects take the form of exhibitions, texts and edited books, which are presented as the portfolio of work. The selected projects are: Malamp UK, Brandon Ballengée (2007-2010); Arctic Perspective Initiative (2009-2011); ITACCUS – IAF Technical Activities Committee on the Cultural Utilisation of Space – and associated activities (2007-2014); Holoturian, Ariel Guzik (2013-2015); and Wrecked on the Intertidal Zone, YoHa, Critical Art Ensemble, et al. (2013-2016).

Through analysis of and reflection on the projects, this commentary proposes a curatorial model of interdisciplinary co-inquiry, which can foster an ecology of practices, enabling curators, artists, scientists, specialist experts and people with situated expertise to coproduce knowledge around matters of concern, particularly relating to human-environment interaction and common and extraterritorial spaces. It examines the roles of the curator in this model and how these might differ from those commonly understood as established curatorial practice.

The commentary further presents an interpretative and tactical framework of the planetary commons for curating art-led projects in the realm of ecopolitical concerns, that can engage audiences and publics with the art and ideas emerging from this co-inquiry approach. The combination of curatorial model and interpretative and tactical framework contribute to discourses on both inter/trans-disciplinarity and the role of art in relation to the politics of ecology.

The Ph.D. contributes to the field on several levels. Within curatorial studies, the interdisciplinary co-inquiry model reconfigures curatorial practice as a collective, inquiry-driven, knowledge-producing practice, and provides a useful methodology for inter-/trans-disciplinary artistic practice in relation to the politics of ecology, while the framework of the planetary commons proposes direction and allows for investment in reciprocity through commoning practices. Beyond contemporary art, a curatorial co-inquiry model deepens and alters existing approaches for listening to, valuing, and synthesising different types of knowledge and expertise around current environmental and related social concerns. While the commentary argues for the planetary commons framework within the contemporary art space, there are wider implications for it as a complement and alternative to the dominant interpretative framework of the Anthropocene.

The term ‘knowledge society’ is used to refer to the increasing relevance of non- manual knowledge-producing labour in current post-industrial economies. Contemporary art, especially since 1989, has not been left out of this trend, to the extent that today it is not rare to see artists and curators described as knowledge producers and exhibitions and art works as instances of knowledge production. Acts of Research: Knowledge Production in Contemporary Arts between Knowledge Economy and Critical Practices analyses this development.
The academic discussion of knowledge production in the arts has taken place mostly in seminars and articles, in which knowledge is often discussed as an intrinsic quality of the artwork. Acts of Research, however, is devoted to studying the rise of knowledge production in contemporary art from the perspective of artistic, curatorial and educational research with an awareness of larger political, economic, geographical and art-related aspects. The concept of ‘acts of research’ is suggested as a way to understand knowledge production as a creative act in which research carried out in relation to a specific material challenges and resists the protocols of conventional knowledge production and norms. It is argued that knowledge production is not a stable concept, but may indicate a series of acts of research that allow each art practice to participate in a collective constitution of both the term and its practice.
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The conclusions are based on two different methodological approaches that structure the thesis. First, Chapter One traces the conceptual history of the term ‘knowledge production’, originally coined in economics and entering arts discourse as a critical term deployed against the rapidly growing global economy of the 1990s, and subsequently becoming a contested term in the new millennium due to its parroting of the discourse of that same global economy. Second, Chapters Two, Three and Four provide close readings of practices of artistic research in relation to the image and war (Hito Steyerl, The Otolith Group and Rabih Mroué), curatorial research in relation to global dynamics (Home Works: A Forum for Cultural Practices 2002-2013, III Bienal de La Habana and dOCUMENTA (13)) and educational projects in relation to knowledge and market economy (Tania Bruguera’s Cátedra de Arte de Conducta, Henriette Heise and Jakob Jakobsen’s Copenhagen Free University and Boris Buden’s Learning Place, part of the Former West Congress 2013); these readings are undertaken in order to understand the practices and workings of the specific mode of knowledge production unfolding through acts of research in the contemporary arts.

Performance at Tate explores the history of performance art at Tate from the 1960s to 2016. Arising from a two-year AHRC-funded research project, this online publication offers a new appraisal of the place of performance art and performativity in the museum through essays and case studies on individual artworks and events. It also publishes for the first time audio, films and videos, photographs, museum documents and reviews drawn from Tate’s Archive.
**Link to full publication: http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/performance-at-tate

With articles by Noémie Drouguet, Areti Adamopoulou, Esther Solomon, Jonathan Paquette, Christopher Gunter, Éric Giroux, and Karen Worcman.
------ See also follow up article "Museums Without (Scholar-)Curators: Exhibition-Making in Times of Managerial Curatorship" published in Museum International (2016):

https://www.academia.edu/33024164/Museums_Without_Scholar-_Curators_Exhibition-Making_in_Times_of_Managerial_Curatorship

Dalla fine del XX secolo, i tentativi di rileggere le collezioni museali sono stati declinati in alcuni casi attraverso narrazioni non lineari che non rispettano le tradizionali categorie della storia dell'arte. L'articolo intende indagare le cause di questa tendenza globale dal punto di vista culturale, sociopolitico e teorico. Queste pratiche si sono avvicinate alle collezioni museali come ad una forma di archivio e sono state sviluppate negli ultimi trent'anni in particolare da diverse istituzioni dedicate all'arte contemporanea, rimodellando gli allestimenti e il loro ruolo istituzionale. Attraverso l'analisi di tre casi studio, il Centre Pompidou di Parigi con la mostra Modernités plurielles (2013-2015), il Van Abbemuseum di Eindhoven con The Making of Modern Art (2017-2021) e il Museo Sztuki di Łódź con Atlas of Modernity (2014-oggi), l'articolo analizza la necessità istituzionale dei musei contemporanei di rileggere e riscrivere la storia della "modernità" e delle loro collezioni nel XXI secolo attraverso l'uso di narrazioni dialettiche. Il rapporto tra l'istituzione, le collezioni e la loro narrazione sarà analizzato come carattere distintivo dell'identità e della missione del museo.

As a researcher and archivist, I often experience prejudices and misunderstandings between the two professions. Different expectations divide the profession and the understanding of each other.
In this essay, I collect some thoughts on the challenges of the respective roles - as curator and as researcher.

Flash Art no. 334, Luglio-Agosto-Settembre 2017



Recensioni dei libri:
"Museologia Radicale" - Claire Bishop (Johan & Levi, 2017)
"Pop Art" - Hal Foster (postmedia, 2016)
"Exforma" - Nicolas Bourriaud (postmedia books, 2017)
"Curatori d'assalto" - David Balzer ( Johan & Levi, 2016)
"Il progetto dell'autonomia" - Pier Vittorio Aureli (Quodlibet, 2016)
"Il pragmatismo nella Storia dell'Arte" - Molly Nesbit (postmedia books, 2017)

A resenha percorre os argumentos centrais de Histórias das exposições. Casos exemplares, livro organizado por Fabio Cypriano e Mirtes Marins de Oliveira e aponta algumas articulações entre o emergente campo de estudos da História das Exposições e outras áreas de conhecimento.

A standard comprehension of curatorial practice is conditioned upon the organizing of relations between objects and meaning, between art and its perception and between objects and other objects. A widespread tendency established in a culture of critique in art and curatorial practice responds to this primacy of the organizational by retreating from it by producing 'open frameworks of interaction' in the hope that this naturalism will secure itself away from what it sees to be problematic instrumentalism of the image. This attitude is underscored, moreover, in practices where the horror of a conscious inability to make this retreat is further standardized in ironic forms of production that correlate a theory of constraint to the materialities of economic dominance. This article argues that both these responses to meaning meet at the same terminus, impoverishing the image and its potential. Looking to and setting out some further problems within Quentin Meillassoux's speculative materialism, this text seeks to move past these problematic

Is the concept of a retrospective antithetical to feminist-aligned politics and histories? How can a retrospective effectively account for the achievements of an artist whose practice was indelibly interwoven with feminist collectives? What possibilities and limitations does working in a museum institution pose for feminist curating? To engage these questions, this article provides a case study of the exhibition, When in Doubt… Ask: a Retrocollective Exhibition of the Work of Mónica Mayer (Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico City, 2016), a long overdue survey of the work of a central figure in the feminist art movement in Mexico.

Installed as an artist’s project for Melbourne Now (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 23 October 2013 – 23 March 2014), The gallery of air was a room filled with hundreds of things, each of which variously held an idea of air: from a draft excluder to an asthma inhaler; from a battery-powered ‘breathing’ dog to an old bicycle pump; from a Jacobean air stem glass to a Salvador Dalí ashtray made for Air India; from a John Constable cloud study to a Goya print of a farting figure. The gallery of air was a diorama of gallery things and my things.
Ninety-two things from the vast array of objects in the NGV’s collection were mixed with 287 of my things – with all objects selected specifically because they held some idea of air. Here a Wedgwood vase decorated with flute players found itself alongside a record by Curved Air; there a blown glass orb with a single air bubble, the breath of its maker, caught forever inside, found itself next to a blow dryer. I simply wanted to put the collection to work in a different way. By selecting these things according to an apparently arbitrary and poetic category, the way we read them was temporarily reset. I was worried that the Gallery’s things might not be as interesting as mine, but luckily they seemed to hold their own.
After giving a talk to the NGV Women’s Association about the upcoming installation of The gallery of air, I was flattered to be asked to write this article, expanding on that address. Having said this, I must also say that agreeing to do so was a bit like telling someone that you’re a comedian, then immediately being asked if you know any jokes. At the risk of explaining my jokes, here I intend to simply unpack The gallery of air and the ideas running through it as frankly as I can.

In recent decades, the context and apparatus of the exhibition have received renewed attention from different design disciplines and practices. This interest has been expressed not only in the study and recognition of the value of exhibitions and the politics of display from the past, but also in the current engagement in, experimentation with and reflection on the potential of exhibition-making and curatorial work as platforms for mediation, production and circulation. ...

'On De-Organisation', from Self-Organised, Stine Hebert and Anne Szefer Karlsen (eds.), Open Editions, 2013

The paper raises questions about distinctions between state, market and artist-run 'organisations' proposing a critical focus on the role of 'organisation' in contemporary attitudes towards work and the self.

Looking beyond Poland's internationally lauded new Jewish museums, this article asks how Jews are represented in longer-standing folk and ethnographic museums whose mandates have been to represent the historical culture of the Polish nation. How have such museums navigated growing internal pressures to incorporate Jews and reconsider the boundaries of "Polishness" alongside external pressures to rethink the function and approach of ethnographic museology? Based on three museums that have taken three different approaches to Jewishness-what we call cabinet of Jewish curiosities, two solitudes, and ambivalent externalization-we assess the roles played by inherited discourses and structures as well as human agents within and beyond the museum. We illuminate how social debate about the character of the nation (and Jews' place in it) plays out in museums at a moment in their transition from nineteenth-to twenty-first-century paradigms and how a distinctively Polish path toward a "new museology" is emerging in conversation with and resistance to its Western counterparts.

KEYWORDS: critical curating, ethnographic exhibitions, heritage, Jews, multiculturalism, Poland

Alison Boyle, Johannes-Geert Hagmann (Volume editor); Dominique Pestre, John Durant, Martin Collins, Robert Bud, Henry Lowood, Dagmar Schäfer, Jia-Ou Song, Catherine Cuenca, Serge Chambaud, Jennifer Landry, Rosie Cook, Anna Ademek, Finn H. Sandberg, Kristin Ø. Gjerde, Teresa Anderson, Tim O'Brien, Olov Amelin, Karen A. Rader, James Hyslop, Osamu Kamei, Roland Wittje, Thomas Söderqvist (Chapter/Paper Author)

This most recent volume in the Artefacts series, Challenging Collections: Approaches to the Heritage of Recent Science and Technology, focuses on the question of collecting post–World War II scientific and technological heritage in museums, and the challenging issue of how such artifacts can be displayed and interpreted for diverse publics. In addition to examples of practice, editors Alison Boyle and Johannes-Geert Hagmann have invited prominent historians and curators to reflect on the nature of recent scientific and technological heritage, and to challenge the role of museum collections in the twenty-first century. Challenging Collections will certainly be part of an ever-evolving dialogue among communities of collectors and scholars seeking to keep pace with the changing landscapes of science and technology, museology, and historiography.

„Es wird keine Bilder mehr geben“ hieß es 1965 wörtlich im „Antiobjekt-Manifest“. Es wird keine Bilder mehr geben! war auch der Titel einer Ausstellung im Atelierhaus Salzamt zu künstlerischen Manifesten. Studierende und Lehrende der Kunstuniversität Linz stellten im April und Mai dort aus. Anna Maria Loffredo und Andreas Zeising berichten als Lehrende.

My paper discussed two controversies surrounding the exhibition Art in the Streets, which was shown at the MOCA in Los Angeles April 17th - August 8th 2011. One focal point was the reaction of conservative American commentators to the exhibition in general; another the reactions of agents within the street art world to the removal of an artwork by Italian artist Blu.

KOLONIALES ERBE IM KUNSTMUSEUM EIN STUDIENTAG ANLÄSSLICH DER AUSTELLUNGEN "WHOSE EXPRESSION?" UND "TRANSITION EXHIBITION"
Die Forderung nach Dekolonisierung der Museen und kritischer Aufarbeitung kolonialer Wissensbestände stellt etablierte Formen der Museumsarbeit genauso wie kanonisierte Narrative der Kunstgeschichtsschreibung in Frage. Das Brücke-Museum in Berlin widmet sich in der Ausstellung "Whose Expression? Die Künstler der Brücke im kolonialen Kontext" der Frage, wie aktuelle Debatten um Rassismus und Kolonialismus den Blick auf Werk und Leben dieser Künstler verändern. Die Ausstellung "Transition Exhibition" im benachbarten Kunsthaus Dahlem präsentiert Karl Schmidt-Rottluffs Sammlung aus kolonialen Kontexten und positioniert sich kritisch zu tradierten Formen des Ausstellens. In Zusammenarbeit mit zeitgenössischen Künstler:innen entstehen neue Narrationen, die die Artefakte "re-aktivieren".

Ohne Frage: Mode im Museum ist in Mode. Doch was passiert mit den Dingen des Marktes im Kontext einer Ausstellung? Die vorliegende Masterarbeit widmet sich dem Verhältnis von Mode und Marken im Museum und fragt, ob und wie Kuratoren/Kuratorinnen das Thema „Marke und Branding“ verwenden können, um Inhalte zu vermitteln und Anknüpfungspunkte für (kreatives) Handeln zu kreieren. Ziel ist es, in einem Gedankenspiel die Grenzen zwischen Marketing und Ausstellung auszutesten und zu überschreiten. Im Kontext einer an Kreativität orientierten Gegenwartskultur wurde zunächst anhand des Konzepts des Fetischs (mit Bezug auf Karl Marx) die Verwandlung der ordinären „vestimentären Objekte“ in übersinnliche Waren betrachtet, anschließend die Kreation des Mythos (mit Bezug auf Roland Barthes) am Beispiel der Marke skizziert, um schließlich die Auratisierung der Objekte im Museum zu behandeln. Das Ergebnis der Arbeit sind drei Gedanken, die als Inspiration für eine kuratorische Praxis mit Dingen und Marken verstanden werden sollen und die Methoden des Branding für die Ausstellungspraxis fruchtbar machen: „Not for Sale“, „New Pattern“ und „Magic“.

O objetivo do nosso trabalho é, a partir da exposição de Karin Lambrecht, estabelecer uma aproximação com a Coleção Justo Werlang no intuito de compreender a constituição, as características e o perfil que a conformam, examinando também as políticas de aquisição e exibição por parte do colecionador particular. Além do interesse em melhor conhecer o respectivo acervo, ao qual não se tem acesso público por conta de sua natureza privada, a motivação parte por se reconhecer a importância do papel exercido pelo colecionador como agente do sistema da arte. Enquanto breve estudo de caso, a intenção é oferecer uma modesta contribuição para o campo de investigações sobre colecionismo privado no Brasil. De um modo geral, interessa-nos colaborar para a visibilidade de acervos particulares e a divulgação de conhecimento sobre patrimônios culturais e artísticos sob guarda privada.

Art Gallery of All (not only visual) Senses
Exercises in and facilitating the direct, active(not merely passive or viewing) participating (as myself, first person) in the sharing of the (undergoing as first person) of sensory experiences (taste, touch, smell, movement, etc) of/by another.
Compared to institutionalized, traditional, passive viewing by people of paintings.
We do not merely ask for more of the same Abramovic or Yoko Ono Performance Art that we must view passively, or even Participatory Art exercises (like sharing Ono’s sunset or Ambramovic’s directed exercises and her new spiritual system or -ism). What we attempt to express and conceptualize are more subtle ideas. All senses need to be explored more and all senses could be involved and the person becomes equipped to imagine exercises themselves, not only in galleries or museums but in all areas of their lives, any time and any place.
This is the opposing 2 different conventions, norms and attitudes to art and art gallery visitation.