Disagreeable Inquiries: Curating as Knowledge Work

Curating and art-making as knowledge practices seem to me to hold out the possibility of asking, “What is to be done?,” “What is to be known?,” and “What sense can be made here?”—and of asking these questions in the company of those already in disagreement with one another.

Mick Wilson • 7/15/25

• Abstract

  Critical Curating is The Curatorial’s section devoted to more theoretically oriented considerations of curatorial research and practice. While of a specialized nature, we seek essays for this section that are written for a broadly engaged intellectual audience interested in curating’s philosophical, historical, aesthetic, political, and social tenets, as well as a labor-based activity and its ramifications.

  In this essay, Mick Wilson discusses the potentialities of art and curating as forms of knowledge production, touching first on four critical approaches that he takes issue with: pro-aestheticism, anti-academicization, anti-institutionalization, and ideology critique. “Wary and distrustful of the claims made for curatorial and artistic knowledge practices to produce a radical break with some monolithic established system of knowledge-power,” Wilson asks whether there is another way forward that avoids nostalgia for liberalism’s notion of a public sphere that promises emancipation while veiling its exclusions. As he notes, the essential question of how curatorial and artistic practices produce knowledge is of the highest urgency today, considering the example of the US government’s fervent attack on research and knowledge work in academic and cultural institutions—a playbook, as he puts it, in common with related versions in Hungary, Slovakia, Turkey, India, and elsewhere. At the heart of Wilson’s deeply thoughtful exploration of how knowledge production can move forward under the current cultural conditions of capital and political division, he voices the most pressing question that all of us in the field must ask each other now, whatever the setting for our artistic and curatorial efforts to produce meaning: “Does the incubation of spaces of convivial dissent become a fundamental imperative in attempting to resist neofascism’s culture of enmity?”  

The arts must be taken no less seriously than the sciences as modes of discovery, creation and enlargement of knowledge in the broad sense of advancement of the understanding.
—Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking1

The curatorial as a regime of the management of aesthetics between the institutional and the artistic field is where the idea of epistemic disobedience might be fostered.
— Silvia Franceschini, “Translating lifeworlds: curatorial practice and epistemic justice” 2

This essay began life as an attempt to think through the claims that curatorial and artistic practices can engender new ways of knowing; claims for art that echo older ones such as Nelson Goodman’s wholesome endorsement of art-as-inquiry above. These more recent claims, now familiar across the expanded contemporary art field, stand in opposition to various Enlightenment and Romantic formulations of the aesthetic as noncognitive and the championing of art as an autonomous domain of value. These curatorial and artistic knowledge projects are also in tension with the contemporary derivatives of these eighteenth-century constructions of the fine arts and the aesthetic.3 However, they might in some instances appear to resonate with other formulations of the aesthetic to be found in the “aesthetic education” of Schiller or in the bildung of the Humboldtian tradition.

The assertion of curatorial and artistic practices as knowledge practices often comes with two complementary moves: (i) claiming to radically break with established knowledge paradigms and (ii) claiming to produce democratic and emancipatory effects and potentials. Although often manifesting common themes and formats, the various programs and projects to realize contemporary art and curating as forms of knowledge production are not uniform and have played differently in different parts of the world. They have been mobilized under different headings: artistic research, curatorial research, the curatorial, practice-based/practice-led research, situated knowledges, sensuous knowledge, and even xeno-epistemologies. They have operated across diverse initiatives and platforms, such as basis voor actuele kunst;4 The Forest Curriculum;5 Red Conceptualismos del Sur;6 Àsìkò;7 the Glossary of Common Knowledge;8 the Expanded Art Research Network (EARN);9 and Asia Art Archive,10 to name only a very small sample.

The first line of Asia Art Archive’s self-description—“Art is knowledge”—provides perhaps the most succinct and indicative encapsulation of this broad swathe of practices and positions. However, I will be at pains here not to reduce these undertakings of curatorial and artistic knowledge to a single phenomenon. While these very different programs and networks have in common a broad commitment to curating and contemporary art as—in part, at least—matters of knowledge work, they do not generically reduce curating and art practice exclusively to a mode of knowledge. The Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos’s site for “expansive and self-critical forms of inquiry”11 at the core of its mission in West Africa, and the Riga-based Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art’s ambition to “look for fresh and alternative approaches to research,”12 as part of its mission in Northeastern Europe, speak to the broad distribution of this alignment of artistic and curating practices with knowledge production. However, they might also be seen to suggest the different stakes at play across different geopolitical frames. This framing of artistic and curatorial work as knowledge work is often (though not always) positioned as part of a wider cultural political project or some form of civil-society-building program. This is made especially clear in the work of the Tranzit network: 

Tranzit is a unique network of civic associations working independently in the field of contemporary art in Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia and Romania and across the borders of a wider Europe. Its main goal is to support and articulate emancipatory practices, establish connections between culture and society by moving across geographies, generations, and political realms. [...] Activities range from exhibitions, thematic projects, seminars, publications based on long-term research and participatory interventions into the public discourse. […] We believe in the relevance of contemporary art institutions as places of liberty, as egalitarian spaces of unbiased, poetical and political research and education.13

These three moves—(i) framing curatorial and artistic work as knowledge work; (ii) claiming a break with established knowledge paradigms; and (iii) orienting this new knowledge work in turn to broader emancipatory social and political goals—are characteristic of a broad variety of practices. They have been challenged and contested from several different, though partly overlapping, positions. In what follows, I will indicate and problematize four of these critical approaches: pro-aestheticism, anti-academicization, anti-institutionalization, and ideology critique. Having done so, I will then propose a different approach that, while not wholeheartedly endorsing these practices and their claims, advocates for their more careful and less generic consideration.

The first, and perhaps most familiar critical approach, comes from a conservative aestheticism that sees a category error in positing the values of knowledge production for curatorial and artistic practice, which are seen properly to be the realms of sensibility, taste, and aesthetic judgment. For others, the problem is not that cognitive value is attributed to curatorial and artistic practices, but rather that the valorization of art’s knowledge risks colonization by the academic protocols and value forms of the university instead of those appropriate to art and the art world.  Such critiques are in part turf wars over who or what has legitimate authority to pronounce on value and saliency, and therefore set the discursive and pragmatic norms with respect to judgments of art.14

This approach most often relies heavily on pronouncements about “what-art-is.” Typically, art is posed as that which, by its very nature, is intrinsically contrary to dreary old academia and its dull formulaic (un)thinking.15 It appears from this perspective that artists “seek to create new questions and new forms of knowledge, using the kinds of embodied-material-conceptual thinking that go hand in hand with art making.” Meanwhile, their colleagues languish in the departments of medieval studies, quantum physics, public health, engineering, pediatrics, history, earth sciences, and anthropology, left with no option but to just repeat the same old disembodied, immaterial, and abstracted Cartesian drone. Worse still, these academics seek to subordinate curatorial and artistic practices to this same numbing regime of accountability and legibility.

In other instances, the even less sober advocates of art’s social exceptionalism and transcendence protest not simply against an expansionist takeover by the academy, but rather any form of “institutionalization” at all. In this formation, they see curating and art as knowledge as a threat to art itself, institutionally captured and confined. These nouveaux fauves contre l’institutionalisation are champions of art’s excess. They claim the space of art as a zone of radically autonomous potential “beyond” institutionalization.16 For these advocates of radical autonomy, it is as if the wilds of biennales, museums, and galleries were being enclosed and domesticated by the deadening conventions of academies and research centers. Such polemicists defend the right of undomesticated artist-beasts to roam wild and free, unharried and untamed as they drift from art site to art site, at one moment hiding in the gaps between the oligarch yachts moored in the Venetian lagoon and at another, galloping excitedly in herds across the vast plains of museum fundraisers—only later to withdraw to the temporary cover afforded by a quiet residency program or the safe margins of a catalogue launch or private view.

A notably more critical approach, rooted in the tradition of ideology critique, is instantiated in Tom Holert’s popular e-flux volume, Knowledge Beside Itself: Contemporary Art’s Epistemic Politics, published in 2020.17 Introducing the volume, Holert outlines his suspicions of curating and contemporary art’s “deep involvement with a global political economy of knowledge” and the broad emancipatory claims that come with this. He notes that the multiplication of “signifiers of research and investigation” in recent practice indicates that knowledge has become fetishized in the era of “cognitive capital.” This latter term invokes a diagnosis of the current conditions in which “knowledge functions more as a principle of social stratification or a source of capital development” and “not as a form of inquiry.”18 He writes that “as much as contemporary art is invested in the promotion and showcasing of nonstandard, transdisciplinary, experimental, informal, and oppositional modes of knowledge production, research, archival work, philosophical speculation, and pedagogy,” it must inevitably feed the demand for “constantly updated knowledge products and educational commodities.”

In this reading, the imperative of consumption negates any purportedly critical or activist impulse. Despite his investment in critique, the sly phrase, “suggesting a consumerist rather than politically empowering experience,” allows him to reduce a globally distributed body of practices to the luster of commodity fetishism by mere insinuation. This easy rhetorical subordination of a vast swathe of practices to the master term of “cognitive capital” enables a cascade of suspicion. These suspicions open up to what seems his gravest concern: “Is the claim of art as a mode of knowledge production, and more precisely as an epistemic practice involved in a politics of knowledge, incompatible with a notion of aesthetic autonomy?”19

Each of these four critiques tends to gather undertakings of curating and art as knowledge somewhat reductively under one heading as one single phenomenon. It then allocates this unitary phenomenon its appropriate place within some mythic ordering of the world. Conservative aestheticism blandishes its commitment to the niceties of a separation of spheres: dinner in the dining room; art in the senses; knowledge within reason; and politics out there in the mess of the world. Art as knowledge as emancipation is an aggregation of category errors, quite simply putting things together that belong apart. As well, the champions of anti-academicization are invested in another separation of spheres: the precious dichotomy of art world and university, where the protocols of the art world’s reputational economy appear as natural law and the writing of footnotes and citations as the treacherous artifice of mere clerks who want to make art beholden to the wrong authority.

For the nouveaux fauves of anti-institutionalism (shapeshifting from artist-beasts to artist-priests), it is a matter of keeping the sacred mystery of “aesthetic incalculabilities” free from the secular contaminations of explanation, from the profanation that would make of art not enigma, not mystery, but only the empty transparency of mere understanding. For critical scribes such as Holert, who champion notions of “aesthetic autonomy” and authentic “politically empowering experiences,” it is most important to keep one’s thinking free from the devious ideological maneuverings and coopting pull of cognitive capitalism and the cunning forces of misrecognition that damn all those fools out there to their neoliberal conscription. 

These four approaches to various projections of curating and art as knowledge practices are not at root operating the same discourse. However, although different, they each make use of an appeal to some form of appropriate separation between essentially different modes of practice. In the production of each position, there is a sorting operation that shores up properly artistic art and/or properly critical critique against other contaminating forces or agendas. Whether they are outright critics or advocates-with-critical-caveats, there is a common call to order at work in each case cited, a call that tries to locate a specific difference within the constitution of art through a form of foundational or criteria-setting move. We see this move made in four different ways, invoking respectively: the disinterestedness of the aesthetic; the absolutely open horizon of art contra the closures of academia; the uninstitutionable excess of “aesthetic incalculabilities”; and the tried and tested old reliables of “aesthetic autonomy” and properly critical art practice. 

These foundational approaches typically lead to lines of argument that favor treating the wider distribution of curating and art as knowledge—not as a dispersed field of pluralities, but rather as a matter of some unitary essence, principle, foundational difference, or world-historical prescription. (After all, who could possibly doubt that we all live under the same global regime of cognitive capitalism?) However, given the fundamentally unsettled and contested status of accounts of “what-art-is,” of the nature of knowledge, and of current heterogeneous geopolitical and historical conditions, and given that many of these curatorial and artistic experiments announce themselves as interrogations of precisely these terms and conditions, it seems that we need to find different forms of address and styles of thinking to engage these knowledge claims on something of their own terms.

Is it possible to respond to the various specificities of these practices and frame a broad view of their field of differences, while not resorting to a general announcement or an over-arching creed of categorical differences and global conditions? Rather than summarily gathering all instances of curating and art that claim some agency as a form of knowledge, as one undifferentiated monolithic formation, perhaps they could be accorded their pluralities, their similarities, their differences, and perhaps even their incommensurabilities? How might such a perspective be formed? In what follows, I try to indicate just how such an approach might be possible and why it might be of consequence.

To begin with, let’s return to the opening observation with which this essay commenced. There exists a wide range of different artistic and curatorial practices that propose themselves as knowledge practices. These show some readily discernible patterns and recurrent devices that other commentators have already noted, including, for example, the widespread invocation of the figure of the archive. This includes practices such as the exhibition of archival holdings; the mobilization of archival formats as formats of display; the nominating of non-archives as archival entities; the speculative (re-)constitution of archives; and the making of new archives with respect to different artistic and curatorial practices and artist-led organizations.

Another recurrent concern is embodiment and the production and instantiation of knowledge through corporeal encounter and affective relays, rather than primarily or exclusively through the work of language and inscription. Paradoxically, this insistence on embodied knowledge is frequently rehearsed through an effusive discourse on the saliency of embodiment, situatedness, and the extra-linguistic. This regularly coincides with an interest in the possibility of transgenerational vectors of trauma and in practices of “care,” “reparation,” and “rememory.” 

Often appearing in conjunction with these themes is the motif of collective process in knowledge-making. Sometimes this comes with a caveat that knowledge is not a thing—possessed or shared as an object—but rather a process or relation whereby a world is lived and not simply appropriated as possession or dominion, nor parsed as a text or a sign. Across this wide range of practices, there are the now-familiar invocations of decolonization—for some as metaphor, for others as existential horizon or as realpolitik. This is typically associated with practices of “aestheSis” and accompanying ideas of irreducibly different onto-epistemologies, worldings, and cosmologies.20

For some, these terms may seem an unnecessary mystification. For others, they are sharpened analytical tools that anatomize Western constructions of the aesthetic and of knowledge to disclose colonial violence as the determining ground for Western knowledges. Importantly, there are recurrent claims for curatorial and artistic practices as knowledge practices that break with the long arc of Eurocentric domination. The emancipatory promise is most often predicated on presenting these curatorial and artistic practices as breaking from the established regime of Eurocentric cultural domination and symbolic violence.

The wide distribution, repetition, and interaction of these themes is notable. However, in spite of these apparent commonalities, the different geopolitical contexts and the different conditions for these curatorial and artistic practices recommend that these are not approached as a generic set of formulaic conventions or as mere variations on a theme, but instead as a field of differences. Before proceeding, it is worth pausing to consider what is at stake or what motivates this kind of impulse to map relations across widely dispersed practices. To what end am I constructing this account of a field of differences across curatorial and artistic practices as knowledge practices? And from what vantage points am I attempting to do so?

This desire to produce an account of a wide field of practice or a state-of-the-art is not innocent. It is a process of sense-making that proceeds from situated agency and the ambition to make meaningful. I am a formally embedded educator and researcher, based in Western Sweden, employed by a public university and working in alliance with different constituencies and across different institutional dispensations regionally, nationally, and internationally. My working language is English. The topic connects with my threefold interest in: (i) artistic and curatorial knowledge practices that, in part, overlap with but remain irreducible to formal educational apparatuses; (ii) the potential continuities and discontinuities at work in the multi-unstable ecologies of contemporary knowledge practices; and (iii) the changing conditions and dynamics of emancipatory and internationalist cultural politics.21 This is also a matter of my wish to be part of wider communities of practice, and to participate in conversations and exchanges across curating, art, and education, which do not assume implicitly or explicitly that an exhibition is the epitome of curatorial practice.

My hope is that among the many different projects of curating and art as knowledge, there are some that can generate insights even without direct participation. I believe that some—even among those that centralize embodiment—can offer ways of thinking, ways of doing, that have a degree of dialogical translatability or mobile agency toward other locations, sites, and conditions. While there is a risk that this travelling capacity is merely coopted in an extractive mode by institutions, markets, and all manner of agents, this is not an inevitable or exhaustive outcome. My sense is that across some of these formations, there is a lively tension between those cultural political frameworks that come from the oppositional moments formed specifically within, and substantially determined by, Euro-Atlantic hegemonic cultures, and those that have been formed under different circumstances.

Rather than importing their protocols from, for example, US campus culture etiquette, some have been formed with respect to different histories of violence and via different constellations of resistance. (Here it may help to indicate such diverse platforms as Gudskul, Indonesia;22 Grupo Contrafilé, Brazil;23 The Question of Funding, Palestine;24 Harvest School, India;25 and the Institute of Radical Imagination, operating across several different countries.26) I am also motivated by a wish to contest some of what already circulates by way of claims for and against this field of difference, such as the four positions I have indicated above. I believe that the four approaches I indicated above misrecognize this field of difference by subordinating it to their preferred covering theories and rhetorical priorities, and most particularly because they do not give sufficient weight to differences of geopolitical positioning.

No doubt, for some it may seem somewhat tedious (indeed, merely academic) to quibble over different readings of the cultural politics of art and curating as knowledge work. However, over the months during which I have tried to reflect on these curatorial attempts to foster alternative knowledge practices, the typically contested arena of knowledge has become subject to profoundly intensified conflict in the US—an intensification that seems to greatly increase the stakes of these readings. There is a long history of knowledge conflict that includes ideological struggles to shape state education along axes of gender, race, class, nation, and language; the skewing of research agendas to prioritize political, military, and corporate interests; and the systematic attempts to subvert public knowledge (e.g., the tobacco lobby, the Mont Pelerin Society, and innumerable think tanks). We witness something that seems qualitatively different in the current assault on knowledge infrastructures and the concerted attacks on common understanding that emanate from the newly ensconced US version of neofascism. 

Illustrative of the changing terms of engagement, it has now reached the point where research, funded wholly or in part by the US federal government, is subject to an audit for red-flag terms that trigger manual review. Such review carries the significant risk of having funding withdrawn.27 Researchers across all disciplines—arts, engineering, health, humanities, medicine, social sciences, technology—are reframing, distorting, and transforming their work to avoid falling into disfavor with a regime that has set itself to rewrite the history of US democracy, disavow human-caused climate crisis, and delegitimize race and gender as terms of social and political analysis, doing so in order to reverse the hard-won gains of organized labor, civil rights, and generations of feminist activism.

This new putsch seeks to reengineer the infrastructures of knowledge, becoming fully empowered instruments of ideological reproduction in service to oligarchic rentier capitalism. This battle is no longer shaped along the familiar contours of Kulturkampf or ideological struggle. In the US, it has become a moment of full-blown epistemic warfare, and as with all US wars, the theater of conflict reshapes international spaces far beyond US borders. Nonetheless, it remains important to not totalize US conditions and to acknowledge the multiple precedents for these conditions in the long arcs of colonial and postindependence regimes across the world.

In proposing that there has emerged a thoroughgoing systemic war on knowledge production, devastating research and education in the US, I am not proposing a diagnosis of contemporary global conditions. Rather, I am noting a changed horizon within the broad sphere of US cultural hegemony. The playbook unfolding there has related versions also rehearsed in Hungary, Slovakia, Turkey, India, and elsewhere with similar recurrent themes and effects, but again with important differences of geopolitical positioning. The joyful viciousness in destruction and devaluation of knowledge, the vicarious popular pleasure in the humiliation of all manner of researchers, scholars, and public servants amplified through social media and mass media, are intended to demean all who are not aligned with the populist strong man. Those who do not embrace the rule of billionaire oligarchs and celebrate the unbridled assault on difference and dissent are subject to increasingly imaginative and illegal actions to force them into submission, silence, penury, or exile. 

Given the gilded crassness of the US regime, we might expect to see all manner of new, sophisticated aestheticisms emerge in response, as it may seem to some reasonable to appeal to patrician cultures of taste or l’art-pour-l’art as forms of critique and resistance. Under these circumstances, the conviviality of collective inquiry, the enlivening of conversational disagreement without the menace of threat or violence, and the sensing of worlds in common—all of which have been part of the rhetorical framing of many of these curatorial attempts at knowing otherwise—take on a new saliency.

I am not suggesting that we should uncritically endorse the desires and impulses of curators and artists who turn to knowledge work as an emancipatory practice. In the same manner that these emancipatory themes acquire a new saliency against neofascist horizons, the urgent critique of these practices also takes on a new prominence, as we must consider whether such forms of collective inquiry and curatorial knowledge can operate within divided and violently polarized societies. Can these practices do more than simply rehearse a nostalgia for liberalism’s public sphere with all its opaque, and not so opaque, exclusions? Or does the incubation of spaces of convivial dissent become a fundamental imperative in attempting to resist neofascism’s culture of enmity? 

On this last question, I would like to return again to Holert’s book and his affirmative proposition in summoning his readers to action:

When knowledge has been disowned, corrupted, and displaced by the opacity of financial transactions, neoliberal market epistemology, platform capitalism, and right-wing populism’s denigration of truth, it is urgent to dislocate it once again, deploying the epistemic strategies developed by marginalized or disobedient thinkers and practitioners, schools, and collectives, making positive use of their relocations and redistributions in contemporary art’s epistemic engagements.28

It is important that Holert does not simply reaffirm the liberal credos of “free science,” “open knowledge,” and “public good” here. Instead, he proposes a further dislocation, a further redistribution of knowledge-power via learning from other sites and other conditions. However, there is an important caveat needed here, for to simply valorize “disobedience” and “marginality” as the indexes of authentically critical and politically emancipatory knowledge practices is to get distracted by the shimmer of oppositionality. These simple inversions of valuation—“so the last will be first, and the first last”—and invocations of “epistemic disobedience” (as per the Franceschini epigraph at the top of this essay) risk reproducing the dogmatism and dichotomous logics of social division that sustain the neofascist moment rather than proceeding by inquiry.

It is for this reason also that I am wary and distrustful of the claims made for curatorial and artistic knowledge practices to produce a radical break with some monolithic established system of knowledge-power (such as coloniality, Eurocentrism, Western science, Cartesian dualism, etc.). These rhetorical formulae, characterizing an overarching singular and cohesive system of knowledge, seem overblown and reductive in their own right. They shrink the space of dissent and inquiry by setting up one-dimensional accounts of the dominant knowledge culture as the foil for announcing difference, radicality, and the promise of emancipation.

Curating and art-making as knowledge practices seem to me to hold out the possibility of asking, “What is to be done?,” “What is to be known?,” and “What sense can be made here?”—and of asking these questions in the company of those already in disagreement with one another. In so doing, these curatorial and artistic practices can perhaps open many different joyful-painful paths of doing, knowing, and sensing otherwise. But such paths would seem not to be readily opened when we gather in the belief that we already know our position, we already know the enemy all too well, and that our collective desire to disobey need only be affirmed. To inquire and to come to know differently seem to be processes that risk our cherished images of self, other, and enemy by subjecting them to the transformative flux of thinking-doing with others. This, then, is a curatorial proposition of non-fascism rather than anti-fascism.29

NOTES

1. Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1978), 102.
2. Silvia Franceschini, “Translating lifeworlds: curatorial practice and epistemic justice,” Alliances, no. 1 (2021), unpaginated. https://urgentpedagogies.iaspis.se/translating-lifeworlds-curatorial-practice-and-epistemic-justice/.
3. The relation between art and knowledge, and the relation between the faculty of aesthetic judgment and the faculty of understanding, are complex themes already set in play within the classic discourse on taste, the fine arts, and the aesthetic among the precursors of the Kantian Critique of Judgment. Centuries downstream from these historical developments, there is a sense for many inheritors of the lexicon of the “fine arts” and aesthetics that “Science” as the cognitive practice par excellence sits in uneasy tension with “Art” as variously another way of knowing, or as a non-cognitive mode of apprehending the world. In contemporary analytical philosophy (if we can use such a term), there is an ongoing contest between cognitivists and non-cognitivists in the philosophical discourse of aesthetics where a version of this game is still in play. My point here is simply that there is a kind of residual afterimage of these older quandaries of the aesthetic and the understanding that surfaces as a suspicion that artmaking is constitutively and essentially different from any species of knowledge work.
4. See https://www.bakonline.org/. See also https://formerwest.org/Front.
5. See https://www.onassis.org/people/the-forest-curriculum. See also https://atlas.smartforests.net/en/radio/.
6. See https://www.museoreinasofia.es/en/museo-tentacular/red-conceptualismos-sur. See also https://redcsur.net/2020/11/26/escuchar-el-susurro/.
7. See Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh, “Oyindamola Fakeye: ‘Not Knowing Is Our Pedagogy’” ArtReview, 75:2, March (2023): 42-44. https://artreview.com/oyindamola-fakeye-not-knowing-is-our-pedagogy/.
8. See https://glossary.mg-lj.si/.
9. See https://www.artresearch.eu/.
10. See https://aaa.org.hk/.
11. Bisi Silva, “Creating Spaces for a Hundred Flowers to Bloom” in ÀSÌKÒ: On the Future of Artistic and Curatorial Pedagogies in Africa, (Lagos: CCA, 2017): xv.
12. See https://lcca.lv/en/about-lcca/.
13. See https://tranzit.org/en/about.
14. Lucy Cotter succinctly expresses this by asserting that “academic protocol[s] often drown out art’s sensibilities” within academic settings, while “claiming interest in art’s epistemological possibilities.” The academicization that is resisted here is not of quite the same nature as, for example, the academicization of the nineteenth-century French salons, when a tight system of formulae covering technique, genre, motif, and representational norms regulated artistic practice. Here the term “academic” indicates a kind of universal house style in knowledge work that is attributed to higher education in general. This contrast between “the academic” and “the properly artistic” is eminently amenable to mythic thinking and ideological figuration rather than requiring attentive description, close analysis, and reflexive problematization. In such an approach, the pluralities of latter-day conflicts of the faculties become somewhat ungenerously reduced to the only-ever-one “idea of the university.” See Lucy Cotter, “Reclaiming Artistic Research— First Thoughts…” in MaHKUscript: Journal of Fine Art Research, 2 (1) (2017): 1-6; and see also Lucy Cotter, “Research in a World on Fire” in her Reclaiming Artistic Research, 2nd Edition, (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 202X).
15. In the opening passages of her important essay, “Becoming Research,” Irit Rogoff describes research as being imagined as a “highly academic activity: consulting great tomes of knowledge, burrowing in dusty archives, interviewing certified actors in certain scenarios, conceptualizing experiments in a laboratory, or relying on expertise from elsewhere to give credibility to a claim.” Irit Rogoff, “Becoming Research” in The Curatorial in Parallax, eds. Song Sujong and Kim Seong Eun (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, 2018), 39. Other advocates of artistic and curatorial ways of knowing “otherwise” declare that the established practices of academia merely “homogenize different forms of knowledge so that they can fit the imperatives of particular disciplines” and consolidate “disciplines and existing modes of production and dissemination.” Pujita Guha and Abhijan Toto, “Notes Towards a Univers(e)ity Otherwise,” in Institution as Praxis: New Curatorial Directions for Collaborative Research, eds. Rito and Balaskas (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2020), 252.
16. In a very entertaining instance of this style argument, Silvia Henke, Dieter Mersch, Thomas Strässle, Jörg Wiesel, and Nicolaj van der Meul have argued that “Art is … a form of exceedance, of transgression and exaggeration into the non-decidable, the occupation of heterotopies as sites of impossibilities.” Manifesto of Artistic Research: A Defense Against Its Advocates (DIAPHANES, 2020), 52. They speak of “aesthetic incalculabilities” in these transcendent terms that would make even the most stout-hearted of old Eurocentric humanists blush.
17. Tom Holert, Knowledge Beside Itself: Contemporary Art’s Epistemic Politics (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2020).
18. Holert citing Steve Fuller, “Can Universities Solve the Problem of Knowledge in Society without Succumbing to the Knowledge Society?” Policy Futures in Education 1, no. 1 (2003): 106.
19. Holert, Knowledge Beside Itself, 184.
20. Walter Mignolo and Rolando Vazquez, along with many other authors, employ the term “aestheSis” as a critical refusal of the colonial ordering of the lifeworld, arguing that: “Decolonial aestheSis starts from the consciousness that the modern/colonial project has implied not only control of the economy, the political, and knowledge, but also control over the senses and perception. Modern aestheTics have played a key role in configuring a canon, a normativity that enabled the disdain and the rejection of other forms of aesthetic practices, or, more precisely, other forms of aestheSis, of sensing and perceiving. Decolonial aestheSis is an option that delivers a radical critique to modern, postmodern, and altermodern aestheTics and, simultaneously, contributes to making visible decolonial subjectivities at the confluence of popular practices of re-existence, artistic installations, theatrical and musical performances, literature and poetry, sculpture and other visual arts.” “Decolonial AestheSis: Colonial Wounds/Decolonial Healings,” Social Text, 2013. https://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/decolonial-aesthesis-colonial-woundsdecolonial-healings/. In a similar manner, other authors have proposed the terms “onto-epistemology,” “worlding,” and “cosmology” as ways of conceptualizing the plurality of lived worlds often in explicit contrast to what are seen as extractivist worldviews that posit the world as an inert standing reserve of lifeless material resource that can make no ethical demand upon human agents.
21. There are, of course, multiple strands knotted within my desire here, and in matters of desire, there is likely more blindness than insight. What I believe I seek is the possibility of doing and thinking elsewise in a way that has a bearing on my own approaches to knowledge work, collaborations, and teaching, and those of my immediate colleagues. I am also pursuing professional positioning, recognition, and affirmation as a peer among wider networks of colleagues who are curious about, and active within, some of these curatorial frameworks of art-as-knowledge.
22. https://gudskul.art/en/about/.
23. https://urgentpedagogies.iaspis.se/grupo-contrafile/.
24. https://thequestionoffunding.com/Home.
25. https://afield.org/person/dharmendra-prasad/.
26. https://instituteofradicalimagination.org/2017/11/15/institute-of-radical-imagination/.
27. See Carolyn Y. Johnson, Scott Dance and Joel Achenbach, “Here are the words putting science in the crosshairs of Trump’s orders,” The Washington Post, February 4, 2025, https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2025/02/04/national-science-foundation-trump-executive-orders-words/. See also Matt Novak “The List of Trump’s Forbidden Words That Will Get Your Paper Flagged at NSF,” in GIZMODO, 5 February 2025, https://gizmodo.com/the-list-of-trumps-forbidden-words-that-will-get-your-paper-flagged-at-nsf-2000559661.
28. Holert, Knowledge Beside Itself, 61.
29. See BAK, “Propositions for Non-Fascist Living,” https://www.bakonline.org/en/making+public/long+term+projects/propositions+for+non+fascist+living/.

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• About Mick Wilson

  Mick Wilson is Professor of Art, Director of Doctoral Studies, at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and co-chair of the Centre for Art and Political Imaginary (2024-2028). He is a co-researcher on The Museum of the Commons (EACEA 2023-2027) and The Foutain: An art-technological-social drama (FORMAS 2020-2024). Recent edited volumes include: with Gerrie van Noord & Paul O'Neill (eds.) Kathrin Böhm: Art on the Scale of Life, Sternberg / MIT Press (2023); with Henk Slager (eds.) Expo-Facto: Into the Algorithm of Exhibition, EARN (2022); with Cătălin Gheorghe (eds.) Exhibitionary Acts of Political Imagination (Editura Artes/ArtMonitor, 2021); with Nick Aikens et al. (eds.) On the Question of Exhibition 1, 2, & 3 (PARSE, 2021). He is a member of the Curatorial Studies Workshop, part of the Expanded Artistic Research Network (EARN).

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Of Snakes and Mirrors

What if nature, transfigured by a mirror, redirected its gaze at us, human beasts?

Bernardo José de Souza • 7/1/25

Adriana Varejão: Don’t Forget, We Come from the Tropics, The Hispanic Society Museum & Library, New York, March–June 2025

• Abstract

  On Site is The Curatorial’s section in which writers review exhibitions from a curatorial perspective—not an art review, a curatorial review. This is also a showcase for master’s degree students in the MA Curatorial Practice program at the School of Visual Arts (the home of the journal) to publish as part of the program—though others are welcome to write for On Site as well.

  In this review, Bernardo José de Souza examines Don’t Forget, We Come from the Tropics, Adriana Varejão’s exhibition at the Hispanic Society Museum & Library. Engaging with colonial histories, Indigenous cosmologies, and the material language of ceramics, the show challenges Western perceptions of nature and subjectivity. Varejão’s large sculptural plates operate as both mirrors and speculative worlds, prompting a reversal of the gaze. The exhibition is conceptually layered and visually immersive, offering a critical reflection on power, perception, and the role of the museum.

Adriana Varejão: Don’t Forget, We Come from the Tropics exhibition view at the Hispanic Society of America. Image courtesy Gagosian.

By luring our imagination beyond surfaces, Adriana Varejão opens wounds in the fabric of reality, ushering the viewer into devious metaphysical pathways that do not abide by easy dichotomies between animate and inanimate entities. As we look at the bursting flesh emerging from within her signature tiles, what we see are the wondrous renderings of the “natural” world seeping through symbolic and material cultures. Attuned to the interactions between various forms of existence, the Brazilian artist has been producing speculative theory throughout her body of work since the 1980s—and the word “speculate,” of course, has the same etymological root as “specular,” which means to reflect, as a mirror does. The reflections prompted by her artworks transcend her canvases, totems, or plates, as the artist articulates fathoms of performative relations between living matter, material culture, and colonial history. She instills a suprasensory perception of the work, one that entices reasoning and seeing as much as feeling. By arousing a sense of alterity and delving into unacknowledged realms of life beneath the grounds of so-called reality, she awakens the stranger within us.

Adriana Varejão: Don’t Forget, We Come from the Tropics exhibition view at the Hispanic Society of America. Image courtesy Gagosian.

As for her recent exhibition at the Hispanic Society Museum & Library in New York, Don’t Forget, We Come from the Tropics, Varejão enlarges decorative concave plates to the extent that they engulf the body and mind, absorbing us into another dimension—as if we had passed beyond the mirror bound to another world, traversing unknown planes of existence in the manner of Orpheus in Jean Cocteau’s eponymous film. Paraphrasing Brazilian artist Maria Martins’ remark “Don’t forget, I come from the tropics,” the title of the exhibition alludes to an ecology of entities and mythologies that derive as much from the Amazonian rainforest and its Amerindian cosmologies as from scientific views of what the natural realm appears to be or stands for in the West. This alternate reality painted and sculpted by Varejão depicts an overwhelming mélange of living creatures, intertwined, inextricable, indomitable—a wild nature, if you will. The concept of wilderness, however, doesn’t exist in most Amerindian cultures, while what the Occident deems to be nature is only a construct: the Romantic projection of a landscape devised according to an anthropocentric understanding of the universe, in which humankind evades the sovereignty of “natural world,” depicting it in order to forcibly control it.

In this sense, Varejão’s new series of painted and sculpted concave plates places the viewer vis-à-vis other lifeforms, while deconstructing the tradition of two-dimensional landscape paintings. These works led me to think about convex mirrors as seminal, emblematic indexes of Eurocentric civilizations: self-obsessed, self-referential, and largely informed by epistemologies that not only oppose the idea of nature to that of culture but also objectify nature under the unidimensional perspective of humankind, apart from all other living creatures. And here, it’s worth noting that mirrors were among the insidious objects given by Portuguese colonizers to Indigenous peoples, no doubt aiming to instill a corrupting sense of individuality in otherwise holistic cultures.1

*

Circa the fifteenth century, or by the time of the first colonial enterprises across the Atlantic, convex mirrors came into fashion around European aristocratic milieus, offering a pristine reflection of one’s own image—a round surface that diffracted far more light than previous rudimentary brass or silver plates. So much so that painter Jan Van Eyck would use one of these devices in his highly elaborated masterpiece, The Arnolfini Portrait (1434): the artist placed it behind the wedded couple, enabling viewers to scrutinize what they would otherwise have been unable to see—and not merely an external view. As an artistic device, mirrors allow their subjects (at least, in the imagination) to be in intimate contact with their inner natures, which was and is, of course, true for artists who render self-portraits as a way to peer into themselves. According to Ian Mortimer, previously to their existence, “individuality as we understand it today did not exist: People only understood their identity in relation to groups—their household, their manor, their town or parish—and in relation to God.”2 Therefore, one could argue that mirrors ended up sealing the anthropocentric perspective of the human being as both the subject and the object of their own unidimensional view of the world, detached from a communal interaction with the surrounding environment.

Westerners tend to see the natural realm as the double-image of their inner fabrications, informed by an ontological detachment that precedes their sought-after “civilized” world. For the West, humans understand themselves as elevated entities capable of imposing order on the “state of nature” (or absence of order), as postulated by Hobbes, Rousseau, and other Enlightenment thinkers. Notwithstanding, what Varejão appears to achieve with her new series of plates is an excavation of our mirrored inner image of nature—largely inspired by the sixteenth-century ceramics of the French Huguenot potter and engineer Bernard Palissy, as well as the Portuguese artist Bordalo Pinheiro’s nineteenth-century tableware adorned with high-relief animals. So, what if “nature” could look back at us? What would it see?

According to anthropological interpretations of Amerindian animistic cosmologies3 —which favor mobile perspectives and relational configurations between “nature” and “culture”— humans see themselves as humans, and animals as animals, while animals see humans as just another animal: “Predator animals and spirits, however, see humans as prey animals, while prey animals see humans as spirits or as predator animals: ‘The human being sees itself as such. Nonetheless, the moon, the serpent, the tapir and the mother of smallpox see them as a tapir or a peccari, which they kill’, notes Baer about the Machiguenga.”4 Still, according to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “by seeing us as non-human, they see themselves as humans.”5 In short, “animals are people, or see themselves as such. This conception is almost always associated with the idea that the manifested shape of each species is a wrap (a piece of ‘clothing’) hiding an internal human form, normally only visible to the eyes of its own species.”6

Eschewing the Amerindian perspectivist theories of scholars, though still following their cues, one could entertain the idea that what nature “sees” is a transmogrified version of us. Conversely, the West’s perspective on the natural realm is one that forces a semblance of order by relegating it to sheer randomness, devoid of actual “thinking,” insofar as it denaturalizes the human as a semi-demiurgic being capable of controlling single-handedly the course of life. In this world of human-driven order, nature is deprived of its autonomous agency, its processes, behaviors, and actions.

If Varejão’s plates evoke mirrors, they can also be thought of as magnifying glasses of sorts, offering detailed depictions of universes abundant with mystifying species. Rather than being flattened on the surface, some of these creatures emerge as actual embodiments—three-dimensional beings projecting their existence into the viewer’s space-time dimension. Here, painting and sculpture operate as a kind of reverse trompe l’oeil, in which subject and background are enmeshed. Or, alternatively, where representation, virtuality, and reality all collide. Much in the same fashion of the convex or concave mirrors of the past, her plates appear to distort the image. It seems that what the artist’s magic operates is a reversal of the gaze. In these new works, we no longer see the objectified image of nature, as devised by the Cartesian mindset—instead, nature looks back at us, inverting the subject/object perspective forged by modernity, in which humans scientifically scrutinizes all other lifeforms.  

Often deriving from mythologies that originated in the lands known today as Brazil, these painted plates are not meant to be thorough and accurate versions of oral histories found in the Amazon; they depict untimely encounters between species invested with their very own perceptual prowess, some even transcending the empire of vision, which by and large imposes itself above the other senses. In the most convoluted of them all, Guaraná (2024), Varejão creates a virtual nest for rare poisonous reptile and amphibian animals, their mesmerizing colors signaling a pattern of visual communication. Detached from the painted surface, where a profusion of carnivore creatures gets entangled, red seeds of guarana spring open three-dimensionally as if they looked at us from the interior of their black-and-white, eyeball-shaped flesh. And as it follows, akin to this most intricate piece, all her plates will, somehow, explore the gaze of nature upon us humans.

Adriana Varejão: Don’t Forget, We Come from the Tropics exhibition view at the Hispanic Society of America. Image courtesy Gagosian.

In a different work, Urutau (2025), the artist portrays a macabre owl of sorts glaring at us with its fired eyes, surrounded by Amazonian butterflies—this rare insect’s wings flashing out exquisite patterns, as if to deceive the viewer (or the predator?) with its bewildering camouflage colors. Another plate, Mucura (2023-25), will confront us with a mythical figure of the the same name, which translates as Opossum, a marsupial of nocturnal habits, here portrayed as a pregnant animal of semi-human features lying among lianas and trees—this time round, the anthropomorphic figure stares at we humans, standing outside the mirror-plate, as if asking: Who has given birth to whom? 

Adriana Varejão: Don’t Forget, We Come from the Tropics exhibition view at the Hispanic Society of America. Image courtesy Gagosian.

On a rather different note, with Boto e Aruá (2025), the artist challenges the primacy of vision as a given in the process of acknowledging the phenomenological world. She devises a plate in which several Boto Cor de Rosa (a folkloric pink dolphin in Amazonia that transforms into a seductive young man) are surrounded by sculpted Aruás do Mato (snails), animals gifted with exploratory antennae that help them smell, taste, touch, and see, reaching for the outer world, rendering the whole of the work an allegory for the entanglement of visible and invisible forces, both tangible and intangible, supposedly real, though just as likely fictitious or mythological. Finally, with Mata Mata (2025), Varejão continues to investigate sensorial aspects of living beings by portraying an Amazonian turtle, its carapace as a shield—disappearance as a strategy for survival: the senses enfolded, allowing for it to disengage with the visible world. The sculpted vessel as enigmatic as the rare species itself, here reproduced by the artist after a drawing made by Frei Cristóvão de Lisboa, a Portuguese priest devoted to zoology.

Adriana Varejão, Boto e Aruá, 2025. Oil on fiberglass and resin. On view at the Hispanic Society of America. Image courtesy Gagosian.

As much as religion and mythology are an attempt to create a rationale for the unfathomable, so is science. What remains to be equated, though, is humankind’s capacity to grasp the social, biological, and cultural realms through its intra-actions with an ecology of other beings, both living and nonliving entities.7

*

Theorizing, a form of experimenting, is about being in touch. What keeps theories alive and lively is being responsible and responsive to the world’s patternings and murmurings.—Karen Barad8

In their 2017 book Are We Human? Notes on an Archeology of Design, Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley inquire into the domain of technology, within which all living entities are captured by the gravitational pull of design. They write: “We live in a time when everything is designed, from our carefully crafted individual looks and online identities to the surrounding galaxies of personal devices, new materials, interfaces, networks, systems, infrastructures, data, chemicals, organisms, and genetic codes.”9 One could argue that from the Amazon rainforest (we now know that it is the product of soil management engineered by its Indigenous population in the distant past) to mythological creatures, myriad constellations drawn on the skies, and even tableware, most of what surrounds us is the product of human ingenuity—technologies (even imagined ones) giving shape to a world devised as an ever-shifting scenario. So, Colomina and Wigley state, “It is precisely the lack of a clear line between human and world that provokes or energizes design as the attempt to fashion a self-image and the forever unsatisfying attempt to come to terms with what we see in this continually reconstructed mirror.”10

In this sense, when looking at the back of Varejão’s free-standing mirror-plates, we are faced with the reproduction of designs of historic ceramics from the Hispanic Museum’s collection and beyond, including Spanish Valenciana, Ottoman Iznik, Ming Dynasty Hongzhi porcelain, and pre-Columbian Amazonian Marajoara pottery. As Louis Vaccara acutely observes in his writing about the exhibition, “The juxtaposition of the two sides of each plate—between natural and man-made patterns—encapsulates a tension between organic vitality and humanity’s desire to immortalize, offering an interplay between the moving, breathing organisms of the Amazon and the crafted, enduring patterns of human history.”11

But when will we acknowledge the rational agency of all beings, not just humans? We typically claim that “natural” patterns are devoid of intellectual intent, of concerted design in this sense. Yet, it is time to acknowledge the intra-action between worldly, human and nonhuman, living and nonliving entities. Aren’t they a precondition for any sort of discursivity? Karen Barad states as much in writing: “Theories are living and breathing reconfigurings of the world,” insofar as “thinking has never been disembodied or uniquely human activity,” and “all life forms (including inanimate forms of liveliness) do theory.”12

Mutatis mutandis, what Varejão provokes when confronting the public with her mirror-plates is a rare sense of unity by dragging the human viewer into phenomenological entanglements with various entities—that is, she confronts us with the idea of “nature” (formulated by Western epistemologies) as an imaginary order, for a fleeting moment releasing us from the constraints of the supposedly objective reality proffered by science. In this way, her plates allow us to see past the Manichaean lens, beyond the horizon of Western binary narratives, through the chimera of wilderness, as it were.

By finding strangeness in what appears familiar, and familiarity in what appears uncanny, we may eventually grasp the sense of alterity that enables us to care for things that are truly singular. “Troubling oneself, or rather, the ‘self’, is at the root of caring,” as Barad remarks.13 Therefore, touching upon another existence entails deconstructing the idea of “us” as opposed to the unknown Other. Ultimately, Varejão prompts us to reflect on our contemporary common solitudes, driving us to grapple with the mythological creatures that emerge from her painterly order to become part of our own world.

Welcoming visitors at the exterior staircase that leadins into the museum’s gardens, an Amazonian Boiúna (Ananconda) sculpted by the artist strangles the equestrian statue of El Cid Campeador (1927, by Anna Hyatt Huntington), vanquishing the colonizing impetus that insists on subordinating all existing creatures and cultures.

Adriana Varejão, Sucuri, 2025. On view at the Hispanic Society of America. Image courtesy Gagosian.

*

The Hispanic Society Museum & Library, founded in 1904 by US scholar, philanthropist, and collector Archer M. Huntington, hosts thousands of books and manuscripts; a multitude of paintings, drawings, and sculpture; and other cultural belongings that date from the Paleolithic period to the twentieth century. Given Varejão’s relentless obsession with and scrutiny of ceramics production across time, multifariously incorporated into her artmaking, the institution invited her to delve into their collection and building with the purpose of renegotiating the contemporary with the past. 

Granted full access to its collections—including plates, bowls, jars, and many other ceramic elements, Varejão devised the installation of her works to challenge and disrupt the Spanish Renaissance-style courtyard, with its ornate architectural terracotta. There, her grand plates, measuring nearly six feet in diameter, enact a rather unsettling choreography of bodies and objects: a jeu de miroirs of sorts, facing different directions, diffracting the attention of viewers, whose eyes travel from the background of the main hall into the abyssal foreground of the action that materializes violently through the entanglement of Amazonian species that exceed the margins of her plates. Operating as curator, the artist orchestrates a dialogical clash between her new works and an array of ceramics from Spain, Mexico, and Portugal (dating as far back as the fifteenth century), between interior and exterior (both physical and psychological), between past and present, and between discursive grip and reverie. She lures the public into the open plane of a decolonial debate that shatters the very grounds of the institution-museum—as well as its forceful grasp on historical narratives. 

Varejão’s curatorial approach recalls the vision of artist Fred Wilson in his exhibition Mining the Museum: An Installation Confronting History at the Maryland Historical Society, in Baltimore, in 1992-93. where he brought to the surface long-entrenched racist characteristics of the collection and its display, reproposing the very nature of what could be seen in and of the institution. As art historian Terry Smith points out, “institutions such as historical societies and museums, which are presumed to outline a general narrative and to present their materials in as objective a fashion as possible, consistently fail to do so when it comes to socially contentious matters, such as, in this case [the Maryland Historical Society], the history of slavery in the U.S.”14

While producing an “unequal accumulation of time,” juxtaposing and over-imposing distinct layers of history, epistemologies, and cosmologies, Adriana Varejão renders the grand narratives of modernity as flawed attempts to preserve the integrity of Western history.15 Like a crack in a vase, which can be mended, though never fully repaired, her insidious intrusion into the precincts of the Hispanic Museum confers a surreal atmosphere on an exhibition that, through its works’ extraordinary distortions, depicts an integral picture of a world that exists beyond the confines of institutional knowledge.

Adriana Varejão: Don’t Forget, We Come from the Tropics exhibition view at the Hispanic Society of America. Image courtesy Gagosian.

NOTES

1. Marcos Carneiro de Mendonça, A Amazônia na Era Pombalina—Correspondência do governador e capitão-general do estado do grão-pará e maranhão, Francisco Xavier de Mendonça Furtado, 2 edição, Tomo I (Brasília:  Ed. do Senado Federal, 2005), 407.
2. Ian Mortimer, “The Mirror Effect,” Lapham’s Quarterly, https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/ mirror-effect.
3. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, A Inconstância da Alma Selvagem (São Paulo: Cosac Naif, 2011), 355. “The original condition common to humans and animals is not animality, but humanity. The great mythical divide shows less culture distinguishing itself from nature than nature distancing itself from culture. [...] Humans are those who have remained equal to themselves: animals are ex-humans, and not human ex-animals.” (Translated by the author)
4. de Castro, A Inconstância, 350.
5. Ibid., 350.
6. Ibid., 351.
7. “Intra-action is the term used by Karen Barad to indicate agency not as an inherent property of an individual or human to be exercised, but as a dynamism of forces in which all designated ‘things’ are constantly exchanging and diffracting, influencing and working inseparably. Intra-action also acknowledges the impossibility of an absolute separation or classically understood objectivity, in which an apparatus (a technology or medium used to measure a property) or a person using an apparatus are not considered to be part of the process that allows for specifically located ‘outcomes’ or measurement,” to use the words of Whitney Stark when referencing Barad’s book Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University, 2007), 141.
8. Karen Barad, “On Touching—the Inhuman That Therefore I Am,” https://bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/sites.ucsc.edu/dist/1/400/files/2015/01/barad-on-touching.pdf?bid=400, 1.
9. Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley, Are We Human? Notes on an Archeology of Design (Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2017), 9.
10. Ibid., 25.
11. Louis Vaccara, “Adriana Varejão: Don’t Forget, We Come from the Tropics,” Gagosian Quarterly (Summer 2025): 168.
12. Barad, “On Touching,” 2.
13. Barad, “On Touching,” 8.
14. Terry Smith, Thinking Contemporary Curating (New York: Independent Curators International, 2012): 122.
15. According to geographer Milton Santos, space is a result of the unequal accumulation of time: layers of geological, natural, human, and technological agents that, in totality, engender history and its intrinsic relationship with political, social, and economic forces. See Milton Santos, The Nature of Space, trans. Brenda Baletti (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021).

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• About Bernardo José de Souza

  Bernardo José de Souza worked as artistic director of Fundação Iberê Camargo, in Porto Alegre, Brazil, from where he departed in early 2019 to work as an independent curator based in Madrid and Rio de Janeiro. He was part of the curatorial team of Videobrasil Biennial, held in São Paulo in 2015, and also a member of Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy's curatorial team in the 9th Mercosul Biennial | Porto Alegre Brazil in 2013. From 2005 to 2013, he worked as the Director of the Department of Cinema, Video, and Photography at the Secretary of Culture of Porto Alegre, Brazil. For the past decade, he has been developing several projects in the visual arts field, including exhibitions, film programs, seminars, and publications, as well as educational programs, many of which developed in collaboration with institutions in Brazil and abroad, such as the Goethe Institute, Instituto Inhotin, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Prince Claus Fund, Mondriaan Fund, Institut Français, among others.

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Curating / The Curatorial

Multiple authors • 7/1/25

• Introduction

  Curating is everywhere and everyone has some sense of what it is, yet the language of curating is less obvious, more malleable, open to interpretation and discovery. The Lexicon is an ongoing project begun by the international Curatorial Studies Workshop, which is part of the Expanded Artistic Research Network (EARN). The initial idea was to locate each member’s definition of key terms often taken for granted in the curatorial field—such as curating, curatorial, exhibition, exhibitionary, representation, and so forth. We quickly discovered that as fundamental as these terms are, they didn’t carry the same meaning for each of us. The Lexicon stimulated a process of mutual understanding while forming a common ground for a cumulative, multi-perspective dialogue. It was an exercise focused not on finding the “most valid” argument, but on the cumulative—and, in a lot of ways, curatorial—juxtaposition built on the collective reflection and dialogue. For The Curatorial, we will continue to build on what we started, adding new definitions/propositions for terms over time to continue a dialogue that we hope will be beneficial and provocative for all those interested in the field and who appreciate the plasticity of meaning and experience so essential to the work we do. The Lexicon is, therefore, not intended to suggest or offer a clear and single definition for the terms proposed. Instead, it aims to generate a productive dialogue between definitions that can help map the variety of curatorial approaches, aesthetic imaginaries, and forms of practice. The Lexicon will stage this dialogue with monthly contributions from curators, artists, organizers, activists, academics, and critical thinkers.—Carolina Rito, Lexicon section editor

• Curating

  Nina Liebenberg

  Curating involves careful consideration of the following aspects: sensory material (a collection), concepts (an intention), context (both original and evolving), displacement (across time and geography), and visual and sensory strategies (metaphor, visual suggestion, analogy, and juxtaposition, to name a few). Through the format of exhibition-making, curating explores—especially—how the visual can be made to speak and celebrates the many ways in which it does. In an interdisciplinary sense, it creates a dynamic tension with knowledge production in other disciplines, where outcomes are primarily conveyed through verbal and textual means.

  Hongjohn Lin

  Curating encompasses the process of exhibition-making, functioning both as a professional practice and as a form of intellectual engagement. It requires managing the venue and infrastructure, communicating with artists, negotiating with institutions, selecting and classifying artworks, fostering knowledge production in art history and theory, and sometimes, securing funding. Curating is not tied to a fixed definition, as its practice adapts to the complexity of topics, media, and sociohistorical contexts, as well as the variability of participating authors and artists.

  Henk Slager

  At first glance, curating is seen as a scenographic activity, i.e., building a spatial constellation for encounters. But curating can also be understood as a way of thinking in terms of connections: linking objects, images, processes, people, and discourses. See Maria Lind, “The Curatorial” in Selected Maria Lind Writing (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010). And thus curating, as an entanglement of actors, is deeply involved in the politics of display, the politics of site, the politics of transfer, translation, and regimes of visibility.

  Vipash Purichanont

  Curating encompasses various acts within a single action. It involves selecting, assembling, listing, and displaying. My reference to “curating” does not strictly adhere to the contemporary art domain from which it may have originated, but rather to its broader application and understanding in everyday contexts since the 2010s. When I conducted research on the use of the term “curating” a decade ago, it was a glamorous term that content creators preferred to justify their selection, which, in return, framed them as connoisseurs. It was employed to differentiate and justify the outcome or a list of certain topics. If a list created by a blogger or YouTuber was “curated,” it would imply that a degree of research underpinned the selection—this is quite ironic, considering the art world always insisted that curating ought to be critical. Fast forward to today, the “curation” of Spotify playlists is conducted through algorithms, which, it seems, has historically been the product of thorough research as well. Global capitalism is pouring capital into training artificial intelligence so that it can curate content and information on our behalf (as our assistants?). Curating, as a human activity, too, is going to be replaced if it continues to be cognitive labor. Gone are the days that we need to make a list every time we go grocery shopping.

  Mick Wilson

  “Curating” enjoys extensive and diverse use. Nora Sternfeld and Luisa Ziaja, “What Comes After the Show? On Post- Representational Curating,” in From the World of Art Archive, ed. Saša Nabergoj and Dorothee Richter, Issue 14 (Zurich: On Curating, n.d.), 21–24.] The primary historical layers in the meaning of the term are the caring for a collection or an apparatus, the making of a public show or exhibition, and the mediation of cultural works. The Royal Society had a role in the 17th and 18th centuries for a “curator of experiments” who oversaw the safe-keeping of various apparatuses and also staged public demonstrations with these. Today, curating is used typically to indicate a broad spectrum of professional practices such as conceiving, selecting, producing, orchestrating, mediating, and actualizing occasions of artistic or other cultural works being made public. This “making public” includes many different possible formats such as publishing, exhibiting, and programming all manner of events, residencies, and platforms. By “knowledge tradition” what is meant is the transmission of know-how or other practical forms of knowledge is not reducible to the model of an academic discipline e.g., professional competencies such as the practice of law, medicine, therapy; craft practices such as weaving, fishing, hunting, cooking; and body techniques such as midwifery, martial arts, meditation.

  Since the 1990s, with the expansion of the international art system(s), the term curating has come to be associated also with a discursive openness and eclecticism that draws on many different knowledge traditions, disciplines, and practices. Already three decades ago, curating began to be associated with co-productive and relational models of cultural practice that diverge to a greater or lesser degree from the image of the lone artist or the self-sufficient artwork as the privileged locus of meaning or value. The artist and commentator Liam Gillick noted already twenty years ago that curating increasingly provides discursive resources for contemporary art to some extent displacing traditional art criticism. Gillick in conversation with Saskia Bos, indicated that criticism “has become either a thing of record, or a thing of speculation whereas the curatorial voice has become the parallel critical voice to the artist that contributes a parallel discourse.” [Saskia Bos “Towards a Scenario: Debate with Liam Gillick” in Bos et al (eds.), Modernity Today: Contributions to a topical artistic discourse, De Appel Reader, No. 1. (Amsterdam: De Appel, 2004): 74].

  For the non-specialist, curating is, however, very strongly correlated with the idea of choice or selection for attention, connecting it to the image of “gatekeeping.” This is curating understood as the brokering of opportunity and validation. For specialists, the activities of curating have long since decentered—if not fully detached—from the caring for collections, the making of exhibitions, and the mediation of cultural materials.

  Carolina Rito

  Curating is the professional practice of organizing, planning, devising, and delivering an exhibition or a cultural program involving artifacts, artworks, conversations, talks, workshops, commissions, publications, screenings, and performances, among other cultural formats. Typically, the activity of curating entails the selection, conceptualization, and presentation of what is made public to an audience. The relationship between the display, its interpretation, reception, and communication is also an integral part of curating. This activity can be learned and improved. This definition was written as complementary to my definition of “the curatorial” in the Lexicon published on The Curatorial.

• The Curatorial

  Nina Liebenberg

  The curatorial refers to an expanded approach to curating. Irit Rogoff and Beatrice von Bismarck call it an "event of knowledge” [Irit Rogoff and Beatrice von Bismarck, “Curating/Curatorial: A Conversation Between Irit Rogoff and Beatrice Von Bismarck,” in Cultures of the Curatorial, ed. Beatrice von Bismarck, Jörn Schafaff, and Thomas Weski (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), 23]—a process of bringing together individuals, artifacts, and ideas with diverse points of reference within a “physical and conceptual arena” [James Voorhies, Postsensual Aesthetics: On the Logic of the Curatorial (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2023),107]. It fosters generosity and curiosity, especially in a university environment, through rendering the familiar strange and the strange accessible. In this space, varied knowledges interact, generating outcomes that transcend any singular perspective.

  Hongjohn Lin

  The curatorial calls for a democratic situation within an exhibition setting, akin to Jacques Rancière’s notion of meta-politics, where emancipated spectatorship unfolds alongside autonomous aesthetic experiences. The concern here is the politics of art—distinct from political art or the instrumentalization of aesthetic practices. Active spectators and beholders are essential, forming the demos of art exhibitions and resisting passive consumption.

  The politics of the curatorial should recognize these active spectators, who, through exhibitions, can generate moments of an epistemological shift. Such shifts always involve cognitive activity, bringing objects and relations into new forms of consideration. If an exhibition constitutes an event of knowledge, it is neither a straightforward depiction nor a logical inference. The unconventionality of the curatorial often appears self-negating, enacting a kind of self-critique that aligns with what might be called the “degree zero” of curating. To reveal the deeper structures that continually recede, the curatorial tends to employ deconstructive strategies in exhibitions rather than presenting art at face value.

  I would extend the definition of the curatorial to Martin Heidegger’s notion of care, which moves beyond personal subjectivity into intersubjective networks. In this sense, care is not merely about individual existence but about living-together. Alongside Sorge— which is translated into English generally as “care,” but can also suggest anxiousness in the concern for oneself and the world across time—Heidegger identifies two specific forms of care: Besorgen, which refers to the practical handling of things, and Fürsorge, which entails actively caring for another in need and for collective well-being. Ultimately, in exhibition-making, the curatorial not only structures intersubjective relations but also shapes the exhibition as form, much like the Roman goddess Cura, who bestows form itself.

  Henk Slager

  The curatorial refers to the fact that curating is actively involved in the production of meaning: it puts forward ideas about subjectivity, community, culture, identity, gender, class, and race. The modes of address in which these questions are articulated is propositional. The field of the curatorial activates epistemic capacities that speculate about a different way of imagining the world and how these imaginaries are made public.

  Vipash Purichanont

  I perceive “the curatorial” as an expanded notion of “curating.” If curating is an action that involves labor (both physical and cognitive) in producing the end result as exhibition or curation, curatorial is an extended field that enables one to think about curating beyond Capitalist production. While curating and curation have been adopted by content creators within the creative industries, curatorial is kept away from labor. I envision the curatorial as a creative practice that needs to be refined and redefined over time. It may encompass the same acts that constitute curating, but liberation from the constraints of productivity may allow it to nurture the foundational elements of care and cultivation. Kohei Saito's reinterpretation of Marx's The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 argues that the relationship between labor and land has been overlooked by Western Marxism. They argue that to better understand the function of capital in the Anthropocene, it is imperative to reexamine the interplay between human labor and natural resources. I have been contemplating the relationship between the curatorial and the cultivation; it is relentless sowing that enriches the soil.

  Mick Wilson

  “The curatorial” is first and foremost a discursive gambit proposed by several key protagonists within the contemporary art field (such as Maria Lind, Irit Rogoff, and Beatrice von Bismarck) to mark a contrast, not a dichotomy, between curating and a variously constructed “other scene” of curating. Typically, the curatorial is posited not in radical contrast to “curating” but as integrally related, though differentiated, moments of a curating practice, with a particular emphasis on curating as a matter of knowledge work, providing epistemic possibilities that are different from traditional university knowledge formations. For example, von Bismarck understands the curatorial as a cultural practice that goes well beyond the organizing of exhibitions and has “its own procedure for generating, mediating for, and reflecting on experience and knowledge.”  [Irit Rogoff and Beatrice von Bismarck, “Curating/Curatorial: A Conversation Between Irit Rogoff and Beatrice Von Bismarck,” in Cultures of the Curatorial, ed. Beatrice von Bismarck, Jörn Schafaff, and Thomas Weski (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), 21–30.]

  For most commentators the curatorial overcomes the logic of representation and seeks to move beyond subject-object relations. Emphasizing the relational dimensions of presenting art transforms exhibitions into spaces where things are 'taking place' rather than “being shown'“or thematized. [Nora Sternfeld and Luisa Ziaja, “What Comes After the Show? On Post- Representational Curating,” in From the World of Art Archive, ed. Saša Nabergoj and Dorothee Richter, Issue 14 (Zurich: On Curating, n.d.), 21–24.] For those who propose this analogy, the curatorial refers to the disruptive knowledge potentials of curating. The curatorial is not a claim for the curator’s capacity, but rather for the disruptive potential that curating sets in play via the coming together of many different agencies. It is a heavily contested term. For some, talk of the curatorial is the quest for curating’s critical and intellectual leavening. For others, it is about the potential for exceeding the given horizons of established culture and knowledge.

  Carolina Rito

  The curatorial is, somehow, a departure from its origins—that is, curating as exhibition-making. However, it is “only” a tangential one. What I mean is that it is as if the curatorial is like a dependent person leaving home but finding refuge in the shelter of the home’s garden and coming in for meals and showers, as if the conversation about leaving had never happened. It is, nevertheless, a departure—one that enables distance (a critical one, not disdain) and growth, in all possible senses. (Would the shelter take over the house?)

  At a linguistic level, the departure is quite radical, as it moves from the confines of the noun “curating” and its derivative adjective, “curatorial,” to claiming its own cluster of relations as a new substantive, i.e., the curatorial. And, because of the departure, despite the undeniable etymological affiliation, the curatorial no longer serves to classify curating-related activities. The curatorial is a hub of connectivity that emerges out of the diversification of curating practices, moving from being a professional practice of exhibition-making in the contemporary art field to a mode of inquiry into contemporary societal and material issues.

  This concept has been introduced through the work of Irit Rogoff (2006, 2013), Maria Lind (2010), and Beatrice von Bismarck (2012). Curators and theorists recognized that there was something more to the act of making things public, juxtaposing seemingly unrelated materials and stimulating the discussion of speculative ideas through proximity between things. In other words, the traditional model of exhibition-making was giving way to a more complex series of cultural exchanges involving different actors, fields, disciplines, and formats. Curating, as a term to capture this complexity, fell short, and that is how the curatorial served to open the space for new approaches.

Exhibition/Exhibitionary →

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• Contributors

  Nina Liebenberg is a South African curator, currently conducting her post-doctoral research at the University of the Arts, Helsinki. Before moving to Finland, Liebenberg spent the last ten years working at the University of Cape Town’s Centre for Curating the Archive, convening a selection of courses for its curatorial program. She uses curation as methodology to explore various overlaps and connections between diverse university departments, drawing on their disciplinary objects collections to curate exhibitions that surface uncanny cross-disciplinary connections and extend the meaning of how these materials are understood in their host departments. She is a member of the Curatorial Studies Workshop, part of the Expanded Artistic Research Network (EARN).

  Henk Slager’s focus has been on research and visual art for the last twenty years. He was a Lecturer at De Appel Curatorial Program (1995-2020), Visiting Professor of Artistic Research (Uniarts Helsinki 2010-2015, 2024-), and Dean of MaHKU Utrecht Graduate School of Visual Art and Design (HKU Utrecht 2003-2018). He is currently working for the same school on the development of a practice-based doctoral program. Slager co-initiated the European Artistic Research Network (EARN), a network investigating the consequences of artistic research for current art education through symposia, expert meetings, and presentations. Departing from a similar focus on artistic research he published The Pleasure of Research, an overview of curatorial research projects (a.o. Shanghai Biennale, 2008; Tbilisi Triennial, 2012; Aesthetic Jam Taipei Biennial, 2014; 5th Guangzhou Triennial, 2015; Research Pavilion Venice, 2015-2019; and 9th Bucharest Biennale, 2020). A follow-up publication will be presented in 2025. Slager is currently co-convening the 6th Asia Triennial Manchester (2025).

  Vipash Purichanont is a lecturer in the Department of Art History on the faculty of Archeology at Silpakorn University in Bangkok, Thailand. He holds a PhD in Curatorial/Knowledge from the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. His research lies at the intersection of curatorial practice, objects, archives, economics, and Southeast Asia. Purichanont was an assistant curator for the first Thailand Biennale (Krabi, 2018), a curator of Singapore Biennale 2019 (Singapore, 2019), and a co-curator of the second Thailand Biennale (Korat, 2021). He is also a co-founder of Waiting You Curator Lab, a curatorial workshop that aims to initiate alternative infrastructures in Thailand and beyond. He is a member of the Curatorial Studies Workshop, part of the Expanded Artistic Research Network (EARN).

  Mick Wilson is Professor of Art, Director of Doctoral Studies, at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and co-chair of the Centre for Art and Political Imaginary (2024-2028). He is a co-researcher on The Museum of the Commons (EACEA 2023-2027) and The Foutain: An art-technological-social drama (FORMAS 2020-2024). Recent edited volumes include: with Gerrie van Noord & Paul O'Neill (eds.) Kathrin Böhm: Art on the Scale of Life, Sternberg / MIT Press (2023); with Henk Slager (eds.) Expo-Facto: Into the Algorithm of Exhibition, EARN (2022); with Cătălin Gheorghe (eds.) Exhibitionary Acts of Political Imagination (Editura Artes/ArtMonitor, 2021); with Nick Aikens et al. (eds.) On the Question of Exhibition 1, 2, & 3 (PARSE, 2021). He is a member of the Curatorial Studies Workshop, part of the Expanded Artistic Research Network (EARN).

  Carolina Rito is Professor of Creative Practice Research at the Research Centre for Arts, Memory, and Communities, Coventry University, UK. She is a researcher and curator whose work is situated at the intersection of knowledge production, the curatorial, and contested historical narratives. Rito is an Executive Board Member of the Midlands Higher Education & Culture Forum and a Research Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary History (IHC), Universidade Nova de Lisboa. She has served as the Executive Editor of The Contemporary Journal and has published in international journals such as King’s Review, Mousse Magazine,  Wrong Wrong, and The Curatorial. From 2017 to 2019, Rito was Head of Public Programs and Research at Nottingham Contemporary, leading the partnership with Nottingham Trent University and the University of Nottingham. She holds a PhD in Curatorial/Knowledge from Goldsmiths, University of London, where she also taught from 2014 to 2016. She lectures internationally—in Europe, South America, and the Middle East—on her research and curatorial studies. She is a member of the Curatorial Studies Workshop, part of the Expanded Artistic Research Network (EARN).

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Exhibition / Exhibitionary

Multiple authors • 7/1/25

• Introduction

  The Lexicon is an ongoing project begun by the international Curatorial Studies Workshop, which is part of the Expanded Artistic Research Network (EARN). The initial idea was to locate each member’s take on key terms often taken for granted in the curatorial field—such as curating, curatorial, exhibition, exhibitionary, representation, and so forth. We quickly discovered that as fundamental as these terms are, they didn’t carry the same meaning for each of us. The Lexicon stimulated a process of mutual understanding while forming a common ground for a cumulative, multi-perspective dialogue. It was an exercise focused not on finding the “most valid” argument, but on the cumulative—and, in a lot of ways, curatorial—juxtaposition built on the collective reflection and dialogue. For The Curatorial, we will continue to build on what we started, adding new definitions/propositions for terms over time to continue a dialogue that we hope will be beneficial and provocative for all those interested in the field and who appreciate the plasticity of meaning and experience so essential to the work we do. The Lexicon is, therefore, not intended to suggest or offer a clear and single definition for the terms proposed. Instead, it aims to generate a productive dialogue between definitions that can help map the variety of curatorial approaches, aesthetic imaginaries, and forms of practice. The Lexicon will stage this dialogue with monthly contributions from curators, artists, organizers, activists, academics, and critical thinkers.—Carolina Rito, Lexicon section editor

• Exhibition

  Nina Liebenberg

  We can define “exhibition” as an event varying in duration that is curated for an audience and includes the display of objects, text, audio-visual elements, and performances. As a format, it can function as a tool to facilitate inter/trans/cross-disciplinary engagements that promote multiple interpretations of single objects (loosening the taxonomic framework to which disciplinary objects and images are usually subjected).

  In his catalogue essay for the exhibition Away from Home, held at the Wexner Center for the Arts (2003), the curator Jeffrey Kipnis calls an exhibition a “roundtrip,” positing that its basic form—home (a), away (b), back (a’)—finds its most fertile incarnation in the sonata of classical music. In a sonata, the exposition (a) introduces themes in the home key before departing. In the development (b), these themes undergo transformations across various keys, creating a sense of adventure. Key changes, or chromatic shifts, add color and render the material unfamiliar or strange. Finally, the recapitulation (a’) brings the themes back to the home key, altered yet familiar. An exhibition functions similarly. [See Jeffrey Kipnis, “Away from Home,” in Away from Home, ed. Annetta Massie (Columbus, OH: Wexner Center for the Arts, 2003), 40–41.]

  Vipash Purichanont

  An exhibition is a series of objects on display. It manifests a set of relations woven together with images, signs, discourse, and power. It is something brought forth to be looked at, to be walked into, to be experienced immersively. Unlike other display technologies, such as cinema (which requires the viewer to remain still while the images move), an exhibition requires the subject to move through a series of relations. It need not be housed in a confined space, as an exhibition possesses an internal quality that draws viewers in, acts on them, and participates in shaping perception and subjectivity.

  It is also temporal. Even a museum’s “permanent exhibition” must eventually be rehung or rearranged. As a form of display, an exhibition rearranges its viewers as well as its objects; the process of viewing can initiate subjectivation, potentially altering one’s worldview.

  Exhibitions are physical. Yet the rise of virtual reality and the metaverse has made exhibitions in virtual space possible. A third-person view, where the user sees their own avatar from an external perspective, exemplifies an exhibition’s power: it enables both observation and the control of a subject undergoing transformation.

  Bige Örer

  The definition of what constitutes an exhibition and what is contained within it is evolving, with many now seen as dynamic, participatory spaces where art, knowledge, and experience are shared and produced. While traditionally curated by a small group of experts, or a single curator, recent practices have shifted toward a more inclusive, audience-centered approach driven by collaboration, community engagement ,and social participation. Typically showcased in a gallery, museum, or a similar venue, exhibitions are increasingly occupying public and digital spaces, extending their global reach. Exhibitions have the potential to enrich public life by making culture, history, and creativity accessible to everyone, addressing pressing societal issues, fostering critical reflection, and inspiring new ideas.

  Henk Slager

  Until recently, the exhibition was primarily a dispositive, a unitary system of unambiguous “expression” or completed display, reflecting in its fixity the imagined self-sufficiency of the autonomous work of art that the exhibition is supposed to mediate. Over the past decade, a paradigm shift has taken place: exhibitions are now understood much more as platforms for knowledge-in-the-making than as static forms of dissemination. The exhibition has the potential to be a mode of research action.

  Cătălin Gheorghe

  An exhibition is commonly understood as a medium, a setting for artworks, or a statement. It is a display of artifacts, structures, ideas, and gestures in an organized way. The production and presentation of an exhibition are co-dependent on an institutional capacity or self-organized initiative, presented in a given space (i.e., museum, white cube, black box, public space, landscape), and to be received by different audiences. 

  Exhibitions have changed in approach and function over time. They have not only reacted against the idea of a prescribed political or natural order of display but also have questioned their space as a privileged site of capitalist forms of representation. In these conditions, the understanding of “exhibition” as predominantly a medium for displaying evocative manifestations of power would compromise the chances of seeing the exhibition as a process based on imaginative instances of criticism. 

  A radical use of the exhibition would be the transposition (as a trans[ex]position) of the actual political space and historical time of its event modeling, in Michel Foucault’s words, a relational heterotopia but also manifestations of heterocronia. The trans[ex]position of time and space would have the quality to intervene in multiple specific contexts creating different perspectives and unexpected situations. There would be different kinds of trans[ex]positions, from interventions based on hacking, to complex installations based on research. Opening new reflections on the potentiality of an exhibition, the trans[ex]position would make use of xeno-practices, redefining spaces of perception as xeno-spaces (as non-familiar spaces of thought and counteraction).

  Hongjohn Lin

  For any exhibition, we are always searching for something novel, original, or better yet, unprecedented. It is true that there is a plethora of exhibitions across diverse settings—museums, galleries, art fairs, community interventions, and biennials. Moreover, the expanding field of exhibitions is increasingly shifting from the physical to the virtual. Both spectators and art communities eagerly await the next event, just as social media feverishly fabricates fleeting memories of the latest spectacle—fifteen minutes of web fame, all too soon forgotten. We live in an era of hyper-metabolism of memory, where everything must go viral and fade rapidly, even faster than fashion trends. The more exhibitions proliferate, the less spectators seem able to recall what they have seen. This phenomenon promotes “exhibition amnesia,” an ideology that emphasizes the new while neglecting the past. Every new opening closes a door to what came before. The white cube, a dominant mode of exhibition display, symbolically ‘whitewashes’ memory, replacing it with interior installations surrounded by sterile drywalls. Exhibition spectatorship is driven by the demand for the novel, the immediate, and the up-to-the-minute, while past exhibitions serve only as references, easily becoming obsolete and forgotten. The genealogy of exhibitions reflects this shift, intertwined with the rise of modern museums in the 18th century and the development of capitalism, where the burgeoning bourgeoisie played a significant role in shaping museums as “public” spaces. As museums became more accessible, they began to reflect and reinforce the values and ideologies of emerging capitalist society, positioning exhibitions not only as new standardized displays but also as expressions of social relations mediated by capital.

  Carolina Rito

  An exhibition is a selected and curated presentation of objects in an institution of display or in an off-site where the display of artifacts is identified as an exhibition. It is typically curated by someone or a group of people and who are likely identified in the credits of the show as its curators.

• Exhibitionary

  Nina Liebenberg

  The exhibitionary relates to the power structures (mostly unseen) that accompany the making of and running of an exhibition or institution with an exhibition program. The “exhibitionary complex,” first introduced by Tony Bennett [“The Exhibitionary Complex,” New Formations, no. 4 (Spring 1988), 73–102], was revealed in practice through the work of artist-curators (such as Daniel Buren, Marcel Broodthaers, Hans Haacke, Andrea Fraser, and Fred Wilson) practicing institutional critique from the 1960s onward. Students in the curatorial program at the University of Cape Town, in which I taught for many years, engage with the exhibitionary by interrogating how the apartheid ideology influenced the categorization, storage, and display of the collections housed in the city’s museums and institutions. They are then asked to consider the task of local curators in relation to justice and restoration, latent collections and absence, as well as public vs. private space, along with ownership and agency.

  Vipash Purichanont

  The exhibitionary is an expanded notion of the exhibition. Unlike an exhibition, which is meant to be seen, the exhibitionary remains hidden from sight; its defining feature is its invisibility. Its lack of physical presence allows it to slip out of institutional spaces and into everyday life—that is, into the realm of the ordinary and unmarked. The exhibitionary captures things and places them in relation, much like a curator does in an exhibition. Often unwittingly, individuals engage in the exhibitionary of daily life. It is a display of relationships within life itself. Like a museum exhibition, the exhibitionary must be maintained, updated, and sometimes rehung. It transforms the individual into an object on display while obliging one to curate one’s own life—a fitting epitome of life under the attention economy.

  Bige Örer

  The term “exhibitionary” refers to a system of protocols, institutions, and frameworks that shape how exhibitions are conceived, presented, and experienced. It highlights the often-unseen mechanisms behind these presentations, unfolding power relations, historical narratives, and institutional forces that determine what gets exhibited and how. In this sense, the exhibitionary is an invisible but pervasive structure that extends beyond institutional spaces, influencing everyday life, affecting how people understand and engage with the world around them. By challenging traditional power dynamics, the exhibitionary fosters collaboration and co-creation while questioning established norms. It reflects and shapes cultural practices in an ongoing cycle of reinterpretation and critique.

  Henk Slager

  In the current paradigm, new forms of interaction (collaboration, co-production, current visual technologies), and transgressive practices (crossovers between the different topologies of visual and performative art, oscillations between various epistemic registers) are taking place. Such modes of meaning-making require more dynamic and expanded exhibition formats, such as archives, community-based projects, concept exhibitions, meeting spaces, and interventions in the public space. See, for example, Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995).

  Cătălin Gheorghe

  The exhibitionary apparatus generates certain perceptions of its intentions that often obscure its actual political privileges. It seeks to influence beliefs, reasons, and behaviors; and its rationale and modus operandi are ordering discourses that mask its power structure. These are consequences of its paradoxical presence, acting from a political distance but speaking in full proximity to the audience. In this way, its dominant normative views are mediated through direct concrete displays that, in effect, regulate its viewers’ perceptions.  This only underscores the fact that its constitutive colonial derivation inflects it with a deeply negative political condition of hierarchical power.

  Even if the exhibitionary moment seems to be not only ideological but also epistemologically compromised, there are substituent chances to overcome institutional conspiracies. Imagining a new, even radical, exhibitionary (social) design that would presuppose the use of present exhibition infrastructures to mediate reformations and reparations, or even revolutionary formulations against the reproduction of the exhibitionary’s underlying privileges.

  Hongjohn Lin

  In contrast to conventional exhibitions housed in the white cube, the "exhibitionary" moves beyond the gallery ideology, expanding into new forms of public engagement through screenings, performances, experiments, talks, and gatherings. These participatory actions reveal how the gallery ideology is constructed and how (art) histories are generated. The exhibitionary, in short, exposes the backstage mechanisms through which realities are shaped. By reconfiguring the dynamics between acting and enactment, the exhibitionary denaturalizes traditional exhibition formats. The conventional roles of artist, spectator, and curator are rewritten, disrupting the symbolic order to reveal how exhibitions construct reality. This approach aligns with various contemporary curatorial practices, including institutional critique, performativity, criticality, the educational turn, and the expanded field of exhibition-making.

  Carolina Rito

  The exhibitionary is the network of protocols and regimes (material, conceptual, epistemic, institutional, etc.) through which exhibitions are seen, conceptualized, and signified. Despite being mainly invisible, the exhibitionary is made manifest in very concrete forms. An exhibition’s arrangement of objects and discourse can be understood as the manifested artifact of the exhibitionary. In other words, and similar to Michel Foucault’s notion of “episteme,” the exhibitionary is a regime of intelligibility that pertains to displays as historical constructs. We can say that the defining frame of an exhibition is always a subset of the exhibitionary, which cannot be contained or even provide a totalizing view. Simply, the exhibitionary is the apparatus through which exhibitions surface or are made to surface. Instead, it is larger than the sum of its parts, in a cycle of constant evolution and transforming norms. As Keller Easterling has written about infrastructure, it can be said as well about the exhibitionary that it “is too big and not at one and the same place. It cannot be addressed through its shape or outline, but rather via its disposition—potentials unfolding in time and territory.” The exhibitionary depends on its activation in order to make sense.

Curating/The Curatorial →

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• Contributors

  Nina Liebenberg is a South African curator, currently conducting her post-doctoral research at the University of the Arts, Helsinki. Before moving to Finland, Liebenberg spent the last ten years working at the University of Cape Town’s Centre for Curating the Archive, convening a selection of courses for its curatorial program. She uses curation as methodology to explore various overlaps and connections between diverse university departments, drawing on their disciplinary objects collections to curate exhibitions that surface uncanny cross-disciplinary connections and extend the meaning of how these materials are understood in their host departments. She is a member of the Curatorial Studies Workshop, part of the Expanded Artistic Research Network (EARN).

  Henk Slager’s focus has been on research and visual art for the last twenty years. He was a Lecturer at De Appel Curatorial Program (1995-2020), Visiting Professor of Artistic Research (Uniarts Helsinki 2010-2015, 2024-), and Dean of MaHKU Utrecht Graduate School of Visual Art and Design (HKU Utrecht 2003-2018). He is currently working for the same school on the development of a practice-based doctoral program. Slager co-initiated the European Artistic Research Network (EARN), a network investigating the consequences of artistic research for current art education through symposia, expert meetings, and presentations. Departing from a similar focus on artistic research he published The Pleasure of Research, an overview of curatorial research projects (a.o. Shanghai Biennale, 2008; Tbilisi Triennial, 2012; Aesthetic Jam Taipei Biennial, 2014; 5th Guangzhou Triennial, 2015; Research Pavilion Venice, 2015-2019; and 9th Bucharest Biennale, 2020). A follow-up publication will be presented in 2025. Slager is currently co-convening the 6th Asia Triennial Manchester (2025).

  Cătălin Gheorghe is a theoretician, curator, editor, and Professor of Curatorial Research and Practices at “George Enescu” National University of the Arts in Iași, Romania. He is the editor of Vector Publications, including the recent volumes Learning by curating. Current trajectories in critical curatorial research (2022) and Exhibitionary Acts of Political Imagination, co-edited with Mick Wilson (2021). He is also the curator of Vector Studio, a platform for critical research and art production based on the understanding of art as experimental journalism. He is a member of the Curatorial Studies Workshop, part of the Expanded Artistic Research Network (EARN).

  Hongjohn Lin is an artist, curator, and Professor at Taipei National University of the Arts, holding a PhD in Arts and Humanities from New York University. His notable exhibitions include the Taipei Biennial (2004, 2012), Asian Manchester Triennial (2008), and Guangzhou Triennial (2015). Lin curated the Taiwan Pavilion’s Atopia at the Venice Biennial (2007) and co-curated the Taipei Biennial with Tirdad Zolghadr (2010). He authored introductions for the Chinese editions of Art Power (Boris Groys) and Artificial Hells (Claire Bishop), and his publications include Poetics of Curating (2018). Lin is the founding editor of Curatography and is currently curating Asian Manchester Triennial 2025. He is a member of the Curatorial Studies Workshop, part of the Expanded Artistic Research Network (EARN).

  Carolina Rito is Professor of Creative Practice Research at the Research Centre for Arts, Memory, and Communities, Coventry University, UK. She is a researcher and curator whose work is situated at the intersection of knowledge production, the curatorial, and contested historical narratives. Rito is an Executive Board Member of the Midlands Higher Education & Culture Forum and a Research Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary History (IHC), Universidade Nova de Lisboa. She has served as the Executive Editor of The Contemporary Journal and has published in international journals such as King’s Review, Mousse Magazine,  Wrong Wrong, and The Curatorial. From 2017 to 2019, Rito was Head of Public Programs and Research at Nottingham Contemporary, leading the partnership with Nottingham Trent University and the University of Nottingham. She holds a PhD in Curatorial/Knowledge from Goldsmiths, University of London, where she also taught from 2014 to 2016. She lectures internationally—in Europe, South America, and the Middle East—on her research and curatorial studies. She is a member of the Curatorial Studies Workshop, part of the Expanded Artistic Research Network (EARN).

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Walking & Talking with Jacqueline E. Burckhardt

Bige Örer, Jacqueline E. Burckhardt • 6/17/25

• Video Summary

  Walking & Talking, hosted by Istanbul- and London-based curator and organizer Bige Örer, is a series of video-recorded conversational experiences based on walking with each guest curator in the same location or in two different places in the world. Some of these conversations address broad societal, cultural, or philosophical questions, while others may unfold more intimate concerns and flow with inner journeys. The walks are imagined as poems shared between the participants on their shared paths.

  
  In this episode, recorded in London on December 10, 2024, Örer speaks with curator Jacqueline E. Burckhardt. Their conversation centers on the idea of “writing” and how Burckhardt’s 2022 publication, La mia commedia dell’arte, brought out by Edition Patrick Frey (Zürich), reveals her multifaceted approach to engaging with art. Together, they reflect on the legacy of the influential art magazine Parkett, which Burckhardt co-founded, and discuss the dynamics and challenges of curatorial work—particularly in the context of artist commissions and research-driven projects. The episode concludes with Burckhardt reading Meret Oppenheim’s poem “Faithful Captain,” offered in response to Örer’s poetic invitation.

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• About Jacqueline E. Burckhardt

  Jacqueline E. Burckhardt is a curator, writer, and art historian whose work spans the fields of restoration, editorial practice, public art, and art education. She has long focused on fostering interdisciplinary dialogue between contemporary art, architecture, and cultural institutions. She co-founded and co-edited the influential art magazine Parkett (1984–2017), a platform for international artistic exchange. From 1999 to 2006, Burkhardt served as president of the Swiss Federal Commission for the Arts, and between 2004 and 2008, she taught at the Accademia di Architettura in Mendrisio, Switzerland. She also curated site-specific commissions for the Novartis Campus in Basel (2005–2015) and from 2008 to 2016, she was director of the Summer Academy at the Zentrum Paul Klee. Trained as a conservator at the Istituto Centrale del Restauro in Rome, she holds a PhD in art history from the University of Zurich. In 2024, the English edition of her book My Commedia dell’arte, also from Edition Patrick Frey.

• About Bige Örer

  Bige Örer is an Istanbul- and London-based independent curator and writer dedicated to amplifying the voices and visions of artists. Her curatorial practice is rooted in centering creativity and artistic perspectives, ensuring that artists remain at the heart of every exhibition and project she oversees. From 2008 to 2024, Örer served as the director of the Istanbul Biennial, where she transformed the biennial into a dynamic platform for artistic collaboration and intellectual exchange. She was instrumental in developing programs that broadened the biennial’s reach, particularly focusing on children and youth, while fostering artistic engagement throughout Turkey and internationally. In 2022, Örer curated Once upon a time…, the Füsun Onur exhibition at the Pavilion of Turkey for the 59th Venice Biennale. Her curatorial projects also include Flâneuses (Institut français Istanbul, 2017), an ongoing series involving walks with artists. Örer played a key role in establishing the Istanbul Biennial Production and Research Program, the SaDe Artist Support Fund, and coordinated initiatives such as the Cité des Arts Turkey Workshop Artist Residency Program and the Turkish Pavilion at the International Art and Architecture Exhibitions of the Venice Biennale. Örer has contributed articles to numerous publications and taught at Istanbul Bilgi University. She has also served as a consultant and jury member for various international art institutions, and from 2013 to 2024, she was the vice president of the International Biennial Association. During this time, she also contributed to the editorial and programming board of the association’s journal, PASS. She is a member of the Curatorial Studies Workshop, part of the Expanded Artistic Research Network (EARN).

An Enfolding: The Exhibitionary Complex and the Self

Steven Henry Madoff • 4/9/25

• Abstract

  Critical Curating is The Curatorial’s section devoted to more theoretically oriented considerations of curatorial research and practice. While of a specialized nature, we seek essays for this section that are written for a broadly engaged intellectual audience interested in curating’s philosophical, historical, aesthetic, political, and social tenets, as well as a labor-based activity and its ramifications.

  This essay reflects on the role and agency of curatorial work through the lens of personal and collective introspection, invoking a memory of the poet William Everson, who used silence and vulnerability to express profound human struggle. It argues that curatorial practice embodies a complex interplay between institutional power, the so-called “exhibitionary complex,” and acts of curatorial care that foster individual growth through what the author calls “elaboration.” Ideas concerning the self are essential to this argument. This turn to individuality as distinct from exhibitionary quantification not only addresses viewers but also curators themselves. Drawing on theorists such as Tony Bennett, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Karl Marx, the text advocates for a curatorial ethics that takes into account these notions of selfhood toward activism in the face of dominant power structures.

I begin with a memory. Around 1980, the American poet first known as Brother Antoninus, and then as William Everson when he left the Dominican brotherhood, came to my school to give a reading. Everson was dying of Parkinson’s. He came to the podium, and then he did something unexpected. He walked out in front of it and stood with his right arm extended, shaking uncontrollably. He didn’t say a word. He just let his ravaged arm quake in the air as he stared at us. It must have been thirty seconds, though it felt terribly longer. Without saying a word, he returned to the podium and read his poems. When he died, I thought of that sign of embattled life held up to his audience as foretaste, resistance, resignation, an aperture opening onto grief. This came to me again the other day amid more news of the devastations of war, and the obvious occurred to me that so few people even have the chance that Everson did so long ago to express their disastrous sense of loss, the briefest sign of mortal contestation.

I come to this now in thinking about curating’s agency, who it addresses, and the ways in which it produces knowledge: knowledge as production, expansion, beneficence, as a collaborative mode of being, as a perceived and enacted form of care since that’s so often spoken of.

To begin this way is meant only to say that what it is to be human, have empathy, produce knowledge, to understand strife and disaster—as well as to experience generosity—redound to the curatorial in its broadest sense and its most practical one of offering frameworks for making, knowing, and feeling into which we pour forms of labor whose mechanisms and protocols are intricate while encompassing all the complications of life.

As with all labor, the work of curators involves infrastructures that support its systemic flows of production and reception, some visible and much of it, like the mechanisms of all machines, not apparent to the eye. The parsing of infrastructure in the case of curatorial work reaches back to Tony Bennett—the late Australian art historian and theorist who coined the term “exhibitionary complex”—and offers a now standard understanding of this work within a larger system that includes the history of museums and their relationship to nationalist power structures. Particularly, he’s speaking of the ways in which cultural institutions metabolize nation-state ideologies and maintain those power structures, with museums mirroring and amplifying ideological positions that further entrench social orders. It isn’t much of a leap, then, to return to where I began in relating mortality to the apparatus of the exhibitionary complex in which curatorial labor resides, as Bennett writes:

The space of representation constituted in the relations between the disciplinary knowledges deployed within the exhibitionary complex thus permitted the construction of a temporally organized order of things and peoples. Moreover, that order was a totalizing one, metonymically encompassing all things and all peoples in their interactions through time. And an order which organized the implied public—the white citizenries of the imperialist powers—into a unity, representationally effacing divisions within the body politic in constructing a “we” conceived as the realization, and therefore just beneficiaries, of the processes of evolution and identified as a unity in opposition to the primitive otherness of conquered peoples.1

Bennett contends that by the nineteenth century, exhibitions became ever-more pliable in serving the “hegemonic strategies of different national bourgeoisies. They made the order of things dynamic, mobilizing it strategically in relation to the more immediate ideological and political exigencies of the particular moment.”2 His thinking rises from Michel Foucault’s writings concerning institutions, power, and governmentality, particularly Discipline and Punish, though it’s all the more (and sadly) apropos of what’s weighing on us now as deaths mount in conflagrations and authoritarian regimes rage and flourish. Bennett’s ideas are foregrounded by Foucault’s notions of biopower, in which he concerns himself with technologies of the self and governmental power over life. Yet in Bennett’s thinking about the exhibitionary, it’s worth considering another avenue in Foucault’s thought, his discussion of the dispositif, or in English, the “apparatus.” Let me quote Foucault from a passage cited in Giorgio Agamben’s essay about him in this regard, “What Is an Apparatus?” Foucault states:

What I'm trying to single out with this term is, first and foremost, a thoroughly heterogeneous set consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral, and philanthropic propositions—in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the apparatus. The apparatus itself is the network that can be established between these elements. [...] The apparatus is precisely this: a set of strategies of the relations of forces supporting, and supported by, certain types of knowledge.3

As an apparatus, the exhibitionary complex can be understood as an imperialist model of expansionism, a dispositif deploying corporate mechanisms of manipulation, control, and profit; an apparatus defined earlier by Marx in his Grundrisse, with its full English title being Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy, written over the course of the winter of 1857–58. In a passage known as “Fragment on Machines,” Marx writes:

Once adopted into the production process of capital, the means of labor passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the machine, or rather, an automatic system of machinery (system of machinery: the automatic one is merely its most complete, most adequate form, and alone transforms machinery into a system), set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages.4

This moving power that moves itself presents a way to think about the exhibitionary complex, or apparatus, when considering the ecology of the art world and how curating moves within it. But this immediately raises a quandary. On the one hand, thinking critically about the exhibitionary complex invokes a critique of power, of imperialism and expansionism, and today we have to add neoliberalist capitalism and its extractivist methods as part of the critique in order to envision ways of subverting and overcoming this moving power that moves itself. The challenge is to acknowledge that our curatorial means for doing this still live within the machine, within the orbit of its centrifugal ambitions, while also recognizing a difference fundamental to what the curatorial is and gives it its significance, its strength as an encompassing activity, its pleasures and its power.

Bennett spoke of the supra-national mission of self-interested imperialist “improvement,” as he put it, in the historical institutionalization of power that shadows the exhibitionary complex. “Improvement” here has the troubling toll of acquisition by any means, and then of manipulation, exclusion and revisionism, suppression and oppression, nuanced or brutal forms of control. Artistic and curatorial knowledge production are of a different stripe both in terms of what improvement and expansion invoke: the more of knowledge and its disciplines—history, sociology, anthropology, economics, linguistics, the hard sciences, knowledge about specific industries and their processes and products, religions and spirituality, theories of race, of pedagogy, studies of climate change, local and global studies of populations, of contemporary technologies such as AI—the breadth is endless, tentacular, deep. And why not?

These are differences that can’t be ignored if we’re to understand most clearly what the ambitions come to mean when we lay out the landscape of the exhibitionary today. Two kinds of expansionism are at play, the regimes of dominant power as they filter into cultural institutions and curatorial practices and the inexhaustible practices of research and knowledge production for audiences toward their individual and collective intellectual and empathic expansion. So: on the one hand, the exhibitionary automaton; on the other, exhibitionary care. On the one hand, curatorial work within the shadow of power; on the other, what we know also exists locally and globally: not cultural institutions that bow to power, but those that speak to it. Curatorial activism can right the long tilt of entrenched prejudicial determinations of what can be collected, displayed, analyzed, and fitted to posterity. This, too, is expansion, but, as I say, of a different kind: exhuming, revivifying, reframing, reconsidering, and puncturing the brackets of power.

These acts are congruent (in a sense not so fanciful) with Everson’s arm shaking in front of us to propose that there is no one way to act in the face of terrible things, in what can be done and remembered as a counterforce of activist being. Which is to say, not merely, in Marx’s words, workers “merely as conscious linkages,” but laborers in the fields of cultural production who aren’t simply linkages within the automaton but willfully autonomous workers moving toward other ends.

A way to think about this is to upend an unspoken assumption when we speak of the exhibitionary complex’s many parts, and that’s to move away from mathematical thinking, from thinking primarily in terms of quantities, of numerousness and aggregation, of a monolithic totality. Instead, it’s crucial to remember who all of these institutions are intended for and are dependent on for their own survival. And that’s to speak of individuals, of viewers as self-moving cognitive workers of reception whose motivation is toward internal growth. This sensory, cognitive “I” has been lost sight of in the quantification of the apparatus and its form of expansionism linked to imperialist/capitalist power.

In writing this, I’m not speaking of each viewer’s formation in the act of entering the special zone of attention we call a museum, a Kunsthalle, a gallery. I’m speaking of elaboration as a process that each “I” may undergo. In the cognitive crucible of being in the world, there is no “we” without a preceding “I,” primary before gathered, self-centric in relation to the whole in the constant avalanche of sluiced reciprocities between self and world—“self,” a construct of presence and reminiscence simultaneously presenting the mind to itself and to the world as representational reflection. And so it is for each self in experiencing an exhibition for which the curatorial task, in its most atomized remit, is essentially and crucially, a form of care that’s addressed not to the roar of the crowd but to the murmur of individual selfhood, personhood. Of course, people do go to exhibitions for sheer amusement, and a capitalist pressure on cultural institutions is to amuse their publics, to enter into a competitive stream of visual moments that captures the thrilled transience of contemporary attention.

But here, if we’re to think of the curatorial task of care as an elaboration of the self that deepens and surprises, encouraging the viewer to leave an exhibition incrementally changed, it’s to elaborate this elaboration and say that it not only magnifies the grain of each viewer’s comprehension but also brings a new transparency to comprehension, a clarity that makes plain. This aspiration is enfolded in the curatorial act that creates an eventfulness for the self, understanding each viewer as a self-moving mover autonomous in introspection and not merely a matter of the automaton’s massification or solely owned by Bennett’s description of a relentless exhibitionary imperialist expansionism.

An irony of our moment is the aporia within the art world that swoons in its dance with capitalism while crowing about freedom and autonomy, celebrating an antique idea of Romantic genius while counting numbers at the museum gate, the biennial gate, the festival gate, the gallery and the auction house. Yet if this elaboration of each self is possible, it’s also possible to argue for introspection and communion as curatorial levers to wedge open and revise institutionalism: not a remaking of the exhibitionary complex if we’re to be realistic, but another vision of what a complex of artistic and curatorial practices could be alongside it.

The Jakarta-based artists’ collective ruangrupa helped us envision this in their collection of collectives for Documenta 15 in 2022. Their invocation of the Indonesian lumbung—the communal rice barn, or gathering house, in which folks join the tumult, negotiation, and collaboration among selves toward a broader kinship. It could be that the very idea of “system” itself, so dear to the exhibitionary complex, might be loosened by the casual convening of an alter-complex in which the felt presence of artistic and curatorial practices articulates a greater valence of personhood over quantifications bracketed by capitalist strictures. Even before the example of ruangrupa, these ideas about cultivating selves individually and in collaboration were approached by Maria Lind when she transformed the Tensta konsthall, from 2011 to 2018, into a center that sought to service the immigrant community on the outskirts of Stockholm, offering them ways to consolidate their fellow-being in an otherwise indifferent Swedish society.

And it occurs to me that this artistic and curatorial inclination toward seeing and recognizing the presentness of individuals has been on my mind for a long time. In December 2010, I published an essay in Artforum titled “Service Aesthetics” in which I differentiated a kind of artistic practice from what Nicolas Bourriaud famously laid out in his 1998 book Relational Aesthetics. I argued that various artists since the 1960s specifically practiced an art not of relations to a generalized audience but of individual address, inviting single people, one at a time, to enter a space with them for a meal, a conversation, even a confrontation.5 And, of course, it’s in 1964 that Susan Sontag writes her essay “Against Interpretation” that concludes with her edict: “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”6

I extrapolate that here to say that we need to honor the individual self in pulling it free from the monolith of the exhibitionary apparatus and its regulated systems in order to recognize not only that it’s the individual viewer we always need to acknowledge at the center but that there is, in this sensorial foliation for the viewer and for viewers in communion, a feeling labor in the act of curating that lives alongside the analytical, the research-based, the professionalized practices—the embodiment of a curatorial erotics for the curator, as obvious yet unsaid as this generally is—and in this way, a still more encompassing consideration within the exhibitionary complex of selfhood.

But how to think about this move, this gesture toward selfhood in curatorial care first toward viewers and then toward curators themselves? After all, what I’ve been pointing to is introspection, an inwardness that expands personal meaningfulness, personal being. This brings me back to Foucault by way of another philosopher, Judith Butler. Toward the end of her book Giving an Account of Oneself, she’s trying to untie the knot of Foucault’s thinking about the self and particularly his own self in his final years. In the process, she touches on Foucault’s analysis of the act of confession, and she notes that confession as a public manifestation of the self requires what she calls “a certain performative production of the subject” [...] that “constitutes the aim of confession itself.”

In confessing, Butler writes, “the manifestation of the self dissolves its inwardness and reconstitutes it in its externality.” So, she continues, for Foucault, “In this sense, manifestation does not ‘express’ a self but takes its place, and it accomplishes that substitution through an inversion of the particular self into an outward appearance,” which she also characterizes as a “publicized mode of appearance.”7 Yet that doesn’t mean the self is only identified as an object. It means that the self is a subject for itself and with others. This “mode of reflexivity,” as Butler calls it, is an ethical practice that the self needs in order to conserve itself in the face of external pressures. That’s to say, the self needs to maintain introspection, which is a form of self-sufficiency, precisely in order to avoid becoming that Marxian mereness of workers regulated by external powers.8

Those questions are pressing here as well. As I’m assuming, again, that the self stepping across the threshold of the experiential space of an exhibition is there to contemplate a work of art, a room of artworks, an exhibition of works, ready for the exhibition’s haptic, sensual, cognitive, and ruminative pathways to unfold in the name of elaboration, and that the encounter, query, and care for the self figure into the implicit struggle, the unsaid and the said, between subject and object, in keeping with Foucault’s notion of the apparatus as a “relation of forces.”

So, Foucault asked, “How might and must one appear?” And Butler comments: “If I ask, ‘Who might I be for myself?’ I must also ask, ‘What place is there for an “I” in the discursive regime in which I live?’ and ‘What modes of attending to the self have been established as the ones in which I might engage?’.”9 If we can continue to claim that the self stepping across the threshold of an exhibition is there to contemplate the works for elaboration, that the exhibition’s haptic, sensual, cognitive, and ruminative pathways unfold in the name of elaboration, then Foucault’s notion of the dispositif, of the apparatus, as a “relation of forces,” can be reframed by the curatorial remit of care—particularly as a trajectory for the self in a mode of reflexivity that welcomes the conversion from inward to outward, first individually, then collectively.

Even with the production of the subject that Butler describes, proposing this outwardness of individual being in the confessional mode, there remains the sturdiness and luminous possibility that the self maintains its sufficiency in contrast to the operation of confession that always fixes the self within regulatory social and religious strictures. All of this is to say that the oscillation between individual being and collective being imposes an urgency on curatorial care to dance between the cultivation of individual being, the possibility of collective growth, and an acknowledgment that the strictures of power are real and present. The enunciation of curatorial care toward the conservation of the self and the encouragement of agency must inevitably take those limitations into account. As Butler says, the subject “is always made in part from something else that is not itself—a history, an unconscious, a set of structures, the history of reason—which gives the lie to its self-grounded pretensions.”10

Still, there’s the calling out, the invitation to each self-attending self, the viewer going toward the work in order to enter into introspection, and here the curatorial gesture is a kindred expression of selfhood, just as Butler proposes: “I give an account of myself to you. Furthermore, the scene of address, what we might call the rhetorical condition for responsibility, means that while I am engaging in a reflexive activity, thinking about and reconstructing myself, I am also speaking to you and thus elaborating a relation to an other in language as I go.”11

It’s as if, in the same slow accretion of time and light, each viewer’s sedimented life can both deepen and extrude feelings through what comes to be known in the sensual and cognitive experience of viewing things. We’re all drawn into the narrative of an exhibition, seduced (if it’s any good), offered the pleasures of agreement or challenge, animation, respite, or even the pleasure to reject. (And for the curator, of course, pleasure includes the optical, spatial, and haptic aspects of exhibition-making.) For a moment, this narrative enters each of us, pulls us into the swell of images and objects that become elements in constellations of ideas. Naturally, the edges of pleasure and its depth, its placement within feeling, are unpredictable and personal, as is its duration.

But then what? What is taken in further, metabolized, if this pleasure lasts more than a moment, enters not only the inner world of the self but also the economies of distribution (memory, discussion, reaction, criticality, writing, broadcast), the address to what Franco Bifo Berardi calls “solidary bodies,” bodies accounting for one another. Naturally, this is toward community—an aggregation, a matter of numbers again—but also, I’ll argue, toward the singularity of positioning my “I” in relation to others. That is intrinsic to the viewer’s pleasure and the curator’s responsibility.

This orchestration of selves, of curator and each self brought into its care, is a politics of linkage, transfer, and affiliation in an aspiration for kinship—and it isn’t without a cost. If, in some deeper sense, every curatorial project is also a kind of confession, an exposure and divulging for the public that is its purpose for being, then it’s also a matter of both joy and taxing work, a weight and unburdening that is, at times, trying. The curator’s unknowing toward knowing, that path broken out and broken open, that responsibility, ethics, politics of self toward others, that imagining of a way alongside the automaton, comes with the question Foucault asks: “How much does it cost the subject to tell the truth about itself?”12

But no one asks this of the curator, what the toll of the task is, only the outcome, the surface glint. No one remarks about curatorial labor in the way that Butler observes in response to Foucault’s question: “Our capacity to reflect upon ourselves, to tell the truth about ourselves, is correspondingly limited by what the discourse, the regime, cannot allow into speakability.” So, she remarks, “We must recognize that ethics requires us to risk ourselves precisely at moments of unknowingness, when what forms us diverges from what lies before us, when our willingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance.”13

What’s at stake for both the curator and the viewer is the dilation of the self that comes with inventing narratives that disorder the scaffolding of unquestioned truths, finding in the path of unknowing the chances of knowledge, and, in our case, marking the risk and promise of the curatorial chance. In the pastoral sense of responsibility for others and for oneself, curatorial work moves from the internal labor of conceptualization, the path of unknowing, to the outward, confessional divulgence that is the exhibition (or any other form of curatorial project) produced in the name of caring and knowing—whatever that knowing is toward: justice, the subversion of givens, the release of beauty into the world, the realization that there is another way to look, understand, react, determine, be, the sense of the proximity to truth.

Let me be quick to add that issues-based exhibitions aren’t the only ones to be made or are made. The exhibitionary complex lies along a continuum of political geographies, some more punitively restrictive than others. What is allowed into speakability and what is not, driven by ideologies and economics, advance different breadths of curatorial thought and production. How to define entertainment and how to calibrate pleasure are operations that live within the constraints of discourses and regimes. Yet those pleasures of looking, of beauty, visual surprise, mystery, the hint of what is being left in the shadows of the mind to imagine, the delicacy of a thing, the leavened flight of what artistic practice can unleash, all of this remains germane to sustaining the self as the curator lays out the table of our visual and intellectual repass, conceptualizing and presenting what entertains, what stirs, what disturbs. This work, in the account of feeling and knowing, of recognition of self and selves, in the responsibilities of transmission and affiliation with the goal of what Donna Haraway calls “making kin,”14 is the curatorial task sensually, intellectually, politically, imaginatively, and practically—the broadest and most specifically planned and executed task of exhibitionary care, which is both speculum and speculation, mirror and window.

This is a way through or alongside the monolith of the automaton. The will of the curator and the will of each viewer, which is to say the position of the self in and toward the world, are to be acknowledged, to be de-algorithmicized; an erotics of exhibition-making calling to each of us, and each of us answering as we need to, as we can.

NOTES

1. Tony Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex,” New Formations, no. 4 (Spring 1988): 92.
2. Bennett, “Exhibitionary Complex,” 93.
3. Giorgio Agamben, What Is an Apparatus and Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 2.
4. Karl Marx, Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Penguin Books, 1973), 620.
5. Steven Henry Madoff, “Service Aesthetics,” Artforum 47, no. 1 (September 2008): 165-169.
6. Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), 14.
7. Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 113-114.
8. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 114.
9. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 114.
10. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 116.
11. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 50.
12. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 120.
13. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 121, 136.
14. Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).

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• About Steven Henry Madoff

  Steven Henry Madoff is the founding chair of the MA Curatorial Practice program at the School of Visual Arts in New York and editor in chief of The Curatorial. Previously, he served as senior critic at Yale University’s School of Art. He lectures internationally on such subjects as the history of interdisciplinary art, contemporary art, curatorial practice, and art pedagogy. He has served as executive editor of ARTnews magazine and as president and editorial director of AltaCultura, a project of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His books include Thoughts on Curating from Sternberg Press (series editor); Turning Points: Responsive Pedagogies in Studio Art Education (contributor) from Teachers College Press; Learning by Curating: Current Trajectories in Critical Curatorial Education (contributor) from Vector; Fabricating Publics (contributor) from Open Humanities Press; What about Activism? (editor) from Sternberg Press; Handbook for Artistic Research Education (contributor) from SHARE; Art School (Propositions for the 21st Century) (editor) from MIT Press; Pop Art: A Critical History (editor) from University of California Press; Christopher Wilmarth: Light and Gravity from Princeton University; To Seminar (contributor) from Metropolis M Books; and After the Educational Turn: Critical Art Pedagogies and Decolonialism (contributor) from Black Dog Press. His new book, The Power of the Unseparate: Network Aesthetics and the Rise of Interdisciplinary Art, is forthcoming from Stanford University Press. Essays concerning pedagogy and philosophy have appeared in volumes associated with conferences at art academies in Beijing, Paris, Utrecht, and Gothenburg. He has written monographic essays on various artists, such as Marina Abramović, Georg Baselitz, Ann Hamilton, Rebecca Horn, Y. Z. Kami, Shirin Neshat, and Kimsooja, for museums and art institutions around the world. His criticism and journalism have been translated into many languages and appeared regularly in such publications as the New York Times, Time magazine, Artforum, Art in America, Tate Etc., as well as in ARTnews and Modern Painters, where he has also served as a contributing editor. He has curated exhibitions internationally over the last 35 years in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East. Most recently, Y.Z. Kami: In a Silent Way at MUSAC, León, Spain, June 2022-January 2023. Madoff is the recipient of numerous awards, including from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Academy of American Poets.

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Walking & Talking with Théo-Mario Coppola

Bige Örer, Théo-Mario Coppola • 3/25/25

• Video Summary

  Walking & Talking, hosted by Istanbul- and London-based curator and organizer Bige Örer, is a series of video-recorded conversational experiences based on walking with each guest curator in the same location or in two different places in the world. Some of these conversations address broad societal, cultural, or philosophical questions, while others may unfold more intimate concerns and flow with inner journeys. The walks are imagined as poems shared between the participants on their shared paths.

  In this thoughtful conversation between Örer and curator and arts writer Théo-Mario Coppola, recorded on November 30, 2024 in Paris, they focus on the notion of “the commons” and how the arts ecosystem can be reimagined with principles of equality, fairness, and transformation. As they walk through the city, starting from Rue du Liban and ending at Rue de Palestine, a meeting point and a destination chosen by Coppola in response to the current geopolitical context, they reflect on the political, social, and cultural dynamics that shape the city’s names and experiences. They explore ideas about redefining the infrastructures of art and exhibition-making as well as the curatorial realm to create a more inclusive and diversity-based approach. The conversation ends with Coppola reading a poem by Mejdulene B. Shomali, “my mother says this would have never happened if we stayed in Palestine,” responding to Örer’s poetic invitation. The video blends more theoretical dialogue with the intimate experience of walking and thinking together, exploring how personal and societal histories influence the world of curating and art.

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• About Théo-Mario Coppola

  Théo-Mario Coppola is a curator and arts writer based in Paris and Vienna. Through their intersectional practice, they support discursive, community- and research-based methodologies by BIPOC, crip, queer, and women art practitioners, and frequently showcase time-based practices, including lens-based works and performances. Seeking to encourage fair and equitable work conditions in the cultural field, Coppola has regularly provided expertise on curatorial and critical affairs, including knowledge building, ethical governance, strategy development, inclusive management, and greater diversity within the context of government ministry advisory groups and sectoral and umbrella organizations. In France, they successfully campaigned for the registration of exhibitions as intellectual work in the French Intellectual Property Code and for the introduction and widespread use of a standard work contract between curators and institutions.

  Among Coppolla’s many activities, they co-organized the “In solidarity with Ukraine” special assembly at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2022; curated the eleventh edition of the Momentum biennale in Moss, Norway, in 2021; and the third edition of the Nuit Blanche arts festival at Villa Medici in Rome in 2018. Coppola founded and curated HOTEL EUROPA, an annual series of exhibitions and programs (Vilnius, 2017; Brussels, 2018; and Tbilisi, 2019). They have served as the artistic and executive director of Collezione Taurisano, an international private contemporary art collection focused on political art and based in Naples from 2017 to late 2018. In parallel, they were the artistic director of Primo Piano and Intermezzo, two private initiatives supporting international artists through a joint residency and exhibition program in Paris. See https://www.theomariocoppola.xyz for more.

• About Bige Örer

  Bige Örer is an Istanbul- and London-based independent curator and writer dedicated to amplifying the voices and visions of artists. Her curatorial practice is rooted in centering creativity and artistic perspectives, ensuring that artists remain at the heart of every exhibition and project she oversees. From 2008 to 2024, Örer served as the director of the Istanbul Biennial, where she transformed the biennial into a dynamic platform for artistic collaboration and intellectual exchange. She was instrumental in developing programs that broadened the biennial’s reach, particularly focusing on children and youth, while fostering artistic engagement throughout Turkey and internationally. In 2022, Örer curated Once upon a time…, the Füsun Onur exhibition at the Pavilion of Turkey for the 59th Venice Biennale. Her curatorial projects also include Flâneuses (Institut français Istanbul, 2017), an ongoing series involving walks with artists. Örer played a key role in establishing the Istanbul Biennial Production and Research Program, the SaDe Artist Support Fund, and coordinated initiatives such as the Cité des Arts Turkey Workshop Artist Residency Program and the Turkish Pavilion at the International Art and Architecture Exhibitions of the Venice Biennale. Örer has contributed articles to numerous publications and taught at Istanbul Bilgi University. She has also served as a consultant and jury member for various international art institutions, and from 2013 to 2024, she was the vice president of the International Biennial Association. During this time, she also contributed to the editorial and programming board of the association’s journal, PASS. She is a member of the Curatorial Studies Workshop, part of the Expanded Artistic Research Network (EARN).

Welcome!

Steven Henry Madoff • 2/1/25

• Abstract

  Welcome to The Curatorial. You will always find in the Abstract a summary of what each section is about, followed by specific details about the essay, transcript, review, video, or portfolio you are about to read, look at, or listen to.

Welcome to The Curatorial.

We’re launching our new international journal, which you can read further about on the About page, with a small number of pieces that will give you the first inkling of what I hope we’ll contribute to your thinking over time: a sense of the cornucopia of ideas around what curating is, roving between the scholarly and practice-based, more whimsical and critically inclined, future-facing and historical.

For example, for the inauguration of The Curatorial, you’ll find two essays more theoretical in nature by members of the Curatorial Studies Workshop, part of the Expanded Artistic Research Network (EARN), a global group of practitioners and academics devoted to thinking about curating and curatorial studies. Workshop members also contribute the initial entries in the lexicon we’re developing around crucial terms associated with curatorial practices, with new entries to each term’s definition, along with whole new terms, on a regular basis. They’re joined in the launch by Amira Gad, Conservator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, who writes here about the evolving relationship between digital art in its various forms and cultural institutions. Amira’s piece serves as an introduction to this section of the journal, The Algorithmic State, concerned with the digital realm as it enters more and more fully into artistic and curatorial production. Istanbul- and London-based curator Bige Örer offers a video in the section she has invented for the journal, Walking & Talking, which features her speaking with curators around the world as they traipse through their respective cities and discuss their work. On Site, introduced with a review by Fulbright Scholar Tom Koren, presents critiques of exhibitions, not from the perspective of the art but instead delving into how a show has been curated as a means to share examples and ideas about exhibition-making. And Roulette is what (I hope) it suggests: a roll of the ball on the roulette wheel or a throw of the dice, meaning a more random contribution that may touch on curating in some other way, or perhaps just a cultural topic of interest. The first piece is about curatorial education by the world-renowned Australian art historian and theorist of curating, Terry Smith.

As the ideas build under the various subject banners you see on our entry page, these areas of concentration will deepen. We start with these initial pieces as we invite more writers and slowly augment our offerings—a journal like an herbarium or a grow box under the shine of contemporary insights. Grow with us. Join us.—Steven Henry Madoff, Editor-in-Chief

• About Steven Henry Madoff

  Steven Henry Madoff is the editor-in-chief of The Curatorial and the founding chair of the MA Curatorial Practice program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. He is a member of the Curatorial Studies Workshop, part of the Expanded Artistic Research Network (EARN).

World Questions—For Contemporary Curatorial Education

Terry Smith • 2/1/25

• Abstract

  Roulette is our section for essays, portfolios, videos, conversations, and more that range across a broader purview of culture and politics, not within our current thematic sections. It is, in a sense, a chance encounter with a subject of interest within the extended realm of visual culture.

  In this essay, Terry Smith examines curatorial studies during a period of global "intermission," exploring how curatorial practices can respond to contemporary challenges such as climate change, economic inequality, geopolitical shifts, and technological disruption within what he calls the visual arts exhibitionary complex (VAEC). He argues that while curatorial studies traditionally make modest contributions to culture, reimagining them as a "curatorial form of life education" could bring about new thinking. Recognizing that a unified global mission is unlikely due to ongoing crises and divisiveness, Smith suggests that curators focus on promoting coeval communality in its liberatory potential in addressing the urgent issues the world faces today and in the years to come. Seven key curatorial models are presented with examples, including curating large-scale world pictures, asserting sovereignty, exploring diasporas, localizing dominant narratives, creating exhibitions as thinking machines, engaging with new technologies, and navigating censorship. The core argument is that curators must actively pursue strategies of coeval communality, resisting passive historical narratives and working toward collaborative, context-specific artistic interventions.

What forms should curatorial studies take at a time of “intermission” for contemporary art and for “broader cultural and political realities” today—indeed, for “human history at this moment”?1

I presume the existence of strong relationships between the specifics of making works of art and practices of curating, on the one hand, and, on the other, the large-scale historical sweep, through the present, of the major forces shaping life on this planet. Among the myriad institutions and networks that mediate these relationships is curatorial studies. The discipline of curatorial studies usually makes modest contributions to changing the status quo while also striving to advance the practice of curating art, of exhibition-making, and of caring for artworks and artists as best it can. Curatorial studies, like everything else involved in art and education today, is subject to the stagnation of “intermission.” Nevertheless, there is the hope that art, curating, and curatorial studies, if radically reconceived as “a curatorial form of life education,” can liberate both “humanity and art.”  

If this is a utopian quest, I feel obliged to point out that realism requires a closer look at the concept of intermission, especially the presumption (or perhaps the hope) that we are suspended—not just between two times, past and future (that will always be true)—but between two world orders: that of a no longer viable past, which nonetheless fills our present, and “a big new play,” a freshly imagined, shareable mission.

What would this big new play need to do? It would need to guide us toward solving the main challenges facing life on Earth at this time. Let me list these challenges as questions:

• Will we wean ourselves from our dependence on fossil fuels in time to hold down the global boiling that is already making the planet uninhabitable for many living beings—and might soon do so for most of us and eventually all?

• Will we arrest accelerating economic inequality before it precipitates unstoppable authoritarianism, fascism, and/or random insurrection within nations and more conflict between them?

• Will the shift in geopolitics from the international “rules-based order”—led since 1989 by the US—to a “world disorder,” consisting of contention between alliances led by major regional powers such as China, Russia, and India, along with coalitions such as BRICS, ASEAN, etc., be accomplished without continuing attrition, regional wars (as in the Middle East at this time), or total war? The resumption of Donald Trump to the US presidency signals the emergence of a new axis of authoritarianism, making such negative outcomes more likely.

• Will the alliance of market economies with representative governance (Western democracy) survive as a framework for national politics in those countries where it prevails at present?  Can states with central economies and single-party rule manage the planetary, global, regional, and internal challenges of state capitalism?

• Do the current international agencies and non-governmental organizations with international remits offer an adequate basis for the worldly cooperation necessary to meet these challenges?

• Will other modes of cooperation and governance emerge in time to address these challenges in ways that work locally and add up planetarily?

• Will the affordances of new technologies, notably AI, outweigh their negative impacts?

These questions do not afford a simple, all-inclusive answer. But their accumulating force suggests that a big new play, a new, shareable mission, is highly unlikely. Rather, we are likely to remain in a state of permanent transition from the postwar order, and from the decolonizing disorder—those remainders of the modern world order—into the contemporaneity of difference that characterizes our continuous present.

Our current situation is haunted by the paradox that divisiveness seems to have reached unprecedented levels at a time when unity among our differences has never been more essential and urgent. A further persistent paradox is that while knowledge of the world’s processes, of human history, and of technological capacity is vast and deep, conversely the task of imagining futures often cedes to presumptions of continuity or to chance; to an emergent victor or a messianic figure; or to algorithmic possibilities, peripheral glimpses, and generalizing categories. Too often—not least in advanced critical thinking—futurity is avoided altogether.

Curating Our Contemporaneity

What kinds of cultural work, artmaking, and curating become necessary, then possible, in contemporary circumstances?

In my books on curating, especially Curating the Complex and The Open Strike, I map the frameworks within which art curators work and suggest strategies for practice within current situations.2 In well-resourced art centers today, these are the places where art is exhibited:

Curatorial education must include learning about these clusters: their distinctiveness and their interactions, their historical development, their imbrication in other social formations, and their connections with visual arts exhibitionary complexes (VAECs) elsewhere. To mangle Roland Barthes’s already overused distinction in Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography: study the studium, absorb it until the puncta that haunt it surprise the curatorial within you and your world.

I will highlight some examples of curators who have pursued art’s liberatory potential in the face of the kinds of challenges I listed above. If a new, shareable mission is unlikely, nevertheless, a workable unity among and between our differences is imaginable—and necessary. A step toward that would be to ask: What can we learn from the constructive, world-building projects that are being urgently embraced by artists, curators, and educators in various places around the world today? How might we build on their achievements, learn from their shortcomings?

I will highlight seven kinds of curatorial projects that I believe are vital today.

1. Curating Large-Scale World Pictures

Very few curators have conceived their work as operating on a worldly scale—that is, as addressing the kinds of world-historical questions I have listed. Okwui Enwezor was one. In 2013, over ten years ago, he conceived an ambitious plan to map the ways in which large-scale sociopolitical and cultural changes were manifest in critical thinking and in art practice since the end of World War II. This was a major enterprise in art-historical revisionism to be conducted through research, publishing, and, above all, exhibition-making. He thought that this would be best done in three big exhibitions: Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945-1965; an exhibition provisionally titled The Postcolonial Constellation: Art, Culture, Sovereignty, 1965-1985; and a third to be called Postcommunist, 1985 – now.

The first was shown in 2016 at the Haus der Kunst, where he was the director from 2011 to 2018. He began from the question: “How did artists contend with the evidence all around them of the enormous destructive power of the human imagination?” His co-curator, Katy Seigel, noted that “the image of the Atomic Bomb becomes the most recognized image in the world. For the first time, the world is a single place,” in which, she implies, all of us could die together—much like the even larger scale, and more multiple, existential crises facing us today. The exhibition argued that “To address deeper questions of morality, meaning, spirit, many artists rejected the ideological demand to choose either tradition and modernity by fusing realism and abstraction.” Can a similar observation be made today? How would you exhibit it?

The second phase, The Postcolonial Constellation: Art, Culture, Sovereignty, 1965-1985, remained unrealized at Enwezor’s death in 2019, but his entire career can be seen as an effort to attack the forces of imperialism and colonization by showing how artists do so: from the 1994 launch of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art through the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale: Trade Routes—History and Geography (1997); The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945-1994 (2001); and Documenta11 (2002), as well as in such exhibitions as In/Sight: African Photographers 1940 to the Present (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1996) and Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography (International Center for Photography, New York, 2006). At Sharjah in 2022, Hoor Al Qasimi took up the challenge of the unrealized postcolonial show in her iteration of the Sharjah Biennial, pursuing his injunction to “think historically in the present.”

In his remarks that opened the 56th Venice Biennale that he titled All the World's Futures (2015), Enwezor was explicit about his conception of exhibitions as “machines for thinking” in this critical way about these great issues. He did this by centering that exhibition, literally, around a continuous reading of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital in the main space in the main pavilion; by inviting works such as Isaac Julien’s video Kapital (2015), a discussion with venerable Marxist geographer David Harvey; and by culminating the parcours with John Akomfrah’s The Vertigo Sea (2015). This was the closest he got to showing the Postcommunist phase in his trilogy.

If driving forward Africanist perspectives was always his priority, Enwezor was highly conscious that this was not simply a partisan or regional commitment. Rather, it was an iconogeographical turning, as I call it—that is, a worldwide, world-historical shift; a constellating of several currents into an unstable but powerful configuration. He spelled this out in his 2003 essay, “The Postcolonial Constellation: Contemporary Art in a State of Permanent Transition,”3 and articulated its effects—not least, the definitive experience of “intense proximity of differences” and the overall state of “permanent transition”—in such exhibitions as 2nd International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville, The Unhomely: Phantom Scenes in Global Society (2006) and the 3rd Paris Triennale,  Intense Proximity (2012).

Enwezor’s legacy is the richest of this kind that we have; a judgment that will be reinforced when the two volumes of his Selected Writings, which I am editing, are published next year by Duke University Press.

And the other six models, briefly:

2. Curating Sovereignty

For artists outside the West, mega-exhibitions such as Documenta and the biennials in Europe, were (and often still are) platforms to negotiate the systemic inequities of imperialism and colonization, to assert a people’s sovereignty, usually through four phases: achieve recognition as existent; secure acknowledgment as equals; arrive at self-acceptance; and create and assert intrinsic value.

Since the postcolonial heyday of the 1990s, biennials have increasingly retreated from the global surveys that were so urgent then and now take incredibly diverse forms. Today we expect a biennial to include as many different kinds of exhibitions as a museum, while museums have become more focused on temporary exhibitions and events.

There has also been a steady stream of exhibitions outside the biennial circuit that shows these changes as aspirations and achieved actualities, including the multiple nuances involved for particular peoples during specific periods.  For example, the anti-colonial, sovereignty-asserting project pursued by Indigenous artists and curators since the 1970s in Australia. Aims: to develop a support and distribution system that would sustain artists working in remote communities; circulate their work nationally and internationally; and encourage Indigenous curators and art writers. Landmark exhibitions include Dreamings (Asia Society, New York, 1988), Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius (AGNSW, 2000), and Madayin (traveling the US, 2023-24). Self-acceptance and the assertion of the intrinsic value of the work were made by Indigenous artists throughout the world and motivated exhibitions such as Nirrin, Brook Andrew’s Sydney Biennale in 2022. The curatorial voice becomes more and more Indigenous.

A parallel history in Canada moves from exhibitions such as INDENGENA: Perspectives of Indigenous Peoples on Five Hundred Years (Canadian Museum of Civilization, Gatineau, 1992; now the Canadian Museum of History) through to somewhat generalizing surveys such as Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art (National Gallery of Canada, Ottowa, 2013) and becomes focused in the work of, for example, Cree Plains curator Gerald McMaster and the Wapatah Center for Indigenous Art, e.g. Artic/Amazon: Networks of Global Indigeneity (Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, 2022).

For some time now in the VAEC, Indigeneity is going global.

3. Curating Diasporas, Transculturality

Within the US, Black aesthetics is flourishing across most of its VAEC, from public art fairs to Gagosian galleries and the leading museums. Definitive exhibitions include shows dedicated to the work of artist, filmmaker, and cinematographer Arthur Jafa, along with Enwezor’s posthumous Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America that took place in 2020 at the New Museum in New York.

In Africa, there is a long history of local and circulating exhibitions pertinent to the recognition of Black artistic production, a recent example being Kayo Kouoh’s When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration (Zeitz MOCA, Cape Town, 2023), which traveled to the Kunstmuseum Basel this year. Then there are the curatorial projects of Gabi Ngcobo, who co-founded the Centre for Historical Reenactments in Johannesburg in 2010, and which describes itself as responding “to the demands of the current moment through an exploration into the historical legacies and their resonance and impact on contemporary art.” Ngcobo has continued her work concerning social justice in various venues, including her curatorial oversight of the 10th Berlin Biennale in 2018, titled We don’t need another hero, and her more recent work as the director of  Kunstinstitut Melly, Rotterdam.

4. Provincializing Europe

Models of cooperative coevality, or coeval communality, are essential to the solution of the challenges outlined earlier. They are constantly being envisaged and enacted by artists to the benefit of millions, especially on local levels, throughout the world. Some of them involve curating the VAEC ecology itself: for example, Maria Lind, currently the director of the Kin Museum of Contemporary Art in Kiruna, Sweden, who is a major organizer of lateral connections between alternative spaces in many parts of the world, and who appointed 100 curators from these spaces as Biennale Fellows when she was artistic director of the Gwangju Biennale in 2016, bringing them together in Gwangju. Appointing ruangrupa as artistic directors of documenta fifteen was an even bolder reverse move. Unfortunately, their lumbung model—an effort to display to the Western world what collective creativity looks like throughout the rest of the world—was met with a Berlin wall of bad faith, aesthetic snobbery, and hypocritcal political reaction.4 The good news: polls showed that younger visitors loved the effort that was being made, however imperfect, and that curating by collectives has burgeoned throughout the international VAEC since then.

5. Exhibitions as machines for thinking about curating and for thinking about thinking

There are many examples by artists, such as Joseph Kosuth, and by curators, such as Harold Szeemann and Hans Ulrich Obrist. In recent decades, the Prada Foundation series at the Ca’ Corner in Venice has been remarkable, including When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969, Venice 2013 (2013); Serial Classic (2015); The Boat is Leaking, The Captain Lied (2017); Human Brains (2022); and Everybody Talks About the Weather (2023).

These exhibitions spring from an instinct for curating against the grain: against the grain of conventional understandings of the idea they explore only to explode it, and against received ideas about the exhibitionary form (group shows, one-person shows, theme shows, etc.) that they productively misuse. The exhibition as punctum?

6. Curating the new technologies

A necessary task for some contemporary curating is to display the affordances of the new technologies while also showing their massive consumption of real-world resources and their dystopic social impacts. Striking examples include exhibitions by Trevor Phomepageaglen and Kate Crawford, suchhomepage as From Apple to Anomaly (Barbican, London, 2020) and Training Humans (Fondazione Prada, Milan, 2019-20), and Paglen and Crawford with Vladan Joler, Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power, 1500–2025 (Fondazione Prada, Milan, 2023). Or you can go to the homepage of Ben Grosser to watch him curate communicative platforms in ways that counter how social media platforms such as Facebook, X, and TikTok manipulate our modes of perceiving the world to their economic and political advantage.

7. Conclusion: Curating the secrets, the Open Strike

As censorship, surveillance, and outright repression grow in many parts of the world, how do we bend curating toward liberation, equality, and coevality? In Slovenia in 1993, Zdenka Badovinac and Igor Zabel began the process of turning the Moderna galerija, the national museum of a new nation, into a “museum of parallel narratives” about its modern prehistory from the late nineteenth century up to the 1990s. Then, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Badovinac curated a program dedicated to the multiplicitous conceptions of time, history, place, citizenship and selfhood that have animated art in the region since then. In both institutions, this was exemplary curating of contemporaneity.5 In 2020, the new right-wing government sacked her. The situation has not improved: in 2024, the government summarily dismissed Alexandra Kusá, director of the Slovak National Gallery, and the director of the national theater. Slovenia is moving towards the situation that obtains in several countries, where official approval of all exhibitions, public and private, is required. When Zoe Butt was the director and curator of Sán Art and afterward of the Factory between 2009 and 202, both in Ho Chi Minh City, she found it necessary to prepare four distinct descriptions of every exhibition—one each for censors, an uninformed public, an informed audience, and artists—and to be careful about which version circulated where. She learned a great deal about the enduring power of circles of friendship and communality as the support structure for artmaking in conditions of constraint. Based in Chiang Mai, Thailand, since then, she founded in-tangible institute, dedicated to mentoring art communities whose viability is inhibited by state or other actors.6 These are just two examples of ethical responses to the increasingly pervasive problems facing contemporary curating.

I have been arguing that today “intermission” is not a pause between two world orders. The sweep of history is not moving one way only, or even predominantly so, from our several pasts toward “a new, big play.”  It is more like an unfolding Hydra-headed disaster as the wrecking ball of imperialist, colonizing, Western modernity clashes headlong with the storm, blowing not from a paradisical future and its angel of history (as Walter Benjamin famously suggested in “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” written in 1940 when he was on the run for his life from the Nazis) but from all the world’s several futures—many of which are already here, while others to come remain unimaginable figments. We are caught between these tides and currents. And few of us are angels.

Commenting in his recent book, The Benjamin Files, on the question posed by Benjamin in his dissertation, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, Fredric Jameson asks: “Do we once again confront the hostile gods (the remorseless laws of planetary geology, the inevitability of Homeric warfare and the finitude and doom of myth), or something closer to the allegorical landscape of rubble and mangled bodies in the midst of which tyrants and usurpers rave, schemers scheme, and saints joyously accept their martyrdom?”7 My ontology of the present says that, in fact, we are being confronted by both in their contemporary costumes, knowing them to be past their times but not their prime time.

Although we might secretly, or even openly, desire the frisson of being swept along as ciphers of history subject to much larger forces, we must resist this comfort. If we wish to curate our contemporaneity, we must learn from the examples I have given and from others like them. We must always pursue political struggles toward coeval communality, aiming at answers to the world’s questions through strategies tailored to our direct circumstances. At the same time, we must focus our artmaking, curating, and criticism on these same values, through artistic, curatorial, and critical strategies. The Open Strike should be at the core of curatorial education.

NOTES

1. This essay is adapted from a talk given at the Institute of Contemporary Art and Social Thought, China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, for its symposium Intermission: Curatorial Studies/Education?, November 3 and 4, 2024. The text in quotation marks in the first three paragraphs is from the prospectus for the symposium, organized by Lu Jie, Feiran Jiang and other members of ICAST, see https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/634363/intermission-curatorial-studies-education/.
2. Terry Smith, Thinking Contemporary Curating (New York: Independent Curators International, 2012), Talking Contemporary Curating (New York: Independent Curators International, 2015), and Curating the Complex and The Open Strike, ed. Steven Henry Madoff (London: Sternberg Press, 2022).
3. Okwui Enwezor, “The Postcolonial Constellation: Contemporary Art in a State of Permanent Transition,” Research in African Literatures 34, no. 4 (2003): 57–82.
4. See Charles Esche, “The First Exhibition of the Twenty-First Century—Lumbung 1 (Documenta Fifteen), What Happened, and What It Might Mean Two Years On,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, August 28, 2024, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14434318.2024.2380770?src=recsys. For my views, see “Unintended Consequences: Withdrawal from Documenta,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, June 13, 2024, https://doi.org/10.1080/14434318.2024.2358199.
5. See “Zdenka Badovinac: Continuities and Ruptures in Museums of Contemporary Art,” in Terry Smith, Talking Contemporary Curating,162-189; and Zdenka Badovinac, Unannounced Voices: Curatorial Practice and Changing Institutions (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2022).
6. See https://in-tangible.org/about-us/.
7. Fredric Jameson, The Benjamin Files (London: Verso, 2022), 66.

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• About Terry Smith

  Terry Smith is Andrew W. Mellon Emeritus Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh; Professor in the Division of Philosophy, Art, and Critical Thought at the European Graduate School; and on the faculty at large in the MA Curatorial Practice program of the School of Visual Arts, New York. An internationally renowned author and lecturer, his most recent book is Six Paintings from Papunya: A Conversation, with Fred R. Meyers (Duke University Press, 2024). Forthcoming from Duke University Press is his edited edition in two volumes of Okwui Enwezor’s selected writings.

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Walking & Talking with Alia Swastika

Bige Örer, Alia Swastika • 2/1/25

• Video Summary

  Walking & Talking, hosted by Istanbul- and London-based curator and organizer Bige Örer, is a series of video-recorded conversational experiences based on walking with each guest curator in the same location or in two different places in the world. Some of these conversations address broad societal, cultural, or philosophical questions, while others may unfold more intimate concerns and flow with inner journeys. The walks are imagined as poems shared between the participants on their shared paths.

  We begin with a conversation recorded last June (new conversations will launch soon). In this insightful conversation with Alia Swastika—a curator, writer, and researcher based in Yogyakarta, Indonesia—she shares her curatorial journey, emphasizing her focus on decoloniality and feminism. As she strolls through the streets of Yogyakarta, while Örer does the same in London, Swastika reflects on how the political upheaval during the fall of Suharto's regime in 1998 shaped her perspectives on art and politics. She discusses feeling isolated in high school due to her peers' lack of political interest, leading her to spend time in libraries and art galleries where she engaged deeply with political movements and artistic expression. She then delves into her work with the Jogja Biennial and the Equator Biennial, highlighting efforts to reconnect with the Global South and foster collaborations among artists from regions with shared colonial histories. Swastika speaks about her methodologies and challenges as a co-curator for the upcoming Sharjah Biennial, aiming to create meaningful, interconnected projects that explore themes of collectivism, individuality, and transnational feminist connections. Throughout the conversation, the dialogue emphasizes the importance of creating spaces for critical perspectives, multiplying narratives, and supporting marginalized voices in the art world.

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• About Alia Swastika

  Alia Swastika is a curator, researcher, and writer whose practice over the last ten years has expanded on issues and perspectives of decoloniality and feminism. Her different projects involve decentralizing art, rewriting art history, and encouraging local activism. She works as the Director of the Biennale Jogja Foundation, Yogyakarta, and has focused her research on Indonesian female artists during Indonesia’s New Order. Some of this research was published in 2019. Swastika established and was the program director for Ark Galerie, Yogyakarta (2007–2017). She was co-curator for the Biennale Jogja XI Equator #1 (2011); co-artistic director of the 9th Gwangju Biennale (2012); and roundtable curator for contemporary art exhibitions for the Europalia Arts Festival (2017), including presentations at Oude Kerk, Amsterdam; M HKA, Antwerp; and SMAK Ghent, Belgium. 

• About Bige Örer

  Bige Örer is an Istanbul- and London-based independent curator and writer dedicated to amplifying the voices and visions of artists. Her curatorial practice is rooted in centering creativity and artistic perspectives, ensuring that artists remain at the heart of every exhibition and project she oversees. From 2008 to 2024, Örer served as the director of the Istanbul Biennial, where she transformed the biennial into a dynamic platform for artistic collaboration and intellectual exchange. She was instrumental in developing programs that broadened the biennial’s reach, particularly focusing on children and youth, while fostering artistic engagement throughout Turkey and internationally. In 2022, Örer curated Once upon a time…, the Füsun Onur exhibition at the Pavilion of Turkey for the 59th Venice Biennale. Her curatorial projects also include Flâneuses (Institut français Istanbul, 2017), an ongoing series involving walks with artists. Örer played a key role in establishing the Istanbul Biennial Production and Research Program, the SaDe Artist Support Fund, and coordinated initiatives such as the Cité des Arts Turkey Workshop Artist Residency Program and the Turkish Pavilion at the International Art and Architecture Exhibitions of the Venice Biennale. Örer has contributed articles to numerous publications and taught at Istanbul Bilgi University. She has also served as a consultant and jury member for various international art institutions, and from 2013 to 2024, she was the vice president of the International Biennial Association. During this time, she also contributed to the editorial and programming board of the association’s journal, PASS. She is a member of the Curatorial Studies Workshop, part of the Expanded Artistic Research Network (EARN).

The Curatorial: From Epistemic Capacities to Curatorial Research

Carolina Rito • 2/1/25

• Abstract

  Critical Curating is The Curatorial’s section devoted to more theoretically oriented considerations of curatorial research and practice. While of a specialized nature, we seek essays for this section that are written for a broadly engaged intellectual audience interested in curating’s philosophical, historical, aesthetic, political, and social tenets, as well as a labor-based activity and its ramifications.

  This essay examines curatorial research as a critical epistemological practice intersecting artistic research, curatorial methodology, and critical theory. Drawing on the work of Irit Rogoff, Maria Lind, and others, it explores how curatorial research operates beyond traditional exhibition-making, emphasizing processes of exposure, relational assemblages, and speculative inquiry. The essay argues that curatorial research resists conclusive answers by prioritizing exploration, dynamic inquiry, and audience participation, offering a transformative approach to cultural knowledge production and critical engagement.

Much ink has been spilled over the last twenty years concerning the specific characteristics and relevance of artistic research. To cite just a few examples: the work of Tom Holert on conceptualizing artistic research as an agent of neoliberal politics, the editorial texts of the Journal of Artistic Research, the numerous events exploring the subject (including the annual conferences of the Society for Artistic Research and the European Artistic Research Network), and the many doctoral programs in artistic research that continue to proliferate around the world.1 However, much has been said, experts question the degree of novelty that seems to animate these conversations, seeing that some of the questions raised appear to ignore the fact that artistic research has been around at least since the 1990s, if we consider the first PhDs in the field. A much longer history could be traced back at least to the nineteenth-century debates about science and art in their particular forms of knowledge production.

I agree with the critique of the relentless sense of novelty in these discussions and the perpetual start-from-scratch tone of most conversations about artistic research. Still, I would like to argue that the same cannot be said about the bourgeoning field of curatorial research, which, like artistic research, is conducted through the means of practice, but this time curatorially. Often confused with the curation of research exhibitions, curatorial research is the process by which curatorial formats are used to articulate questions, advance investigations, and provide new insights into the subject matter to which they are applied. Although curatorial research is far from being the new kid on the block, it is fair to say that it has never attracted the same kind of attention as artistic research. This lack of attention is evident both in the nature of the debates and, most fundamentally, in the lack of resources devoted to supporting and enabling these investigative practices. In what follows, I will discuss some of the reasons that have led to the lack of resources for curatorial research, and I will trace some of the prominent references in this debate. Most importantly, I would like to suggest a few ideas to frame the epistemic qualities of curatorial research.

Before outlining some of the contributions and specifics of curatorial research, it is important to acknowledge that, for some of the scholars who have engaged in these debates, the curatorial is a field that benefits from being left without a clear definition so that its practice, together with its needs and urgencies, determines its behavior and how it manifests itself. And while I agree with the principle of letting practice determine the direction of the field, I am also wary of the lack of a clearer framework, which has arguably limited the development of curatorial research in both the cultural and academic fields. These drawbacks include, for example, the lack of recognition of the field in research funding, in doctoral programs in practice studies, and in curatorial programming in cultural institutions, where research is usually limited to the domain of exploring the museum’s collection.

As I have noted above, curatorial research has often been confused with the curation of exhibitions in which the results of a research process are displayed and shared with a wider audience. This is what I would call a research exhibition. Research exhibitions can be the result of an investigation in any field and discipline, from the arts and humanities to the sciences, and are organized to display and represent the results, interpretations, and findings. More than occasionally, this is taken to simply signify exhibitions that involve some degree of research in their preparation—which is arguably always the case, since a curatorial process typically involves the exploration of a wide range of ideas and artifacts toward the ultimate selection to present.

Another common misconception is that curatorial research is the result of a thematic exhibition, where a theme is represented by the objects/artifacts/documents on display. This is often the case in the arts, where artworks are brought together to represent an idea, concept, or argument. A simple example would be an exhibition exploring the impact of climate change on the planet, with the presentation of artworks representing natural disasters such as floods, droughts, and the displacement of peoples and species caused by CO2 emissions into the atmosphere.

What I want to explore is curatorial research, not as a representation of the given subject, but as a process of investigation in which the subject is set in motion through curatorial formats. These methods, such as exhibitions, talks, workshops, events, publications, and more, make public the questions, doubts, propositions, and ambiguities of the process of knowing. So, we can say that curatorial research is a methodology of knowledge production situated symbiotically with the field of artistic research—or, as it’s sometimes known, as practice research in the arts—where artistic research is conducted through the means of curatorial methods, formats, and modus operandi.

The Curatorial and the Production of Knowledge: The Debate

In the first decade of the 2000s, the intersection between knowledge production, research, and curating has led curators and researchers to claim that this new arena of practice was a place where knowledge was constituted differently. These claims go hand in hand with the expansion of curating, from the presentation of a set of objects to convey an idea and/or a narrative, to a much broader cultural activity from which questions, knowledge, and concerns are addressed by bringing together people, materials, and ideas in the larger field of the artwork and the exhibition. It is with these new ideas in mind that such scholars and curators as Irit Rogoff, Maria Lind, Beatrice von Bismarck, and Paul O'Neill and Mick Wilson, among others, have begun to explore the potential of curating as a forum for critical debate and knowledge production.2 Despite the differences in their arguments, there is a common denominator in the points they share: the field of curating has given way to a new kind of cultural engagement and conceptual formulation. In their writings, they called this new approach “the curatorial.”

As the curatorial began to emerge as a new concept, it was useful for these authors to explain the differences between curating and the curatorial. Although both terms are related to the practice of giving-something-to-be-experienced, the curatorial is seen as a departure from the professional activity of organizing exhibitions. Instead, the curatorial is located in the expanded field of curating, with a role that goes beyond displaying objects and points to the epistemic functions of cultural production. As Lind put it:

Seen this way, “curating” would be the technical modality—which we know from art institutions and independent projects alike—and “the curatorial” a more viral presence consisting of signification processes and relationships between objects, people, places, ideas, and so forth, that strives to create friction and push new ideas—to do something other than “business as usual” within and beyond contemporary art.3

In the wake of the second millennium, curating was enjoying its own success with the heyday of the never-ending proliferation of biennials, large-scale exhibitions, and the increasingly prominent stardom of curators that some felt was annoyingly overshadowing the space that once belonged exclusively to artists. While the glitter danced in the air, there were practitioners and thinkers who were intrigued by the new possibilities that curating was opening up beyond the spectacle and the spotlight. One could even say that other curatorial ambitions, which seemed to be set against the increasing neoliberalization of cultural production as a spectacle commodity, were ready to be apprehended. These debates were concerned with finding a space for a long-term, process-driven, collective forum to exchange ideas and energize contemporary debates among participants in the field. The idea was to promote the field’s radical interdependence with every discipline of knowledge production, getting rid of the long and monotonous discussion about the autonomy of the artwork, and the exhibition.

In 2006, Rogoff published “Smuggling—Embodied Criticality,” which has become one of the seminal texts on the curatorial. It explored the epistemic possibilities of the curatorial from a different standpoint. It started from the complex position of the curator/researcher and their socio-political conditions to generate new questions and methods of approach. Rogoff argues that the inherited disciplines in academia no longer "accommodate the complex realities we are trying to live, nor the ever more attenuated ways we have of thinking about them."4 In this way, Rogoff makes a clear distinction between curating and the curatorial. While curating stands for the professional skills of exhibition-making and the task of representing worlds, the curatorial is far removed from illustration, intention, and exemplification. The curatorial is critical thinking that does not rush to embody itself, does not rush to concretize itself, but allows us to stay with the questions until they point us in a direction we might not have been able to predict.5

A few years later, Lind took up the debate about the differences between curating and the curatorial to locate the latter in the tensions and frictions of the connections between things; in the “linking objects, images, processes, people, locations, histories, and discourses in physical space like an active catalyst, generating twists, turns, and tensions.”6 In this way, the curatorial is not the result of an intended message, but the generator of a new social and political situation. For Lind, following Chantal Mouffe's notion of “the political,” the curatorial performs something in the here and now, rather than merely mapping it from the there and then, or representing what is already known. This new space of signification is also where the potential for political resignification can take place, with new dynamics, roles, functions, meanings, and social relations becoming moving parts.7

These lively debates demonstrated that the space opened up by the curatorial allowed for the exploration of forms and concepts of practice that operate away from, alongside, or in addition to the main work of curating as exhibition-making, an approach considered from various perspectives in O’Neill and Wilson’s Curating Research.8 Further to this, Irit Rogoff notes:

[…] the curatorial makes it possible for us to affect a shift in emphasis to a very different place, to the trajectory of activity. So if in curating, the emphasis is on the end product—even if that end product is often very complicated and ends up performing differently than one might have assumed—in the curatorial, the emphasis is on the trajectory of ongoing, active work, not an isolated end product but a blip along the line of an ongoing project.9

This implies a process of signification that inevitably changes in the new assemblages of things, the performance of meaning in the making. Here the questions are: How does the curatorial investigate and constitute the world around us? How is knowledge articulated differently from the inherited disciplines and protocols of academia?

The Epistemic Capacities of Curatorial Research

Defining the epistemic qualities of the curatorial has implications for how knowledge is perceived outside the traditional institutions of knowledge production, such as the university and the museum, as well as for the continued belief in the hegemony of the inherited protocols of academic research based on rigor, originality, and objectivity. The impact of the debates about the characteristics and modes of the curatorial is as much an epistemic shift in perceptions of where and how research is conducted and valued as it is a political consideration—who has the power to validate it and who is it for. What I mean to present here is to present a few ideas for a possible framework for curatorial research that academia explore, enable and support.

The curatorial, as a situation or event of knowledge, emerges from the juxtaposition and relations between materials and ideas. And that these relationships are enacted and activated within and through the exhibitionary conditions present in the socio-political context. “Exhibitionary” here refers to the apparatus that incorporates and activates these materials and their meanings in their relation to one another, or in their exposure to one another. “Exposure” is central to my thinking in what follows, and I use the term in alignment with Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion of “touching,” which refers to how the meanings and perceptions of materials in relation to one another are established, as well as the relationships among more abstract forms, such as concepts and ideas.10 These relationships emerge from the materials that constitute the objects in any curatorial production—or even outside of it. They define those objects in their co-relations, modifying their meanings, how they are perceived, and actualizing them in time and space.

This is not only a matter of the physical arrangement of objects and their proximity to one another but also a matter of their remote correlation—the way that connections are established among objects even when they are not in proximity. Exposure also relates to the correlation (as it is with people and ideas) over geographic and temporal distances. This is like two people in different countries who remain “in touch,” mutually influencing each other over space and time. The exposures of the curatorial are aesthetic, as they are established as the forms of the historical, the social and the political in the instability and plasticity of meanings and affects. It is in the tensions between things that the singularity of the curatorial situation is generated, a unique situation that is provoked precisely thanks to and in the instability between (un)fixed meanings and affects.

In the curatorial, the subjects and objects of inquiry are set in conversation, mutually influencing one another, and neither subject nor object remains the same throughout the research process. This is in keeping with the fact that, arguably unlike traditional research, curatorial research does not aim to reach a conclusive outcome, providing a fixed answer or solving a problem. It is not about knowing more and better. The curatorial is not concerned with the idea of immanent knowledge or the meaning intrinsic to things in the world, but rather with historical systems of truth, genealogies, and the plasticity and performativity that these materials carry with them. In this way, the curatorial aims to critically engage with the material and immaterial formations that are exposed in a historically situated world, while critically perform within aesthetic and epistemic formations. In that way, we could say that the curatorial contribution to the subject matter to which it is applied is essayistic and exploratory rather than evidence-based.

The methods of the curatorial are the so-called formats of curating, which include, but can’t be reduced to, exhibitions, talks, publications, workshops, public programs, and essays, to name just a few. These events (or what I would like to call “operative exposures”) come into being when propositions are made public and meanings are challenged, resisted, and reimagined. Because of its public nature, the methods of the curatorial are simultaneously outputs, and means of dissemination of the investigation. The intersection of methods, outputs and dissemination in curatorial research raises new questions about audiences in their different formations as participants and recipients. The audience becomes one more exposure to what is being set in relation, and so is an active participant in the sensory experience and resignification of the work. The audiences’ co-engagement (whether profound, superficial, or tangential) continues beyond the temporal end of the curatorial event.

In conclusion, I believe that curating has a great deal to contribute to the ways in which we perceive the functions of cultural production as well as the potential of research in the arts to navigate the complexities of contemporaneity. If the epistemic and methodological dimensions of the curatorial are further developed, it holds the prospect of establishing a curatorial way of understanding the material world around us. This approach is critical, relational, and performative, grounded in the instability and interconnectedness of meanings, objects, and ideas. By prioritizing exposure, juxtaposition, and the dynamic interplay between materials, concepts, and audiences, curatorial research resists definitive answers and instead embraces essayistic inquiry, enabling critical engagement within the forms of the historical, social, and political. In this sense, the curatorial is not merely a medium for disseminating knowledge but a transformative space in which understanding is continually reimagined through collective participation and dialogue. For it to thrive, though, it is crucial that academia and the cultural sector avoid imposing rigid protocols on this kind of research, instead using it as an opportunity to expand their epistemic and practice-research horizons.

NOTES

1. Tom Holert, Knowledge Beside Itself: Contemporary Art’s Epistemic Politics (Cambridge, MA: Sternberg Press, 2020). Michael Schwab, "Editorial," Journal of Artistic Research, no. 24. https://jar-online.net/en/issues/24.

2. Irit Rogoff, “‘Smuggling’ – An Embodied Criticality,” Transversal - EIPCP Web Journal, no. 08 (2006). https://eipcp.net/dlfiles/rogoff-smuggling/attachment_download/rogoff-smuggling.pdf. Irit Rogoff, “The Expanded Field,” in The Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating, ed. Jean-Paul Martinon and Irit Rogoff (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 41–48. Maria Lind, “The Curatorial,” Artforum, October 2009. https://www.artforum.com/columns/the-curatorial-192127/. Maria Lind, Selected Maria Lind Writing, ed. Brian Kuan Wood (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010). Maria Lind, ed., Performing the Curatorial: Within and Beyond Art (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012). Beatrice von Bismarck, Jörn Schafaff, and Thomas Weski, eds., Cultures of the Curatorial (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012). Curating Research, eds. Paul O’Neill and Mick Wilson (Amsterdam: Open Editions/de Appel, 2014).

3. Lind, Performing the Curatorial, 20.

4. Rogoff, “‘Smuggling’ – An Embodied Criticality,” n.p.

5. Rogoff, “‘Smuggling’ – An Embodied Criticality.”

6. Lind, Selected Maria Lind Writing, 63.

7. Lind, Selected Maria Lind Writing.

8. O’Neill and Wilson, Curating Research.

9. Irit Rogoff and Beatrice von Bismarck, "Curating/Curatorial: A Conversation Between Irit Rogoff and Beatrice von Bismarck," in Cultures of the Curatorial, ed. Beatrice von Bismarck, Jörn Schafaff, and Thomas Weski (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), 21–30, 23.

10. Jean-Luc Nancy, “Touching,” in The Sense of the World, (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 59–63.

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• About Carolina Rito

  Carolina Rito is Professor of Creative Practice Research at the Research Centre for Arts, Memory, and Communities, Coventry University, UK. She is a researcher and curator whose work is situated at the intersection of knowledge production, the curatorial, and contested historical narratives. Rito is an Executive Board Member of the Midlands Higher Education & Culture Forum and a Research Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary History (IHC), Universidade Nova de Lisboa. She has served as the Executive Editor of The Contemporary Journal and has published in international journals such as King’s Review, Mousse Magazine,  Wrong Wrong, and The Curatorial. From 2017 to 2019, Rito was Head of Public Programs and Research at Nottingham Contemporary, leading the partnership with Nottingham Trent University and the University of Nottingham. She holds a PhD in Curatorial/Knowledge from Goldsmiths, University of London, where she also taught from 2014 to 2016. She lectures internationally—in Europe, South America, and the Middle East—on her research and curatorial studies. She is a member of the Curatorial Studies Workshop, part of the Expanded Artistic Research Network (EARN).

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At the Edge of Ailey

Tom Koren • 2/1/25

Edges of Ailey, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, September 2024–February 2025

• Abstract

  On Site is The Curatorial’s section in which writers review exhibitions from a curatorial perspective—not an art review, a curatorial review. This is also a showcase for master’s degree students in the MA Curatorial Practice program at the School of Visual Arts (the home of the journal) to publish as part of the program—though others are welcome to write for On Site as well.

  In this review, Adrienne Edwards’s groundbreaking exhibition, concerned with the choreographer Alvin Ailey, is critiqued. The exhibition offers a variety of approaches to delve into Ailey’s work and cultural context. It is spectacular and challenging in ways that are both informative and problematic for our reviewer.

As the Whitney Museum elevator doors open onto the fifth-floor galleries, the Edges of Ailey audience is met with a dizzying spectacle. The vastness of the open space, the dramatically dimmed spotlights, the luscious burgundy walls, the abundance of artworks, and the multi-channel video panorama that envelops the gallery—its soulful and propulsive soundtrack reverberating throughout—combine into a glamorous theatricality, making it feel as though one has emerged directly onto an active stage. 

Installation view of Edges of Ailey (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, September 25, 2024-February 9, 2025). From left to right: Romare Bearden, “The Father Comes Home” from the Bayou Fever series, 1979; Romare Bearden, “Wife and Child in Cabin” from the Bayou Fever series, 1979; Romare Bearden, “The Herb Woman” from the Bayou Fever series, 1979; Romare Bearden, “The Mother Hears the Train” from the Bayou Fever series, 1979; Robert Duncanson, View of Cincinnati, Ohio from Covington, Kentucky, c. 1851; Mary Lovelace O’Neal, Race Woman Series #7, c. 1990s; Jean-Michel Basquiat, Hollywood Africans, 1983; Emma Amos, Judith Jamison as Josephine Baker, 1985; Kerry James Marshall, Souvenir IV, 1998; Ellsworth Ausby, Untitled, 1970; Lorna Simpson, Momentum, 2011; Kandis Williams, Black Box, 4 points: Horton, Ailey, McKayle contractions and expansions of drama from vernacular –– arms outstretched and entangle, 2021; Jacob Lawrence, Figure Study, c. 1970; Terry Adkins, Other Bloods (from The Principalities), 2012; James Little, Stars and Stripes, 2021; Rashid Johnson, Untitled Anxious Men, 2016; Glenn Ligon, Stranger in the Village #12, 1998. Photograph by Ron Amstutz. All images courtesy the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Edges of Ailey, curated by Adrienne Edwards, the Engell Speyer Family Curator and Curator of Performance at the Whitney, honors the trailblazing choreographer Alvin Ailey (1931–1989) and the legacy of his eponymous dance company, founded in 1958 and active to this day. Drawing on Ailey’s innovative, cross-disciplinary, and tentacular approach to modern dance—with inspirations ranging from literature and poetry, music and art, theater and cinema, to history, politics, community, and spirituality—the exhibition seeks to explore and pay homage to the roots and impact of his practice through a unique presentation of visual art complemented by a live dance program in the museum’s theater.

From left to right: Ellsworth Ausby, Untitled, 1970; Kerry James Marshall, Souvenir IV, 1998; Beauford Delaney, Charlie Parker Yardbird, 1958; Norman Lewis, Phantasy II, 1946; Sam Gilliam, Swing 64, 1964; Loïs Mailou Jones, Jennie, 1943; Betye Saar, I’ve Got Rhythm, 1972; Charles Gaines, Sound Box: Nina Simone and Billie Holiday, 2021; Jean-Michel Basquiat, Hollywood Africans, 1983; Romare Bearden, “The Father Comes Home” from the Bayou Fever series, 1979; Romare Bearden, “Wife and Child in Cabin” from the Bayou Fever series, 1979; Romare Bearden, ”The Swamp Witch” from the Bayou Fever series, 1979; Romare Bearden, “The Blue Demons” from the Bayou Fever series, 1979; Romare Bearden, “The Wart Hog” from the Bayou Fever series, 1979; Romare Bearden, “The Lizard” from the Bayou Fever series, 1979; Romare Bearden, “The Hatchet Man” from the Bayou Fever series, 1979. Photograph by Ron Amstutz.

Ailey’s visionary spirit is reflected mainly in the exhibition design. The decision to open up the entire gallery space is daring; there are hardly any separations, and the entirety of the show becomes visible at a glance. Paintings and sculptures are grouped in archipelagos in the center of the space, propped against dark red backings or suspended from the ceiling in a free-standing, Lina Bo Bardi fashion, while other sections of artworks hang on the surrounding walls beneath the video installation. The exhibition includes works from the Whitney’s collection alongside some loans and commissions, all intended to represent or respond to the elements that made up Ailey’s life and artistic persona, together forming one multilayered portrait of the choreographer and an encompassing visualization of Black dance. Interwoven throughout the artworks are personal notebooks, postcards, books, photographs, posters, and other Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (AAADT) ephemera, densely aggregated inside vitrines. The curatorial strategy aims to form “constellations” that resist a linear or hierarchical narrative, blurring the boundaries between the disciplines and themes that shaped Ailey’s choreography. While this curatorial approach works well conceptually—successfully restaging the multidimensionality, richness, and breadth of Ailey’s influences and accurately capturing the spirit of the time inherent to his practice—there is a sense that the concept comes at the expense of the artworks. The floating islands and dense hanging of works create a slightly disorienting dramaturgy for the audience, resulting in a sight that is as aesthetically dazzling as it is overwhelming, leading to a somewhat superficial encounter with the art on display.

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From left to right: Romare Bearden, “Star (Star from the Heavens)” from the Bayou Fever series, 1979; Archibald John Motley Jr., Gettin’ Religion, 1948; Roy DeCarava, Coltrane and Elvin, 1960; Roy DeCarava, Elvin Jones, 1961; Lyle Ashton Harris, Billie #21, 2002; Hale Aspacio Woodruff, Blind Musician, 1935/1998; Norman Lewis, Jazz, 1943–44; Gordon Parks, Music–That Lordly Power, 1993; Mary Lovelace O’Neal, Race Woman Series #7, c. 1990s; Terry Adkins, Other Bloods (from The Principalities), 2012; Bill Traylor, Untitled (Man in a Blue House), date unknown; Ralph Lemon, Bongos and Djembe, 1999; Ralph Lemon, Untitled (On Black music), 2001-07; Ralph Lemon, Untitled (Miles Davis), 2006; Mickalene Thomas, Katherine Dunham: Revelation, 2024. Photograph by Ron Amstutz.

The selection of artworks elegantly unpacks the era and situates Ailey’s oeuvre within a larger sociopolitical context, tying an important interdisciplinary link between his many realms of influence and the figures he was in dialogue with. The focus on his upbringing in the American South and the historical emphasis on Black migration and liberation work to elucidate just how groundbreaking and unprecedented his worldwide success was at the time. That being said, the sensory overload resulting from the large amount of works, their clustered, salon-style hanging, and the all-encompassing presence of the video installation limits a deeper engagement with each thematic section and with the individual pieces within it. The thematic groupings often feel loose or associative, with artworks serving as explicit visualizations of broad and abstract topics. For instance, the section dedicated to the influence of Black women on Ailey’s life includes paintings of Black women or mothers, while his struggle with mental health is illustrated by Rashid Johnson’s Untitled Anxious Men (2016), which depicts an abstracted and distraught figure, its features frenetically etched into thick black wax.  While the porousness of the different sections is intended as part of the constellational curatorial vision, they are at times confusing to navigate through. This isn’t always made easier by the didactics, which are often too small or placed in strange, inconvenient locations such as the floor or in the middle of a section, surfacing only after you’ve spent a moment wondering what you are looking at and how it ties into the exhibition. To a viewer who isn’t well versed in Ailey’s world, this makes it difficult to distinguish which of the artworks have a direct connection to his life or practice, and which are included to illustrate abstract elements of his biography. The juxtapositions of the works rarely form illuminating conceptual connections that enhance their individual presence or enrich the internal logic of each section, resulting in a whole that may be greater than the sum of its parts, yet, on balance, offers a spectacle that is somewhat flattening.

From left to right: Sam Doyle, Frank Capers, 2023; Sam Doyle, LeBe, 1970s; Wadsworth Jarrell, Together We Will Win, 1973; Faith Ringgold, United States of Attica, 1971; Wadsworth Jarrell, Revolutionary (Angela Davis), 1972; James Van Der Zee, Marcus Garvey Rally, 1924; Jeff Donaldson, Soweto/So We Too, 1979. Photograph by Ron Amstutz.

To the left of the exhibition space is a section of archival ephemera, dominated by a double-sided row of old TV monitors that plays black-and-white videos. The source materials are dedicated to Ailey’s influences and collaborators, ranging from specific choreographers, artists, and musicians to broader themes like Hollywood or Broadway. These are also inadequately contextualized in the didactics. Their connection to his practice is often too unclear or too loose, and the lack of seating doesn’t aid viewers in the extended type of engagement that can illuminate the works or inspire the audience. In the absence of time-based media that actually depicts Ailey’s practice itself, the amount of videos dedicated to his influences is disproportionate, lacking anything substantial for viewers to tie it back to. This also applies to the archival documents presented in vitrines throughout the space, where Ailey’s personal notebooks and correspondences mainly function as material relics since they are usually too illegible to consume as content.

From left to right: Alma Thomas, Mars Dust, 1972; Charles White, Preacher, 1952; Lonnie Holley, Sharing the Struggle, 2018; Benny Andrews, The Way to the Promised Land, 1994; Sam Doyle, Frank Capers, 2023; Sam Doyle, LeBe, 1970s; Wadsworth Jarrell, Together We Will Win, 1973; Faith Ringgold, United States of Attica, 1971; Wadsworth Jarrell, Revolutionary (Angela Davis), 1972; James Van Der Zee, Marcus Garvey Rally, 1924; Jeff Donaldson, Soweto/So We Too, 1979; Horace Pippin, School Studies, 1944; Horace Pippin, Cabin in the Cotton, c. 1931–37; Horace Pippin, Knowledge of God, 1944; William H. Johnson, At Home in the Evening, c. 1940; John Biggers, Sharecropper, 1945; Robert Duncanson, View of Cincinnati, Ohio from Covington, Kentucky, c. 1851; Joe Overstreet, Purple Flight, 1971; Emma Amos, Judith Jamison as Josephine Baker, 1985; Kerry James Marshall, Souvenir IV, 1998; Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, A Knave Made Manifest, 2024; Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Fly Trap, 2024; Missa Marmalstein and other makers unknown, Block 1871 of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, 1987. Photograph by Ron Amstutz.

It is important to note that the decision to represent dance through various mediums—showcasing not only Ailey's choreography but also his concerns, the art that interested him, and the art that bounds the experience of Blackness—is, of course, an important endeavor—and one that continues the correction of the historical imbalance of the representation of Black artists in American institutions, both in collections and exhibitions. But are paintings and objects really the best way to convey the history and legacy of dance? One thing that starkly stands out about the exhibition is that, despite its insertion of dance into the museum, Edges of Ailey upholds the traditional division of visual art and live performance. While the exhibition design and content do transcend disciplinary borders in various ways, the show is largely made up of conventional, two-dimensional, static visual art forms. Described as a “dynamic showcase” by the Whitney website, the exhibition is surprisingly dominated by a stillness of objects, despite the presence of scattered videos, as well as the video frieze atop one long wall of the space. The artworks remain divided from live performance, which is relegated to a separate black-box theater’s ticketed performances in allocated time slots. Considering that the show was initiated by a renowned curator of performance art, it would have been interesting to include a durational, unpredictable, or experimental live element within the gallery space.

From left to right: Maren Hassinger, River, 1972/2012; Melvin Edwards, Utonga (Lynch Fragment), 1988; Aaron Douglas, Bravado, 1926; Melvin Edwards, Chitungwiza from the Lynch Fragment series, 1989; Aaron Douglas, Flight, 1926; Melvin Edwards, Katura from the Lynch Fragment series, 1986; Aaron Douglas, Surrender, 1970; Melvin Edwards, Cup of? From the Lynch Fragment series, 1988. Photograph by Ron Amstutz

Even the musical aspects of Ailey’s practice are referenced illustratively and two-dimensionally, with paintings of instruments and a Billie Holiday photograph standing in for more creative auditory forms. The only music that is vibrantly present comes from that sprawling 18-channel video frieze, which is the one truly dynamic and innovative element in the show. The hour-long, looping montage features footage from the AAADT archive paired with a soundtrack of both timeless and contemporary music—ranging from Pharoah Sanders to Donny Hathaway to House music cuts—that is overlaid with interview clips. However, the video’s elevated placement causes it to function more decoratively as a backdrop to the still works, rather than as an artwork in its own right. This feeling is amplified by the fact that the video is uncredited and unexplained within the gallery space, with details about its creators—filmmakers Josh Begley, Kya Lou, and the curator—available only on the website. Were there additional time-based or performative media within the exhibition that referenced Ailey’s practice, this panoramic strip would have sufficed as a curatorial element alone.

From left to right: Purvis Young, Ocean, 1975; Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, Mold for Crusaders for Freedom, 1962; Sam Gilliam, Untitled (Black), 1978; David Hammons, Untitled, 1992; Al Loving, Untitled, c. 1975; Hale Aspacio Woodruff, By Parties Unknown, 1935, printed 1996; Hale Aspacio Woodruff, Giddap, 1935, printed 1996; Purvis Young, I Love Your America, late 1970s; Martin Puryear, The Rest, 2009-10; Samella Lewis, Migrants, 1968; Purvis Young, Black People Migrating West, late 1970s; William H. Johnson, Moon Over Harlem, 1943-44; Lonnie Holley, Sharing the Struggle, 2018; Theaster Gates, Minority Majority, 2012; Sam Doyle, Frank Capers, 2023; Sam Doyle, LeBe, 1970s; Wadsworth Jarrell, Together We Will Win, 1973; Faith Ringgold, United States of Attica, 1971; Wadsworth Jarrell, Revolutionary (Angela Davis), 1972; James Van Der Zee, Marcus Garvey Rally, 1924; Jeff Donaldson, Soweto/So We Too, 1979; Maren Hassinger, River, 1972/2012; Melvin Edwards, Utonga (Lynch Fragment), 1988; Aaron Douglas, Bravado, 1926; Melvin Edwards, Chitungwiza from the Lynch Fragment series, 1989; Aaron Douglas, Flight, 1926; Melvin Edwards, Katura from the Lynch Fragment series, 1986; Aaron Douglas, Surrender, 1970; Melvin Edwards, Cup of? From the Lynch Fragment series, 1988. Photograph by Ron Amstutz.

While this immersive video installation is mesmerizing and atmospheric, its fast-paced edits offer limited insight into the essence of Ailey’s choreography. Without prior familiarity with his work or access to the museum’s sold-out performances, I left the show without any clear sense of what Ailey’s choreography is actually like. Ultimately, while the exhibition aims to celebrate Ailey’s groundbreaking legacy and cross-disciplinary influence, it fails to foundationally destabilize disciplinary boundaries in practice, or to reimagine new ways of presenting an archive through performance. By relying on representations instead of recreations and pointing at ideas instead of performing them, Edges of Ailey looks backward, surveying the past more than it experiments with possibilities for the future.

In vitrine, from left to right: Elizabeth Catlett, I am the Negro Woman, 1947, printed 1989; Elizabeth Catlett, In Harriet Tubman I helped hundreds to freedom, 1946, printed 1989; Elizabeth Catlett, In Sojourner Truth I fought for the rights of women as well as Negroes, 1947, printed 1989; Elizabeth Catlett, In Phillis Wheatley I proved intellectual equality in the midst of slavery, 1946, printed 1989; From left to right: Kara Walker, African/American, 1998; Karon Davis, Dear Mama, 2024; Geoffrey Holder, Portrait of Carmen de Lavallade, 1976; Beauford Delaney, Marian Anderson, 1965; Loïs Mailou Jones, Jennie, 1943; Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, Mother and Child (Secret Sorrow), c. 1914. Photograph by Ron Amstutz.

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• About Tom Koren

  Tom Koren is currently a student in the MA Curatorial Practice program at the School of Visual Arts, New York. She received her B.A in Art History and English Literature at the Tel Aviv University. Her professional experience is rooted in the music field, working as a curator, DJ, marketing manager and creative director for leading alternative cultural institutions and events in Tel Aviv. She has recently been awarded a Fulbright fellowship in the Public Humanities program, with which she aims to merge her academic and professional backgrounds by crossing over to the visual art field, experimenting with the curation of interdisciplinary events and further exploring her interest in participatory and live art practices.

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Changing Concepts of Curatorial Enquiry: Care, Ethics, and Research

Henk Slager • 2/1/25

• Abstract

  Critical Curating is The Curatorial’s section devoted to more theoretically oriented considerations of curatorial research and practice. While of a specialized nature, we seek essays for this section that are written for a broadly engaged intellectual audience interested in curating’s philosophical, historical, aesthetic, political, and social tenets, as well as a labor-based activity and its ramifications.

  In this essay, the current debate about paradigm formation in artistic research is chosen as a starting point. The way in which artistic research operates as a convergence of creative practice, artistic thinking, and curatorial strategies shows strong similarities with the definition of care proposed by Maria Puig de la Bellacasa: a dynamic, triangulated interaction between labor, affect, and politics. This proposition will be briefly elaborated on the basis of three research projects. Starting from the statement “Research is another word for Care” (Marion von Osten), a further reflection on the significance of this perspective for the topical discussion about curatorial research will be developed.

Today, there is an encroaching sense that our relationship with the world is more and more disturbed. As a result of omnipresent technological acceleration, we are now running up against psychological, political, and planetary limits. This escalation manifests itself in topical forms of precarization (self-exhaustion), the crisis of democracy (politics that are no longer responsive to citizens), and the environmental crisis (treating nature only as a resource for extraction). It seems that we have lost the very pathways and rhythmic relationships to the world as such.1

This awareness is reinforced by the contemporary technological compulsion to transform everything into data. Through this new epistemic regime, we are no longer autonomous producers of knowledge but are forced, because of the imperative of transparency, to cede our sovereignty to processes of abstraction, quantification, digitization, calculation, and algorithmic regulation.

This whole constellation leads to alienation, which has affected many of us in various intensities as an inability to feel, sense, or hear ourselves. In addition, a large part of mankind has lost the common understanding of what a better society might look like. It even seems that our utopian energies are fully exhausted. Philosopher Boris Groys, for example, describes this current state of mind as follows: “Today no one has any idea what will happen in the future. The only hope people have is that the future doesn’t bring anything terrible. The hope is that everything remains as it is—that is the best hope that we can have.”2

Is it feasible to escape this rationalistic, instrumental, calculated, and disengaged relation to the world? Is it conceivable to overcome the current orientation toward the logic of unbridled growth and its cost to our humanity? In other words: Can we achieve a “way out” that resonates with the world and draws attention to other forms of knowledge, agency, solidarity, and community?3 Can we foster shifts in awareness that, as Marina Garces argues in her essay, “Conditio Posthuma,” could lead to a new revolution of “looking after ourselves”?4

In what follows, I’d like to put forward a series of artistic and/or curatorial propositions that might put us on the path to this transformation. For that purpose, the urgent question to be asked is what should be done to “maintain, continue, and repair our world so that we can live in it as well as possible.”5

Political scientist Joan Tronto introduces the concept of care as a tool to repair the connections between world, existence, and life. She does so by deploying this concept strategically: an understanding of care that goes beyond neoliberal capitalism’s calibration of individualist perspectives and preferences that emphasize self-care (a reductive appropriation of the ethical ideologies of care, focusing on lifestyle, fitness, and family). To free care from this hegemonic machine—or better to reclaim care—the concept will have to be recalibrated in its full complexity and ecology: “care shapes what we pay attention to, how we think about responsibility, what we do, how responsive we are to the world around us, and what we think of as important in life. That world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web.”6 From Tronto's perspective, care is not something an inherently isolated and selfish individual needs to be forced to engage in through considerations of self-interest or duty. On the contrary, it comes naturally to us because we are all involved in and dependent on the ecology of this life-sustaining web. And with that, care is also a critical practice and concept. Starting from collective and multivocal enactments, it stands for strategies of survival, resilience, and resistance in a more-than-human world that is characterized by global inequality, climate crisis, and loss of biodiversity.

Precisely this disruptive understanding of care resonates with the field of artistic research that has played a significant role in art discourse from the beginning of this century. This relatively new form of research is characterized by intertwining creative practice, critical epistemologies, and engaged strategies of dissemination. This specific mode of inquiry enables artistic research to rehearse topical issues concerning planetary urgencies—such as the ecological crisis and social injustice—in a completely different way, namely from the transformative potential to imagine, initiate, or negotiate other ways of living together.

A striking example of this modus operandi is Gustafsson & Haapoja’s research project, “Becoming. Manual for Earthly Living.”7 This project departs from how the capitalist dictate of chronopolitics—that is, using time as a tool for social control in every precinct of life from work, production, and school schedules to health care to transportation—affects our Earth’s ecosystems by asking: Is it possible to live as a human being in a world that is dominated by Western models of progress that are exhausting our planet?

To find a possible answer, Gustafsson & Haapoja conducted thirty-seven video interviews to identify ways of relating to ourselves, others, and the world. They contemplated phenomena that are budding at this very moment and that should be nurtured. In these video conversations, the specific question arises: How can art contribute to forms of subjecthood and citizenship that are no longer determined by anthropocentric frameworks that use the rhetoric of exclusivity or human exceptionalism? In this way, a future world could be built where care forms the basis of coexistence and communality; a world based on another biopolitics where the dominant perspective of the homo economicus is replaced by homo ecologicus, i.e. substituted with a perspective characterized by a polyphonic imaginary, a collective empowerment, a sustainable existence, and a more-than-human community.

Gustafsson & Haapoja, Becoming. Manual for Earthly Living, installation view of Farewell to Research, MNAC, Bucharest, 2021.

Ursula Biemann’s research offers us another excellent example of this approach. Her practice emphasizes the speedy course of climate change into unknown futures that is forcing us to fundamentally rethink the relationship between humans and the Earth. For instance, the video essay Subatlantic juxtaposes the science of geology and climatology with human history, proposing that the fully imaginary globe that has been constructed in the disciplinary field of humanities fails to resonate with the mighty planetary grammar.8 Therefore, if we think from the perspective of a posthuman future, it is extremely important to develop a mode of contemporary art that brings the Earth on stage, so to speak, so that we see it as it is: an unstable living environment reconnecting us to infinite, untameable forces that animate extra-historical dimensions. “Perhaps from there, we can envision a less divided future that can harbor a post-human way of being in the world.”9

Ursula Biemann, Subatlantic, installation view (right side), Re-Imagining Futures, OnCurating, Zurich, 2019.

A similar postcapitalist perspective is articulated in the research project “Stones Have Laws” by Lonnie van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan.10 The film portrays how the Western model of linear time has played an important role in processes of colonization and exploitation, as well as in the loss of self-determination for a wide range of cultures and creatures. “Stones Have Laws” attends to the current situation of the Maroon community in the interior of Surinam and to another aspect of capitalist chronopolitics: a process that exchanges ecological time for a growth-oriented, measurable time. As a consequence, a system came into being in which nature became commodified, i.e., understood as an object for consumption. Meanwhile—and this is central to Van Brummelen & De Haan’s research project—a social protest is developing in Latin America that demands another ecology of care: a living world that requires different ways of organizing knowledge, time, and ontology that trouble the traditional direction of progress and the speed of technoscientific, productionist, future-driven interventions.

Lonnie van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan, Stones Have Laws, installation view, Any
Speculation Whatever, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana, 14th Havana
Biennale, 2022.

These projects emphasize that the urgencies of care ethics and the imagining of potential “ways out” are also high on the agenda of artistic research. María Puig de la Bellacasa's book, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds resonates with this.11 She describes care as a dynamic triangulated relationship of labor, affect, and politics; and it should always have these three ontological dimensions actively present: the practical (work), the affective (engagement), and the ethico-political (involvement). Only then can care present itself as both a speculative and existential domain: open-ended, with room for possible reconfigurations.

With Puig de Bellacasa’s characterization of care, we see clear similarities with a possible definition of the practice of artistic research.12 This mode of inquiry can also be described as a dynamic triangulated relationship: between creative practice (experimentality, art-making, the potential of the sensible); artistic thinking (open-ended, speculative, associative, nonlinear, haunting, thinking differently); and dissemination strategies (curatorial formats, topical modes of political imagination, performative perspectives, transformational spaces for encounters), comprehending these different kinds of conceptual space in their mutually vibrant and coherent interrelationships.

From whatever conceptual space one departs, an artistic research practice should always signify a transversal constellation—as a creative proposition for thought in action. Yet, that mode of research should never be reduced to a method of one of the three constituents. Artistic research cannot be exactly equated with creative innovation or disciplinary knowledge production or political activism. Consequently, it seems urgent now to profoundly challenge and question the issue of how to articulate and present the condition of the intersection between creative practice, artistic thinking, and the ways they are made manifest.

What does this triangulated connectivity mean for thinking about the curatorial dimension? In the symposium, Going to the Limits of Your Longing, Research as Another Name for Care, organized by the Basel Academy in 2021 to honor the late curator and artist Marion von Osten, a constructive and inspiring perspective was presented.13 The point of departure for the symposium was Von Osten’s empathetic curatorial approach to the medium of exhibition-making. This revolved around artistic research devoted to collective issues and modes of meaning-making, putting forward ideas on community, access, agency, gender, and ecology. And here we see a topical interpretation of curatorial care and responsibility: to work against repression, exclusion, and marginalization. Or to put it differently, curatorial care requires attention to other modes of being and thinking that are sensitive to difference. In this way, the curatorial also shows its political potential, i.e., making an ethics of care public in a strategic manner based on an understanding of the politics of display: how care is disseminated, how care is performed, how care is propagated, and how care ultimately resists categorical modes of thinking.

Beatrice von Bismarck also describes how curating involves modifying and generating meaning in acts of assembling in public. It constitutes a coming-together for processes of negotiation, but also for proclamation, demonstration, or argumentation. In this approach, curatorial processes are essentially performative. Exhibits find themselves in new juxtapositions, entering into relations with altered spaces and social, economic, and discursive contexts. Attention focuses on the interplay of all factors, and in particular on “the transformative, but also self-transforming relational fabric of the curatorial situation, its conditions and preconditions, and the options for actions they offer.”14

In this moment of making things public, we notice a challenging task for both thinking and practicing curatorial care and artistic research. This includes investigating the disruptive potential, the triangulated condition, the topical role of speculation, the perspective of change vectors, and different modes of agency, focusing on other ways of living together as a performative exploration of possible ways out. All of this could lead to the mutual enrichment and reassessment of the concepts and ecologies of research and care, and consequently afford a more profound thinking about matters concerning all of us and imagining future scenarios.

NOTES

1. In his book Resonance, A Sociology of our Relationship to the World (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018), Hartmut Rosa looks for possibilities to restore our relationship with the world. Can we recover the phenomenological condition that makes it possible again to resonate with the world and hear its polyphony? 
2. Boris Groys, Philosophy of Care (London/New York: Verso, 2022). See also “Philosophy of Care: A Conversation.” https://www.e-flux.com/notes/499836/philosophy-of-care-a-conversation.
3. The curatorial project “The Way Out” (Steirischer Herbst, Graz 2021, curators: Ekaterina Degot, David Riff) contrasts the disappointment of self-regulatory markets with a different, confrontational model of care. https://2021.steirischerherbst.at/en/program/2293/the-way-out-of.
4. Marina Garces, “Conditio Posthumana,” in The Great Regression (Cambridge: John Wiley & Sons, 2017), 7.
5. Joan Tronto, Who Cares, How to Reshape a Democratic Politics, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015), 3.
6. Tronto, Who Cares, How to Reshape a Democratic Politics, 8.
7. Presentation of “How to Become Human” in the context of the 9th Bucharest Biennale publication MaHKUscript, Journal of Fine Art Research, 5, After the Research Turn, 2020. See also Terike Haapoja’s presentation “Vulnerability, Animality, Community,” EARN Conference, The Postresearch Condition, BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, 2021.   MaHKUscript: https://mahkuscript.com/5/volume/4/issue/1. https://www.hku.nl/en/study-at-hku/creative-transformation/pre-phd-programme/the-postresearch-condition.
8. This work by Ursula Biemann was shown in the research presentation “Re-Imagining Futures,” OnCurating, Zurich, 2019. “Re-Imagining Futures,” https://oncurating-space.org/re-imagining-futures/.
9. Quote from Ursula Biemann, Subatlantic, 2015. https://vimeo.com/123399928.
10. The research project Stones Have Laws was part of the second iteration of Re-Imagining Futures, titled Any Speculation Whatever, Futuro Y Contemporaneidad, 14th Havana Biennial. Stones Have Laws: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McQjpqbRjj0.
11. Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).
12. First steps toward this paradigm formation were given in “Farewell to Research” (9th Bucharest Biennale, 2020-2021) and the publication The Postresearch Condition (Metropolis M Books: Utrecht, 2021). Farewell to Research: https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/410540/farewell-to-research/. Postresearch Condition: https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/410536/metropolis-m-books-publishes-the-postresearch-condition/.
13. Symposium Going to the Limits of Your Longing, Research as Another Name for Care. In Memory of Marion von Osten, Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW, March 17-18, 2021. https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/381063/going-to-the-limits-of-your-longing-research-as-another-name-for-care-in-memory-of-marion-von-osten/.
14. Beatrice von Bismarck, The Curatorial Condition (London: Sternberg Press, 2022), 9. In her description of the curatorial, von Bismarck also uses the model of dynamic triangulated relationships, consisting of the following constituents: constellation, transposition, and hospitality. “The curatorial is characterized by transpositional processes generating constellations that are determined by curatoriality and that are situatively, temporally, and dynamically shaped on the basis of the dispositif of hospitality.”(28)

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• About Henk Slager

  Henk Slager’s focus has been on research and visual art for the last twenty years. He was a Lecturer at De Appel Curatorial Program (1995-2020), Visiting Professor of Artistic Research (Uniarts Helsinki 2010-2015, 2024-), and Dean of MaHKU Utrecht Graduate School of Visual Art and Design (HKU Utrecht 2003-2018). He is currently working for the same school on the development of a practice-based doctoral program. Henk Slager co-initiated the European Artistic Research Network (EARN), a network investigating the consequences of artistic research for current art education through symposia, expert meetings, and presentations. Departing from a similar focus on artistic research he published The Pleasure of Research, an overview of curatorial research projects (a.o. Shanghai Biennale, 2008; Tbilisi Triennial, 2012; Aesthetic Jam Taipei Biennial, 2014; 5th Guangzhou Triennial, 2015; Research Pavilion Venice, 2015-2019; and 9th Bucharest Biennale, 2020). A follow-up publication will be presented in 2025. Henk Slager is currently co-convening the 6th Asia Triennial Manchester (2025).

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Digital Art as Intangible Heritage: A Shifting Cultural Landscape

Amira Gad • 2/1/25

• Abstract

  This section of The Curatorial, The Algorithmic State, considers visual culture, forms of intelligence, imaginative and critical faculties, and the revision of art historical notions in the digital sphere. For example, contrary to early utopian claims for the liberatory potential of artificial intelligence, AI has proven to be a technology of extraction. The resources required to run it, the downward pressure it places on wages, and the data harvested from every action and expression of its users all require an increase in socially and ecologically damaging practices. So, what are the costs, on a planetary scale, of a network that is increasingly the cause and the tool of undemocratic governance and inequity? Can we salvage the liberatory potential of AI? These and other questions related to technological advancements, as they pertain to artistic and curatorial practices, will be addressed in this section.

  In “Digital Art as Intangible Heritage,” Amira Gad examines the evolving relationship between digital art in its various forms and cultural institutions. The essay addresses the reasons for digital art’s importance in culture today and gives a brief history of the medium and early institutional support in the West. Gad then discusses essential characteristics of this art and speaks about the tension between entertainment and critical engagement, considering the benefits of digital artistic production as a lever for the democratization of art in general while also speaking to the problems emerging from technodiversity, including digital colonialism. In this light, Gad calls for cultural institutions to redress power imbalances between the Global North and South through the auspices of museums prioritizing diverse voices and perspectives while being mindful of how digital infrastructures often perpetuate existing inequalities. She advocates for a more nuanced and critically engaged approach to digital art curation that goes beyond simple experiential presentations of spectacle to foster meaningful cultural discourse and inclusive representation.

Artists in our pervasively digital culture have naturally engaged with its technologies. They have used it as a medium in the making of a work (such as internet art, interactive installations, or Mixed Reality (MR) works), as subject matter for reflection, and as a way of challenging the way we engage with it and society at large. Technology continues to transform how art is created and experienced, as well as its dissemination. And so, the question of how to engage with digital culture within the contemporary art sector is all the more relevant. The need to reflect this dynamic and evolving digital culture within institutions was accelerated by the 2020 global pandemic. The cultural sector had to rapidly move real-life engagement online, kicking off a feverish search for “digital strategies.” For some, this search put a spotlight on existing work. For others, it was the start of exploring what it meant to work with digital culture in their respective contexts. Without a doubt, the pandemic marked a paradigm shift in attention to digital culture across the cultural sector.

The platform on which so much of this work takes place is the internet. Internet art, or net art, first emerged in the 1990s and used the platform as a medium and subject. Curating these works within the physical space of a museum brings layered complexities. Institutions need to bridge the gap between online and offline worlds. Now, more than 30 years later, it is worth questioning whether the definitions of digital art still stand—particularly within an intrinsically evolving genre.1 Post-internet art, for instance, came about at the beginning of this millennium. It refers to art created in a world in which the internet is ubiquitous. Post-internet work does not necessarily have to be online or digital, but it’s shaped by the conditions of a networked world. It reflects how artists engage with digital culture and the omnipresence of online platforms. I’d like to return to this perspective on digital culture as I believe it should guide institutional thinking toward focusing on culture, rather than technological tools. It mirrors the fact that the digital per se is not separate from us but is well-embedded in every aspect of our lives, even to the point that it is a challenge for us to dissociate ourselves from it.

Ian Cheng: Life After BOB, 9 September - 6 November 2022 at Halle am Berghain, Berlin © 2022 Ian Cheng. Presented by LAS Art Foundation © Dario Laganá

Digital Strategies in Museums

Over the years, museums and institutions across the globe have set up protocols and experimented with how to engage with digital culture, from exhibition to preservation and collecting. A non-exhaustive selection from the Western institutional landscape includes Rhizome (founded in 1996), New Inc. (established in 2014), and in Europe, there is ZKM | Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe (founded in 1989), HEK (Haus der Elektronischen Künste) in Basel (established in 2011), and across the pond in London is my former employer, the Serpentine Galleries, to name a few. Since the 1980s, these various institutions have continued to lead the conversation in digital culture, highlighting the range of approaches to curating new media in the contemporary art context, whether it’s an open-ended and exploratory laboratory that allows for projects to redefine the role of technology in contemporary art or an interdisciplinary residency that enables the exchange of ideas to ensure a fluid and forward-thinking conversation. While the institutions cited here dominate a Western-centric discourse, digital culture is an international phenomenon that transcends geographical boundaries and speaks to the shared experience of living in a networked society.

Consequently, museums across the globe are picking up the pace. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York was the first to commission net art and holds the United States’ leading conservation lab in the field. The most common approach adopted by museums is similar to Tate Modern’s digital strategy that aims to “embed digital thinking across the organization” by developing online platforms.2 The Tate Digital Studio, for example, offers digital art commissions, virtual exhibitions, and interactive projects to extend the museum’s reach beyond its physical walls. On the other end of the spectrum, another type of initiative has emerged to zoom in and bank on the assumed entertainment quality that digital art can enable, such as Pace Gallery’s commercial initiative Superblue that was launched in 2020 to create a space for experiential art. This is where definitions start to get a bit blurry.

Hito Steyerl: Power Plants. Installation view, 11 April – 6 May 2019, Serpentine Galleries. AR Application Design by Ayham Ghraowi, Developed by Ivaylo Getov, Luxloop, 3D data visualisation by United Futures. Courtesy of the artist, Andrew Kreps Gallery (New York) and Esther Schipper Gallery (Berlin). Photograph: © 2019 readsreads.info

The Hallmarks of Digital Art

One of the hallmarks of digital art is its potential to provide immersive and interactive experiences. The cultural sector strives for this kind of audience engagement. The recent article “Immersive Art is Exploding, and Museums have a Choice to Make,” by Felix Barber and András Szántó, addresses the hurdles, dilemmas, and market value of this art and its venues within today’s experience economy.3 Frequently cited examples include immersive and interactive installations by teamLab, United Visual Artists, Refik Anadol, and Random International, each of which has shown us how “new and younger” audiences can be targeted through the experiential nature of their works, often qualified as (and sometimes reduced to being) Instagram-friendly. This might involve participatory elements, real-time interaction, or using social media to extend the experience beyond the physical space. Their large-scale, immersive installations promise a theatrical experience that can transcend the ordinary, evoking awe and wonder while blurring the boundaries between the art object and the audience’s role as active participants. In this idealized vision, technology holds the potential to reach new audiences and reshape how we experience art in a way that feels transformative.

This is the essence of what the promise of digital art is for the cultural sector: the possibilities of expanding our understanding of art and making it accessible to new and younger audiences through engagement and interactivity, while also enhancing art’s publicity through online exposure. Unsurprisingly, this essence is at the core of the institutional struggle wherein digital art is utilized more often as a marketing tool to increase visitor numbers and ticketing revenue. The consequence of this is that the initial (curatorial and artistic) objective to reflect on the role of and relationship between technology and society, and to engage with contemporary art discourse, is sidetracked. Most significantly, the radical experiments and thinking that technologists and artists seek to engage with are too often overshadowed. The intersection of technology, art, and commerce reflects a growing trend in which the line between cultural experience and marketing is simply becoming far too blurred—and as such, definitions of digital culture are becoming more ambiguous. This raises concerns and cynicism about institutions’ ability to present digital art without risking turning it into a commodity—an experience designed for consumption rather than critical engagement.

Essentially, what I’m proposing here is not to ignore the entertainment quality of digital artistic practice, but to veer away from exhibiting “pure” experiential presentations. In other words, without an added or follow-up layer of critical reflection, these works are just another dot among the infinite productions that will not stand the test of time within cultural infrastructures. As a curator who has increasingly worked with digital artistic practices over the last few years, I’m often asked to hit those targets: the immersive presentation that will bring new kinds of audiences in with the ambition to renew people’s interest in the museum altogether. And for this, I always exercise caution and steer the focus to make sure that the presentation is doing more than creating immersive experiences, which returns me to the definition I started this essay with: art that is created in a world where the internet is ubiquitous and where works don’t have to be digital but that are shaped by the conditions of our networked world.

It should be noted that the idealism of digital culture is inherent and, in fact, inherited from the technology sector as a whole: techno-utopianism is the belief that technology can revolutionize society, solve problems, and create a more equitable world. These ideals, of course, have historically permeated the arts, too. Certainly, technology is often seen in the arts as a tool for liberation, providing new modes of expression, breaking down barriers to entry, and democratizing access to culture. The often-participatory nature of digital art embodies this hope that technology can foster a more connected, engaged, and inclusive society. However, while this vision captures the imagination, it also risks oversimplification. The belief that technology can solve complex societal problems too frequently overlooks the broader systemic issues and ethical dilemmas that come with it. There’s a tendency to view technology through rose-tinted glasses, assuming it will naturally lead to positive change without critically considering who controls it, who benefits from it, and who may be left out.

Simon Denny: Products for Organising. Installation view: Serpentine Galleries, 25 November 2015 – 14 February 2016. Photograph © 2015 readsreads.info. Courtesy of the artist

 Democratizing the Arts

This potential to break down boundaries between audiences and museums and disrupt the structures of traditional art institutions is at the core of the promise of digital art. As technologies do offer the means to decentralize art production and distribution, this is largely true. Social media platforms, online marketplaces, and decentralized blockchain networks allow artists to reach global audiences directly, bypassing the traditional gatekeepers of the art world such as galleries, auction houses, and museums. The NFT (Non-Fungible Token) boom (which was also intensified by the global pandemic) exemplifies this decentralization, offering artists new ways to monetize their work and establish ownership over their digital creations without intermediaries, challenging traditional models of art valuation and distribution. They also expanded the notion of art collecting, making it accessible to anyone (with a crypto wallet). This created a supposedly more democratic system where artists can gain visibility without needing to conform to the standards of the institutional art world. The hierarchies within traditional institutions are then flattened, and the protocols that often limit accessibility are bypassed. In theory, this opens the door to a more inclusive and diverse art scene.

Still, the NFT space is not without its issues. While digital platforms expand access, we shouldn’t neglect factors such as digital literacy, internet access, and representation. Access can be questionable as it assumes a certain technical know-how from the user on how to open a crypto wallet, for instance.4 Questions of authenticity, value, and sustainability have also plagued the NFT market. The environmental impact of blockchain technology, particularly the energy-intensive process of minting NFTs, raises concerns about the broader ecological implications of digital art (just as crypto mining and powering AI are posing increasingly serious energy concerns). While NFTs democratize access in some ways, they also reflect the speculative nature of the art market, where hype and scarcity can inflate prices, sometimes at the expense of artistic merit or cultural significance, leaving yet another challenge for the cultural sector to siphon out the myriad productions and evaluating what is meaningful in that realm.

These ideas around democratizing access to the arts can sometimes feel reductive. One could argue that among the pitfalls of a so-called global outreach facilitated by digital culture are the crucial issues of inclusivity and accessibility. That’s to say that if we set aside the importance of digital literacy and equality of resources for a moment, we immediately find ourselves facing questions concerning technodiversity and digital colonialism. When I speak of digital colonialism, I’m specifically referring to the phenomenon of dominant entities exercising control over digital spaces, resources, and platforms—typically companies in technologically advanced and economically powerful regions. Economist and writer Yanis Varoufakis takes it further and coined the concept of “technofeudalism” where he likens the owners of big tech with the world’s feudal overlords, replacing capitalism with a new system and calling for us to escape our digital prison.5 When this troubling subject comes up, it’s often reduced to Big Tech’s use of data. Yet this is too simplistic. Digital colonialism runs deeper. It is manifested in the dominance of Western-centric narratives and perspectives in online content. It imposes technological standards and norms that marginalize diverse voices and cultures. And not only does it extract data and resources from developing countries, but it does so also without equitable compensation. All of this raises critical questions about ownership, representation, and the ethics of technological innovation in the context of cultural production. We need to re-evaluate digital practices in our commitment to decolonizing digital spaces in the pursuit of equity, diversity, and inclusion in the arts.

In this pursuit, technodiversity is key to promoting digital pluralism and the development of alternative, sustainable practices that highlight diversity. And as we do this, whether we are speaking, say, about democratizing access or the potential of blockchain technologies, it’s crucial to consider what is buried in these colonial legacies and ask: Whose access? To whose benefit? Should the cultural sector be an agent in these power dynamics? As museums engage in decolonial practices of their collection and programs, it is precisely these questions (and no doubt others) that have to be taken hand-in-hand with the curating we do, with collecting, preserving, and engaging digital culture in the widest sense.

When it comes to my curatorial engagement with digital artistic practices in the Western cultural sector, particular attention is paid to how we could flip the balance or how we could monopolize the Global North in favor of the Global South. How can ideas of technodiversity be applied to the museum context, to be inclusive and not have art museums and institutions contribute to increasing power gaps and inequalities? There are two ways in which this could be done: on the one hand prioritizing working with artistic practices or thinkers who raise awareness that the digital infrastructures as we know them today are built at the expense of the Global South.6 And the other lies in the importance of integrating diverse voices in the Global North narratives and stepping out from the echo chambers often illustrated by the same group of artists representing the voice of digital art today and who are exhibited widely. To do this, and to give legitimacy to new entries, the museum institutions need to become the platform that enables and essentially shapes these voices from the Global South by giving them access to the very technologies that contribute to their suppression. To be successful in this, I think a combination of both strategies is necessary and it is a long-term game of slow infiltration. When we talk about reframing narratives and decolonial practices within the museum, we eventually end up in thinking about the preservation of those narratives and the inclusion of those voices within museum practices, and this is epitomized by a museum’s collection.

Refik Anadol, Echoes of the Earth: Living Archive, 2024. Installation view, Serpentine Galleries, London, 2024. Photo: Hugo Glendinning. Courtesy Refik Anadol Studio and Serpentine.

 Shifting Cultural Landscapes

As previously touched upon in this essay, one of the tenets of digital culture today, brought on by blockchain technologies among others, is shifting our thinking about ownership and authorship because of its advocacy of horizontal and collective ownership, and transparency. So, how do we reconcile traditional models of collecting with the advent of the digital age and its ethos? How do we tackle collecting (in other words, centralizing) artworks that are decentralized and distributed? This inadequacy prompts a need for a new ecosystem, with new protocols and alternative frameworks.

One way of looking at this is to approach engaging with (and so presenting, collecting and preserving) digital culture as we do intangible heritage. By approaching digital culture as we do intangible heritage, we acknowledge its fluid, evolving, and non-tangible nature, focusing on the preservation of the knowledge systems, practices, and contexts that give rise to digital works, rather than just the outputs or artifacts themselves. This method places emphasis on the cultural and social values embedded in digital practices, allowing for a deeper understanding of the communities, narratives, and innovations behind these works. Like intangible heritage, digital culture requires active participation and transmission across generations, ensuring its continued relevance and adaptability. This approach would help cultural institutions create frameworks that not only archive and exhibit digital art but also foster a living, breathing dialogue with it, continually adapting to technological advancements while safeguarding the context and meaning behind the work.

Artists are pioneers of (technological and) cultural discourse. So perhaps we should model our strategies to their thinking in addition to presenting, exposing, and exhibiting their work. And so, should our new collecting strategies (of digital artworks) also be distributed and decentralized? The museum sector could, for instance, consider a strategy whereby a network of organizations could leverage their respective strengths (distribution of (financial) resources) in collectively managing a truly global and international heritage of our digital culture (decentralized collecting) that illustrates the techno-utopian promise of digital art discussed earlier: to be free of transnational boundaries. The challenge is to define such protocols of authorship and ownership that reflect the collaborative and dynamic nature of digital culture.

Envisioning this new model opens the possibilities to learn from the horizontal hierarchies of blockchain technologies. By fostering greater collaboration, institutions can create more inclusive and representative collections. This approach not only democratizes access but also ensures that collections remain relevant to current artistic practices. As the boundaries between institutions, artists, and audiences blur, the need to balance the preservation of digital culture with innovation and accessibility is all the more important. The future of collecting digital art depends on how well institutions can adapt to this new paradigm and how it can restructure its programmatic budgets to prioritize such a global network.

Digital culture is challenging the cultural sector to be future-proof and relevant today through considering more radical, experimental, and innovative approaches to their structures that mirror changing society. From incubation and experimentation to preservation and critical discourse, organizations reflect how digital works of art are created, exhibited, understood, and remembered. The overlap between art, technology, and society necessitates an interdisciplinary approach to understand the artistic and technological dimensions of digital culture. These cross-pollinations might keep institutions and their audiences from falling into the trap of either spectacle or obsession with technological tools, each of which steer away from the multilayered dimensions of digital culture—and so an understanding of the world we live in. This calls for evolving the thinking and operational modes of the cultural ecosystem to embrace the ever-changing nature of digital culture.

As custodians of culture, this is an invitation for us to imagine a new cultural ecosystem that aligns with the ethos of digital culture. The utopian ideals that surround digital art stem from a belief that technology has the potential to solve the world’s problems and usher in a more equitable future. But let’s consider the ideal where curatorial practices can be decentralized and collaborative, that collecting can be a globalized and shared practice and where the art sector can empower voices and blur the lines of transnational boundaries. As with any tool, technology as much as culture is shaped by the hands that wield it.

NOTES

1. The digital culture field has a rich history that is not being elaborated here for scope. See, for instance, Art in the Age of the Internet: 1989 to Today, ed. Eva Respini (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018); Christiane Paul, Digital Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 2023); and Curating Digital Art: From Presenting and Collecting Digital Art to Networked Co-Curation, ed. Annet Dekker (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2021).
2. Digital transformation | Tate Digital Transformation, Tate website, accessed August 28, 2024, https://www.tate.org.uk/about-us/projects/digital-transformation.
3. Felix Barber and András Szántó, “Immersive Art is Exploding, and Museums have a Choice to Make,” ARTnews, accessed August 22, 2024, https://www.artnews.com/art-news/opinion/immersive-art-industry-and-museums-1234715051/.
4. A crypto wallet is typically an application downloaded on a smartphone that allows for the safekeeping and storage of cryptocurrency.
5. Varoufakis, Yanis. Technofeudalism: What killed capitalism. New York: Melville House, 2024.
6. For example, architect and researcher Marina Otero Verzier’s work explores how built environments intersect with global systems of power and control. She often examines the impact of technological advancements on social structures and public spaces, critiquing issues like surveillance, labor, and ecological degradation. Another reference is writer Arthur Steiner's book The Digital Atlas: an exploration of the social, cultural, and political impact of digital technologies around the world. The book emphasizes the importance of "digital geographies," showing how technological infrastructures affect human experiences, identities, and power structures. Steiner's work is significant for promoting a more nuanced understanding of digital spaces, highlighting both the potential and pitfalls of technological advancements.

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• About Amira Gad

  Amira Gad, an Egyptian-French curator, is Conservator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. Previously, she served as a curator at the Serpentine Galleries in London and as Curator at Large (Arts Technologies) at KANAL – Centre Pompidou in Brussels, where she developed the museum’s strategy for engaging with digital artistic practices. Over the years, Gad has curated exhibitions by Ian Cheng, Sondra Perry, Arthur Jafa, Hito Steyerl, Zaha Hadid, Simon Denny, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, among others. Gad has been part of a number of juries and is a regular contributor to artists’ catalogues.

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