MA Curatorial Practice 7/20/26 MA Curatorial Practice 7/20/26

Special Section: 61st Venice Biennale

If art and its exhibition are a kind of gnomon to guide us to the right time of reckoning, quite a few pavilions showed us the length of the shadows and the nuanced complexities (sometimes as amusing as they were alarming) that illuminate the world at this moment.

By Steven Henry Madoff

Steven Henry Madoff • 7/20/26

Chris Levine, *Higher Power*, 2026, laser projected from the San Clemente Palace Hotel adjacent to the 61st Venice Biennale. Image courtesy MACP.

For the 61st edition of the Venice Biennale, I invited graduate students in the MA Curatorial Practice program at the School of Visual Arts in New York to go to Venice and select an exhibition within the biennial to review. This Biennale has been burdened by the sudden death of its artistic director, Koyo Kouoh; strikes concerning Palestine and workers’ rights; protests over the inclusion of Russia, Israel, and the United States; and the subsequent resignation of the prize jury. The European Union punished the Biennale for allowing the Russian Pavilion to open (which it did for just the week of the professional opening) by withdrawing $2.3 million in funding. Whatever the validity of the criticisms and tumult of this Biennale, the fact of Kouoh’s passing left her vision for the exhibition in the Central Pavilion and the Arsenale in the hands of her small curatorial team, who were without that single guiding hand to make it all cohere.

With 110 artists from scores of countries within what Kouoh called “the relational geography of encounters,” her theme, “In Minor Keys,” wanted to ramp down the contemporary condition of spectacularized focus on trauma of one stripe or another. Instead, she proposed an exhibition foregrounding the amelioration of duress that comes with localized joy, daily consummations of the good, the caring, the wanted touch, the opening of social vistas in place of clenched turmoil.

The national pavilions that reside in tree-lined lanes alongside the Central Pavilion—a colonialist habit of empire-saturated ownership literally built into the Biennale’s grounds—are under no compulsion to follow the artistic director’s theme. It turned out, as many of the writers note in this special section, that the pavilions largely resounded with the same sensitivity to the world’s woes that undergirded Kouoh’s counter-position of retrenched human fealty, though her curatorial approach, at least as it was executed by her team, was read by some critics as diffuse and ungainly. Instead, the reviews here suggest that the curators of various pavilions offered responses more incisive and piercing. Their incisions in the skin of social injustice and global ruin were more vivid, with a greater hold on viewers’ attentions, both critical and sympathetic. If art and its exhibition are a kind of gnomon to guide us to the right time of reckoning, quite a few pavilions showed us the length of the shadows and the nuanced complexities (sometimes as amusing as they were alarming) that illuminate the world at this moment. Read on.

Table of Contents
Justin Apice, Still Joy?
Romy Cohen, Collective Respiration: Embodied Knowledge in Minor Keys
Colleen Dalusong, Paradise Must Not Last Forever
Chaieun Lee, Liquid Tongues: Expanding Language, Limiting Experience
Steven Henry Madoff, Our New New Teacher
Kiera McIntosh, Whose Wet Dream Is This?
Naomi Moser, Rehearsals for Possible Futures
Diana Sardaryan, A Shift in the Air
Hyun Sung, The Interstitial Stitch: Goen Choi’s Meridian in Venice
Hongjin Zhou, Minor Life in the Embrace

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 Unseparate: Modernism, Interdisciplinary Art, and Network Aesthetics from Stanford University Press; 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. 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. He is a member of the Curatorial Studies Workshop, part of the Expanded Artistic Research Network (EARN ).

MA Curatorial Practice 7/20/26 MA Curatorial Practice 7/20/26

Still Joy?

In the face of the ongoing, catastrophic war, the Ukrainian exhibition proposes that joy, despite everything, is a sign of strength and resistance.

By Justin Apice

In the face of the ongoing, catastrophic war, the Ukrainian exhibition proposes that joy, despite everything, is a sign of strength and resistance.

Justin Apice • 7/20/26

Still Joy—From Ukraine Into the World, curated by Björn Geldhof and Oleksandra Pogrebnyak, Ukraine Collateral Event, Palazzo Contarini Polignac, 61st Venice Biennale, May 9—November 22, 2026

On Site is The Curatorial's section for curatorial reviews and a venue for MA Curatorial Practice students at the School of Visual Arts to publish as part of their program, though it is open to all writers.
In this piece, Justin Apice reviews Still Joy—From Ukraine Into the World, Ukraine's collateral event curated by Björn Geldhof and Oleksandra Pogrebnyak, which frames joy as radical resistance under conditions of ongoing war. Apice posits that the exhibition's most compelling works, particularly Khimei and Malashchuk's Open World and Nikita Kadan's closing painting After All, reveal joy and grief as inseparable, undercutting the curatorial premise in a way that deepens it. Apice further notes that the Biennale's accommodation of the United States, Russia, and Israel compromises the very theme it set out to champion.

Simone Post, *She Knew She/It/They Would Melt*, 2026, installation view, Ukraine Collateral Event, 61st Venice Biennale. Image courtesy the author.

As the 2026 edition of the Venice Biennale continues into the fall, there is still much that feels unsettled and unsettling about the show. What was meant to be the celebratory spirit of In Minor Keys—the late Koyo Kouoh’s curatorial vision of the “quieter,” Indigenous, and marginalized art communities being exhibited for international audiences—has so far resulted in mixed reviews, controversies, and numerous protests over the participation of the United States, Russia, and Israel. Given the current geopolitical crises unfolding around the world, the choice to include these countries has left many disheartened by the blindness to the violence these nations perpetrate and the decision, nonetheless, to allow them to be represented here in Venice. Despite the restlessness and gloom of so much of the content of this Biennale, Ukraine’s collateral event, Still Joy—From Ukraine Into the World, situated in the Palazzo Contarini Polignac, instills a much-needed sense of euphoria and the power of love as an act of resistance amid global systemic collapse.

Alla Senchenko, *Testimony to Joy*, 2026, installation view, Ukraine Collateral Event, 61st Venice Biennale. Image courtesy the author.

Curated by Björn Geldhof and Oleksandra Pogrebnyak, the exhibition brings together international and Ukrainian artists to reflect on the concept of joy as a radical act of humanity. Under the context of war and the reduction of a great deal of Ukraine’s sovereign territory to rubble, the exhibition highlights testimonies collected by the Pinchuk Art Center from Ukrainian soldiers, such as Alla Senchenko, who believes that “allowing yourself to feel joy despite everything is a sign of strength.”1 This elevation of feelings is brought to the viewer throughout the three-story exhibition. As I entered, I was immediately presented with a rave featured on a two-channel video, the work of Ukrainian artists Yarema Malashchuk and Roman Khimei. Titled Dedicated to the Youth of the World II (2019) and Dedicated to the Youth of the World III (2023), the videos show youth engaging in rave culture, which remains popular in Eastern Europe. Both videos feature different temporal realities, one before and one after the full-scale invasion. With a pulsating score, viewers become part of the movement, where—within the confines of the dance floor—pleasure prevails over the terror that exists outside a club.2

Nikita Kadan, *After All*, 2026, installation view, Ukraine Collateral Event, 61st Venice Biennale. Image courtesy the author.

The theme continues, consistent throughout the whole of the exhibition. On the second floor, viewers are thrust into a candy wonderland, with Simone Post’s She Knew She/It/They Would Melt (2026). Referencing the Palazzo’s chandeliers and grand decoration, Post created copies of the decor made entirely of candy, altering the gray monotone of the room with the bright colors of hard candies. The work filled the space, a cornucopia of childlike delight, though its sweetness had the tinge of longing for an innocence lost in adulthood—all the more present with the wages of war. Still, it felt like an escape from everything outside of the centuries-old palazzo, and its wistfulness, however Instagrammable-inducing, spoke to the melancholy and bite underlying the curators’ advocacy of overarching joy, though, of course, that is what makes the exhibition poignant.

Consider the current reality for Ukrainian art production through the lens of resistance: Throughout the rubble of its war-torn cities, artists put their lives on the line, facing death by artillery, to create murals alongside half-standing buildings, instilling hope and morale in Ukrainian soldiers and the populace who face constant threat.3 To that extent, Still Joy effectively presents the spirit of resistance, to a degree. While many of the works in the show rely on happiness as a sign of rebellion, the note of sadness haunts the exhibition as a gross reminder that the violence is unremitting, with no prospect of resolution on the horizon. The two sides of the coin, how to continue living in the shadow of the war, turn Post’s work bittersweet.

Yarena Malashchuk and Roman Khimei, *Open World*, 2025, installation view, Ukraine Collateral Event, 61st Venice Biennale. Image courtesy the author.

Khimei and Malashchuk’s Open World (2025) illuminates this paradox, showing the journey of Yaroslav, a teenager who fled Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, and now lives in Poland. With the help of a robotic dog, Yaroslav navigates his once-beloved city remotely, finding himself in his half-destroyed school, chatting with his mother, who still lives in the city, at least some of the time. The commentary from Yaroslav appears to be lighthearted, with a humorous moment in the conversation he has with her captured onscreen, until he’s then reminded that he won’t be able to return home—a moment of silence followed by Yaroslav’s tears. Open World mediates grief during war. Remaining joyful is a way to think beyond the current despair, but what the exhibition shows, whether intentionally or not, is that this kind of resistance has its limits.

The end of the exhibition is a dark blue room with a large painting by Nikita Kadan, After All (2026), that explicates the jubilations of lived experiences as they intertwine with violence. Where the show begins with a rave scene, offering feelings of ecstasy to forget about the world, After All carries the weight of the world. A tense dialogue between the orgy scene above and the dismay of a dark, destroyed land below, the painting proposes how thin the line can be between happiness and despair. Rather than merely concluding the exhibition, Kadan’s work is in productive friction with the central theme of the Biennale. It suggests that celebration and destruction are not opposites but coexist within every life in the global system, all affected by uneven distributions of power, visibility, and suffering. As the rave can be seen to represent the Biennale’s curators’ intentions to celebrate the small moments in life overlooked by spectacles of power, the rubble below concisely represents the unending continuance of those spectacles, and that not only Ukraine but every country has suffered and continues to suffer from the monolithic force of dominating actors on the world stage. With Russia, Israel, and the United States’ participation in the Biennale, the poetic strength of this year’s theme is compromised by its accommodation to the agents of violence, whose crimes against humanity allow them to prosper and, ironically, fulfill their own joys.

Yarena Malashchuk and Roman Khimei, *Dedicated to Youth of the World II,* 2019 (right) and *Dedicated to the Youth of the World III*, 2023 (left), installation view, Ukraine Collateral Event, 61st Venice Biennale. Image courtesy the author.

NOTES

Alla Senchenko, “Alla Senchenko,” PinchukArtCentre, April 29, 2026.
Annalise Kamegawa, “In Venice, Ukrainian Artists Reclaim Joy with Tender Force,” Designboom, May 15, 2026.
Anastasia Khudiakova, “Anti-War Murals in Ukraine and the World During the Russian-Ukrainian War,” The Ukrainian Art and Design Journal (Hudprom) 25, no. 1 (2023), 200.

Justin Apice is an independent curator and art historian. He is a graduate student in the MA Curatorial Practice program at the School of Visual Arts. He has curated numerous exhibitions at the United Nations, worked at the Jewish Museum as a curatorial researcher, and currently works as a gallery associate in New York. His curatorial work is particularly concerned with the ways that artists uncover the human condition in times of suffering and political dissonance. His interpretation of contemporary art is predicated on his interests in social justice and the practice of active listening to diverse voices.

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MA Curatorial Practice 7/20/26 MA Curatorial Practice 7/20/26

Collective Respiration: Embodied Knowledge in Minor Keys

Despite little evidence to support the harboring of hope, these works allow us to imagine that through collective care and action, renewal and repair are possible.

By Romy Cohen

Despite little evidence to support the harboring of hope, these works allow us to imagine that through collective care and action, repair and renewal are possible.

Romy Cohen • 7/20/26

Gabrielle Goliath, Elegy, Chiesa di Sant’Antonin, May 4–July 31, 2026, and Yo-E Ryou, Breath Orchestra: Act 9: Ellipsis, 61st Venice Biennale, May 9–November 22, 2026

On Site is The Curatorial's section for curatorial reviews and a venue for MA Curatorial Practice students at the School of Visual Arts to publish as part of their program, though it is open to all writers.
In this text, Romy Cohen pairs two works from the 2026 Venice Biennale: Gabrielle Goliath's Elegy, relocated to the Chiesa di Sant'Antonin after the South African government refused to sponsor it, and Yo-E Ryou's Breath Orchestra: Act 9: Ellipsis in the Arsenale. They are both read in relation to Koyo Kouoh's curatorial invitation to breathe as an act of agency. Cohen argues that the two installations position respiration as a communal practice through which bodies negotiate grief and repair: Goliath deploying the sustained collective voice as a form of infinite mourning and resistance; Ryou drawing on the ritual breathing traditions of Jeju Island's haenyeo divers to connect visitors to embodied, intergenerational knowledge.

Gabrielle Goliath, *Elegy*, 2015–ongoing. Presented independently at the Chiesa di Sant'Antonin, Venice. Realized with the support of the Bertha Foundation, Ibraaz, and Galleria Raffaella Cortese. Image courtesy MACP.

[Take a deep breath]
[Exhale]
[Drop your shoulders]
[Close your eyes]
— Koyo Kouoh’s introduction to In Minor Keys

The ability to control one’s own breath is, perhaps, the most primal expression of personal agency. In the 61st Venice Biennale, the late curator Koyo Kouoh’s invocation at the Central Pavillion’s entry to In Minor Keys asks visitors to pause and give consciousness to that freedom. Seen through this curatorial invitation, Breath Orchestra: Act 9: Ellipsis (2024-26) by Yo-E Ryou and Elegy (2015-ongoing) by Gabrielle Goliath, both position respiration as a communal practice through which bodies negotiate the interdependence of grief and repair. In these two installations, practices of collective breathing connect to a vision of embodied knowledge that challenges detached observation as the site of comprehension. Within Kouoh’s exhibition, embodied knowledge, and specifically breath, emerges as a critical site to inhabit “the persistent signals of earth and life,” as she notes. Breath, usually a silent partner, becomes active as it binds individual bodies to collective histories and a shared environment. Visitors are implicated not as witnesses, but as participants in collective ritual, proposing physical experience as a vital source of understanding.

Entering Breath Orchestra: Act 9: Ellipsis, which includes drawing, two video works, a multi-channel sound installation and performance, we are invited into a collectiveexperience of breathing grounded not in observation but participation. Korean artist Yo-E Ryou reflects on her time with the haenyeo women of Jeju Island. Feeling suffocated in New York City during the pandemic, Yo-E relocated to Hado-ri, a small village on South Korea’s Jeju Island, where she embedded herself in the community of haenyeo deep-sea divers. The haenyeo practice an ancient harvesting ritual, diving as deep as sixteen meters without breathing apparatus to gather sea life from the ocean’s floor. On any given day, they can spend up to six hours under the frigid water collecting their livelihood. Over centuries, the divers have developed ritual breathing practices that allow them to accomplish this extraordinary feat.

In her installation, Yo-E creates a seating circle that mirrors the shape of the open-air enclosures where the haenyeo gather. Two video screens each show a group of women. In one, girls variously standing or sitting on the rocky edge of the sea, the wind gently tousling their hair, are practicing the ancient breathing, learning how to achieve the skill that will bring them to the state of unity with nature. They do not learn their craft through detached instruction. Instead, understanding is produced through evolving engagement with each other and the sea. The second screen shows the masters, older women, sleeping together in a display of comfortable intimacy developed over years of mutual survival; close bonds formed through a lifetime of shared practice. Sitting between the two screens, we are placed in the arc of the generations, invited into the cycle of life, reminded of the lineage of women who have practiced this for hundreds of years. A series of drawings gives a poetic overview of the interconnected networks of bonds between people and nature, voices of the sea and of the divers, and the water with which the women become a part when they submerge themselves.

Yo-E Ryou, *Breath Orchestra*, 2026, still from video, Arsenale, 61st Venice Biennale. Image courtesy the artist.

In the circle, we experience Breath Orchestra’s multichannel audio recording of a composition made from the sounds of the various breaths of the haenyeo women masters. The haenyeo’s breathing cycle alternates between four phases, transforming breath into a disciplined practice of bodily control rooted in attuning oneself to the natural world. Preparation, characterized by slow, measured, regulating breaths that calm the body for the descent are followed by powerful energy producing breath. Once prepared, withholding breath through the dive becomes a conscientious labor of endurance and discipline. In this phase the divers’ experience an almost transcendent state of being at one with the sea. Finally, there is the recovery breath, the sumbisori, when the divers’ surface and transition back to the land.

The longest phase of breath is holding it, and so much of the audio we hear is nearly silent. There are the gentle sounds of the seaside heard in the video of the young women, along with an occasional dramatic sumbisori breath and the gentler breaths of preparation breaking the silence. These moments provide an unpredictable effect, giving an emotional shape to the to the quiet. John Cage and his sense of the powerful presence of silence come to mind, with the breaths that bracket the silence in Yo-E’s work gaining particular impact. Here, the layered sounds of the sea, the wind, and breathing draw us into the bodily experience of the haenyeo, connecting us to them and the natural world with which they are so closely connected.

While Yo-E approaches breath as a means of connecting people to one another and to nature, Gabriel Goliath’s Elegy similarly invokes breath, but not as a means of connecting to nature, rather as mechanism of ritualized mourning and renewal. Like Breath Orchestra, Elegy is deceptively simple. Comprised of three different project suites, each documents a series of performances dedicated to a particular victim of imperial, colonial, or patriarchal violence. Very like each other in format, each of the screens presents a theatrically lit singer, dressed in black, standing on a podium, holding a single note until her voice starts to fail. She then steps down and another singer steps onto the podium, continuing the note. Eight separate videos, each with its own continuous voice, create a soundscape that is a meditative and mournful lamentation, revealing the possibility of infinite resistance through continuity not as individuals, but as a collective community. Addressing layers of injustice and marginalization, each of these projects acknowledges a specific loss; in this installation, South African student Ipeleng Christine Moholane, two Nama women ancestors, and the Palestinian poet Heba Abunada. Goliath has made dozens of such performances since 2015. While the beauty of a seemingly infinite collective voice of resistance inspires, it also gives us the overwhelming realization that there are a seemingly infinite number of victims to mourn.

Although the work was originally intended to be shown in the South African Pavilion, because one of the performances laments a Palestinian poet, the conservative South African government deemed the work too controversial and refused an official national presence for this Biennale. Goliath then found alternate sponsors and relocated her exhibition to the Chiesa di Sant’Antonin, within walking distance of the main grounds of the Giardini. In this space, the voices are beautifully amplified acoustics that evoke centuries of worship and rites of passage. The collective cry is not simply heard; it is absorbed into the body, resonating through time and place as echoes of grief, memory, and resilience. For the run of the Biennale, the South African Pavilion stands empty, its own vacancy a symbol of repression, censorship, and continued efforts of a hierarchical society to silence marginalized voices.

Yo-E Ryou, *Breath Orchestra*, 2026, installation view, Arsenale, 61st Venice Biennale. Image courtesy the author.

Over ten years ago, Eric Garner died at the hands of police, his final words, “I can’t breathe,” initiating civil rights protests around the United States and the world. In the years since, we’ve experienced a conservative backlash and backslide, rendering even the freest among us inert. In concert with the theme of Kouoh’s In Minor Keys, these works investigate breath as a refuge, a lamentation, a meditation, a connecting medium, and most importantly, a site of personal agency. Despite little evidence to support the harboring of hope, these works allow us to imagine that through collective care and action, renewal and repair are possible.

Romy Cohen is an independent curator, writer, and master’s degree candidate in Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts. Her practice explores the intersections of art, architecture, and the body, with a particular interest in materiality, spatial perception, and the ways contemporary art reshapes our understanding of embodied experience. As a docent at the Whitney Museum of American Art, she leads tours that situate works of art within broader social and cultural contexts, encouraging close looking and dialogue. Her curatorial research examines how artists mobilize architecture, landscape, and the built environment as sites of memory, movement, and embodied experience. She is interested in exhibitions that foreground the body as a site of knowledge, perception, and social encounter.

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MA Curatorial Practice 7/20/26 MA Curatorial Practice 7/20/26

Paradise Must Not Last Forever

The Latvian Pavilion does a far better job of embodying intimate and convivial universes created by artists compared to the Biennale’s overstuffed and incohesive main exhibitions in the Giardini and Arsenale.

By Colleen Dalusong

Colleen Dalusong • 7/20/26

MAREUNROL’S and Bruno Birmanis, Untamed Assembly: Backstage of Utopia, curated by Inga Lāce and Adomas Narkevičius, Pavilion of Latvia, 61st Venice Biennale, May 9—November 22, 2026

On Site is The Curatorial's section for curatorial reviews and a venue for MA Curatorial Practice students at the School of Visual Arts to publish as part of their program, though it is open to all writers.
In this review, Colleen Dalusong examines Untamed Assembly: Backstage of Utopia, the Latvian Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale, arguing that its reconstruction of the Untamed Fashion Assembly (UFA)—an experimental fashion festival held in Riga during the 1990s—offers a compelling model for thinking about artistic communities as temporary yet generative utopias. Through an installation that foregrounds backstage labor, archival memory, and material improvisation, MAREUNROL, Bruno Birmanis, and curators Inga Lāce and Adomas Narkevičius shift attention from spectacle to the social infrastructures that make creative experimentation possible. Situating the project against the broader context of the Biennale, the review argues that the pavilion demonstrates how ephemeral artistic spaces can endure as cultural imaginaries, suggesting that the value of utopia lies not in permanence but in its capacity to inspire future forms of collective creativity.

MAREUNROL’S, *Untamed Assembly: Backstage Utopia*, 2026, installation view, Pavilion of Latvia, 61st Venice Biennale. Photo by Kristine Madjare.

On entering the Latvian pavilion, I had the impression of entering the backstage of a fashion show after everybody has already left. At the center is a towering, almost palatial structure of gleaming chrome clothing racks, its metal rods twisting and bending to intertwine with one another. There are barely any clothes left hanging on the racks (the models must have chosen to wear the designs to the afterparty), a few chairs are scattered haphazardly around the perimeter, a forgotten pair of monstrously tall platform shoes are there, as if just taken off, and a slouching backpack emanates a mysterious golden glow. Along with these lingering traces of backstage frenzy, metal birds scattered around the structure hold aloft panels of fabric printed with scenes from archival footage from the Untamed Fashion Assembly (UFA), an annual fashion festival held in Riga between 1990 and 1999.

For the Latvian pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale, curators Inga Lāce and Adomas Narkevičius worked with the artist duo MAREUNROL’S (Mārīte Mastiņa-Pēterkopa and Rolands Pēterkops) and the fashion designer Bruno Birmanis to reimagine a backstage utopia inspired by the UFA. The festival’s carnivalesque and avant-garde shows were a direct antithesis of the mainstream fashion trends at the time, namely the minimalism popularized by designers such as Calvin Klein, Jil Sander, and Helmut Lang. Designers, models, photographers, musicians, and artists from all over the world would descend on Riga to take part in the UFA, which was legendary not only for its non-commercial and DIY spirit but also for the sense of freedom and joy to be found at the festival.

The UFA’s archival footage takes on many forms in the exhibition: in its most straightforward incarnation, the original videos are visible only to those who are curious enough to peek behind the curtain that separates the central sculpture from the makeshift viewing room, essentially flipping the expectations of what takes the centerstage versus the backstage. Here, the catwalk is relegated to the periphery while the invisible labor of those who toiled out of sight becomes the main attraction. The once-forgotten faces and voices of those who made the UFA possible become all the more visible when viewers glance in the mirrors resting against the wall. Each person’s reflection is literally framed by cut-out stickers of models and assistants from archival footage, occasionally punctuated by stickers immortalizing quotes, such as “WHEN YOU HAVE NOTHING, YOU FIND SOMETHING POWERFUL,” or “THE OPENINGS BECAME NIGHTCLUBS BECAME THE BEACH BECAME THE CLUB.”

The juxtaposition of the viewers’ reflections with these stickers is wholly inviting, almost encouraging each visitor to imagine themselves as one of the visionary artists who took part in the UFA’s utopian atmosphere of creative experimentation. This invitation is taken a step further in the incorporation of still images from the archival footage printed onto the clothing and the chairs that populate the almost-empty room. Rather than plain fabric, the folding chairs are upholstered with images taken on bus rides to Riga, hands performing last-minute tailoring, and public plazas repurposed for fashion shows. The fabric panels held aloft by the birds depict similar scenes from the archival footage, suggesting that the history of the UFA is one that we can bring into our own lives—whether it is an idealized reflection to strive toward, a comforting legacy that we can find relief in, or a committed lifestyle choice, such as the clothes we choose to wear on our bodies every day.

The clothing shown at the UFA was outrageous yet inventive. According to Bruno Birmanis, a number of participating designers incorporated furniture fabric into their designs simply because it was cheap and readily available. Models would strut onto the runway, wearing minidresses adorned with bedazzled hammers and sickles, hats resembling traffic cones, or duvets and pillows reimagined as sumptuous ballgowns. As Birmanis fondly recalls, nothing was off limits, and designers were more than happy to search, improvise, and invent new ways to bring their visions to life in the face of shortages and economic collapse.

Although it isn’t part of the Biennale’s main exhibition, the pavilion reminds me of the following passage from the late Koyo Kouoh’s curatorial text: “Minor tones are also minor islands: worlds in the middle of oceans, with distinct and infinitely rich ecosystems, social lives articulated—for better or worse—within much larger political structures, and ecological stakes of great significance. In this context, the evocation of tones and islands extends to an archipelago of oases: gardens, courtyards, residences, lofts, dance floors—the other worlds created by artists, intimate and convivial universes that regenerate and sustain even in the darkest moments; indeed, especially in the darkest moments.”

Ironically, the Latvian Pavilion does a far better job of embodying this idea compared to the Biennale’s overstuffed and incohesive main exhibitions in the Giardini and Arsenale. Perhaps this is because Lāce and Narkevičius are at an advantage compared to Kouoh’s curatorial team—it is much easier to make sense of the past than it is to wade through the muddled chaos of the present. For this reason, the Latvian project accomplishes what the vast majority of the Biennale does not: its focus on the UFA, an oasis created by artists during bygone times of darkness, illuminates a possible pathway for those of us in the present moment.

To say that the UFA took place during tumultuous times would be an understatement. It existed in a strange in-between state in the shadow of the collapsed Soviet Union, somewhere between Western and Eastern Europe, no longer communist but not yet fully capitalist either. Nonetheless, it was a utopia precisely because Latvia’s role wasn’t defined yet, so people felt free to experiment. In the same way that childhood is idyllic because it lacks the crushing weight of being defined by a job or a social responsibility, the UFA was able to operate as a short-lived paradise that many people look back on fondly.

Some people would say it’s a shame that the UFA couldn’t last forever, yet there’s really no need for a paradise to do that. If such a thing were possible, then nothing would ever change, and there would be no craving or desire for the experimentation that created paradise in the first place. It’s enough that it existed at one point in time, during the long and endless stretch of human history. The fact that it could ever exist in the first place—however short-lived it may have been—already provides the foundation for future dreamers to build the next utopia.

Colleen Dalusong is an independent curator and writer based in New York City and is currently a master’s degree student in Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts. She has previously curated exhibitions at Accent Sisters, CP Projects Space, Uncool Gallery, A Space Gallery, and nuun gallery. Her writing has been featured on Whitehot Magazine, Cultbytes, Impulse Magazine, sabukaru.online, Hot Coffee Conversations, and Mercer Street Reader. She has held positions at Alternative Space LOOP, the International Studio & Curatorial Program, and the Asian American Arts Centre.

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MA Curatorial Practice 7/20/26 MA Curatorial Practice 7/20/26

Liquid Tongues: Expanding Language, Limiting Experience

There is a difference between making deaf people the topic of an exhibition and actually being inclusive of them in making the exhibition.

By Chaieun Lee

There is a difference between making deaf people the topic of an exhibition and actually being inclusive of them in making the exhibition.

Chaieun Lee • 7/20/26

Liquid Tongues, Bogna Burska and Daniel Kotowski, curated by Ewa Chomicka and Jolanta Woszczenko, Pavilion of Poland, 61st Venice Biennale, May 9–November 22, 2026

On Site is The Curatorial's section for curatorial reviews and a venue for MA Curatorial Practice students at the School of Visual Arts to publish as part of their program, though it is open to all writers.
In this review, Chaieun Lee examines Liquid Tongues by Bogna Burska and Daniel Kotowski at the Polish Pavilion, curated by Ewa Chomicka and Jolanta Woszczenko, an audiovisual installation that draws on sign language, whale song, and underwater space to challenge the primacy of spoken language and foreground deaf experience. Lee argues that while the work succeeds in proposing spoken language, sign language, and other communicative forms as parallel rather than hierarchical, its curatorial execution falls short of its own ambitions, guiding hearing visitors through sound while leaving deaf visitors at a momentary disadvantage, and missing opportunities, particularly in the sculptural seating structure, to communicate through vibration and bodily sensation. The review ultimately distinguishes between representing deaf people and designing for them, asking whether the exhibition's inclusivity was fully realized or only partially imagined.

Bologna Burska and Daniel Kotowski, *Liquid Tongues*, 2026, still from video, Pavilion of Poland, 61st Venice Biennale. Image courtesy Zacheta Archive.

What first overwhelms visitors on entering the Polish Pavilion is the surround-sound chorus. Sequences of spoken letters, harmonies reminiscent of whale song, and fragments of text drift through the space, drawing visitors toward the exhibition’s two large screens, one mounted on the wall and the other suspended overhead. As they watch the performers’ gestures and movements, they soon realize that what they are seeing is a form of sign language and that the exhibition seeks to address, at least in part, the marginalization of the deaf. Yet, a surprising question almost instantly came to mind as I moved through the space and sat there: Who was this exhibition for?

Liquid Tongues, an audiovisual installation by hearing artist Bogna Burska and deaf artist Daniel Kotowski, presents two screens that only come fully into view after entering the space and turning one’s head or body. Hearing visitors are naturally guided toward the screen on the wall to the left by sounds resembling water or whale song. It seems an irony that deaf visitors, not able to share that same auditory invitation into the work, are left at a momentary disadvantage, and the question emerges of how this might have been curatorially resolved.

Still, the images ultimately draw everyone in, and they are striking. In the videos, against cool-toned backgrounds, groups dressed in vivid red move their hands and mouths as they submerge themselves underwater in a swimming pool and stand in a snowy winter landscape, communicating through language and gesture. This visual intensity resembles the way many deaf people navigate the hearing world, where communication often begins with the need to capture another person’s attention. The videos’ stark contrasts seem to reflect that condition, where visibility becomes a prerequisite for language itself.

The address of Liquid Tongues to auditory otherness also resonates with “minor keys,” the late Koyo Kouoh’s theme for the Biennale’s central exhibition. Kouoh described “minor keys” as an invitation to revisit, listen to, and sense the margins of society and daily experience. Yet the notion of hearing and listening carries its own implicit limitations and risks of marginalization. For all the good intentions carried in the musical allusion of Kouoh’s title, the auditory remains exclusionary for some. And so, for the Polish Pavilion, curators Ewa Chomicka and Jolanta Woszczenko, who seek with the artists to highlight the agency of deaf people living within a hearing world, it might be said that they signal the “minor” to redress exclusion and celebrate difference without calling aloud for its keys. Kotowski spoke in a recent interview about this as “Deaf Gain,” saying that “hearing people usually perceive deaf people through a strongly medicalized perspective and notice only the deficits that deaf people may have. But Deaf Gain completely reverses this and shows how much deaf people are capable of and how much they can offer the world.”1

Bologna Burska and Daniel Kotowski, *Liquid Tongues*, 2026, installation view, Pavilion of Poland, 61st Venice Biennale. Image courtesy Jacopo Salvi (altomare)/Zachęta Archive.

Liquid Tongues explores this condition most strikingly through underwater space. The performers who appear throughout the videos, Chór w Ruchu (Choir in Motion), are composed of both deaf and hearing members. They sing in spoken and sign languages, attempting communication through their bodies as much as through their words. In the videos, water, which covers most of the planet yet remains outside the principal living and communication space for humans, becomes a primary space for the way meaning is signaled. In this submerged environment, spoken language becomes distorted and difficult to understand, while sign language takes on authority and centrality, and the evocation of whale song offers another instance of alternative communicative authority, identity, and sovereign wholeness. As Burska said about the work, “I had this idea that together we could create a kind of super-language, expressed through sound, the way hearing people speak, and through image and space, the way deaf people communicate, so that together they could create this super-language. Maybe we could try to imagine how whales communicate and interpret the world, or to put it more accurately, in whale language.”2

Here, a reversal of this hierarchy is powerfully presented. The assumption that spoken language holds primacy originates in the history of the word “language” itself. The English word derives from the Latin lingua, meaning “tongue.” If language itself is etymologically tied to the tongue, it is easy to understand why speech and the ability to hear it are intrinsic to the way language is valorized in its auditory form. Liquid Tongues proposes a profound reconsideration, in which spoken language, sign language, whale song, and written language in the form of the videos’ subtitles are presented not as hierarchical forms of communication, but as parallel ones.

Significantly, the curators chose the plural form, tongues—languages—rather than the singular. And we can see this attentiveness in the work’s soundscape itself. Certain words, phrases, and refrains drawn from distinct sources and contexts recur throughout the work, from the repeated “whup whup,” an interpretation of humpback whale calls disrupted by human-generated ocean noise, to “hand talk,” recalling Indigenous sign languages displaced by spoken-language systems. While they spark curiosity, their meaning isn’t always immediately clear.

The zine distributed in the pavilion provides crucial context, including explanations of specific phrases, their sources, and information about Kotowski’s collaboration with a hearing interpreter in translating whale communication into spoken and sign languages. It also clarifies why whale communication occupies such a significant place in the project. Reading these explanations, visitors gradually begin to trace connections between the historical marginalization of sign language and the difficulties whales face communicating in increasingly noisy oceans. Still, much of this important information is difficult to find in the project’s materials online. Of course, providing additional context on-site is an important curatorial practice. Yet the reliance on a single physical format still feels at odds with the exhibition’s broader concern for accessibility.

There is another aspect of communication that seems not fully aligned with the exhibition’s ambitions. At the center of the pavilion, a sculptural seating structure by Marcin Kwietowicz is installed, positioned like an island between the wall and ceiling screens. Visitors can recline against its streamlined form, reminiscent of a whale's spine, while watching the videos. Because of its primary position within the installation, and because it invites direct physical contact, I expected the structure to function as an organ of resonance, that is to say, as another channel of communication, connecting the audience to the work through the body as well as through sight and sound. Yet the structure remains primarily a seat, and the exhibition remains more conventional than it could have been as an audio-visual installation—a missed opportunity. Even more so because vibration, lip movement, and bodily movement all play a role in the communicative practices of the deaf. Had vibration traveled through Kwietowicz’s work, it would have brought this communicatory form to life for visitors as a way to more fully apprehend deaf experience in its breadth.

And so, let me return to my initial question: Would a deaf visitor encounter this exhibition in the same way as a hearing audience?

Liquid Tongues succeeds in challenging the hierarchy that has long privileged spoken language over other forms of communication. Yet it has to be asked if deaf people in this exhibition were imagined solely as a subject of representation or as members of its audience and, by extension, more fully understood members of society. There is a difference between making deaf people the topic of an exhibition and making them the point of reference through which the exhibition is designed to create that greater inclusivity. It would be unfair to do anything less than praise the exhibition’s significant engagement with deaf experience and the compelling artistic work it has produced. Still, if spoken and sign languages were more fully embodied in the presentation of Liquid Tongues,the ambitions of the artists and curators would have been truly met.

Bologna Burska and Daniel Kotowski, *Liquid Tongues*, 2026, still from video, Pavilion of Poland, 61st Venice Bienale. Image courtesy Zacheta Archive.

NOTES

Artim, “Polish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2026,” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsDCyVc8EqU.
Artim, “Polish Pavilion,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsDCyVc8EqU.

Chaieun Lee is an independent curator and artist from Seoul, South Korea. Drawing on her background as an artist, she approaches each exhibition as a work in its own right. Her practice focuses on accessibility and marginalized voices, exploring how exhibitions can create spaces for empathy and dialogue. She is currently a student in the MA Curatorial Practice program at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Alongside her independent curatorial practice, she has curated exhibitions in Seoul and New York and worked at DIA Contemporary, New York, and Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, Utrecht, the Netherlands.

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MA Curatorial Practice 7/20/26 MA Curatorial Practice 7/20/26

Our New Teacher

Our agency is parodied and mourned by this chattering, oneiric devil as we cruise at ballistic speed not only toward the conjugation of democracy's collapse but toward the collapse, too, of the division between human and machine.

By Steven Henry Madoff

Our agency is parodied and mourned by the artist’s chattering, oneiric devil as the division between human and machine continues to collapse.

Steven Henry Madoff • 7/20/26

Li Yi-Fan, Screen Melanchol, curated by Raphael Fonseca, Taiwan Collateral Event, Palazzo delle Prigione, 61st Venice Biennale, May 9—November 22, 2026

On Site is The Curatorial's section for curatorial reviews and a venue for MA Curatorial Practice students at the School of Visual Arts to publish as part of their program, though it is open to all writers.
In this text, Steven Henry Madoff reviews Screen Melancholy by Li Yi-Fan, curated by Raphael Fonseca as Taiwan's collateral event at the Palazzo delle Prigioni. The presentation is a sixty-minute AI-generated video installation in which a cheerful golem delivers an endless, dissociated monologue spanning self-help, tech instruction, and existential dread. Madoff argues that Li deploys AI as both medium and subject, using machinic intelligence tools to lampoon and mourn the very agency it displaces. The work's surreal humor, he contends, is not relief from its darkness but its vehicle, a hyperactive voice that, through ironic juxtaposition, teaches us what it means to be human.

Li Yi-Fan, *Screen Melancholy*, 2026, installation view, Taiwan Collateral Event, 61st Venice Biennale. Image courtesy MACP.

I remember coming down the stairs in my parents’ house, I was 13, and I had a book in my hand. My mother had just come in from the garden, so it must have been a late spring weekend or early summer. I said something to the effect that I’d found a poetry anthology upstairs and a particular poem was amazing, and I read it aloud to her. I didn’t know it then, that it would change the whole direction of my life. You likely know the beginning of the poem well: “Let us go then, you and I,/When the evening is spread out against the sky/Like a patient etherized upon a table.” A cloud of administered sleep, like a body infused with chemicals, morbid and remarkable. The insertion of the technological word “etherized” is a sudden shift in the poem’s tone, a little leap of ideational contrast into a pleasure I hadn’t known, dipping me down into the under-ness of understanding, the suddenness of it erupting.

I think of this now, back from Venice, where there was a work like that. Well, not so strangely elevated as T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” but still revelatory in our age of rapidly unsettling intelligent machines: something immersed in the fluidity of life transmogrified through the sleight-of-hand of a technological unveiling. In Eliot, we may find the rediscovery of the sensations of life, but in this new work, those sensations are replaced by an artificiality zoomed in on from the horizon of what’s to come.

The work is Li Yi-Fan’s sixty-minute software-generated video installation, Screen Melancholy (2026), featured as Taiwan’s collateral event and organized by the dexterously talented curator Raphael Fonseca, in which the lubricity of AI-generated speech is given the chameleon logic of dreams—a language that already awaits us in the virtual passageways of customer support, of bureaucracy sped up, alien, and inescapable. I came once to see Li’s video, then after seeing everything else there was time for in the Biennale, I came back to see it again. What is it about Screen Melancholy that’s so haunting and macabre, and won’t leave my mind?

Li Yi-Fan, *Screen Melancholy*, 2026, installation in Palazzo delle Prigione, Taiwan Collateral Event, 61st Venice Biennale. Image courtesy the artist and TFAM.

The first thing that struck me wasn’t the content of this remarkable work, but the look of it. Li’s palette ranges over a continuum of sepulchral grays. Scenes have objects done in acid reds, blues, and greens, but his world-building largely conjures the dimly lit half-life of the undead. The heavy atmosphere is set askew still more by the jarring, almost avuncular, cheeriness of its protagonist, who has the comic gait of Charlie Chaplin, though more robotic, and is wrapped in the sallow skin of Gollum from Lord of the Rings, with whom he has a passing resemblance. Amid these tints and shadows, his manic talk rushes toward us in an endless, AI-fueled monologue of self-help, tech instructions, and hyperventilated storytelling about his own organs—heart, lungs, intestines, prostate, eyes—which are presented as mini-me puppets he manipulates, and keeps repeating, “I don’t want your gift. I don’t want your gift. I don’t want your gift.” Is that gift human sentience and subjectivity, or just meat instead of electrons, with the expiration date of organic life?

He talks about how to make the video he’s in, about AI and frame generation, jump-cutting from oracular commentary to the technological and an approximation of emotion: “One day you will also become a low-poly model. […] What is your relationship to all the images you’ve seen? […] How do you project a 2D plane onto a spherical geometry? […] Are you lost? Are you lost?” And, with an artificially sweetened dose of sentimentality, “You must follow the heart.” A golem is an anthropomorphic figure created from inanimate matter—mud or clay—and here, Li has created his golem from the inanimate material of code, seeming to stand in as an exculpatory being who somehow absolves us of the guilt implicit in the very creation of beings who are altering our lives. In this way, the giddy weirdness of his talk and bendy movements offer a kind of ventilating humor, relieving us of the claustrophobia of the space and the estranging aura of AI that he personifies, as he slips between English and Mandarin and pierces himself with arrows. That suffering unto the lord of digital advancement, which undergirds Screen Melancholy’s surreal narrative and scenes, is as ecstatic and fearsome as St. Sebastian while it floats in the hollowed-out feeling of the totally prefab, all synth and hall of mirrors.

In the video, our mongrel narrator crisscrosses a room that reflects the one we’re sitting in (a seventeenth-century palazzo interior of gray Istrian stone, once part of a prison, fitted out with monolithically scaled sculptures of body parts, some of which we sit on as benches) and a hallucinatory warren of rooms on two floors that magically rise and fall like stage sets, the spaces cluttered with technical equipment, military equipment, cooking gear, and junk. Sitting in that room simultaneously simulated on the screen somehow twists our physical presence, doubling and cleaving our sense of here-ness, dipping us in disorientation—a sort of quantum spookiness we inhabit on the other side of the work’s “melancholy screen,” which evokes all the screens through which we experience so much of contemporary life, at once endlessly deep and flattened.

To use the tools of AI to critique and lampoon its fleet-footedness as well as its potentially devastating weight is, of course, the point of Li’s off-kilter tension, to which we’re all captive now. The paradox of machinic life haunting—or is it taunting—the human in its own dissociated voice is vivid as a bruise. In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant wrote, “What can I know? What should I do? What can I hope for?” Here, the artist seems to be saying, with soul-searching melancholy pulsing under his humor, that the darker realities of AI plumb the first two of these questions for itself, while immiserating the last for humankind.

So it was that I stepped from the brilliant morning light of the Piazza San Marco, with its clouds of pigeons and the scintillations of the Grand Canal, into a technological den of humanly made inhuman artifice, whose ultimate message, I think, is about being human and our particular trait of tool-making, taught back to us here by our own ironic creation. Tool-making has always been an act of invention on whatever scale with the goal of improvement or, most basically, of survival. Now, as Li’s golem shows and tells us, it’s an apparatus of onanism whose prospect exists within a bubble of artificial self-determination; an echo chamber in which the call for improvement is replaced by the algorithmic desire to only reproduce its own environment and its own organs in a technological hothouse. At one point, he remarks, “Are you scared? Don’t be scared. It’s just a computer graphic.” His reassurance is hardly reassuring. It feels as if our own agency is parodied and mourned by this chattering, oneiric devil as we cruise at ballistic speed not only toward the conjugation of democracy’s collapse but toward the collapse, too, of the division between human and machine, as abstract and visceral as Eliot’s etherized cloud, enveloping us as we watch.

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 Unseparate: Modernism, Interdisciplinary Art, and Network Aesthetics from Stanford University Press; 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. 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. He is a member of the Curatorial Studies Workshop, part of the Expanded Artistic Research Network (EARN ).

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Whose Wet Dream Is This?

The body becomes its own archive of the exhibition’s demands in the Austrian Pavilion, and this visibility raises the very question it might intend to foreground: Who is this visibility for?

By Kiera McIntosh

The body becomes its own archive of the exhibition’s demands, and this visibility raises the very question it might intend to foreground: Who is this visibility for?

Kiera McIntosh • 7/20/26

Florentina Holzinger, Seaworld Venice, curated by Nora-Swantje Almes, Pavilion of Austria, 61st Venice Biennale, May 9—November 22, 2026

On Site is The Curatorial's section for curatorial reviews and a venue for MA Curatorial Practice students at the School of Visual Arts to publish as part of their program, though it is open to all writers.
In this review, Kiera McIntosh examines Seaworld Venice by Florentina Holzinger at the Austrian Pavilion, curated by Nora-Swantje Almes, in which a rotating cast of female performers spend extended periods submerged, spinning, and suspended across a series of aquatic stations for the full seven-month run of the Biennale. McIntosh argues that while Holzinger achieves something genuinely radical, making the labor of performance legible on the surface of the body itself, the work cannot fully resolve the tension between feminist critique and the spectacle it stages. Naming the gaze, she contends, does not disrupt it; and asking female bodies to absorb, endure, and display the marks of that endurance for an audience risks restaging the very extraction the ecological frame sets out to critique.

Florentina Holzinger, *Seaworld Venice*, 2026, performance view, Pavilion of Austria, 61st Venice Biennale. Image courtesy Nicole Marianna Wutyczak.

Walking through Florentina Holzinger’s Seaworld Venice at the Austrian Pavilion, past the well-calculated aesthetics, the audiences openly filming despite signage demanding otherwise, and the portable toilets on either side of the central tank whose contents, provided by the public, quite literally fed the exhibition (the body’s waste becoming the water, the water becoming the work, rising levels of human excess made literal), I couldn’t help but stop and notice the bruises.

Before entering the pavilion, just outside every hour on the hour, a naked woman in a harness climbs a rope up to a large brass bell suspended from a blue crane, and rings it by hanging upside down from inside, her body becoming the bell’s clapper as she swings side-to-side with slow, rhythmic momentum. Inside, the pavilion unfolds as a hallway leading to a single open atrium: to the left, a large open tank in which a naked woman on a jet ski circles with building force; to the right, a towering spinning ladder on which golden sculptures of women frozen at various stages of ascent share the structure with real, naked women moving slowly among them, mirroring the cast figures’ poses. At the end, anchoring the center atrium, a large viewing tank in which a naked woman stood immersed, scuba mask on, staring back through the glass, the two portable toilets connected on either side. Pale blue-yellow blooms spreading across a thigh, a forearm, and a shoulder blade; skin that has puckered and whitened from three hours in the water, and fingertips wrinkling into soft, collapsed ridges. The women in the tank, climbing the spinning ladder, operating a jet ski, or hanging upside down in a brass bell, are not enacting exhaustion; they are actually very much exhausted, while the audience, dry and clothed and temporally passing through, looks on.

Florentina Holzinger, *Seaworld Venice*, 2026, peformance view, Pavilion of Austria, 61st Venice Biennale. Image courtesy Nicole Marianna Wutyczak.

This is the central friction of Seaworld Venice, and it is one that the work's ambitious conceptual scaffolding (water as ecological crisis, the body as machinic organism, purity and pollution as co-constitutive) does not fully resolve. Holzinger, an Austrian choreographer and director who has built her practice around the radical possibilities of the female body, staging works in which nudity, danger, and physical extremity are not provocations for their own sake but the very grammar of the work, has long been drawn to extreme durational embodiment, to bodies pushed past the decorative and into the frankly material: bleeding, straining, and enduring. Here, the aquatic installation demands that a rotating cast of female performers spend extended periods submerged in tanks that double as both amusement park spectacle and sewage treatment. The press release tells us the performers inhabit an ecosystem out of control. What it does not quite tell us is what that inhabitation costs the body over not an afternoon, but seven months of a Biennale run.

The bruises and the waterlogged skin are not prosthetics or theatrical effects, but the legible record of what sustained immersion and immense physical labor do to human tissue. In this sense, Holzinger achieves something genuinely radical: she makes the labor of performance visible on the surface of the body itself. The body becomes its own archive of the show’s demands, and this visibility raises the very question it might intend to foreground: Who is this visibility for?

The gaze is not a neutral instrument here either. When we look at women’s bodies in states of physical duress, whether it's bruised, bloated with water, or stripped of the armor of composed presentation, we are operating within a long history of looking that has rarely been to women's benefit. Holzinger is clearly aware of this as she directly engages the mechanics of spectacle, refusing to let the audience sit comfortably in voyeurism by implicating them in what they consume. The press release’s closing provocation—“whose wet dream is this?”—names it directly. But naming the gaze does not automatically disrupt it. An audience can hold both the critique and the pleasure simultaneously, and often does. I mean, I literally saw an older man take out his DSLR camera, walk right up to the tank, and take a close-up shot of his “wet dreams.” Apart from that, the bruises become aestheticized, whether or not that is the intention, and the exhausted face becomes a kind of sublime. This is not a failure unique to Holzinger; it haunts durational work involving female bodies almost constitutively, but it is a tension the work does not resolve so much as stage.

What is also being staged, whether consciously or not, is the transformation of emotional labor into physical labor. The history of demanding that women perform endurance for an audience, like sustaining discomfort, remaining present, and continuing despite the cost, is not separate from the history of domestic and affective service. The female body in the tank is also, in some register, the female body doing what female bodies have always been asked to do: maintain composure while placed under uncomfortable situations. This is not a new artistic gesture when thinking about artists such as Marina Abramović, who built an entire practice on the proposition that the body under duress becomes a site of meaning, and Valie Export, whose early actions made the female body’s suffering and endurance specifically political, refusing to let that labor remain invisible. Holzinger’s work within this lineage and the feminist force of making physical labor legible is real and significant. The argument here is not that this work is spectacle rather than art, or that endurance is exploitation rather than expression. It is rather that the performance of endurance by women, for an audience, carries a weight that no amount of feminist framing entirely neutralizes, and the work is most honest when it holds that tension rather than resolving it. When we ask whose endurance is being consumed and toward what end, it is not to undermine the work but to hold it to a high enough regard to ask.

Then there is the durational question that the institution of the Biennale itself poses. Seven months is not a performance but seems more like a condition. The body can sustain extraordinary things for a single afternoon, a single week, but the cumulative effect of repeated immersion over a Biennale season, the repeated bruising, and the skin that never quite recovers is a different ethical proposition. What does it mean to ask this of bodies? What does it mean for the performers who say yes? There is, presumably, genuine consent and a genuine desire to participate, and yet consent is not the end of the ethical inquiry. The question of what we are willing to let art do to human bodies, and which bodies, and over what duration, is not answered by pointing to contracts or voluntary participation. There is no simple answer to these questions, but it’s important to raise them.

This is especially pointed given Seaworld Venice’s ecological ambitions. Holzinger connects the body’s fluids (urine, sweat, etc.) to water as a planetary resource and crisis. Rising sea levels are not an abstract backdrop but the conceptual ground of the work. The body submerged in water is the body living inside the consequence of human excess, as the earth is submerged in the waste of its own civilization. There is something genuinely moving in this alignment: the individual body as a microcosm of planetary crisis, the female body as a figure for a nature that is exploited, overworked, and required to absorb damage it did not produce. Mother Earth (the cliché goes) and Holzinger are asking what it actually looks like to live in that saturated, waterlogged condition, and to have the consequences of others’ waste written on your skin. The bell will always take its toll and time will always be up. Ding, ding!

But here, the ecological frame and the endurance frame collapse into each other in ways that are worth pressing. If the female body is made to stand in for an exhausted, over-extracted earth, then the performance of that exhaustion risks becoming not a critique of extraction but a restaging of it. The work makes the women’s bodies do what industrial capitalism makes the planet do: absorb, endure, and display the marks of that absorption for an audience that leaves intact.

Can it last seven months? Probably, with rotation and care. Should it? That is a question the work itself seems to be asking, even if it cannot answer—and perhaps that is precisely the point. It must install an unanswerable question in the body of the show, to make the audience sit with the discomfort of what they are watching and what they are complicit in, long after they have stepped back into the opulence of Venice.

Kiera McIntosh is an independent curator from Denver, Colorado, whose practice explores the intersection of desire and storytelling through poetics, feminist theory, and communicative practice. Her exhibitions investigate intimacy, embodiment, and voice, pairing exhibition-making with live public programming that positions desire not simply as a subject, but as a curatorial methodology. Her practice is informed by sustained experience across artist-led, commercial, and institutional contexts. She has supported exhibitions and public programming at Camden Arts Centre in London, managed large-scale public events as Program Manager for The Dinner Party in Denver, and held curatorial and gallery roles at Pardon Arts and Dateline Gallery, where she contributed to artist selection, exhibition development, installation, and interpretive texts. Across these positions, she has developed a practice grounded equally in conceptual research and the practical realities of producing exhibitions. McIntosh is currently an MA candidate in Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts in New York, where she continues to develop a feminist approach to exhibition-making rooted in poetic inquiry, critical research, and collaborative forms of knowledge production.

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MA Curatorial Practice 7/20/26 MA Curatorial Practice 7/20/26

A Shift in the Air

Venice was unexpectedly hopeful, not because it offered solutions, but because it reminded me that there are other stories, other histories, other ways to understand the world.

By Diana Sardaryan

Venice was unexpectedly hopeful, not because it offered solutions, but because it reminded us that there are other stories, other histories, other ways to understand the world.

Diana Sardaryan • 7/20/26

In Minor Keys, curated by Koyo Kouoh, with Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Hélène Pereira, and Rasha Salti, and Siddhartha Mitter, 61st Venice Biennale, May 9–November 22, 2026

On Site is The Curatorial's section for curatorial reviews and a venue for MA Curatorial Practice students at the School of Visual Arts to publish as part of their program, though it is open to all writers.
Diana Sardaryan surveys the 2026 Venice Biennale, In Minor Keys, curated by the late Koyo Kouoh and carried out by her assembled team. Framing it as a symptom of a broader shift in the global order, Sardaryan argues that where previous landmark curatorships by Okwui Enwezor and Adriano Pedrosa confronted or rewrote the Western canon, Kouoh's exhibition opted out of opposition altogether, allowing other histories and cosmologies to exist on their own terms. Formally uneven and at odds with conventional exhibition-making, In Minor Keys is assessed here not by professional criteria it was never designed to meet, but by its emotional register: dense, dissonant, and ultimately humble. Drawing on observations across multiple national pavilions, she argues that the Biennale's most honest gesture was its willingness to begin from uncertainty, proposing not solutions, but a pause, and the possibility of other stories.

Kaloki Nyamai, *Kwata kau, Ithyonze nitwavika vaa,* and Ithyonze nitwavika vaaII, 2025, installation view, Arsenale, 61st Venice Biennale. Photo by Marco Zorzanello.

Before coming to Venice for the first time, I thought of the Biennale primarily as a spectacle of cultural capital: an expensive global event seemingly disconnected from the suffering, violence, and instability shaping much of the world. But once I found myself there, surrounded by its contradictions, I realized that critique alone was insufficient. The 2026 Venice Biennale was not simply a reflection of the world we live in, but a symptom of it, which revealed far more about the historical moment we are living through.

As always, this edition of the Biennale brought together countries, institutions, and cultural positions from across the world, creating a snapshot of the present—in this case, I think, a peculiar one. Looking at this landscape, I had the impression that something fundamental is shifting. For decades, certain countries and institutions have occupied the position of the world’s grand narrators, defining the dominant ideas of universality, progress, coexistence, democracy, and the global order itself. Yet the consequences of that order have made this position increasingly difficult to uphold, and the 2026 Biennale stands as a testament to that condition.

Of course, this process has been unfolding for some time. Thinkers such as Adorno and Lyotard had already diagnosed the contradictions of modernity and the exhaustion of its universal narratives. But in an age of instantaneous communication, those contradictions have become impossible to ignore. The distance between proclaimed commitments to peace, love, and freedom, and the realities they produce has become apparent.

Florentina Holzinger, *Seaworld Venice*, 2026, installation view, Pavilion of Austria, 61st Venice Biennale. Photo by Andrea Avezzù.

This shift was perhaps most visible in the decision to place the central exhibition in the hands of the late Koyo Kouoh, the Cameroonian-born curator and former executive director of Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town, who passed away shortly before the opening of the exhibition. Subsequently, the team she assembled—curators Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Hélène Pereira, and Rasha Salti, together with researcher Rory Tsapayi and editor-in-chief Siddhartha Mitter—attempted to realize her vision. Historically, Kouoh’s appointment was not unprecedented. Okwui Enwezor was the first African-born curator of the Venice Biennale’s central exhibition in 2015, and Adriano Pedrosa’s Foreigners Everywhere in 2024 further challenged the boundaries of the Western canon. Yet In Minor Keys seemed to operate differently. Where Enwezor’s exhibition confronted the political and economic structures of the Western-designed world, and Pedrosa’s sought to rewrite art history from the perspective of those excluded from it, Kouoh’s exhibition seemed less interested in opposition altogether. It was not about who was permitted to speak, but instead about the nature of the conversation itself. Operating in a different register that did not seek to establish hierarchical legitimacy, it allowed other histories, cosmologies, and ways of being to exist on their own terms, without requiring translation or obligatory relation to the dominant cultural framework.

Kouoh’s exhibition looked bad, yet it didn’t feel bad.

According to almost every professional criterion a typical Western-educated curator or critic might use to evaluate an exhibition (and Western criteria are largely the only criteria most of us are taught), the show didn’t seem to work. The number of artworks, the selection, the coherence, the placement, the lighting, the navigation, the rhythm: everything seemed wrong at first. Yet looked at less formally, In Minor Keys was a dense, messy exhibition that remained intimate, informal, emotional, and open. Sometimes too much. Sometimes unclear. Often not entirely certain of what it wanted to say, while completely certain in its urge to be heard. As Kouoh suggested in her curatorial text, she wanted her exhibition to sound like free jazz: dissonant at first—full of stray sounds, missed notes, and moments that seemed almost out of place—yet capable of reaching the heart if given patience.

The organizers of the Biennale entrusted the central exhibition to a different curatorial perspective from the typical kind of authorial uber-statement, and in doing so, a productive tension was present. The art exhibition is itself a European invention, shaped by its own assumptions and hierarchical universalism. What happens when forms of expression rooted elsewhere are asked to inhabit that format? Perhaps something like In Minor Keys. It can even be said that the exhibition’s evident unevenness was a sign of the challenge to translate this very different curatorial vision—and especially without the curator who conceived it. Throughout her career, Kouoh’s work was often at odds with the European exhibitionary model exemplified by the Venice Biennale, and here it was equally so. The exhibition took a humble position. She and her team did not attempt to offer a new truth or replace one universal narrative with another. Instead, they invited viewers to “shift to a slower gear and tune in to the frequencies of the minor keys” because, “though often lost in the anxious cacophony of the present chaos raging through the world, the music continues...”1

Sumakshi Singh, *Permanent Address*, 2026, installation view, Pavilion of India, 61st Venice Biennale. Photo by Luca Zambelli Bais.

Rather than claiming certainty, they seemed willing to begin from the uncertainty of becoming. Perhaps that was the most honest position to take. Nobody possesses a complete map of history or a framework capable of explaining everything. Yet In Minor Keys did not leave the viewer in a state of paralysis. Instead, it proposed a pause, a space to breathe, to remain together, and to search for ways of creating meaning and beauty. As Kouoh quotes Toni Morrison in her curatorial text, “In our myths, in our songs, that’s where the seeds are. It is not possible to constantly hone on the crisis. You have to have the love, and you have to have the magic, that’s also life.”2

The transitional condition of our world, where the old world is dying and a new one struggles to be born, extended beyond the central exhibition, taking various forms. Many of the pavilions at the center of the old global order felt like exhibitions of mourning for their own death. France’s Comme Saturne (Like Saturn) revolved around erosion, devouring, self-consumption, and burnout. Germany’s In Ruins revisited historical fractures and unresolved debts. Austria, with SEAWORLD VENICE, presented multiple dystopian performances, in one of which a suspended body functioned as the clapper of a church bell, ringing it hourly with their own body, and recalling an image from Bosch’s The Last Judgment.

Other pavilions, while equally grounded in their geographies, histories, and lived realities, were less extreme, less confrontational in front of an international audience. Their reflections on the present were more measured, whether in formal material terms or traditional modes of telling. In the Indian Pavilion, Sumakshi Singh’s Permanent Address reconstructed a demolished childhood home through delicate thread and embroidery, grounding the work in memory, place, and generations of collective making by women. Morocco’s pavilion, centered on Amina Agueznay’s installation Asǝṭṭa, drew on traditions of ritual weaving and collective knowledge, transforming the space into an intimate environment where visitors could sit, lie down, and move freely. The Uzbekistan Pavilion, The Aural Sea, approached the ecological catastrophe of the Aral Sea through sound and storytelling. Arriving during Josef Tumari’s live performance, Äwlep, I found myself less drawn to individual works than to the pavilion’s atmosphere. There was air between the works, which was part of the exhibition, echoing the vast emptiness left behind by the disappearing sea.

I came to Venice with a great deal of despair. Immersed in the artistic and intellectual life of New York, I often find myself trapped inside a self-referential conversation, speaking constantly about the world while rarely acknowledging how partial its view might be. Venice was unexpectedly hopeful, not because it offered solutions, but because it reminded me that there are other stories. Other histories. Other ways of understanding the world. The dominant narrative has become so self-contained that it leaves little room for other realities. Many countries no longer seemed interested in fitting themselves into a single global narrative or defining themselves in relation to it. Instead, they were trying to understand themselves on their own terms. This may look fragmented, uncertain, or unfinished. Yet perhaps that is simply the honest condition of our moment.

Perhaps this is a moment of turning toward ourselves, our histories, our traditions, and our conditions. A moment of knowing ourselves and maybe feeling embarrassed or appreciating who we are. A moment of an inevitable need to be honest with ourselves.

And perhaps only then can we begin to understand our relationships with each other.

*The Aural Sea*, 2026, installation view, Pavilion of Uzbekistan, 61st Venice Biennale. Photo by Luca Zambelli Bais.

NOTES

Koyo Kouoh, In Minor Keys, exhibition text, 61st Venice Biennale, 2026.
Ibid.

Diana Sardaryan is a curator from Yerevan, Armenia, with over five years of experience in independent art contexts, working locally and internationally. With a background in film direction, she engages with a wide range of mediums in contemporary and historical art, as well as archives, spanning traditional forms, non-traditional practices, and creative technologies. Her curatorial work is dedicated to amplifying under-represented cultures, engaging with post-colonial narratives, and exploring situated cultural knowledge and plural practices within today’s global context. She is currently based in New York, pursuing an MA in Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts.

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MA Curatorial Practice 7/20/26 MA Curatorial Practice 7/20/26

The Interstitial Stitch: Goen Choi’s Meridian in Venice

These arced movements spark the imagination, raising questions about how borders shift across national lines, and how such artistic activity can expose and unsettle the invisible infrastructures underpinning a nation's governance.

By Hyun Sung

The arced movements of Choi’s work raise questions about how borders shift across national lines, and how such artistic activity can expose and unsettle the invisible infrastructures underpinning a nation's governance.

Hyun Sung • 7/20/26

Goen Choi, Liberation Space: Fortress/Nest, and Hyeree Ro, Mourning Station, curated by Binna Choi, Pavilion of Republic of Korea, 61st Venice Biennale, May 9–November 22, 2026

On Site is The Curatorial's section for curatorial reviews and a venue for MA Curatorial Practice students at the School of Visual Arts to publish as part of their program, though it is open to all writers.
In this review, Hyun Sung examines Liberation Space: Fortress/Nest at the Korean Pavilion of the 2026 Venice Biennale, curated by Binna Choi, focusing on Goen Choi's commission Meridian, an expansive network of burst copper pipes that threads through and beyond the pavilion's architecture to physically map the spatial politics of national representation. Sung argues that Choi's installation does not refuse nationhood so much as expose and destabilize the discursive infrastructure that produces it, tracing punctures and splices in Korea's representative image while crossing territorial boundaries, most pointedly in a pipe that arcs through the bush dividing the Korean and Japanese pavilions. Read alongside Hyeree Ro's durational sculptural stations and the contributions of the pavilion's inaugural fellows, Meridian emerges as a system that simultaneously questions and fractures the nation-state, ultimately reframing the exhibition's central question, "How Can I Ever Possibly Love This Country?", as an embrace of friction rather than a flat refusal of it.

iPhone photograph of Lang Lee & Goen Choi: *SCULPTURE, SONG, SHOWING UP: A DIALOGUE*, published in *LIBERATION SPACE: READER (1)*. Image courtesy the author.

The subtext for Liberation Space: Fortress/Nest at the Korean Pavilion for the 61st Venice Biennale, poses the question: “How Can I Ever Possibly Love This Country?” Within this global constellation of art, the exhibition allegorically questions the very capacity of the Korean Pavilion to represent the nation-state as a living monument. Inspiriting a nuanced occupation of the Pavilion, curator Binna Choi has gathered an intimately collaborative exhibition of liberatory praxis, staging commissioned works by artist Goen Choi and Hyeree Ro, while enfolding various forms of contributions from the inaugural fellows: writer and singer Lang Lee, Nobel Prize-winning novelist Han Kang, photographer Yezoi Hwang, activist-farmer Huju Kim, and artist Christian Nyampeta.

Goen Choi’s commission for the Pavilion, Meridian (2026)—an expansive infrastructure of burst copper pipes spanning varied lengths and undulating arcs within and beyond the pavilion building—lays bare a paradoxical transparency in the site's physical and ideological structure. Symbiotically counterweighting the airiness of Choi’s lines, Hyeree Ro’s Bearing assembles stationary wooden and clay structures as “stations” for somatic activities and durational movements of care. These rituals transpire behind a monumental wall of wax-coated organza circles, activated daily by a cohort of “Bearers” whose repetitive bodily labor continuously reinforces the partition with the material residues of their processes. While varying in their approaches to the pavilion’s architectural constraints, if the hard edges of Choi’s liminal gestures throw the building’s territorial function into flux, Ro’s opaque wall functions as a protective second skin against the building’s transparent glass facade, embracing these sites of collective place-making like internal organs. As the shifting, durational contributions of the fellows further upend the static constants of the Biennale, any reduction of these practices to a singular national identity is most directly pierced by the stillness of Meridian. Working from within this state-sanctioned simulacrum of sovereign territory, Goen Choi expounds upon and implodes the institutional networks that uphold this spectacular national illusion—tracing the outlines, punctures, and splices inherent in the discursive fabrication of Korea’s representative image.

Walking between the German and Japanese Pavilions, visitors approaching the Korean Pavilion encounter Corea Pavilion-Bush-Giappone Pavilion (2026)—one element of Meridian—from a distance, experiencing its architecture phenomenologically before entering the building. The sunlight glimmers off the metallic skin of an elongated copper pipe, split perfectly in half across its length. Emerging from the dirt, it arcs through the bush that divides the territories of the Korean and Japanese pavilions. Immediately following the announcement of the Korean Pavilion’s establishment in 1994, the Japanese team had planted this bush, erecting a physical partition to delineate one sovereign territory from another. The opening and closing “stitch of this weave,” as the artist refers to the allegorical function of Meridian, bodily transcends this territorial boundary, a spatial placement made possible through close collaborations between the Korean and Japanese curatorial teams (mirroring this, parts of artworks presented at the Japanese Pavilion are also placed across the Korean Pavilion). Plunging back into the earth on Japan’s side of the bush, this opening act leaves the viewers to wonder: Where does Meridian truly end?

A sprawling constellation of curved linear forms, Meridian weaves across the grounds, physically charting the spatial politics of its ecosystem. Threading into the building’s interior and protruding outward through the pavilion walls, elements of Meridian-pillar (2025-2026) have been inserted into its sole structural column. On one side of the pillar, a rectangular slab has been removed to make the hidden electrical panel and archival wiring visible. Investigating the operational gravity of this structural foundation, as well as the encircling emptiness where a spiral staircase once allowed for direct access to the rooftop terrace, Choi makes these invisible nuances of space, history, and somatic movement palpable. Exposing the core operations of the building’s technological network, the infrastructure is laid bare. This architectural exposure directly informs the dynamics of the half-copper pipes that, from this gravitational point, seemingly burst out into the gallery space, through the glass windows, and onto the entering path. Though void of kinetic capabilities, these sculptures register as a durational performance in limbo, extending beyond the pavilion’s walls to burst outward while drawing the external environment into the interior.

On the way out of the pavilion, one recognizes how all components of Meridian interconnect, their material resonance and linear positioning reconstellating into a new kind of map. This map becomes emphatic in its relationship to the surrounding collaborative works and texts within the pavilion's ecosystem. Diagramming both the outermost and innermost layers of the pavilion’s architecture, Meridian embraces, weaves, and expands the resonances between its artistic counterparts. It achieves this through a simple gesture of lines that do not merely connect one point to another but oscillate in the spaces between them. These arced movements spark the imagination, raising questions about how borders shift across national lines, and how such artistic activity can expose and unsettle the invisible infrastructures underpinning a nation’s governance. The installation operates as a system of parts that simultaneously questions, deconstructs, stabilizes, and fractures—not the state itself, but the discursive framework of its ecosystem, inciting the viewer to envision alternative structural realities.

It is a phenomenal paradox that the transnational framework of the Biennale’s exhibitionary economics and politics provided the very possibility for Meridian to exist. For reasons that are complex and tied tobureaucratic histories, the Korean Pavilion is a long-term concession with Venice and the Biennale, as opposed to having been purchased outright and claiming ownership, highlighting the comparatively tenuous nature of its territorial claim. Meridian emerged from Choi’s inquiry into Korea’s industrial production facilities and close collaboration with factory workers, yet these resulting objects have been transposed to a foreign land. Do they rebound across the Giardini, where most of the pavilions are situated, and beyond? Is there a point at which the copper wiring in the pavilion’s electrical panel becomes entirely disconnected from the electrical grids of South Korea?

What happens when participants refuse to straightforwardly claim the country they represent? An argument could certainly be made positioning these works as a development of modern Korean aesthetics, noting the clear dialogue between Choi’s material sensibilities and the sprawling installation forms of older generations of Korean artists, such as Lee Bul or Lee Ufan. Yet, the specific structural operations within the pavilion directly tie historical referents of Korea’s resistant past to the core, material and conceptual development of the artworks, charging the very space Meridian dissects. Within Hyeree Ro’s Mourning Station, the enfolding of Han Kang’s text-sculpture The Funeral (2018) commemorates the Jeju 4.3 Uprising and Massacre (1947–1954). Nearby, at the Remembering Station, Christian Nyampeta’s lino plates from the post-uprising Gwangju People’s Art School (1983–1986), ritually altered daily by a Bearer, sit alongside Yezoi Hwang’s transferred photographs documenting the citizen protests spanning the recent December 2024 martial law declaration to the April 2025 presidential impeachment. On the rooftop, the ensemble of ceramic vessels that comprise the Sharing Station house Lang Lee’s commissioned song Our ㅁ (mieum) and Huju Kim’s clay-molded indigenous seeds. Anchored by these historical traumas and revolutionary acts, the exhibition’s subtextual question becomes less a flat refusal of nationhood and more a deep embrace of the friction, turbulence, and ambivalence characteristic of the nation’s identity.

Hyun Sung is the nom de plume of a student in the MA Curatorial Practice program at the School of Visual Art.

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MA Curatorial Practice 7/20/26 MA Curatorial Practice 7/20/26

Minor Life in the Embrace

Through the clever use of weighted dolls, the exhibition proposes that tenderness also holds a sense of burden, both symbolic and actual.

By Hongjin Zhou

Through the clever use of weighted dolls, the exhibition proposes that tenderness also holds a sense of burden, both symbolic and actual.

Hongjin Zhou • 7/20/26

Ei Arakawa-Nash, Grass Babies, Moon Babies, curated by Horikawa Lisa and Takahashi Mizuki, Pavilion of Japan, 61st Venice Biennale, May 9—November 22, 2026

On Site is The Curatorial's section for curatorial reviews and a venue for MA Curatorial Practice students at the School of Visual Arts to publish as part of their program, though it is open to all writers.
In this piece, Hongjin Zhou reviews Grass Babies, Moon Babies by Ei Arakawa-Nash at the Japanese Pavilion of the 2026 Venice Biennale, curated by Horikawa Lisa and Takahashi Mizuki. She focuses on its use of participatory interaction to translate the global birth rate crisis into a lived, embodied experience. By inviting visitors to carry weighted baby dolls through the pavilion, the exhibition transforms "care" from an abstract ethical concept into a concrete physical burden, generating spontaneous social exchange in the process. Zhou argues, however, that the exhibition's greatest strength is also its central weakness: its playfulness and entertainment value ultimately dilute engagement with the weighty issues—such as immigration, colonial history, and nuclear disaster—it claims to address, and curatorial decisions around text placement and interactive programming compound this tension.

Ei Arakawa-Nash, *Grass Babies, Moon Babies,* 2026, installation view, Pavilion of Japan, 61st Venice Biennale. Photo by Uli Holz. Image courtesy The Japan Foundation.

The 61st Venice Biennale, curated by the late Koyo Kouoh as its artistic director, and a team that carried out her plan, takes “In Minor Keys” as its theme and title. It aims to shift the balance from the spectacles of disaster exhausting the world today, advocating instead for people to listen to the minor notes of living, tuning into the sotto voce, the whispers and lower frequencies of the human spirit amid international conflicts, dwindling populations, and anxieties about the future. 1

Though national pavilions in the Biennale are autonomous and hold their own themes, there was a certain resonance with Kouoh’s vision felt in the Japanese Pavilion, where artist Ei Arakawa-Nash’s exhibition, Grass Babies, Moon Babies, created an immersive interactive experience of intimate care. According to the pavilion’s curators, Horikawa Lisa and Takahashi Mizuki, Arakawa-Nash’s show is a direct response to the sharp global decline in birth rates since 2023, a trend highlighted by the the International Monetary Fund that reminds us of our collective responsibility.2 In reaction, the exhibition evinces a kind of softness, even a tenderness in the way that it invites visitors to engage. And yet, in the context of the Biennale’s main exhibition, with its references to the world’s struggles, it may seem mild, even insufficient. But that would miss the cleverness of it, particularly in the way that it transforms the notion of “care,” so intrinsic to child-rearing, from an abstract ethical concept into a concrete and burdensome reality that we have to face.

On entering the pavilion, visitors are invited to pick up and symbolically take care of one of 200 baby dolls on display, carrying it around the building’s lower space, then into the garden, and finally up into the second-floor galleries.3 Not only were there dolls available for “parenting,” they were also playfully placed on scaffolds that had the look of a towering jungle gym, seated on the edge of the pavilion’s roof, and lowered up and down in baskets from one level to the next by guests. Baby carriages were gathered on the ground floor as well. If the pavilion can be understood as our world in miniature, the dolls echo the exhibition’s central propositions: babies are born everywhere… and yet in harrowingly depleted numbers.

Tenderness is, then, an affect that holds a sense of burden, both symbolic and actual. Even though the dolls are harmless in appearance, even amusing, they were physically heavy enough to convey infants’ demand for continuous attention and our ethical requirement to fulfill it. Their weight slowed people down, occupied their hands, and, in fact, distracted attention from the dolls themselves. That is to say, their function here was to serve as symbolic agents of social mediation more than as works of art in themselves. The art was the conversation that emerged between strangers almost automatically, turning the concept of responsibility into a real, on-site interaction. The notion of “minor keys,” of the daily routines of care that fill our lives, was made tangible and relatable, aligning with the Biennale’s introspective tone.

Yet this tenderness is a limitation as much as it is a strength of the exhibition. In its attempt to delve into declining birth rates and related grand issues—such as immigration, conflicts, colonial history, and nuclear disasters—the playful interaction with the dolls, which is so palpable and entertaining, paradoxically weakens the focus on these weighty issues.4 While the show succeeds in its evocation of softness in the experience of caring for a child, this intimacy in caregiving distances us from the broader social concerns.

The curatorial execution here contributed to this, too. The wall at the entrance to the second floor is crowded with historical events spanning dates, locations, and occurrences, illustrating the global turbulence contributing to spiraling birth rates, and seeking to generate a sense of empathy from viewers. But the text is too small and dense, and it contains so much information that it’s hard to take it all in—and it’s doubtful that anyone would spend the time to do so. On the one hand, the artist and curators want to create the sense of urgency befitting the population crisis. On the other hand, the curatorial decision to present the text as they did and to place it on the second floor, when people are already immersed in actively carrying their “baby,” means that they may have limited the opportunity for deeper engagement with the discursive aspect of the show.

This was only exacerbated by the entertainment factor they deployed, with other interactive activities including the invitation to visitors to diaper their adopted baby and scan a code to receive a short, personalized poem based on the baby’s birthday.5 Even the exhibition’s web page emphasizes the babies’ personality traits over the significant historical events presented. Arakawa-Nash, Lisa, and Mizuki succeed in playfully captivating their audience at the same time that doing so diminishes the overarching point, with the presentation of the writing not precisely helping their case.6 And there is, of course, the question of what kind of world are we bring children into that also grates against the overall amusement here.

It’s true that within the framework of this year’s Biennale, the sheer fun of the Japanese pavilion is unique. In its favor, it can be said that the pavilion effectively responds to the melancholy on view In Minor Keys. The problem of the way in which it counters its own mission by inadvertently downplaying its grand narrative also reminds us that responsibility does not begin with abstract concepts but with that tiny, yet heavy, life in our arms. If some more dramatic outcome for viewers was intended, the final effect of tenderness touches us, though it fails, ultimately, to shake us.

Ei Arakawa-Nash, Horikawa Lisa, and Takahashi Mizuki. Photo by Ryuichi Maruo. Image courtesy The Japan Foundation.

NOTES

Koyo Kouoh, In Minor Keys (La Biennale di Venezia, 2026), 3–4.
Horikawa Lisa and Takahashi Mizuki, “Curatorial Statement,” in Grass Babies, Moon Babies (Japanese Pavilion, La Biennale di Venezia, 2026), 10–13.
The Japan Foundation, “Ei Arakawa-Nash’s Grass Babies, Moon Babies Is Set to Permeate the Peripheries of Japanese Pavilion through a Constellation of Voices and Practices,” press release, March 19, 2026.
Horikawa Lisa and Takahashi Mizuki, “Introduction,” in Grass Babies, Moon Babies (Japanese Pavilion, La Biennale di Venezia, 2026), 16–17.
The Japan Foundation, “Ei Arakawa-Nash’s Grass Babies, Moon Babies Is Set to Permeate the Peripheries of Japan Pavilion through a Constellation of Voices and Practices,” press release, March 19, 2026.
Horikawa Lisa and Takahashi Mizuki, “Curatorial Statement,” in Grass Babies, Moon Babies (Japanese Pavilion, La Biennale di Venezia, 2026), 10.

Hongjin Zhou is an emerging curator from Chengdu, China, and a current master’s degree student in Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts. Her curatorial practice explores the dialogue between traditional and contemporary art, with a particular interest in how exhibitions can foster cross-cultural understanding and public engagement. From 2023 to 2025, she contributed to exhibitions and public programs at the Sichuan Provincial Cultural Center, working with traditional Chinese painting and calligraphy, intangible cultural heritage, and interdisciplinary cultural exhibitions. Her early experience as a volunteer museum guide continues to shape her commitment to making art and cultural history more accessible to diverse audiences.

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Emily Roemer 3/19/26 Emily Roemer 3/19/26

Breaking Out of Dominant Temporalities: Demodernizing the Museum?

Demodernizing is not a return to the pre-modern past, but an attempt to release new potentialities within modern cultural practices by taking modern ideology out of them.

By Charles Esche and Hélène Valance

Demodernizing is not a return to the pre-modern past, but an attempt to release new potentialities within modern cultural practices by taking modern ideology out of them.

Charles Esche and Hélène Valance • 3/19/26

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 interview with Charles Esche, the former director of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, explores demodernization as a situated response to decolonial thought and its implications for museum practice. Esche reflects on how modernity and coloniality function as intertwined structures within art institutions, shaping narratives of progress, authorship, and value. Drawing on examples from the Van Abbemuseum, he discusses strategies for pluralizing temporalities, unsettling canonical hierarchies, and foregrounding relational forms of display that challenge the universalizing myths of modern art history. Through exhibitions such as Delinking and Relinking and The Making of Modern Art, Esche considers how museums might reconfigure chronologies, incorporate social histories, and engage with colonial legacies without reverting to singular counter-narratives. The conversation addresses diagrammatic models of art history, the politics of geography, and the future of museums amid contemporary political urgencies. Esche proposes the museum as a site for relationality and provisional community.
This is a republication of Charles Esche and Hélène Valance, “Sortir des temporalités dominantes: démoderniser le musée?” (Breaking Out of Dominant Temporalities: Demodernizing the Museum?). The interview was originally conducted in English and first published in French, translated by Élisabeth Agius d’Yvoire, in Perspective: actualité en histoire de l'art, no. 2: “Anachronismes,” 2025, 75–88. This version presents the original English text, with emendations by Steven Henry Madoff. It has been slightly revised to reflect The Curatorial’s format and style guidelines. See the French publication here: http://journals.openedition.org/perspective/31931 and here: DOI:https://doi.org/10.4000/156gm.

In recent years, curatorial discourse has increasingly engaged with decolonial theory as a means of challenging the epistemological and institutional legacies of Western modernity in museums and art institutions, including their use of linear and uniform chronology. Indeed, time has been described by many thinkers as “a most effective colonizing tool” instrumentalized by Western cultures to assert their dominance over history and to place Western art at the center of a narrative of cultural progress, with museums acting as the preservers of a universality that only perpetuated imperialism.1 Over the past decades, however, curators and museums have sought not only to confront the racist and colonial foundations of cultural institutions but also to reimagine their temporal, spatial, and relational structures. These efforts were meant to go beyond the mere gestures that tried to include artists and artworks from oppressed cultures in otherwise Western collections, gestures that often resulted in institutional tokenism. An early example is Fred Wilson’s intervention in the Maryland Historical Society’s collections with Mining the Museum in 1991–92.2 There the artist interrogated the narrative of history proposed by the institution through a rearrangement of its collections that strove to make invisibilized histories apparent, forcing viewers to go back and forth between moments in time, as well as between the points of views of enslavers and enslaved persons. Recent exhibitions, such as Before Yesterday We Could Fl: An Afrofuturist Period Room in 2021 at New York’s Metropolitan Museum, mobilized anachronism to interrogate the role of the institution as a powerful agent in the history of diverse racial communities at the local and national scale;3 while the one-year research and exhibition program, “UNTIE TO TIE – On Colonial Legacies and Contemporary Societies,” at the ifa-Galerie Berlin in 2017–18, stressed the global reach of such reinterpretations.4

Charles Esche actively participated in this approach in his curating work at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven over the past two decades.5 The interview that follows explores a concept he calls demodernizing—a situated, processual approach grounded in decolonial thought, particularly as articulated by scholars such as Aníbal Quijano and Walter D. Mignolo.6 While Quijano and Mignolo do not use the term demodernizing explicitly, the concept as articulated by Esche stems from their work in decolonial theory, particularly their critiques of modernity and coloniality. Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano introduced the concept of the “coloniality of power,” which describes how patterns of domination established during European colonization continue to structure global hierarchies even after the formal end of colonial rule.7 For Quijano, modernity and coloniality are inseparable: the so-called progress and rationality of Western modernity were made possible through colonial violence and epistemic domination. He calls for a process of “de-linking”—a word borrowed by Esche in his reinstallation of the Van Abbemuseum’s collections in 2021-24—that is, of disengaging from Eurocentric ways of thinking and organizing society, urging a move toward epistemic diversity and the recognition of other ways of knowing and being. Walter D. Mignolo builds upon Quijano’s framework in arguing that modernity functions as a rhetoric of salvation—a narrative of progress and human development that hides its “darker side”: colonialism, genocide, and the suppression of other knowledge systems.8 Mignolo emphasizes “epistemic disobedience” and “decolonial delinking” as a necessary emancipation strategy to evade the structures and logic of Western modernity. His work foregrounds location-based knowledge and relational thinking, insisting that alternatives to modernity are already being enacted in communities historically marginalized by it. This interview addresses the temporal dimension of demodernizing and its potential relation to anachronism. Here, time is not conceived in linear-progressivist terms, as in the dominant narratives of Western art history, but rather as plural, relational, and situated. Drawing on what Esche describes as a “relational temporality,” the interview considers how curatorial practice can function as a space in which heterogeneous times coexist, thereby unsettling the modernist presumption of historical inevitability. —Hélène Valance

Hélène Valance: As [former] director of the Van Abbemuseum, you have introduced decolonial approaches to the museum. Decolonial studies, as well as some trends in anthropology, have increasingly been included in curatorial thinking to challenge linear models of time that have long been prevalent in the history of art and in museums. Tellingly, you have anchored your approach in a perspective you called “demodernizing.” Can you tell us more about this approach, and specifically of its temporal dimension and potential relation to anachronism?

Charles Esche: Demodernizing is for me a situated response to the broader decolonial studies discourse. Decolonizing gives demodernizing its foundation, context, and motivation, and is, above all, a mode of decolonial thinking that takes seriously what [Walter] Mignolo calls “the darker side of western modernity” as the actual experience of modernity for most people on the planet. Decolonizing’s critique of modernity is profound, whether at a philosophical level—where the centering of (white) humans and the reduction of the nonhuman world to dead material is understood as the ethical basis for human enslavement and the destruction of Earth, or at the economic and political level of extraction, expulsion, and expropriation. The “lighter side of modernity” has historically refused to address this dark side or ascribed it to colonial errors that are part of its past—an analysis that decolonizing rejects. Demodernizing is built on these foundations by addressing this “lighter side,” understood as a lived experience of some humans that is largely limited by class and geography.

Class is here defined as the right of some, often by birth, to exceptional economic and cultural privilege at the expense of others, and geography is understood as parts of Europe (mostly in its north and west) and in the genocidal settler colonial states of the Americas, Israel, Australia, and New Zealand, as well as very small, complicit groups of people resident in the colonized territories of the Global South. In both cases, privilege is largely, though not exclusively, defined by ethnicity and gender. This combination of class and geography is where I am personally grounded, and demodernizing emerged as response to decolonizing from that position. Its application outside this terrain is still uncertain for me, but I am interested in any dialogues that might emerge. I will just add that I mostly use the gerunds “demodernizing” and “decolonizing” as activating nouns because I want to denote the ongoing, processual, and never-completed projects that fall under these terms.

In more art historical terms, demodernizing is an attempt at the level of art, architecture, and the broader cultural field (with potential wider applications) to address the erasures and blind spots within this “lighter side of modernity,” and also, by doing so, to help revive relations, knowledge, and traditions that are nevertheless present in modern culture, but that have been ignored or suppressed by what might be called official modern ideology. In doing so, the point is not to encourage feelings of guilt or penance—emotions that usually serve as a way to recenter white European discourse—but rather to construct a propositional project within the lands of “light modernity” that responds in a relational way to the experiences of decoloniality here and elsewhere.

In terms of anachronism, it is not something I have explicitly addressed until now, but I find it an interesting suggestion. The first thing to say is that demodernizing is not advocating for a return to a pre-modern past. It is actively seeking to take modern ideology out of certain modern and contemporary cultural practices (and potentially political and economic practices as well) in order to release new potentialities within them. I cannot ignore that one aspect of anachronism as a concept implies a direction to time, change, and even progress that is, in itself, a modern conceit. However, a more decolonial idea of relationality between times and places built on positionalities that are always specific, but also capable of dialogue and exchange, might encourage anachronism in the sense of bringing social or cultural practices from different time coordinates into relation around artistic sites such as museums or cultural centers. In this way, chronologies are made plural, and a concept like cosmic time can be placed next to the more familiar clock time or the death and life cycles of matter in exhibitions or conferences. I know this is something Yolande Zola Zoli van der Heide is investigating for the next iteration of the Van Abbemuseum’s collection display, which will build on the demodern basis we have created there.

Another possible anachronistic aspect is the degree to which demodernizing can advocate for the re-existence of pre-modernist ways of being and understanding that have been forgotten. This operates at the level of remembering without memory and reconstituting through doing. I am thinking here of certain artistic strategies of remembering ceramic or weaving techniques by learning them anew through practice or the revival/reinvention of traditions and languages such as the Taino people in Puerto Rico, the Pende traditions in Congo and others.9These kinds of activities are close to the critical fabulations that Sadia Hartman defines, which I would also want to understand as a demodernizing technique.

A third anachronistic relation could be seen in the attempt to revive the relevance of modern conceptual and minimal art practices through artistic and curatorial re-use. Projects I have been closely involved in include the remaking of many works from the Van Abbemuseum by Li Mu for his home village in Hunan Province, China, or the copying and free distribution of a sculpture by Sol LeWitt initiated by the Danish collective Superflex. I see these projects as releasing a potential that arguably already exists in the work and in the original artists intentions, but that has been silenced or caged by the protocols of modern art (history), its museum collections, and its default display in white cubes. By defining new conditions of reception and new uses for artistic objects, aspects that characterize modern ideology, such as the refusal of relationality or the division into specialisms and knowledge silos, are undermined. An arguably older concept of art as a socially integrational tool and site for connection between people, place, and cosmos is thereby allowed to breathe again.

HV: Demodernizing the museum often means, in your practice, shifting the geographical boundaries of traditional art historical narratives. You have put a lot of effort into situating the museum not only historically but also geographically. Could one say that in this articulation of time and space, escaping the North American and European spaces allows for the revision of history? Are there limitations to this perspective?

CE: Interestingly, I would see the shift in geographies of artistic practice as being more of a straightforward decolonial strategy rather than a specifically demodern one. However, the two are closely connected. The limit, or danger perhaps, of this approach is that it addresses the appearances of coloniality-modernity without challenging the fundamental injustices, silencing, and erasures that are its modus operandi. In this sense, I am very wary, not to say simply opposed, to the idea of inclusion as a tactic of museums and art-history writing. To include “others” beyond the “lighter side of modernity,” while keeping the main narrative of progressive modernist art in place, is simply a superficial pretense at decolonizing Western institutions and more a confirmation of official modernity as it has been written rather than any revision. What is more interesting for me is upending the classical but mythical narrative of modern art as written by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and which was then exported to Western Europe after 1945, and beyond that after 1989.

An example of how to reorientate such a mythology would be in the current collection presentation, Delinking and Relinking, in the Van Abbemuseum. The exhibition starts with a Wifredo Lam painting in the center of the room as the teacher and Picasso on the side as his pupil. This simple displacement reverses the classical narrative of Picasso as the teacher of Lam. Here the Spanish artist comes to the complexities of Caribbean culture, the influence of non-Christian spiritualities on image-making, and the community of thinkers, such as Amié Césaire, through Lam’s insights. This small adjustment elevates Lam and questions Picasso’s authority in terms of situated experiences. At the same time, Picasso remains a part of the story, so it is not simply an alternative version or a willful erasure, but a challenge to an established hierarchy and the claims of universal value. In this way, I think there’s a possibility for plural narratives to emerge in which Picasso can be both respected for his creativity and challenged by different configurations or stories that are sensitive to the needs and desires of each moment. This time sensitivity hopefully encourages a fluidity that modern ideology lacks, without becoming an attempt to replace one singular narrative with another. Anachronism might be an effective tool here to check the tendency to speak beyond your own time and to respect whatever returns or learns to re-exist from other time coordinates.

View of the exhibition *Delinking and Relinking*, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 2021. © Succession Picasso/photo © Archives Van Abbemuseum, photographer: Joep Jacobs.

In the same exhibition, an Ossip Zadine wood figure from early in the last century stands next to a similar sculpture carved from a tree trunk by Rodan Omomá, an Asmat artist from Papua who created it only a few years ago. Here, both time and place are disturbed. Traditionally, Omomá’s work would be shown in a former colonial/ ethnographic museum, most likely as part of a display of traditional crafts. Zadkine, on the other hand, is part of the twentieth-century modernist canon, an original artist and teacher whose work belongs securely in an art museum. Yet they are each doing very similar things with wood, and both are addressing traditions they feel as their own—Omomá in calling on his Asmat ancestors, Zadine in naming his work after the Greek goddess Demeter, a protagonist in a belief system that modern ideology places at the origin of “light modernity.”

The kinds of small adjustments that bring these two works into connection are valuable if we are to start to write pluriversal art histories in which museums tell different stories about modern, contemporary, and decolonial forms of art that depend on place (the relationship of the Netherlands to Papua or Dutch New Guinea is part of this narrative, for instance) and on the contextual time in which the works are shown. In terms of time here, the possibility that Omomá’s work could be understood as anachronistic hinges on modern ideas of progress and primitivism that Zadkine himself rejects but yet relies on for his status as a modern artist. Thus, within modern protocols, Zadkine is allowed to cite “primitive” art without becoming “primitive,” while the Papuan artist must remain in his ethnographic cage. This bind for artists from the Global South is a key to understanding what demodernizing can offer as a full reorientation of Euro-American value systems and a way to construct museums that can include cultures such as the Asmat within a pluriversal artistic narrative. At the same time, it releases some of the burden that Zadkine’s work has to carry in representing the “primitive” in an acceptable way. In the collection exhibition, the dialogue between these two works is also reinforced for me by a video nearby made by the Dutch artist Roy Villevoye that tells a story of two other Asmat cultural figures visiting the Netherlands in the 2010s and taking advantage of European medical technology to have their sight restored.

Beyond the collection presentations, geography plays a part in temporary exhibitions. I am very fond of duo or trio exhibitions, where different geographies and times can coincide in the museum space. One example I am especially proud of at the Van Abbemuseum is a duo show with Léon Ferrari and Gülsün Karamustafa, two artists from similar generations who never met, but who went through remarkably similar Cold War experiences of suppression and resistance in Argentina and Turkey. In presenting their parallel biographies, the exhibition spoke about the global reach of the binary Cold War and the effects of universalizing ideologies. It also related ways in which artists learned how to resist their marginalization and imprisonment, and challenged national art-historical discourses that stop at the borders. In this way, universalism is not opposed by particularism but by relationality.

HV: Speaking of narratives, your approach is one that multiplies viewpoints. How do you, in curating shows and the display of collections, make stories work in relation to history? How do your display strategies deal with the discrepancies, dissonances, and contradictions of the various levels, or modes of narration, and specifically the fact that they can be out of step with one another and unfold in different temporalities? What challenges does this approach create for the curator? Can you specifically think of successful or, on the contrary, unsatisfying or problematic examples?

CE: It’s interesting to me that you oppose stories and history, whereas I would see them as very compatible. History is composed of stories of the chronologically empowered: in the case of Northern and Western Europe, the United States of America is the hegemonic power here since 1945. Northern and Western Europe’s vassalage is partly one of submitting to stories generated from New York as exportable and applicable to this territory. Decolonizing helps us to see this for the power play it is, rather than a natural consequence of defeat or a “passing of the torch” from some empires to others, as British art historians like Kenneth Clark or Simon Schama would claim. Here, I would rather follow Walter Benjamin, who, at the end of his life, spoke about three parallel forms of history—the past, memory, and tradition—and how all are needed, while none is sufficient as a narrative in and of itself.10

In my sense, the task of a museum in a vassal territory such as the Netherlands would be to indicate how modern art emerges as a story in relation to a particular political, economic, and military moment, and to outline or suggest other parallel (or pluriversal) possibilities that might be more appropriate for our current time. In this sense, the fact that such narratives are out of step, both with dominant histories and within themselves in one exhibition, is crucial. It is this “out-of-step-ness” that creates the cracks into which subjectivity, doubt, and opinion, both communal and individual, can flow. Let me try to illustrate this with some concrete examples.

One of the Van Abbemuseum’s previous collection displays was called The Making of Modern Art and was curated together with an organization called The Museum of American Art, Berlin. The exhibition opened with a quietly didactic display of the (hi)story of art from the Dutch auction houses of the seventeenth century to the two pre-1945 art museum models developed by Alexander Dorner and Alfred Barr in Hannover and New York, respectively. The didacticism inherent in the displays was then undermined by bringing art together that carried very different historical weight. So, a Max Beckmann was shown alongside works borrowed from Hitler’s private collection, and a copy of an ironic Sotsart work by Alexander Kosolapov was hung next to an early example of socialist realism from the DDR. Interestingly, the two paintings held today to be more propagandistic are in the collection of the German Historical Museum [in Berlin] rather than in an art collection, thus showing how works shift from art to artifact, depending on political regimes. In the display, however, they were equalized in a way that made their different original contexts manifest and how they have been used to satisfy different narratives of modern art at different times, all written with little relation to the works themselves. These different modes of display—original, copy, collection, loan, photographic evidence, document facsimile, etc.—pluralized the first narrative and brought its authority into doubt.

It was also important that none of these multiple modes were trying to replace the MoMA myth with a new, singular, or corrective history more relevant for the present. Instead, the alternatives lay side by side within the overall story about the fiction of modern art as a category The exhibition unfolded further with Soviet exhibition histories and the significance of the patronage of American women collectors, such as Peggy Guggenheim or Katherine Dreier, and ended with a fantastical and quizzical look at modern art from a Utopian outside perspective.

My view is that this collection exhibition was crucial for liberating our largely Dutch publics, including myself and my curatorial colleagues, from the burden of carrying MoMA’s art history as a prime justification for the quality of the collection—especially as “quality” was an uninterrogated, almost canonical criterion in museum collecting until recently. The Making of Modern Art created the possibility to make sense of a project like demodernizing because it turned modern art into a contingent category. That’s hard for curators and art historians who are generally trained to uphold the established idea of modern art. To do what we did as a museum needed the authority, charm, and courage of an artist, albeit one who chooses to call himself the Technical Assistant of the Museum of American Art, Berlin. He helped us to release some of our curatorial gatekeeping through his artistic license. In this way, something like critical fabulation could be brought to bear on the museum’s collection without obsessing about its accuracy or defending an idea of history as a recreation of how the past actually was.

View of the exhibition *The Making of Modern Art*, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 2017.

Another positive example of narrative disjunctures is Play Van Abbe 4, which focused not on the art as such, but on the roles of the viewers, running four possible visitor role models for looking in parallel at artworks: the flaneur, the tourist, the pilgrim, and the worker. This was well-liked by the public, but I think the failures are possibly more instructive, especially if we measure intention against public reception. Here I would first think about my only attempt to really create a new singular narrative of the collection, which was called Once Upon a Time. Although it had some good moments, such as an extended modern-art exhibition-histories display, it relied too much on Immanuel Wallerstein’s world systems analysis as a new fixed chronology. The problem as a curator was that this one story (or history) took over and left little room for artistic experimentation or thinking about modes of display and the bodies of the museum users that were essential in later editions of the collection displays. Its didacticism was oppressive rather than playful, which is never a good feel for publics.

A more interesting failure, perhaps, was even earlier with Plug-In [in 2007], where we simply deconstructed any narrative from room to room and took each gallery as a world unto itself that could be changed or swapped about, depending on need and available resources. It borrowed from an Archigram idea of flexible urban architecture and was very much part of the fluid, neoliberal discourse of the pre-2008 financial crash period. Again, it had some great moments, such as the public request facility for works from the collection to be shown. But its fragmented nature was more alienating than stimulating, especially for traditional museum visitors. It remains remarkable for me that local politicians and even moderately successful artists would comment that the collection was no longer shown in the museum, meaning that the protocols of the collection—its semi-permanence, white cube, and familiar chronological narrative—were the defining aspects of identifying a collection, rather than the works themselves. This observation led me to understand that the claims of the presence of the artwork (its immanence) or its inherent “quality” are very dubious indeed. So, there is a balance to be struck between multiple narratives and fragmentation, in which the multiplication feeds a sense of discovery and not confusion and distraction. I think that’s an important lesson I learned through pluralizaing (hi)stories.

HV: In the Delinking and Relinking collection exhibition, you have used the motif of the rhizome, or the network of roots, to display the museum’s entangled history with the colonial past. I also heard you comment on Alfred Barr’s timelines of modern art from 1936 and 1941, demonstrating how these were profoundly connected to the thinking of their times. What role do these diagrammatic displays have on the perception of the history of art? And can one imagine a design that could unfold fully outside of the logic of colonial thinking? Again, could you comment on successful or problematic aspects of the designs you have been using in your curatorial work?

CE: It is an interesting question because I did try in the early days to make a new version of the Alfred Barr diagrams. This was before I fully understood that decolonizing does not mean trying to replace the universal modern timeline or sense of progress, but to pluriversalize everything to do with history/the past/tradition. My attempt was in response to a very different project by Tate London to bring Barr’s diagram up to date. What was interesting about that was that it fell apart after conceptualism and minimalism, first into media (photography/graffiti), then geography (Young British Art), and finally into single brand-name artists without any relation to each other. It was a failure and was fairly swiftly removed, but I think it showed exactly how any claim to a coherent modern art history is doomed. It was only ever Barr’s inventiveness and authority that made it possible. My timeline tried to draw out relations over time between realism and abstraction and how one aspect wanes as the other waxes and how individual artists are subtly responding to these waves of realism or abstraction. It was undoubtedly a misbegotten enterprise, and I never made it public, but it showed how in around 2008–09 I was still thinking that the modern as an ideology was salvageable. It was my growing awareness of a decolonizing imperative that stopped that attempt once and for all.

What I have found more compelling for diagrammatic design are mind-maps or mind-clouds that avoid chronologies but try to build from relations between certain terms or clusters of ideas. I’m sure these are not outside the colonial, but they learn from decolonizing thinking. The designers of Delinking and Relinking helped me and the museum curators to shape a curtain at the entrance of the exhibition that has some of these clusters on it. I think this is where you have seen the rhizomatic approach. I hope for some members of our publics that it provides an interesting insight, while for me, it feels more like snapshots of curatorial thinking at a certain moment in time and space. I guess the easy answer to your question about a design emerging outside the logic of colonial thinking is to say that it cannot start from here—from the Netherlands or France, for instance. It needs to begin in places where even the category of modern art would be puzzling and gradually build toward a relational understanding with “the lighter side.”

Alfred H. Barr, cover of the exhibition catalog *Cubism and Abstract Art*, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1936.

The question of the colonial past and present of the museum is rather more fraught than passages of art history through time. As we see around us, decolonial thinking has produced a huge backlash. This comes not only from conservatives who want to preserve their colonial privileges but also from a left that seeks to defend the benefits of coloniality for the white working and middle classes, and in some cases defends new colonial genocides, as in Gaza. In response, I think it is vital that museums—which are holders of memories and are (hi)story-telling machines—come clean about their roots in colonial plunder and extraction, as well as research how those origins have not disappeared but continue in the form of coloniality today and are still present in their collection, programs, and patrons.

In the Van Abbemuseum, we tackled this in two ways. First, by making a strong exhibition statement that was called Hidden Connections and did not include many artworks but simply laid out the conditions for workers on the tobacco plantations that had generated the finances for the museum. Second, when I left, we had begun to work with artists and activists in Java and Sumatra to see what use the museum could be in support of their struggles and cultural activities. I saw this as a small step toward restitution, both in financial and epistemological terms. One concrete example would be an agreement to support a small museum in the Wates community of West Java by acquiring work from the BKP collective based nearby, and by offering our institutional knowledge to help develop the museum. Another concrete example was part of the last exhibition I made in the museum, which involved supporting the Congolese collective CATPC (Congolese Plantation Art Workers Circle), visiting the original tobacco fields in Sumatra, where they asked permission to show their work in Eindhoven and forged links that I hope the museum will develop after me.

HV: In your work at the Van Abbemuseum, you have included an extensive use of archives that reflected on the social history of the institution more than on the traditional art historical narratives. In your opinion, what does this epistemological shift from art history to social history mean for the discipline of art history at large? Does this redefine art history as an anachronistic discourse? And could one say that it is itself a product of its own history?

CE: Every discipline is a product of its own history, of course, and that history has ebbs and flows. However, I am not interested in defining art history, or discussing whether it is valid, but in using it as a tool to address art and art’s condition in the world. As such, art history is one of the tools a museum curator can use to reflect on the art that is being shown to their publics. For me, it remains valid but not particularly privileged when working in a museum. In making an exhibition like Hidden Connections about the colonial plantations that created the Van Abbemuseum, we needed economic and political knowledge first, and we worked with a social historian Reggie Baay to create a narrative that was partially erased by the colonizers. Later, the help and support of artists like CAPTC came in to develop relations with the people who now live and work on these plantations and whose conditions have not changed radically, though tobacco has given way to palm oil.

This exhibition is part of Delinking and Relinking as a whole; in other parts, such as Lam and Picasso or the room of two official modernisms, art history was essential. Then, in a room like “Proud Rebels,” with Sanja Iveković, Patricia Kaersenhout, Marlene Dumas, Gülsün Karamustafa, and Iris Kentsmil, the narrative relies less on art history and much more on feminist histories and theory, as well as a “boomerang” understanding of the Second World War in Europe to give the ensemble meaning. So, I would say that art museums are moving away from a close relation to art history, where they were even illustrators of art historical movements, and that they are adding other relationalities and theoretical constructions, including, of course, decolonizing. However, I don’t see them abandoning art history wholesale, but rather pluralizing the sources of the narratives that the museum seeks to share.

View of the CATPC exhibition, *Two Sides of the Same Coin*, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 2024. © CATPC/photo © Archives Van Abbemuseum, photographer: Nick Bookelaar.

HV: In a 2005 essay on contemporaneity, Giorgio Agamben explains that one needs to be out of step with one’s own time, to be anachronistic, to really be of one’s time. Yet at the same time, he explains being fully contemporary means “to show up on time at a rendezvous that one can only miss.” Our current political context forces many of us to sense a form of historical urgency and an increasing pressure on our definitions of history, and in looking for a “truth of the past.” What role do you see the museum playing here? What do you imagine the future of the museum to be in this context?

CE: I guess all philosophers are inconsistent, but maybe there is a way to reconcile being out of step and showing up on time. The most compelling part of Agamben’s thinking for me is in The Coming Community, which is a book that rejects identity for a whatever singularity (if I understand it well). Maybe this could be applied to the question of time, urgency, and anachronism. If the museum can be a place where whatever singularities, both animate and inanimate, can come together unburdened by the processes of claiming or rejecting identities, but in search of a relationship to art, to each other, and even to the divine, then this might help to define their future role. This would allow us to think about how a museum could be a place out of time and out of step and one that encourages reflection rather than mimicking the experience that the world anyway offers. At the same time, it is an embodied experience where it is necessary to be physically present in order to build relations. I see a connection here with our work in the museum on how different bodies and capacities can feel welcome, including touch, sound, and smell in the mediation support structures.

Maybe this is all a little too vague, but I would be interested to borrow from Agamben to develop an idea of a museum as a place that prefigures the coming community. I also see it as idealistic, but I think museums need to be in dialogue with idealism, even as they are constantly confronted by pragmatics. Museums are not profit-centers nor measured by popularity because they preserve something like collective cultural memory that is not limited to an exhibition or even a generation. That is their strength and uniqueness, and museums are there to cherish what is not instantly able to be financialized. It is partly the loss of a plurality of ideas next to capital accumulation that is the tragedy of the early twenty-first century, and museums could, if they understood themselves as such, bear part of the responsibility to resist the bitter logic of the bottom line.

HV: As a curator of contemporary art, does your experience in decolonizing the museum make you more attentive to the work of artists who address history and our relationship to it? Can you comment on the work of artists who do shed a creative light on the issues you have been working on at the museum?

CE: What decolonizing points to above all is the need to understand modernity and coloniality as two aspects of the same. A museum of modern art has, therefore, to bear the erasures and destruction of coloniality inside itself and in its foundations. Decolonizing is, therefore, not simply a rewriting of histories—though it includes it—but more a reorientation away from repeating the colonial-modern forms of politics, economy, and social control. When I think about artists working today who address these questions, my knowledge is also very partial and geographically limited. But artists and thinkers who are important to me in working through these questions include DAAR (Sandi Hilai and Alessandro Petti), Hira Nabi, Zena Cumpston, Catherine Walsh, Rolando Vazquez Melken, Jatiwangi Art Factory, ruangrupa, Patricia Kaersenhout, CATPC, Walter Mignolo, and Experimental Station for Art and Life, to name a few with whom I have worked recently.

What is important for me in all their work, if I can generalize for a moment, is that it has a fundamentally propositional character rather than a critical one. In my view, these artists and thinkers are working to free themselves of the inheritance of modernist criticality and to seek different possibilities and better values in the mire of the mid-twenty-first-century world. This minor optimism in the face of current conditions is hugely important, I think, no matter how bad the next wars will be. I find myself today often saying that we have to remember that there was a 1945—something that would have seemed unimaginable only five years before. We should really prepare ourselves not to miss that rendezvous when the world has again had enough of tyrants and bullies, and wants to revise its ideas of justice, extraction, and relation to the land. Artists have a way to understand and communicate all of this in ways that I still find extraordinary. That’s why I’m sticking with them.

NOTES

1. Barbara Adams, Time (Polity, 2004). Adams’s view resonates with postcolonial and anthropological critiques of temporal hegemonies, such as the works of anthropologist Johannes Fabian and historian Dipesh Chakrabarty. See also Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other How Anthropology Makes Its Object (Columbia University Press, 1983, 2014) and Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton University Press, 2008).

2. Fred Wilson, Mining the Museum: An Installation, Maryland Historical Society, April 4, 1992–February 28, 1993. See similar interventions, such as The Lost World, Oxford Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and Contemporary Art Tasmania (CAT), Hobart. October 23—November 30, 2013, and the book inspired by the exhibition, The Importance of Being Anachronistic: Contemporary Aboriginal Art and Museum Reparations, ed. Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll (Discipline and Third Text Publications, 2016).

3. Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, ongoing since November 10, 2021.

4. “UNTIE TO TIE – On Colonial Legacies and Contemporary Societies,” ifa-Galerie, Berlin, March 30, 2017–March 30, 2018.

5. The Museum Is Multiple. Van Abbemuseum 2004–2024, eds. Charles Esche and Chương-Đài Võ (Van Abbemuseum, 2024).

6. Esche is currently working on a book on demodern thinking with Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti, forthcoming from Duke University Press this year.

7. Quijano, Aníbal, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” Nepantla: Views from South 1 (3), 2000, 533–580.

8. Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. (Duke University Press, 2011).

9. Specifically, I am thinking of the work of Jorge González Santos or the Congolese Plantation Art Workers Circle here.

10. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Thesis VI, Critical Theory and Society (Routledge, 2020), 255–263.

Charles Esche is a curator and writer. He served as Director of the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2004–2023), where he developed a program centered on decoloniality, institutional critique, and plural narratives of modern and contemporary art. He has curated numerous international exhibitions and biennials and writes widely on museums, politics, and artistic practice.
Hélène Valance is a scientific advisor responsible for the Histoire en Jeux research program at the InVisu laboratory (CNRS) at the National Institute of Art History. Her research focuses on representations of the past in the visual cultures of nineteenth-century France and the United States.

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Emily Roemer 3/17/26 Emily Roemer 3/17/26

Walking & Talking with Katerina Gregos

Curator Katerina Gregos reflects on the architectural history, public space, cultural life, and recent urban transformations in Athens.

By Katerina Gregos with Bige Örer

Bige Örer, Katerina Gregos • 3/11/26

Walking & Talking, hosted by Istanbul- and London-based curator and researcher 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- collaborative verses composed along a shared path.
In this episode, Örer takes a long walk with Katerina Gregos, the artistic director of the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST) in Athens, Greece. They walk through the city with Eclair, Gregos’s canine companion, and their conversation traverses the Greek capital’s architectural history, public space, cultural life, and recent urban transformations, which have all been shaped by crisis, development, and gentrification. Along the way, Gregos also discusses her curatorial work at EMST, describing the museum as a public platform for addressing questions of democracy, social life, and ecology through contemporary culture in Greece and the Mediterranean region.

Katerina Gregos is a curator, lecturer, and writer originally from Athens, based in Brussels since 2006. Since the summer of 2021, she has served as the artistic director of the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST), Athens.
From the beginning of her professional career, her curatorial practice has consistently explored the relationship between art, society, and politics with a particular view on questions of democracy, human rights, economy, ecology, crisis, and changing global production circuits.
Gregos has held directorial positions for both private and public institutions, and has curated numerous large-scale international exhibitions and nine international biennials. Most recently, she was chief curator of the 1st Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art (RIBOCA1): Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More, which she was also instrumental in setting up as an institution (the exhibition was selected by both ArtNet and Hyperallergic as one of the top 20 international exhibitions of 2018).
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).

Emily Roemer 2/24/26 Emily Roemer 2/24/26

Nnena Kalu’s 2025 Turner Prize

Only if institutions move beyond symbolic validation—toward sustained collecting, rigorous criticism, and genuine integration—will this so-called “watershed moment” mark real change rather than a passing gesture.

By Andrew Hunt

Andrew Hunt • 2/24/26

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, Andrew Hunt follows up on his previous piece to consider whether Nnena Kalu’s 2025 Turner Prize win marks a genuine transformation in contemporary art or a temporary institutional gesture. Situating the award within decades of grassroots advocacy for learning-disabled artists, Hunt contrasts critical responses—from Adrian Searle’s aesthetic praise to Waldemar Januszczak’s accusations of “virtue-signaling”—while highlighting more nuanced curatorial perspectives that call for careful, non-instrumentalizing approaches to disability in art. He challenges the widespread framing of the moment as a “watershed,” arguing that meaningful change depends not on symbolic validation by institutions such as Tate Britain but on sustained commitments to collecting, critical evaluation, and integration into art history. Ultimately, Hunt calls for the development of a new critical language capable of recognizing disability as vital context without collapsing artistic judgment into either tokenism or erasure.

Nnena Kalu in the studio with works from her series of *Vortex Drawings*. Courtesy the artist and ActionSpace.

Following my piece for The Curatorial, published in September 2025 and titled “On Curating the Art of the Learning-Disabled and Neurodiverse: A Manifesto,” I was invited to write a response to Nnena Kalu’s Turner Prize win on December 9, 2025.1 Rather than provide an immediate reaction or bulletin-like statement, I decided to process possible future trajectories for the development of the art of the learning disabled, especially given the range of reactions, both prior to and after the announcement of the prize. These reactions roundly, and perhaps slightly exaggeratedly, described the prize as a historic moment or “watershed” by journalists and museum directors.2 At the same time, this text provides an opportunity to extend the spirit of the initial piece, which aimed at setting a scene for a range of activist, curatorial, and museological formulas that might continue to incorporate learning-disabled art into mainstream discourse, with and without differentiation from the work of other artistic producers, and to support practical curatorial responses that seek to advance the momentum of this work.

To begin, it’s productive to digest responses to Kalu’s nomination, starting in September 2025, when many journalists began to lobby for Kalu’s work, and continuing through mid-December, when discussions of her win took place, together with where we stand now in early 2026. The British critic Adrian Searle, for example, supported the artist’s work early on. He wrote in The Guardian on September 23, considering all the nominees (which also included Rene Matić, Mohammed Sami, and Zadie Xa), that “everyone has a spiel, but one artist stands out,” and “there’s no fudging. Kalu deserves to win this year’s Turner prize.”3 Searle’s intention is clearly that, beyond the perceived strategies of the other shortlisted artists’ works, Kalu’s sculpture and drawings had a creative impulse that stood apart from any formulaic political agenda or pre-existing academic or identitarian stance, productively and anarchically so. He called Kalu’s form of abstraction “riotous and rhythmic, purposeful and compelling.”

Nnena Kalu’s exhibition at Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, Bradford, UK, 2025. Courtesy EPA Images.

The opposite sentiment was voiced by the critic Waldemar Januszczak, a writer of the same generation as Searle (respectively, they were in born 1954 and 1953) and who has long presented himself as a “bad boy” of art criticism. On October 7, Januszcak wrote in The Sunday Times, that the Turner Prize is “the cockroach of art”—perhaps meaning it’s an established institutional pest that would outlive a nuclear war or alternatively would serve to contain and control any paradigm shift in art and culture. He also pronounced that Kalu’s art was a “sprawling mix of lumpy sculpture,” both disheveled and poorly thought-out artistically and curatorially. After learning from the exhibition text that Kalu was autistic and uses art as a “personal release or therapy,” Januszczak remarked that this raised a dilemma for him, namely whether critics should judge purely on artistic evidence or, like the Turner judges, in his view, be compassionate in broadening what counts as “good art.” Despite his reasoning, it’s not hard to see the innate prejudics in Januszczak’s system of judgment (which may well coincide with populist sentiment), when he concludes that it wasn’t the job of art or the Turner Prize to confuse therapy with talent. In a subsequent Times piece, he criticized the decision as being driven by social politics rather than genuine artistic quality, calling the judges’ choice “virtue-signaling,” and suggesting that compassion or inclusivity might have won out over “tough-minded aesthetic judgment.”4

I’ll come back to look at these perspectives a little later, but keeping the timeline of responses intact for the moment, another piece of interest outside of mainstream newspapers was critic and curator Lisa Slominski’s feature in the London art magazine Art Monthly’s November issue, titled “Curating Difference.”5 Rather than offering praise or a critique of the work—or any form of qualitative perspective—Slominski uses Kalu’s nomination as a starting point to ask deeper questions about how difference, especially neurodiversity and disability, can be represented, contextualized, and interpreted in contemporary art without being reduced to a stereotype or being instrumentalized for other social agendas. In essence, her analysis is rooted in a desire to understand and respect Kalu’s work, and that of others, alongside its context. Rather than reduce criticism to a simple verdict or apply critical judgment, a different criterion is used to ask whether it’s possible to situate Kalu’s art “with care and without instrumentalizing it,” instead of simply celebrating inclusion or forcing aesthetic judgment on the work.

Following the announcement of the prize, the rush to write a newsworthy response included Searle, who reiterated, again in The Guardian, that in his view the judges were correct in affirming Kalu’s work on its own aesthetic merits, which vindicated his position.6 Again, Searle celebrated the physical and sensuous quality of her art, describing it as “embodied” and “sensuous.” He emphasized a deep physical engagement between the artist and her materials, arguing further that it should be appreciated as a powerful and original contribution to contemporary practice.

Perhaps as a response to Januszczak’s claim that the work seen in the gallery in the city of Bradford looked poorly thought out, Searle described the same experience as an “almost alien unknowable presence.” He went on to claim that “the closer you get to Kalu’s endless sinewy trails of old VHS tape, their spews of filigree plastic webbing, their bound-up, sometimes cable-tied suturings, the harder it is to know where their forms stop and the space around them begins.” In my view, this is the closest that any mainstream critic has come to describing what is revelatory about this work: an attempt to start a shift in critical thinking on what makes the work work, outside of standard platitudes or reductive dismissals.

Numerous other responses (including, again, two more in The Guardian, such as the following excerpt from Lanre Bakare) emphasized the director of Tate Britain and chair of the jury Alex Farquharson’s claim that the award, as previously mentioned, represented a “watershed moment” for the international art world. Kalu’s win, he wrote “begins to erase that border between the neurotypical and neurodiverse artist. You suddenly become aware that actually it’s been a boundary around our history, and around contemporary art. But that boundary is dissolving.” Bakare goes on: “Nnena’s work was very much selected for its quality, but given she’s a neurodiverse artist, given her verbal communication is limited, she’s someone who previously would have been on the outside.”7

After this point, coverage, opinion, and news abruptly halted, perhaps in part due to Tate director Maria Balshaw’s decision to make public her resignation two days after the Turner Prize announcement on December 11—a fact that obviously took the focus away from Kalu as the organization’s latest headline.

However, what is most interesting in the ongoing narrative around Kalu is to look at a response to the language of inclusion that was part of the critical response, including, again, this notion of a “watershed moment.” That is the precise wording used by critic Eddy Frankel, an early champion of Kalu’s nomination, published in The Guardian on May 19, and then subsequently repeated by Farquharson. An unsigned editorial in The Guardian on December 12 regarding Kalu’s win stated that her work must be accepted on its own artistic terms, noting that “her sculptures and drawings must speak for themselves.”8

Seeing these patterns, we might ask how can we make something meaningful from a phrase such as “watershed moment” and champion the willing dismissal of disability in the judgment of art? What does this mean in the current cultural climate? The axiom “watershed” is a geographical term that describes the origin of a high natural water source: the mountainous area from which a natural lake drains to create new minor tributaries downstream. Although this wasn’t the intention, applying this metaphor to Kalu’s win from Tate’s perspective can read as slightly misplaced. It speaks of the obvious authorization of the institutional backing of the establishment’s Turner Prize, applying a backhanded gravity to the award and its impact on culture. Here, the hierarchical watershed from above, the lake of “major” institutional consensus and validation that pours down, purportedly nourishes and enriches the great unwashed of public consciousness. This exaggerated sense of importance is weighty with arrogance and touches both the relevance of Tate and of the Turner Prize. In reality, the entire system of support for learning-disabled art has come from the slow and sustained support of “minor” grassroots organizations, initiated in the early 1970s and only recently starting to gain force. This is the reality of the flow of any watershed, one that has trickled down slowly over decades to be finally acknowledged by the cultural elite, often too careful of their reputational profile, and rarely straying outside of critical and market consensus.

Nnena Kalu’s exhibition at Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, Bradford, UK, 2025. Courtesy Getty Images.

Of course, the story of museums playing catch-up isn’t new, and perhaps what is exciting about Kalu’s exemplary institutional recognition is that hierarchies might be beginning to change. An optimistic view is that supported studios and museums might work together more actively and consistently to create this perceived consensus on learning-disabled art. This would be a real watershed.

As mentioned in my previous piece, the two issues of central importance and urgency are not only the active collecting by museums of learning-disabled work but also the ability to develop a critical language that works in tandem with policies for acquisitions. In terms of the former, two examples of recent museum acceptance of learning-disabled artists (which I strongly suggest paved the way for Tate’s decision to award Kalu the prize) were, as I mentioned in my first piece, SFMOMA’s decision to acquire a large selection of work by Creative Growth in 2024, as well as NIAD’s Marlon Mullen’s solo exhibition at MoMA in New York last year. The increasing inclusion of the Bay Area organizations’ artists by museums over the past few years has acted as a barometer, and it’s worth citing an interview with Tom di Maria, the outgoing director of Creative Growth on the acquisition by SFMOMA, alongside excerpts from another interview I did with him on August 8, 2024.

In the following passage, we can see an existing formula for understanding the perceived importance of this extended moment, alongside how we might measure it and how we might support its development.9

Andrew Hunt: How important do you think this moment is, not only for the Bay Area and its audiences, but also for shaping future perspectives on equality in art and museum collections globally?

Tom di Maria: I do think this represents a tipping point, a cultural shift in how artists with disabilities are included. The question for me is whether this is something that becomes momentary or fashionable, something that has its moment for a year or two and then fades, like NFTs, for example, or whether it marks a lasting change in the narrative arc of art history. I don’t know the answer yet. But I do believe there’s no going back to how things were before. And that is a historic demarcation.

Despite the fact that, as di Maria states, it’s difficult to see if we’re within a defining moment for learning-disabled art, what is clear is that we need to avoid any lapse in focus in order to keep momentum through a clearly articulated strategy of support, including collaborative work with studios, commercial spaces, and large-scale institutions. Again, what isn’t so straightforward is the critical development of the work: to see it as a genre with discreet differences, and to create an embryonic yet sophisticated evaluative set of criteria that responds to the intelligence of the work alongside its progression over time. With regard to this, it’s worth quoting di Maria again in terms of his and SFMOMA’s practical curatorial strategy for their Creative Growth show:

TdM: One principle quickly became central: respect for artistic practice. In discussions around art and disability, there’s often a negative stereotype: that artists are “one-trick ponies,” that they don’t evolve, that anyone could learn to do one thing. We wanted to counter that directly. So, we focused on showing the evolution of an artist’s work, which meant looking at suites of works rather than isolated pieces.

Moreover, the idea of actively acknowledging artists with disability, with and without distinction, is paramount:

AH: You also talk about the need to level distinctions and labels—self-taught, professional, disabled, outsider—and to resist viewing these artists through any kind of reductive lens. Ideally, they would simply be seen as artists, operating on the same playing field as anyone else. How do you think that kind of leveling can happen in a genuinely progressive way? And what do you see as the current challenges for the arts and disability movement?

TdM: One of the central challenges is bringing the voice of disability fully into the dialogue. That’s complicated, because in some ways it’s about putting ourselves out of business. You want the work to be seen as equal and contemporary, without qualifiers, but at the same time, you can’t entirely step away from the culture of disability that informs the work. So, the question becomes: How do we hold those two positions at once? How do we navigate viewpoints that can seem almost in opposition to each other? Where is the intersection? I think that tension is the challenge, but it’s also what makes the moment exciting. I actually think that’s the future of the field.

This aim of critical evaluation and qualitative judgments to hold “two positions at once” becomes vital in terms of changing critical perceptions around value, and it addresses Januszczak’s apparent inability to form a pluralistic viewpoint alongside other critics’ disinclination to make disability a meaningful context for judgment.10 It’s clear that Kalu’s work differs radically, both formally and aesthetically in philosophical terms, from the other nominated artists in 2025. Yet, to this point, new critical and curatorial ways to address such work needs to be found. What we need to develop is a way to analyze these artistic practices both synchronically, addressing where we are now, as we are currently attempting to do by hitting the pause button, and diachronically: producing a deep form of looking in tandem with the development of the work of artists over time, as di Maria suggests.

Instead of resorting to the ongoing legacy of ironic postmodernism, in relation to the production of work and its interpretation and critical reception, we need a new process that isn’t grounded in something already intellectualized, something pre-formed. Perhaps, any critical interpretation must begin in a more unstructured place, much like the act of making the work, to produce a kind of evaluation that is unexpected, even alien, as Searle suggests, and that subsequently forces a new act of intellection. If one mode of expression and interpretation (the existing professionally trained artist and critic, or those using the legacy of postmodern irony) illustrates intellectual ideas that already exist, the other (learning-disabled and “professionally trained” artists using humor over irony) gives rise to intellectual concepts that might not otherwise have come into being. We may need to develop a new critical language that accommodates the legacy of a critical vocabulary, while making room for considerations fitting this art more specifically. That language doesn’t exist yet.

Of course, this is true for all new movements of art in the past; every conceivable art has spawned a new language to describe it. Perhaps the difference now, however, is that there is very little really new critical language that offers any accommodation to radically different work, certainly when it comes to a nuanced critical approach to learning-disabled art. Perhaps this is inflected by the hangover of postmodernism, which never rose above the shallowness of its form of irony, glibly trading in hollow differences. And so, to hold two positions in the mind at once is not easily accomplished by critical vocabularies that are used to this shallowness, to stylistic surfaces alone, while remaining limited in processing something more profoundly dialectical.

In terms of the practical side of addressing these complex positions critically and curatorially, Christopher Bedford, the director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, who was instrumental in collecting Creative Growth’s work, speaks of siloing and integration.

Christopher Bedford: Siloing creates an intensity of attention. It forces a reckoning. Only after that first act can the second act take place, which is genuine integration into a broader art-historical narrative. Applied to Creative Growth, it would have been far too slight a gesture for us to acquire a single strong painting by an artist with disabilities and hang it quietly next to a Jackson Pollock, hoping that the juxtaposition alone would do the work. No one would have noticed. Instead, this was an intentional act of concentration, of insistence. It compels attention. The second act, which is already underway, is integration: weaving this history into the larger fabric of formal, social, and political art histories. But without that initial moment of focus—of forceful visibility—you never reach that point.

With concentrated strategies such as this, there’s reason to be optimistic about the expanding plurality of art. In terms of a perception of 2025’s Turner Prize award being simply that year’s fashionable choice, to stop this from becoming a reality, we need to actively support learning-disabled art from all sides. Will things go back to business as usual? Only time will tell.

NOTES

1. Andrew Hunt, “On Curating the Art of the Learning-Disabled and Neurodiverse: A Manifesto,” The Curatorial, September 1, 2025. https://www.thecuratorial.net/index/roulette/on-curating-learning-disabled-and-neurodiverse-art

2. Eddy Frankel, a journalist for The Guardian, and Alex Farquarson, Director of Tate Britain and Chair of the 2025 Turner Prize, used the phrase “watershed moment” to describe Kalu’s original nomination and subsequent award of the Turner Prize. Frankel referred to Kalu’s initial nomination as “a watershed moment for art” in his piece “Her need to make is off the scale: why Nnena Kalu’s Turner prize nomination is a watershed moment for art” on May 19, 2025, while Lanre Bakare stated in the same newspaper on December 9, 2025, that Farquarson defined the win as a “watershed moment for the international art world” in the piece “Nnena Kalu becomes first artist with a learning disability to win Turner prize,” continuing in its subheading: “Chair of 2025 judging panel says win ‘begins to erase that border between the neurotypical and neurodiverse artist.’” https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/may/19/nnena-kalus-turner-prize-watershed-glasgow and https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/dec/09/nnena-kalu-first-artist-learning-disability-win-turner-prize

3. Adrian Searle, “Turner prize 2025 review – puzzling banners, tinkling bells, burning landscapes and bum-like sculptures,” The Guardian, September 23, 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/sep/23/turner-prize-2025-review-cartwright-hall-art-gallery-bradford-city-of-culture

4. Waldemar Januszczak, “The Turner Prize is the cockroach of art,” The Sunday Times, September 27, 2025. https://www.thetimes.com/culture/art/article/the-turner-prize-is-the-cockroach-of-art-8sgkb2pjs? gaa_at=eafs&gaa_n=AWEtsqdRckFbo-d1WiR5Bd3WSlBv7Y8xbMazEaPWJpWWgaG92MzBF1t1skLN4iKTS0s%3D&gaa_ts=698dbf91&gaa_sig=J-y0GbN5Yajse075VtbPizw_lzWae5Ksmtsd2eGb6yBwRrUl_SoTJPY1ovi8idF9SejepuqmhbOEhxdLYNx1-w%3D%3D. On December 9, 2025, Januszczak published his judgment of the prize going to Kalu. “Turner prize 2025: Nnena Kalu is first winner with learning disability.” https://www.thetimes.com/culture/art/article/turner-prize-2025-winner-nnena-kalu-0ljqnt6z2

5. Lisa Slominski, “Curating Difference,” Art Monthly, Issue 491, November 2025.

6. Adrian Searle, “Nnena Kalu’s embodied, sensuous art makes her a worthy Turner prize winner,” The Guardian, December 9, 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/dec/09/nnena-kalus-embodied-sensuous-art-worthy-turner-prize-winner

7. Bakare, “Nnena Kalu becomes first artist with a learning disability to win Turner prize.” https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/dec/09/nnena-kalu-first-artist-learning-disability-win-turner-prize

8. The Guardian, “The Guardian view on Nnena Kalu’s historic Turner prize win: breaking a glass ceiling,” December 12, 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/12/the-guardian-view-on-nnena-kalus-historic-turner-prize-win-breaking-a-glass-ceiling

9. The following quotations are excerpts from Andrew Hunt’s book, Interviews on Contemporary Painting, forthcoming from Ridinghouse in 2027.

10. Di Maria goes on: “Some people come here [to Creative Growth] already convinced that the work can’t possibly be valuable; that people with disabilities can’t be cultural participants, or that non-academically trained work can’t be intellectually engaging. Others come simply to validate their existing ideas. … But I also don’t want to diminish or denigrate academically trained artists, or the work shown by commercial galleries. That’s not what I’m doing. It’s just not what I personally respond to most strongly. And there are people who don’t respond to what Creative Growth does, and that’s fine too. I think of it a bit like music. Do you listen to hip-hop? Jazz? Classical? If you’ve only ever listened to Beethoven, you may not respond immediately to hip-hop, and that doesn’t mean one is better than the other. Visually, we seem to struggle more with that idea. We don’t always give ourselves permission to like different kinds of work, while simultaneously recognizing that other kinds of work are valuable. For me, it’s about allowing that plurality, about understanding that difference doesn’t require hierarchy.” This is an excerpt from Andrew Hunt’s book, Interviews on Contemporary Painting, forthcoming from Ridinghouse in 2027.

Andrew Hunt is a curator and writer. From 2017 to 2025, he was Professor of Fine Art and Curating at Manchester School of Art. He is currently the director of the contemporary art gallery Moon Grove in Manchester, UK. He was previously the founding director of Reading International (in 2016 with Susanne Clausen), director of Spacex, Exeter (2013–2014), and director of Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea (2008–2013). In 2012, Hunt was a member of the Turner Prize jury. As a curator and artistic director, his research has focused on the ability of new institutions of all sizes to support artists and transform communities. As a writer, he has contributed to many magazines and journals of contemporary art and culture, including Artforum, Art Monthly, The Burlington Magazine, Domus, frieze, Mousse Magazine, Picpus, TATE ETC and The Curatorial.

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MA Curatorial Practice 1/23/26 MA Curatorial Practice 1/23/26

The Sovereign Fox Persuades Law to Dissolve into Politics

The juridical ambitions of Zasha Colah for her edition of the biennale were laudable, but elusive as her symbolic fox.

By Sophie Barfod

The juridical ambitions of Zasha Colah for her edition of the Biennale were laudable, but as elusive as her symbolic fox.

Sophie Barfod • 1/23/25

passing the fugitive on, 13th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Berlin, June 14 – September 14, 2025

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, Sophie Barfod examines the 13th Berlin Biennale, passing the fugitive on (2025), curated by Zasha Colah, focusing on its use of dramaturgy to frame law, justice, and activism. Structured as a dispersed performance in which viewers are cast as jurors and artworks function as evidence, the Biennale presents law as mutable and performative, gesturing toward fugitivity as an ethical response to lawful violence. Barfod critically evaluates how this approach engages Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), historical instances of immoral legality, and contemporary artistic practices that destabilize juridical authority, ultimately arguing that the exhibition’s reliance on ambiguity functions as a protective curatorial condition.

Zasha Colah cast her Berlin Biennale, titled passing the fugitive on (June 14–September 14, 2025), as a kind of performance theater spread among four different locations. The drama inherent in using performance theater as a curatorial approach seems an effective attempt to draw in contemporary (often attentionless) art viewers. To that end, the Biennale presented sixty artists and more than one hundred seventy works of art, intending to stimulate a debate on how to position oneself in relation to repressive contexts. Criticism has arisen about the irony of curating a show that apparently seeks justice, while “the viewer is invited to think about almost everywhere but Gaza.”1 It has been argued that the Biennale gravitated toward safer forms of activism, operating within what critics have described as a frame of complicit silence. The Biennale chose to omit geopolitical contexts where global demands for justice continue to be most pressing, therefore aligning itself with sites of political power that prefer such conflicts to remain unspoken.2 This essay examines how justice is articulated curatorially and asks whether legal questions framed through implicit dramaturgy can sustain an activist claim under conditions of political urgency.

Artcom Platform stages a silent monument commemorating the individuals in Kazakhstan who were killed, detained or tortured in 2022 in the uprising known as “Bloody January.” Image courtesy Elisa Carollo.

Colah’s exhibition as a construct operates within the register of the performative, in which passing the fugitive on employs dramaturgy as the primary curatorial intervention. Dramaturgy is traditionally examined curatorially through the ways in which a theatrical setting opposes the standard white cube as a site for display. Even though the Biennale employed scenographic strategies—such as the black-box theater exhibition room at the Hamburger Bahnhof—its staging more generally functioned as a forum for judgment, in which meaning was produced through assigned roles and procedural relations rather than through the white-cube logic of autonomous aesthetic experience.3 Visitors were cast as a public jury, artworks functioned as evidence, and the curatorial framework assumed the position of a closing argument. Such role assignment exceeds metaphor and enters the logic of juridical theater, where interpretation is inseparable from performance. The exhibition space becomes a stage on which judgment is rehearsed rather than resolved. This reveals the risk embedded in this approach: moral interpretation grants judges—and here, viewers—a wide margin for discretion, opening the door to judicial overreach. By asking the audience to “judge the judge,” Colah foregrounds law as a malleable construct, one that is subject to performance and perception. Authority shifts from the institution to the individual, where the viewer becomes the arbiter of moral principles. Some argue that legal interpretation, whether within legal institutions or artistic contexts, is ultimately dependent on collective belief, meaning it is ideological and subject to biases. In the Biennale, Colah seems to shift legal interpretation from legal institutions to aesthetic and social performances, allowing its audience to reflect on their own biases and beliefs in relation to morality.

The Biennale’s central motif is the fugitive fox, a creature that does not break laws but lives indifferently to them. Hence the title, passing the fugitive on: an instruction to carry evidence in body and memory until the right moment to relay it.4 Colah uses the imagery of the fox to pass the idea of fugitivity on to others as an activist gesture and ambition. In the catalogue, she defines this state as the cultural capacity of art to set its own laws in the face of lawful violence, moving outside the law’s demand to be acknowledged. What Colah presents, then, is not merely the fact that law is interpreted, but the possibility of a different horizon for justice, one in which legality gives way to justified resistance and social struggle. Here she converges with the legal movement called Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), which reframes justice as an ongoing negotiation that takes into account colonial histories, structural asymmetries, and the voices of the marginalized. Critics of TWAIL argue that framing justice as “struggle” or “resistance” risks being too open-ended. If justice is always contested, what are the concrete standards? How do we know when justice is achieved or when resistance itself becomes oppressive?5

The former courthouse on Lehrter Straße, 2025. Image courtesy Raise Galofre.

Colah aims to answer this question with the Biennale’s exhibition section titled “Legality, Illegality, and the Artist’s Claim,” set in the former courthouse on Lehrter Straße. Colah utilizes the site itself as a curatorial argument by excavating the building’s history, as it was the site of the 1916 trial of the German socialist politician and anti-war revolutionary Karl Liebknecht. Prosecuted under wartime censorship laws for his participation in anti-war demonstrations and his criticism of the German military, Liebknecht was a key figure in debate on immoral legality. As the only member of the German parliament to openly oppose the country’s involvement in the First World War, his stance on anti-militarism marked a significant rupture within the legal order.6 Colah mobilizes this legacy by framing the exhibition vis-à-vis this conflict, which was later widely read as unjust. She treats the building less as a neutral container than as an archive of historical institutional immorality. Yet this curatorial precision risks evaporating at the level of encounter. If the historical hinge is legible only in the catalogue, then the exhibition’s ethics remain essentially invisible. For a project that leans on dramaturgy, that’s a structural inconsistency: the trial’s “whispers” should have been staged as part of the exhibition’s script, materialized through some form of scenography or explicit interpretive cues, so that the viewer meets the curatorial argument in space.

Simon Wachmuth’s work plays into this eerie sense of legal injustice with his video commission From Heaven High (2025). In the first half of the work, a black-and-white performance confronts the viewer with the figure of a marching, literally pig-headed soldier at Tempelhofer Feld, where the stark imagery is juxtaposed with Martin Luther’s sacred hymn, “Vom Himmel hoch, da komm ich her” (From Heaven High I Come). Once repurposed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to support German imperial ambitions, the hymn’s inclusion highlights how cultural symbols have historically been used to sacralize the state and advance nationalist agendas.

Simon Wachsmuth, *From Heaven High*, 2025, installation view, 13th Berlin Biennale, former courthouse on Lehrter Straße, 2025. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2025; Zilberman Berlin/Istanbul. Image courtesy Eberle & Eisfeld.

Wachmuth uses this once-sacred hymn to critique the myth of neutrality in cultural heritage, and instead creates a sinister scene concerned with (in)justice. Marching—once a sign of discipline and unity—now becomes a symbol of militarism as performative theater. Wachmuth extends this theatricality into the courtroom that’s shown in the second half of the video, where the logic of militarism is ridiculed further. He presents the scene of a trial as a dramatically lit space in which the very notion of impartiality is replaced by the theatrics of the judge, who declares: “I’ll decide who’s bad and who gets sentenced.” The sovereign tone projects authoritarian overreach, signaling how personal (im)moral judgment, not law, guides decisions. Wachmuth uses this allegory to critique creeping authoritarianism and the erosion of democratic safeguards, hinting at “rule by man, not the law.”7

From Heaven High illustrates the way unlawful directives can issue from the law, calling the very grounding of the law as “blind justice” into question. The work draws on John Heartfield and Rudolf Schlichter’s 1920 Dada installation, Prussian Archangel, at the International Dada Fair in Berlin. It featured a pig-headed papier-mâché soldier with a wire-mesh body hanging from the ceiling, responding to the dubious moral righteousness of military (Prussian) officers in the wake of the disasters of the First World War.8 The original work included an absurd instruction that mirrored the absurdity of war logic, stating that “to fully comprehend this work of art, one should exercise for twelve hours a day on the Tempelhofer Feld with a fully packed backpack and equipped for a field march.” This satirical directive mimics Dada’s anti-war stance, and Wachmuth takes the absurdity of obedience to nationalism as a crude practice at the hands of pigs (sorry, pigs!) and enacts it in his video.

Isaac Kalambata’s collage work Mizyu (2025) seems to be a curatorial illustration of the impact of lawful immorality. Kalambata’s work showcases Zambian legislation on forests and property laws (No. 4 of 2025) with the word “DISPLACED” stamped in red on top of copies of the legislation, illustrating the ways in which the corrupt force of law has brought the displacement of Indigenous populations. The work is accompanied by photographs of what appear to be natives and their belongings. In the center of the piece, we see Mwendanjangula, the “Lord of the Forest,” with his hands tied behind him, eternally attached to a tree. The metaphor touches on the continuous battle between “development” in the eyes of the capitalist beholder and violence in the eyes of the subjugated. Mizyu draws inspiration from the Witchcraft Act of 1914, “a legislation that expressly sought to entrench the colonial Christian church by curtailing alternative spirituality and healing practices within what is now Zambia.” Colah, with the choice of this work, seems to criticize a porous distinction between “this is law” and “this ought to be law.”

Isaac Kalambata, *Mizyu*, 2025, detail, 13th Berlin Biennale, former courthouse on Lehrter Straße. Courtesy Isaac Kalambata. Image courtesy Eberle & Eisfeld.

One question still lingers after seeing the thirteenth iteration of the Berlin Biennale: if justice is always contested, what are the standards on which it is based and can be counted on in civil societies? Colah’s curatorial approach persuades us to see law as malleable, contingent, and fugitive. TWAIL scholarship affirms this vision, as previously noted, by reframing justice as resistance, as an alternative horizon that refuses colonial hierarchies. In line with the critique that this approach can collapse into ambiguity, the late legal scholar Ronald Dworkin argued that law is always a matter of interpretation, with precedent neither rigid nor random. Yet it must offer integrity and moral validity. In the case of lawful violence, rejecting the law is acting in accordance with a deeper moral logic of the legal system. Essential to this is the discipline of principled interpretation; if everything is up for debate, integrity is lost and law dissolves into politics.9 Between these poles, Colah proposes that the fugitive fox that lives outside of the law, and whose figure suggests that law dissolves into politics, offers neither stability nor certainty. Instead, the fox is a provocation to reimagine the grounds on which justice stands.

Yet the Biennale stops short of articulating what, concretely, should replace that compromised ground. Fugitivity appears as the implied answer—an ethics of refusal, of moving beyond the law’s demand to be acknowledged—but it remains more mood than method. Indeed, the visitor is left with “a sense of a fox with its feet tied.”10 Part of this restraint may be structural rather than accidental: as a publicly funded platform, the Biennale cannot easily stage a critical political position without risking the charge of turning public culture into a partisan mandate.

Colah’s solution is to distribute judgment outward, where the viewers become the jury, and the exhibition provides tools rather than verdicts. But this redistribution produces its own problem. Advocacy requires a legible call and a transmissible ethics—something that can travel beyond the exhibition as more than ambiguity. If fugitivity is meant to be “passed on” as an activist ambition, the dramaturgical conceit promised by the Biennale demanded more than inference; it demands a legible call. Without clearer cues inside the exhibition’s curatorial script, the viewer is left to author the politics alone. In this sense, ambiguity functions as a protective condition. It is even possible that this suspension of principled interpretation was intentional. The Biennale’s reliance on ambiguity seems a wager for the consequences of advocacy to remain hidden, echoing the logic of the fox that survives by remaining elusive, but in doing so cannot be passed on.

Daniel Gustav Cramer, *Fox & Coyote*, 2024/25. Image courtesy © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2025. Courtesy Sies + Höke, SpazioA, Vera Cortes, Yvon Lambert.

NOTES

1. Martin Herbert, “13th Berlin Biennale Review: What Doesn’t the Fox Say,” ArtReview, September 5, 2025, https://artreview.com/13th-berlin-biennale-for-contemporary-art-various-venues-berlin-review-martin-herbert/.

2. Andrea Scrima, “The Berlin Biennale’s Complicit Silence,” Hyperallergic, July 30, 2025, https://hyperallergic.com/berlin-biennale-complicit-silence/.

3. Colah’s iteration of the Berlin Biennale included four venues. The largest part of the exhibition took place at KW Institute for Contemporary Art. The other venues were the Hamburger Bahnhof–National Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sophiensæle, and the former courthouse on Lehrter Straße.

4. Zasha Colah and Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, eds., 13th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art: catalogue. (Berlin: Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, 2025).

5. Naz K. Modirzadeh, “‘Let Us All Agree to Die a Little:’ TWAIL’s Unfulfilled Promise,” Harvard International Law Journal 65, no. 1 (Winter 2024): 25–68.

6. John Simkin, “Karl Liebknecht,” Spartacus Educational, updated January 2020, https://spartacus-educational.com/GERliebknecht.htm.

7. Editor’s Note: In this regard, it is worth noting that when The New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers, he replied: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/us/politics/trump-interview-power-morality.html.

8. Simon Wachmuth, From Heaven High (2025). Wall label, 13th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, former courthouse on Lehrter Straße, Berlin.

9. Ronald Dworkin, Law’s Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986).

10. Herbert, “13th Berlin Biennale Review.”

Sophie Barfod is an independent curator from Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She works at the intersection of curating and strategy, currently contributing to W.A.G.E. and SaveArtSpace. Her practice is focused on curating in found spaces, with exhibition concepts often rooted in feminist theory and social practice work. She is currently a student in the MA Curatorial Practice program at the School of Visual Arts. She has held positions at YAG (McKinsey partner), Heineken, Julietta Alvarez Galeria, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, and is an ex-founder of an experimental arts and technology startup in Amsterdam.

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Emily Roemer 12/9/25 Emily Roemer 12/9/25

Outsideness, and Other Words of Advice for Young Curators

The problem, especially for emerging curators, should not be how to get inside the sphere and sensibility of rote privilege and power in the art world and exhibition-making, but how to stay out of them.

By Niels Van Tomme

Niels Van Tomme • 12/9/25

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 “Outsideness, and Other Words of Advice for Young Curators,” Niels Van Tomme reframes the desire to “enter the art world” by proposing outsideness—adapted from Mikhail Bakhtin’s phrase, “excess of seeing”—as a productive curatorial orientation. Reflecting on his directorship of De Appel’s Curatorial Programme, Van Tomme contrasts the institution’s early experimental ethos with the professionalized expectations that later narrowed its scope. He argues for curatorial practices that resist standardized exhibition formats, privilege deep collaboration with artists, and cultivate forms of publicness not bound to art-world norms. Through projects such as the 2016–17 Why Is Everybody Being So Nice?, he demonstrates outsideness as a relational stance that expands how the curatorial can operate. He urges emerging curators—and the programs that train them—to maintain critical distance from institutional insider behaviors, fostering self-reflexive practices in a field increasingly defined by its own mythologization.

“The art world is shutting down,” a curator friend from New York City recently texted me. As previous art-related certainties crumble—like other aspects of our lives affected by our current and seemingly relentless polycrisis—and funding models increasingly become obsolete, without viable alternatives to replace them, there is an undeniable truth to my friend’s claim. Yet, at the same time, the industries surrounding art’s production, circulation, and speculation through monetization continue to thrive. Evidently, there is no significant slowing down in the organizing of blockbuster exhibitions, biennials, art fairs, conferences, or any other type of international contemporary art event. The same trend can be observed for curatorial activities. The past decades’ mushrooming and current plateauing of curatorial programs across universities and art schools internationally is a case in point.

During exchanges with young curators throughout my tenure as director of the De Appel Curatorial Programme, as a visiting lecturer or critic at various curatorial departments, and in everyday exchanges since then, there is one question that regularly returns. It is the young curator’s equivalent to the young artist’s, “How do I get noticed as an artist? How do I become seen and part of the art world?” For curators, this existential inquiry translates into, “How do I get a job? How do I create opportunities for myself and get inside the art world?” Obviously, such questions are nearly impossible to answer for either group. As has been pointed out exhaustively, there is no such thing as “the art world,” monolithic and singular. There are collaterally bouncing interests, networks, values, politics, ideals, talents, and belief systems, but they fluctuate wildly, depending on what purpose they are being cultivated for, as well as in which geographic context they are situated. Additionally, there are no straightforward formulas available for “getting inside,” as our curatorial reality is increasingly defined by heightened idiosyncrasies and oftentimes mythologized personal trajectories. And what if there is no inside?

Even if a young curator’s concerns about how to get “inside the artworld” are understandable (especially when studying at a curatorial program that costs increasing amounts), it is clearly a flawed goal. To counter such misguided aspirations, I would like to invoke the concept of “outsideness” as a potential position one could explore as a curator, and which is easier to aspire to on an individual rather than an institutional level. It is a term that I borrow freely from the Russian philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin and which is applied somewhat mischievously here—the same way in which curatorial practices allow one to freely borrow from art-adjacent theoretical frameworks when conceptualizing exhibitions. For Bakhtin, outsideness refers to the position of the outsider who is always in possession of an “excess of seeing,” by which he means that each of us brings an entirely singular perspective when looking at others, and by extension, at the world. This excess is ethical and relational and allows us to form a more coherent understanding of what we are a part of and what our responsibilities toward others should be.1 Seen as such, shouldn’t outsideness be pivotal to curatorial practice as a whole, and shouldn’t curators always activate this excess of seeing in the activities they engage with? What else is curatorial practice, really? So, instead of tirelessly aiming for the inside, wouldn’t it be altogether more inspiring to consciously and creatively practice outsideness when mounting professional curatorial careers?

Jes Brinch & Henrik Plenge Jakobsen, Ticket booth, 1996, de Appel, Amsterdam. Photo: Niels den Haan.

Looking back at my work as head of De Appel, as well as of its Curatorial Programme, I was confronted by conflicting impulses. The program is a pioneering one globally, second to Le Magasin’s in Grenoble, and by evoking it here, I wish to emphasize its significant place in contemporary curatorial history. For someone who had practiced outsideness extensively throughout his professional activities, leading up to this job, and who didn’t have a formal training as a curator, I suddenly found myself on the very inside of institutionalized curatorial thinking. What made De Appel’s program unique was that one could trace outsideness throughout its rich history. It included such experimental projects as the notorious Crap Shoot, staged by the 1995-96 participants during founder Saskia Bos’s tenure.2 This project tested the boundaries of what is acceptable as curatorial practice altogether. Later decades, however, slowly pushed the Curatorial Programme into the rigid networks of the niche curatorial world. This is not a reflection on the quality of the participants’ output or the ways in which other directors imagined the program, but of the ways in which there appeared to be less and less self-awareness about the functioning of the program and its position vis-à-vis the fluidly defined “art world.”

From within my position, I tried to communicate the necessity of holding on to De Appel’s initial position of outsideness, even though I didn’t necessarily frame it so explicitly to the program’s participants at the time. One of the key elements to achieve this was to consciously steer the participants away from making proper “exhibitions” when developing their collective final project, which was the culmination of the program. This meant avoiding standardized exhibition formats, such as the solo or group presentation, in favor of something more exploratory. In doing this, I tried to (sometimes successfully) convince the participants that they should avoid adhering to established checklists of proper exhibition-making, as these are mostly restrictive and redundant in nature.

The concept of outsideness within the context of my time at De Appel Curatorial Programme translated to suggesting that the participants radically think along with artists, as opposed to focusing on what exhibitions should look like or do, or how they should be mounted or displayed. Instead, I tried to encourage deep collaborations with artists, and to discover what it is that a particular curatorial interest (theirs) could bring to an artist’s practice—in the best cases, advancing both the artistic and curatorial process. More importantly, it was key that these projects would generate purpose within certain discursive settings (which could also be casual), beyond their status as art-related phenomena. One could interpret this as the Bakhtinian excess of seeing of these projects.

*Why Is Everybody Being So Nice? Day 4: The Night of Exhaustion and Exuberance.* Performance with Arie de Fijter and Ksenia Perek for the Open Avond(S) series, 2017, de Appel, Amsterdam.

A fine example was the 2016-17 Curatorial Programme’s final project, Why Is Everybody Being So Nice?, which was an extensive investigation into the social pressures of niceness, resulting in a four-day program and closing with a collective sleepover, The Night of Exhaustion and Exuberance. Being driven by such (some would say naïve) beliefs in ideas and positions, the curatorial role here was one of outsideness in order to advance a sense of publicness. The curator, then, became more like a humble public servant who bridges the various worlds they/she/he is engaging with rather than producing or safeguarding one—“the art world”—that remains at all times ungraspable and opaque.

Ultimately, what does outsideness mean for university curatorial departments and programs at art schools? I’m not entirely sure. But aren’t they perhaps too focused on fostering a feeling of being inside, of receiving a certain (but not unlimited) amount of privileged wisdom originating from within that you can’t get anywhere else? The problem then is not how to get in, but how to stay out. Or, more precisely, how to cultivate outsideness as a means to enact the curatorial—more like a basic attitude and state of mind that can be achieved from within curatorial sites of learning as well. Evidently, the knowledge and networks they offer are useful as long as one remains conscious of the pitfalls of their potential insularity. Finally, to young curators, I would offer the following thoughts: Don’t rely on institutions too much. Focus on making strong connections with artists and colleagues. Always doubt everything you do, but do it nevertheless. Trust your intuition. Patiently build a singular position of outsideness, carving a world for yourself in deliberate and open ways, instead of adhering to one that is already solidified in curatorial-institutional mythmaking, which might never have existed in the first place.

NOTES

1. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,” in Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, eds. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, trans. Vadim Liapunov (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 22.

2. Saskia Bos founded the curatorial program in 1994, whereas De Appel itself was founded by Wies Smals in 1975.

Niels Van Tomme (he/him) is a curator and lecturer who works internationally at the intersection of contemporary culture and critical social awareness. He was director and chief curator at Argos Centre for Audiovisual Arts in Brussels (2018-24) and De Appel in Amsterdam (2016-18), curator at the Bucharest Biennale 7 (2014-16), visiting curator at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture in Baltimore (2011-16), and director of arts and media at Provisions Learning Project in Washington, DC (2008-11). In 2014, Van Tomme received the Vilcek Curatorial Fellowship by the Foundation for a Civil Society for his demonstrated experience and excellence in engaging with international contemporary art.

His exhibitions and programs have been shown internationally, including at The Kitchen (New York), Contemporary Arts Center (New Orleans), Akademie der Künste (Berlin), Tallinn Art Hall (Tallinn), Gallery 400 (Chicago), Värmlands Museum (Karlstad), National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), and P! (New York). His writings have appeared in Artforum, The Wire, Art in America, Camera Austria, Metropolis M, Afterimage, and Art Papers. His edited volumes include Muntadas: About Academia: Activating Artefacts (2017), Aesthetic Justice: Intersecting Artistic and Moral Perspectives (2015) with Pascal Gielen, Visibility Machines: Harun Farocki and Trevor Paglen (2014), and Where Do We Migrate To? (2011). He has additionally contributed to numerous books and exhibition catalogues, such as Christine Sun Kim: Oh Me Oh My (2024) and Tony Cokes: If UR Reading This It’s 2 Late, Vol. 1-3 (2019). Van Tomme regularly writes about music and occasionally provides liner notes for vinyl records by artists such as Hieroglyphic Being and Aki Onda. He has held teaching positions at Parsons School of Design at The New School (New York) and University of Maryland Baltimore County. He has lectured at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Queen Mary University of London, Vassar College, University at Buffalo, School of Visual Arts (New York), Valand Academy of Art and Design at University of Gothenburg, and the Jan Van Eyck Academy.

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Emily Roemer 11/11/25 Emily Roemer 11/11/25

Walking & Talking with Tīna Pētersone

Latvian curator Tīna Pētersone speaks about the dynamics and challenges of curatorial practice amid today’s political and social climate in the Baltic countries.

By Tīna Pētersone with Bige Örer

Bige Örer, Tīna Pētersone • 11/17/25

Walking & Talking, hosted by Istanbul- and London-based curator and researcher 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- collaborative verses composed along a shared path.
In this episode, Örer walks and talks with Latvian curator Tīna Pētersone through the streets of Riga, Latvia. Their focus: the challenges of curatorial practice amid the political and social dynamics in the Baltic countries today, especially in Latvia, emphasizing the need to internationalize curatorial collaborations with other art ecosystems.

Tīna Pētersone is a Latvian independent curator with an MFA in Curating from Goldsmiths, University of London.

In 2025, she co-founded the inaugural Riga Art Week and she serves as Creative Producer for Liepāja 2027, European Capital of Culture, where she is developing international contemporary art commissions.

Her practice is shaped by residencies and fellowships across Europe, Africa, and the US: at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris; Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago (CEC ArtsLink, 2022); the Baltic Fellowship at Performa Biennial in New York (2023); the Who Is Being Heard? curatorial program for research across the Nordic region; and the Sisters Hope residency in Copenhagen (2024). She is currently in an academic program, Reframing Colonial Legacies, at Zeppelin University in Friedrichshafen, Germany, and the University of Cape Coast in Cape Coast, Ghana.

Her current work focuses on developing art infrastructures and creating opportunities for artists and art professionals, with particular emphasis on cultural exchanges that connect the Baltics with global artistic communities.
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).

Emily Roemer 10/21/25 Emily Roemer 10/21/25

Poor Space

In schematizing the poor space, the intention is to envision it as a locus of disobedience, ambiguous as well as potentially ambivalent, performing non-totalizing gestures in place of the authoritarian impulse.

By Steven Henry Madoff

Steven Henry Madoff • 10/21/25

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, Steven Henry Madoff extrapolates from Hito Steyerl’s notion of the “poor image,” which she proposed in her essay, “In Defense of the Poor Image,” that appeared in e-flux Journal in November 2009. Steyerl wrote about the potential for low-resolution images on the internet to democratize image-making and the global distribution of images (though with caveats). Madoff takes the beneficial character of low resolution as a way to speak about a curatorial strategy that deploys a lack of transparency as a way to address political issues indirectly. He considers related means to accomplish political resistance through redirection, such as the uses of metaphor and allegory, as well as Guy Debord’s notion of the dérive and Edouard Glissant’s promotion of “opacity.” Madoff suggests that such tactical ways of curating may be of increasing importance as authoritarian regimes spread internationally.
This essay, in a different version, was presented as a talk in Riga, Latvia, at the symposium “Eastern European Curatorial Practices: Historical Development and Challenges” held in September 2025.

If this is the new era of artificial intelligence, it’s also the old era, or rather the renewed era, of authoritarianism. Where I come from, New York, the city has never felt more like a bubble in a country whose democracy has never felt more like a punching bag. If Americans are now being shocked on a daily basis by the new regime, we have a lot to learn from Eastern Europe, among other regions of the world, about what is coming, let alone what is here already, and how to respond. And while artificial intelligence is also bringing increasing disruptions to our world, in the context of curating and the wider scope of the curatorial, I can’t say it has made fundamental shifts in the way curators work. Not yet, at least. And so, questions about the impact on the curatorial field under the clouds of authoritarianism, about which Eastern European geopolitics offer historical lessons, are pressing on me as an American, while I certainly have ideas about what technological advancements will bring.

The uproar around AI’s generative image-making and the fear that advanced computation is approaching consciousness and autonomy are as yet unfounded and are, for now, a distraction from the urgent issues of our time, with rising authoritarianism, genocide, climate change, immigration crises, and economic precarity all tipping us toward darkness. I won’t digress further about AI (and yes, there are relatively near-term scenarios in which AI is a baby with a gun), but at the moment it is most practical to say that the ways in which artists and curators are thinking about, producing, and exhibiting algorithmic art are still topical, not truly fundamental to the renovation of our artistic, cultural or political conditions—and, in any case, this kind of work lies along a continuum in an artistic tradition of fascination with machines, not a consciousness of machines fascinated with us.

Still, why I think it’s useful to bring up generative AI image-making here is that its way of shredding and diffusing vast numbers of images to make other images—though, for the most part, visually banal, anodyne, or toxic ones—presents a model of ontological decentering, a collapse of origin, an endless robbery and reshaping that violates and empties authorship yet promises unparalleled possibilities of a democratized and fugitive form of making that links directly to a techno-political condition already diagnosed by Hito Steyerl in her famous 2009 essay, “In Defense of the Poor Image.”1 Steyerl proposed that globally circulated, continually copied and regenerated low-quality digital imagery, while technically degraded and dangerously instrumentalized, also has a high social quotient of democratizing influence, of upgraded mobility, and therefore stands as a political signifier and activator of an alternative political economy—at once low-resolution and high-potential for creative work in the face of hierarchical power.

So, she writes: “The networks in which poor images circulate thus constitute both a platform for a fragile new common interest and a battleground for commercial and national agendas. They contain experimental and artistic material, but also incredible amounts of porn and paranoia. While the territory of poor images allows access to excluded imagery, it is also permeated by the most advanced commodification techniques.” And later in the essay, she concludes: “The circulation of poor images feeds into both capitalist media assembly lines and alternative audiovisual economies. In addition to a lot of confusion and stupefaction, it also possibly creates disruptive movements of thought and affect.”

It seems to me that what she diagnosed with the poor image as an online phenomenon seeping into the world reflects what we have now with AI as a sign of displacement that only amplifies the condition of the poor image and offers a way to think about curatorial work as well. So, let me, for the moment, call it the “poor space” of curating, which has nothing to do with budgets or scale, but as a tactical way of thinking about curatorial making in the stifling atmosphere today of political intimidation and restriction.2 Irony and cunning are the way of the poor space—something I know is familiar to an Eastern European artistic sensibility, while I might also add to this the notion of the dérive, Guy Debord’s Situationist proposition of political parcours, of the roundabout way to get where you want to go as a form of trickster liberation.

Just as the lexicon found in The Curatorial includes the terms “curating” and “the curatorial,” in which “the curatorial” designates a broad conceptual framework for acts of curating—you might say, a socio-political surround in which curating takes place—the “poor space” is a surround for curating in its symbolic mode of misdirection-as-redirection.3 As a token of this idea of the poor space, I think of an image of near-emptiness. The image is of Ryan Gander’s I Need Some Meaning I Can Memorize (The Invisible Pull) (2012), a work that was almost no work at all, consisting of nothing more than a slight breeze in a nearly empty gallery space just to the left as you entered the Fridericianum at the time of Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s documenta (13) in 2012. Along with it, there were four objects, barely noticeable at first: three slender sculptures by Julio González in a narrow vitrine, which had already been installed in the same place at documenta 2 in 1959, and a letter of refusal by Kai Althoff—a participation by refusing to participate that in turn echoed, almost like the breeze in the room, Robert Morris’s actual refusal to participate forty years earlier in documenta 5.

Ryan Gander, *I Need Some Meaning I Can Memorize (The Invisible Pull)* (2012).

I’d like to use this image as a lever, a curatorial generator to produce a specifically unspecific way in which the curatorial poor space, poor gallery, poor room deploys its subject as a kind of dérive, or what in literature are the devices of metaphor and allegory. Metaphor, as I’ve written elsewhere, affords an artificial pleasure of purposeful distance; it is a way to accommodate ourselves to the brute intractability of the world by shifting appearances.4 At the same time, the allegorical impulse, as Craig Owens noted long ago (and that is instrumental in the activation of the poor space), is restorative through its superimposition of one meaning on another—a form of replacement to empty out the authority it seeks to detour, deflate, deflect, or decline. Allegory, by its substitutive nature, intends to supersede or revoke, but also to make apparent again. Or, as Owens remarks, “In allegorical structure, then, one text is read through another.”5

The emptiness that Gander’s work deploys also carries the ghost of another moment in the history of art that speaks in the language of metaphor and allegory in order to insulate itself, to rebuff and ironize governmental oppression: the moment of the Moscow Conceptualists in the 1970s and ’80s as the Soviet Union slowly ran its great ship into the shoals of its exhaustion. So, Ilya Kabakov wrote about the local art of his contemporaries: “This contiguity, closeness, touchingness, contact with nothing, emptiness makes up, we feel, the basic peculiarity of ‘Russian conceptualism’... It is like something that hangs in the air, a self-reliant thing, like a fantastic construction, connected to nothing, with its roots in nothing...”6 Kabakov’s work, along with those of Komar and Melamid, Irina Nakhova, and others, through slogans, paintings, and installations, addressed the voice of monolithic Soviet inflationary self-regard to satirize, allegorize, puncture, and relieve it of its authority. If a famous work by Kabakov, his 1989 allegorical installation titled The Man Who Flew into Space from his Apartment, is the material opposite of Gander’s empty room, presenting a mad overload of propagandist images that symbolize the burden of Soviet life, they are both imaginaries of escape from oppressive weight.

Ilya Kabakov, *The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment*, 1985, mixed media, installation view, 2017. Photo: Andrew Dunkley.

This mode of desolidification through metaphor and allegory, through an emptiness that is not, is emblematic of what the poor space offers, shifting the blunt facts of the world through symbolic relations. They do so precisely to bring us around from another side, a dérive. George Orwell wrote in his 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language,” that writing politically may “vary from party to party, but [it is] all alike in that one almost never finds in [it] a fresh, vivid, home-made turn of speech.”7 Yet the value of the poor space is its curatorial status as a platform that reorients and re-presents, often in a local register, and that, as with allegory’s implicit humor, slyness, ironies, and slipperiness, illuminates ways around the politics of oppression and displacement by way of displacement, bringing something vivid and fresh.

The very idea of a situated form of expression that deploys oblique means toward a revised and revived language of critique is recalled in other Eastern European actions, particularly what have been called “monstrations,” as Zdenka Badovinac recounts in her book, Unannounced Voices: Curatorial Practice and Changing Institutions. There, she notes Andrei Monastyrsky’s Collective Actions Group, active from the mid-1970s, along with the Russian philosopher Alexei Yurchak’s reflections on the Slovenian art collective Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK), begun in the 1980s. In relation to NSK’s work, he speaks of “monstrations”—a word that conflates “demonstration” and “monsters”—and he remarks that “participants in monstrations carry signs with apparently ‘absurd, meaningless and disconnected slogans.’” Wonderfully off-kilter examples include: “We support same-sex fights” and “I demand meaningful slogans.” These forms of performative illogic illustrate a rhetorical strategy that, as an artistic and curatorial action, seems at first “utterly apolitical and nothing more than a meaningful carnival,” as Yurchak observes. “However, the closer scrutiny shows that monstrations [are] a powerful form of political critique in the context of late-Putin rule.”8

Collective Actions Group, *Slogan* (January 26, 1977). The text reads: “I DO NOT COMPLAIN ABOUT ANYTHING AND I ALMOST LIKE IT HERE, ALTHOUGH I HAVE NEVER BEEN HERE BEFORE AND KNOW NOTHING ABOUT THIS PLACE.” A quote from Andrei Monastyrski’s 1976 poem, “Nothing Happens,” a key text for the Moscow Conceptualists.

Such performative renderings exemplify the ambitions of the poor space to wriggle free from the vise of authoritarian restrictions by means of linguistic and apparently counter-rational modes of expression—a vividness accomplished through illegibility and deracination. The poor space is not fixed in its location, and it is intellectually permeable. It doesn’t necessarily seek reparations so much as it reroutes the rhetorical bounds of the regime, disarticulating its elocutions of power. The poor space isn’t necessarily about or driven by collectivity, but it is, by shrewdness and perhaps at times by luck, a space of infection and, therefore, of democratizing distribution. It offers the possibility, in Gayatri Spivak’s phrase, of “affirmative sabotage.”

In this regard of artistic and curatorial moves of misdirection-as-redirection, of illicitness, of willful illegibility in the face of juridical scrutiny, I think as well of Philippe Pirotte’s Montreal Biennale in 2016, into which he curated Corey McCorkle’s Monument (2013), a video projection of a blind horse that could only be viewed in the dark and at night, the constraint on seeing proposed as a way to perceive against the odds, against the grain. Empathy, or imaginary transfer, from one housing of perception, the blind horse, to another, the human, encourages this action, performing this nightshift that proposes another way to see out of need.

Corey McCorkle, *Monument*, 2013, HD projection, 5 min., 36 sec., Montréal Biennale, 2016, at La Station, former gasoline station designed by Mies Van der Rohe, Ile des Soeurs, Montréal.

Following directly from the tension of this nocturnal frame of emancipatory obliqueness, there is Pirotte’s Busan Biennale last year to consider. Titled Seeing in the Dark, its basic premise was this sidelong approach to political address as a form of deviation and cunning. One example of this was Pirotte’s inclusion of the work Hail (2020), by Lee Yanghee, picturing South Korea’s underground rave scene in the early 2000s and calling up metaphors of formal and alternative dance, altered archetypes, queerness, and bodily pleasure that countermands public restriction.

Lee Yanghee, *Hail*, 2020, 4-channel video, 6-channel audio, 15 min., 46 sec., Busan Biennale, “Seeing in the Dark,” 2024.

Of course, writing this within the context of Eastern European cultural-political practices, it is all too clear that there is a need for strategies of the dark, so to speak; for a rhetorical commons of the oblique; an artistic economy dedicated to gestures of displacement that can thrive in the shadows of authoritarianism as a means of survival, or what Judith Butler has spoken of as the will to “to minimize the unlivability of lives,” which, once again, is our current challenge.9

What the use of the term “poor space” helps me to emphasize is that an exhibition made with this kind of strategy usefully decenters its subject, shifting authoritarian gravity, and just as Pirotte did in Busan, it wears the cloak of Édouard Glissant’s idea of opacity as resistance, as beneficial ambiguity.10 As well, this is what the political theorist James Scott noted in his idea of the public transcript and the hidden transcript, where the public transcript is visible and therefore can be controlled, shut down, even erased, while the hidden transcript is illicit, mobile, subversive.11 And in turn, opacity and the hidden transcript echo in Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s proposition of “fugitive planning,” about which they write: “To enter this space is to inhabit the ruptural and enraptured disclosure of the commons that fugitive enlightenment enacts.”12 Those words perfectly correspond with Steyerl’s claim that the poor image “creates disruptive movements of thought and affect.”

Zasha Colah, in her 2025 curation of the Berlin Biennale, invoked a similar dérive, titling her exhibition “passing the fugitive on,” taking the figure of foxes shifting through the cityscape of Berlin as a tutelary spirit under the siege of contemporary life that symbolizes, as she put it, “the cultural ability of a work of art to set its own laws, in the face of lawful violence.”13 She calls this, as an active verb, “foxing,” and speaks of these moves as a fugitive way, a potent illegality, that traverses injustice. Of course, not every proclamation of rebellious fugitivity is successful, and the structural contradictions of a government-funded “foxing” exhibition in Germany, with the imposition that some subjects cannot be discussed (and weren’t), complicates and diminishes any actual action intended to outfox those very restraints.

Nonetheless, in schematizing the poor space, the intention is to envision it as a locus of disobedience, one that may well be both ambiguous and ambivalent, performing non-totalizing gestures in place of the authoritarian impulse. This helps us to see that the counter-narrative of the poor space is one of recalibration and disequilibration by intention, a rhetoric of sleight-of-hand, an allegorical revision that may adumbrate, that may whisper almost inaudibly its truth to power, throwing its voice as political ventriloquism. Needless to say, this may be increasingly useful as a curatorial tactic, certainly in the US, but of course in so many other places today.

I’m not suggesting this is the only political form of curating. There are other, surely more frontal, curatorial approaches toward resistance, reform, repair, reparation, and community. But the poor space as a cunning form of shifted thought, as a curatorial platform that embodies disembodiment and an altered political situatedness, is a strategic push against the force, the high resolution, of authoritarianism, in order to turn it—like Ryan Gander’s Invisible Pull—into an ungraspable breeze that’s nonetheless felt; to turn the poor space and its particular form of low resolution into a liberatory instrument of fugitive enunciations.

NOTES

1. Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image,” e-flux Journal, number 10 (November 2009), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image.

2. I should note that the poor space that I speak about here is predominantly envisioned as a physical space in which physical exhibitions are staged. But, of course, the poor space can be virtual and accessed through such technological devices as a computer, a mobile phone, or a spatial computing device, such as a VR headset or smart glasses. The poor space accommodates many spatialities and temporalities.

3. See https://www.thecuratorial.net/index/lexicon/curating-swbk8.

4. Steven Henry Madoff, “Metaphor and the Feeling of Fact,” The Brooklyn Rail, October 2013, https://brooklynrail.org/2013/10/criticspage/metaphor-and-the-feeling-of-fact/.

5. Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism,” October 12 (Spring 1980): 69.

6. Ilya Kabakov, as quoted in Mikhail N. Epstein, After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture, trans. Anesa Miller-Pogacar (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 188.

7. George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, volume 4, eds. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), 135.

8. See Zdenka Badovinac, Unannounced Voices: Curatorial Practice and Changing Institutions (London: Sternberg Press, 2022), 34.

9. Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 67.

10. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).

11. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).

12. Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Wivenhoe, UK: Minor Compositions, 2013), 28.

13. See https://www.berlinbiennale.de/en/biennalen/3389/13th-berlin-biennale-for-contemporary-art.

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 Unseparate: Modernism, Interdisciplinary Art, and Network Aesthetics from Stanford University Press; 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. 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. He is a member of the Curatorial Studies Workshop, part of the Expanded Artistic Research Network (EARN ).

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Emily Roemer 10/10/25 Emily Roemer 10/10/25

Thoughts on Repair and Remediation

Remediation is not nostalgia, nor is it a utopian projection. It is work performed and actualized, always oriented toward the present and the possible futures that emerge from it.

By Daniela Zyman

Remediation is not nostalgia, nor is it a utopian projection. It is work performed and actualized, always oriented toward the present and the possible futures that emerge from it.

Daniela Zyman • 10/10/25

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 “Thoughts on Repair and Remediation,” Daniela Zyman examines the possibilities and limitations of repair as both a concept and a practice, drawing from her curatorial work with Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21) at C3A, the Andalusian cultural institution in Córdoba. Anchored in a trilogy of exhibitions—Abundant Futures, Remedios, and The Ecologies of Peace—the essay reframes remediation not as a return to a prior state, but as an ongoing, situated engagement with brokenness, violence, and loss. Engaging with Indigenous cosmologies, Black radical thought, and postcolonial critique, Zyman approaches repair as a collective, relational, and necessarily unfinished process. Rejecting redemptive narratives, she argues for a politics and “poethics” that remain with the trouble, embracing the ambivalence and irresolution inherent in reparative work. She further situates contemporary remedial praxis within planetary struggles for habitability in the ruins of extractive capitalism and settler modernity.
The essay originally appeared in Spanish in Remedios / Ecologías De La Paz, edited by Alex Martin Rod and Zyman (Madrid: Turner Ediciones, S.A, TBA21, 2025).

In 2022, TBA21 was invited to develop an exhibition trilogy at the C3A Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía, marking a three-year institutional residency in Córdoba. This collaboration sought to situate and contextualize visionary artistic practices from the TBA21 collection within the context of its longstanding engagement with ecological and social concerns. The three annual exhibitions in TBA21’s cycle that I curated at C3A—conceived around the concepts of abundance (Abundant Futures), repair (Remedios), and just and peaceful futures (The Ecologies of Peace)—experimented with artistic expressions and aesthetic methodologies dedicated to the collective struggle of forging a livable imaginary for the future. They were not only curatorial articulations but also propositions for how to endure and create under conditions of crisis. As the anthropologist Elizabeth A. Povinelli reminds us—drawing on the wisdom of her Aboriginal family in Australia—this requires what she calls a “science of dwelling.”1

Such a science refuses to treat catastrophe as an external condition, instead transforming loss and grief into meaningful actions and aesthetically resonant creations through which individuals shape more-than-human and storied realities. It insists that enthusiasm for worldmaking must not be abandoned in the face of deprivation and dispossession. And rather than being paralyzed by the desire to restore a previous condition, this science cultivates relational ways of being and thriving under the (failing, hostile, and sad) conditions that humans must contend with, passing down the ingenuity and wisdom for their rehabilitation to future generations.

Consequently, the science of dwelling in economies of abandonment doesn’t imply acceptance of the status quo, or some sort of gratitude for the (limiting and always limited) possibilities that remain. This science is not misguided by the artistic and scientific canons that no longer extend comfortably to the contemporary situation. Instead, it urges us to consider new ideas and models for a different geology, an epoch that demands that we experiment with our cosmologies, concepts, stories, and with everything broken and damaged. It unleashes creativity through encounters and draws very near the objects we study, relate to, or wonder about—a closeness that can be described as intimacy or situatedness, or simply as being touched. This closeness is fundamental for building relationships based on relational accountability, steering us away from extractive economies and reductive ways of knowing, which dictate and limit the shape of our world.

We also draw inspiration from the many transformative movements, initiatives, and engagements that have emerged over the last few decades, including—but not limited to—those centered around buen vivir, radical agri-ecologies, the reinvigoration of the commons, economic degrowth, care networks, abolitionism, peace activism, and the Black, Brown, Indigenous, and youth movements marching in the streets to demand an earth uprising. This inspiration also extends to the many artists, researchers, and curators who have mined and recomposed the archives and counter-archives of abundance, repair, and justice.

Reparative Politics under the Climates of Capital

In everyday language, the term “remediation” can encompass meanings like “remedy,” “repair,” “fix,” “renovate,” “restore,” or even “return.” It can also extend to practices of healing, reparation, and restitution. However, these broad interpretations can lead to confusion unless we clarify where our emphasis lies. Each synonym offers distinct insights but also has its limitations. To navigate this complexity, let’s begin by exploring the concept of Remedios as a form of reparative politics. The first lesson, as I see it, is this: the creative ethics of repair are neither an individualistic pursuit of self-improvement nor a narrow, single-issue concern. Rather, it encompasses a range of social, material, and symbolic practices that address multiple, intersecting breakages or crises.

Indeed, the call for reparative politics runs deep in a time marked by numerous crises and the call for atonement and re-memorialization of past injustices. If the spirit of revolution defined the generation of the 1960s and beyond, today’s political engagements tend toward reparation, healing, and reconciliation. The most radical visions and corrective actions converge on addressing the damage to the environment, defending a different concept of the human and the health and well-being of earthly life, while redressing the aftermath of colonialism and its genocidal and epistemocidal impulses. Guided by the understanding that the social, political, environmental, and epistemic crises (understood as a turning point, per the word’s Greek etymology) are interrelated, with their effects compounding, thinkers, artists, and activists often rally under a trans-environmentalist banner, which to political thinker Nancy Fraser includes both “‘environmental’ and ‘non-environmental’” facets of the crisis.2

The “climates of capital,” as Fraser calls the confluence of ills and afflictions bestowed on the world through global capital, are as disruptive and pervasive as the weather. Rather than unifying “the world” through more mobility, exchange, and commercial integration, globalization’s forbidding paradox has been the production of more discord, fragmentation, and injustice. The primary motivation that has driven the neoliberal world order has been “the reallocation of the Earth's resources and their privatization by those who had the greatest military might and the largest technological advantages,” according to the Cameroonian political scientist Achille Mbembe.3 The machinations of primitive accumulation have not only accelerated inequality among nations and inflicted an unparalleled environmental catastrophe on the biosphere but also escalated a supremacist and deeply racist anti-humanism, premised on the notion that the world belongs to a few exceptional groups.

The exclusion of racialized, poor, differently abled, and otherwise stigmatized groups— “human bodies deemed either in excess, unwanted, illegal, dispensable or superfluous”—from the world in common is driven by a white, supremacist “politics of belonging” on the rise since the 1990s.4 These politics of belonging are triggered by an identitarian conception of selfhood and “defensive identity,”5 rooted in the complete disregard and lack of empathy for the rights, lives, and well-being of those deemed outside the boundaries that differentiate and often physically separate those who belong from those who do not.6 Such forces and powers invest in building walls and borders to police the movement and determine the rights of those who must be excluded. And they celebrate the individual (and by extension propertied relations) as the model of the human, whose self-aggrandizing entitlement to freedom, sovereignty, possession, aggressive self-expression, self-defense, etc., undermines social obligation, solidarity, and sociality.

It is precisely the divisionary impetus of both globalism and identitarian politics that we must resist through reparative ethics. Even in light of the different agendas of environmentalist movements, Indigenous struggles, social mobilization, and anti-capitalist activists, among others, it is only, as Fraser aptly demonstrates, a unified politics that links ecological concerns with social justice movements that can lead to the transformation of the economic, political, and epistemic systems that underpin it. This means building alliances between environmentalists, labor movements, and social justice advocates to create more equitable and sustainable futures.

No Quick Fix

Perhaps the most contested interpretation of Remedios is the act of fixing something broken—broken earth, broken bodies, objects, ideas, infrastructures, or even a broken world. Given the current dismal state of affairs, the act of fixing would seem like a noble pursuit. But what if, as the unfolding climate catastrophe lays bare, there are things that are irreparable or broken beyond repair? What if that which we try to mend and plaster over are merely the symptoms or small structural parts of much larger infrastructures of brokenness? Black, Brown, and queer theorists and writers, whose “lives are lived under occupation,” have been developing a rich body of thinking on repair, heedful of the material and immaterial injustices of colonial violence that persist into the present.7

The Black poet and writer Fred Moten, who has much to offer for understanding the genocidal structures of slavery and how they are currently active in racial capitalism, argues that the scars and losses from these violations are neither reducible nor fixable. He states: “To imagine that our stories of loss are also stories of war is also to imagine that there will be no repair, that this is something we’ll never get over, and that this not getting over it, which will have always been part inability and part refusal, bears so much more than the limited possibilities that repair implies.”8

Moten challenges us to consider the im/possibility of repair, suggesting that enduring wounds and losses may not be something to “fix,” but rather stories of war to share and reckon with. He does not explicitly write, though that’s what I understand, that these acts of sharing—through writing, reading, storytelling, and art-making—must refuse more harm or injury in the name of reparation.9 Given that the urge for repair is potentially reactionary and sometimes extractive, certainly damage-centered and quite often reductionist, only the “practice [of] vigilance, militance, and love, which (the abolition of) war demands” would lay the groundwork for a future where racism— understood as the systemic vulnerability to premature death—is no longer tolerated as the foundation of our existence.

Similarly, for the French-Algerian artist Kader Attia, the traumas of history’s darkest moments have left enduring material and immaterial scars, much like a phantom limb from an amputated body part.10 In his art, Attia attends to the work of repair by exposing the brokenness of things and holding their shards in place with visible staples. Metal clips and clamps serve as both evidence of the endured violence and a starting point for the ongoing and often denied process of healing. To Attia, “fixing” means “to hold in place,” allowing the fractures and amputations to continuously unmoor the beholders, with his art persistently asking more questions, or as poet Ross Gay puts it, “unfixing” us—that is, unsettling and unworlding us.

As we are bound to live with the consequences of irreparability, recognizing that repair always already arises amid a rolling catastrophe, and acknowledging that something ongoing cannot be memorialized, we have to concede that any form of collective ameliorative efforts and remediation would have to summon their energies from the residues, wounds, and debris left behind—from the underside of history. The conditions of brokenness are only bearable if they are seen not through the hope for benevolent acts of repair, but through the intimate and intricate relationships inherent in the science of dwelling, which, as discussed, is both an analytics and a worldview in action, responding to the unfolding politics of abandonment. It is in the terraformed and depleted soil where seeds are planted and new growth is nurtured. Working with broken tools, inadequate and rigged, is unsettling, humbling, and sobering. It puts us to the task of cobbling things together, improvising with what we have, while grieving losses and tending to wounds. On a geologically and biologically destabilized planet, this entails acknowledging and listening to the vexed forces that have been silenced and are now revendicated in their presence.

With this sobering realization comes another difficult junction in the face of vulnerability. Given the current conditions of life, where no spaces are untouched by conflict, residual traces of dispossession, or the stench of environmental degradation, reparative work cannot withdraw into safe spaces. Safe spaces are bordered and defensive, often built on one-dimensional notions of identity, subjectivity, and entitlement. While striving for solidarity, mutual support, and communal bonding is imperative, immunity (which has its root in the term munus, the public duty or service offered to the communis) has exclusionary effects due to its overemphasis on security and defense mechanisms. The same holds true for art institutions. If art spaces pretend to offer zones of comfort and embrace an exclusive and at times elitist politics of intimacy that serve as antidotes to otherwise complex and painful realities, they risk replicating a logic of enclosure. Under the contemporary regime of bordering, cultural spaces that prioritize protection and immunity often end up reinforcing divisions, excluding those considered insufficiently radical.

The Political in Our Time Must Start from the Imperative to Reconstruct the World in Common11

If repair (as the act of fixing) is im/possible, beyond our best intentions, can we nevertheless aspire to “reconstruct the world in common”? This concept of reconstruction is not about creating something new, but rather about interrupting the cycles of destruction and undoing that characterize modern life and the kinds of pro-capital counter-reforms of extractivism and structural adjustments. Mbembe considers reparation and restitution as the only viable politics for creating conditions under which individuals and their world can sustain their presence. Despite the difficulties of repair and its potential failure, Mbembe focuses on ways to restore relationships and livability, allowing for the renewal of shared experiences and alliances in a world that is caught up in the contradictions, injustices, and structures that we have already identified as violent, damaged, and intolerable. He is remarkably emphatic when he states: “The key question today is how (life and the world in common) can be repaired, reproduced, sustained and cared for, made durable, preserved and universally shared, and under what conditions it ends.”12

In the epilogue to his influential book Critique of Black Reason, Mbembe identifies the life-sustaining “endless labor of reparation”13 within African cosmologies and vernacular knowledge, whose function was to negotiate and consolidate the relationship between humans and the earth beings with whom they share the world.14 Initiated experts (akin to Amazonian shamans or magicians in other cultures) were and are, in a sense, “reality therapists,” whose labor is to harmonize the effects of transformation with processes of regeneration. As long as the curative work on the cosmological system is performed, life stabilizes in an “imperishable form” that strives toward reproduction and multiplication. “Sharing the world with other beings was the ultimate debt,” Mbembe concludes.15

It is neither nostalgia nor traditionalism that motivates Mbembe. Like Moten, Denise Ferreira da Silva, and other thinkers, he insists that the therapeutic interventions needed today must deeply engage with the erasures and the cannibalistic structures passed down from modernity. Under the ominous climate regime of the Anthropocene and amid the ruins of racial capitalism—potentially even hurtling “toward the End of the World as we know it”—reparation must address the catastrophic impacts of systemic, historical, and ongoing violence and destruction wrought by colonialism and capitalism (including relentless growth, consumption, extraction, exploitation, and dispossession).16 To build a world that we share, Mbembe insists, “we must restore the humanity stolen from those who have historically been subjected to processes of abstraction and objectification. From this perspective, the concept of reparation is not only an economic project but also a process of reassembling amputated parts, repairing broken links, relaunching the forms of reciprocity.”17

Most importantly, Mbembe’s reference to precolonial healing practices points to an elemental aspect of reconstruction: the inseparability of reparation from everything related to the land. Throughout the Indigenous world, any science of dwelling is rooted in land relations, as are Indigenous legal regimes, theories, stories, and the kinship relations to other earthly beings. (And as is colonialism, by definition, the access to land for settlement and extraction.) To specify the meaning of land for Indigenous relations, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes that it is “everything: identity, the connection to our ancestors, the home of our nonhuman kinfolk, our pharmacy, our library, the source of all that sustains us. Our lands were where our responsibility to the world [was] enacted.”18

Land relations are not metaphorical; they are fundamentally methodological. They are methodological inasmuch as they assert the inseparability of bodies and lifeworlds while actively enacting protocols that do not “moralize maximum use, universalize, separate, produce property, produce difference, maintain whiteness.”19 These relations refuse metaphorical and compensatory gestures that fail to dismantle exclusionary spatial arrangements designed to sustain settler futures. And while they are specific to peoples and lands, their scope is planetary and in solidarity against ongoing dispossession, thus fostering cooperation among the incommensurabilities of different worlds, values, and obligations.

The struggle to reconstruct the common world lies in navigating the persistent and compromised afterlife of spoilage and the reweaving of palliative and nourishing relations. It creates an intrinsic ambivalence that we must tolerate and integrate into our work. Reparative interventions in art and transformative politics blend the soothing and ameliorative powers of aesthetics and “poethics” with the acknowledgment of the “total violence,” according to Ferreira da Silva, which threatens the durability of the world as we know it.20 This form of practice thrives on the tension between critical reckoning and “radical hope,” focusing on channeling these complex and antagonistic emotions rather than seeking mere redemption or immunity.

No Return to a Pristine Past

There is one other fallacy I would like to address when considering reparative effects on existing and future worlds. While reparation is multitemporal and originates in history, it cannot offer a path for returning to the past or any (mythical) wholeness. From the many concepts often used somewhat interchangeably to describe the ethics of repair, terms like “restore” and “renovate” imply efforts to reclaim a prior state or condition, grounded in ideals of how things should be founded on a past often imagined from the present perspective. In fact, the root of the word “renovation” is novus, indicating a process of making something new again.

Restorative interventions embody the promise of retroactive renovation. They aim to realize an idealized image of the past in the present while erasing any traces of disfiguration and constituent violence. While returning to the safe space of idealized history is often misleading, it also bears the danger of the resurgence of reactionary politics, defensive notions of collectivity, and forms of retro-nationalism. Looming large behind this notion is the dream of purity and revindication, both unhelpful for sustaining reparative work.

Hence, considering practices of reparation in the context of Remedios points toward serving individuals, communities, and their lifeworlds in a historically resonant but forward-moving manner. Remediation is not nostalgia, nor is it a utopian projection. It is work performed and actualized, always oriented toward the present and the possible futures that emerge from it. It is an intervention and a methodology invested in the here and now, a critical optic and potent strategy to counter forces of undoing, anxiety, and pessimism. If remediation is rooted in the here and now, it nonetheless must reckon with the past—not as a destination to which one returns, but as a historically denied reservoir of possibilities.

As Ariella Aïsha Azoulay argues in Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, the crucial distinction is between “returning in time,” often reactionary and nostalgic, and “returning in possibility,” which reopens horizons violently foreclosed and enables those who claim reparation to shape the world in their eyes, “outside of the outlines of imperial states.”21 Against the imperial temporality that seals crimes as closed and adjudicated, potential history calls for unlearning and refusing such closures. Repair, in this sense, does not replicate the past but rekindles potential conditions in which both individuals and their worlds can regain presence—through the activation of shattered possibilities essential for the continuation of worldmaking practices.

In the chapter titled “Repair, Reparations, Return: The Condition of Worldliness,” Azoulay is mostly interested in a dimension of reparation, namely the movement of reparations in response to disaster-generating regimes.22 Any account of reparative politics would remain incomplete without a discussion of this as compensation for systematic expropriation and violence, particularly under conditions that, from the perspective of the oppressors, are presumed to be long sealed. The cases for unsettled reparation claims are too many to be listed, with notable examples including the Transatlantic Slave Trade, plantation slavery and the genocides of Indigenous peoples in the Americas, the Jim Crow laws, the Palestinian Nakba, and on and on. Reparations remain unsettled both for strategic reasons and due to the persistence of disaster-generating systems, never fully abolished. This dynamic makes the descendants of “victims” appear to be mired in the past and colonial history, while the descendants of “perpetrators” focus on building the future.

The imperial principle, which is congealed in time, space, and the body politic, makes a world in common impossible, unless it is attended to. So, Azoulay writes: “Perpetrators and their descendants cannot decide on the nature of reparations, and they cannot extend them to others. An act of imagination is needed here, one that will allow us to recall that the political realm could be different, not only one that consists of the rulers and the ruled, perpetrators and victims, whites and non-whites, grantors and claimants of rights. An act of potential history would see descendants of perpetrators in the position their ancestors should have been in when crimes were perpetrated—that of returning what was taken and begging to be allowed a place in the shared world.”23 In line with this thoughtful assessment of potential history, veritable restitution is one that first and foremost makes reparations to the continuance of life itself—to the capacity of sociality to renew and extend—rather than merely to material damages.

Remediation, then, is an insistence on tending to the fractures of the world while resisting the very conditions that have produced them. It is to unlearn the historical fault lines of modernity, undo the authoritarian, xenophobic, and anti-ecological violence it originates, and cultivate livability on our planet. If repair is to become a political project rather than a private ethic, it must be undertaken collectively—through shared responsibility, solidarity, and in support of critical-creative practices that harbor different futures. It calls for a politics and a poethics that dwell within brokenness, binding together the temporalities of grief and possibility, and extending to the nonhuman the right to flourish. Perhaps what Remedios finally teaches us is that reparative labor animates the very possibility of social reproduction especially amid the damage wrought by austerity, crumbling infrastructures, extractivist economies, and now perpetual war.

NOTES

1. See “Dwelling Sciences,” in Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 32-33.

2. Nancy Fraser, “Climates of Capital,” New Left Review no. 127 (February 25, 2021): 96.

3. Torbjørn Tumyr Nilsen and Achille Mbembe, “Thoughts on the Planetary: An Interview with Achille Mbembe,” New Frame (September 5, 2019), https://nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-1909/msg00047.html.

4. Nilsen and Mbembe, “Thoughts on the Planetary.”

5. Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity, Information Age, v. 2 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997), 9.

6. Nira Yuval-Davis, The Politics of Belonging: Intersectional Contestations (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2011), 20.

7. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 22.

8. Fred Moten, “Prepare to Imagine,”2022, https://zcmp.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Moten_prepare-to-imagine2.pdf.

9. Eve Tuck, “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities,” Harvard Educational Review vol. 79, no. 3 (September 1, 2009): 413.

10. Kader Attia, “The Field of Emotion,” 2018, http://kaderattia.de/the-field-of-emotion.

11. Nilsen and Mbembe, “Thoughts on the Planetary.”

12. Nilsen and Mbembe, “Thoughts on the Planetary.”

13. Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, trans. Laurent Dubois (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 180.

14. Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 180.

15. Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 181.

16. Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics: The Quest(ion) of Blackness Toward the End of the World,” The Black Scholar vol. 44, no. 2 (June 2014): 84.

17. Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 182.

18. Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientiﬁc Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013), 17.

19. Max Liboiron, Pollution Is Colonialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021), 79.

20. Ferreira da Silva, “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics.”

21. Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (London: Verso, 2019), ebook.

22. Azoulay, Potential History.

23. Azoulay, Potential History.

Daniela Zyman is a Vienna-based writer, curator, and the artistic director of TBA21—Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, based in Madrid. Since the foundation of TBA21 in 2003, she has played a central role in shaping its program, curating over fifty exhibitions and contributing extensively to its publishing and commissioning initiatives. Zyman’s curatorial practice is rooted in material culture, artistic research, and ecological and post-disciplinary knowledge forms. She consistently engages with alternative epistemologies and speculative modes of world-making, positioning artistic research as a space of critical imagination and ecological thought. Previously, she served as chief curator at the MAK – Austrian Museum of Applied Arts/Contemporary Art in Vienna (1995–2001), where she co-founded the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles. From 2000 to 2003, she was the artistic director of the Künstlerhaus in Vienna and Director of A9 Forum Transeuropa. In 2024, she published The Laughter of the Jellyfish (German edition, Walther König), a monograph that articulates a prefigurative, antagonistic approach to artistic research and traces a genealogy of emergent counter-methods.

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MA Curatorial Practice 9/15/25 MA Curatorial Practice 9/15/25

Curating / The Curatorial

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.

By Multiple authors

Multiple authors • 9/15/25

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

Steven Henry Madoff
The platforms for curating have vastly expanded with late capitalism and advancements in technology. The techniques, histories, technological implements, considerations of space, budgets, internal institutional politics and external politics, and publics as receptors and transmitters, as participatory and juridical parties, all weigh on the task of the curator. Some who take on this role prefer the term “organizer” to that of “curator,” and in that inflection emphasize the practical aspects of selecting, gathering, arranging, and displaying those objects that hold a vibrancy of being in their interrelations as brought into visibility by the organizer, curator, or assembler. All of these nominations indicate acts of curatorial labor, a facet of curating implicit in the German name for the one who performs these manual and conceptual tasks: Ausstellungsmacher. The exhibition-maker today must be considered a laborer whose energy, resources, remuneration, and rights, along with all the pressures brought to bear on this laborer, are only now being more frontally considered. Curating is at once an instrument of institutional rootedness and of fugitive being.
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 seventeenth and eighteenth 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. “Knowledge tradition” is used here to indicate a transmission of know-how or other practical forms of knowledge that 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 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.

Steven Henry Madoff
The curatorial can be described conceptually as a formative process of assembly. What is being assembled, and what prejudices of knowledge and ideology are involved, will shape the construction steps, pathways, formation, and reception of the material construct (the curatorial project). Of course, to denote the curatorial suggests a single thing, the one way in which this framework exists, while the actual proposal is of an endless, though particular, capaciousness of ideas, influences, epistemologies, and so forth that frame an individual approach in its specific situation. The curatorial is implicitly and inevitably a political condition as it cannot be formulated without its edges being shaped by the influence of external forces such as governmental policies, economics, the market, the mood of the polis, and intellectual, artistic, and curatorial fashions. These forces shape the assemblages, often in reciprocal tension among constituent elements. Ideology becomes a form of opticality. This world-picture of confluent and contested behaviors inevitably becomes the basis of selection and comprises a curatorial assembly.
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 →

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, Unseparate: Modernism, Interdisciplinary Art, and Network Aesthetics 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. He is a member of the Curatorial Studies Workshop, part of the Expanded Artistic Research Network (EARN ).
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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Emily Roemer 9/15/25 Emily Roemer 9/15/25

Walking & Talking with Lawrence Rinder

Lawrence Rinder’s thoughtful exchange with Bige Örer weaves through reflections on working across different geographies and institutional contexts, the complexities and freedoms of curating independently versus within institutions, and their shared passions for art, poetry, walking, and animals.

By Lawrence Rinder with Bige Örer

Bige Örer, Lawrence Rinder • 9/15/25

Walking & Talking, hosted by Istanbul- and London-based curator and researcher 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- collaborative verses composed along a shared path.
In this episode, recorded on February 27, 2025, Örer speaks with curator Lawrence Rinder. Their exchange weaves through reflections on working across different geographies and institutional contexts, the complexities and freedoms of curating independently versus within institutions, and their shared passions for art, poetry, walking, and animals.

Lawrence Rinder is Director Emeritus of the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. He has organized exhibitions at the Walker Art Center, the Drawing Center, the Fabric Workshop, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Berkeley Art Museum and Film Archive, among many other venues. He is currently on the boards of Kadist and the Wangduechhoeling Palace and Museum in Bumthang, Bhutan. He lives in Eymoutiers, France.
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).

[Take a deep breath][Exhale] [Drop your shoulders][Close your eyes]— Koyo Kouoh’s introduction to In Minor Keys

And so, let me return to my initial question: Would a deaf visitor encounter this exhibition in the same way as a hearing audience?

In the following passage, we can see an existing formula for understanding the perceived importance of this extended moment, alongside how we might measure it and how we might support its development.9

Andrew Hunt: How important do you think this moment is, not only for the Bay Area and its audiences, but also for shaping future perspectives on equality in art and museum collections globally?

Moreover, the idea of actively acknowledging artists with disability, with and without distinction, is paramount:

[Take a deep breath]
[Exhale]
[Drop your shoulders]
[Close your eyes]
— Koyo Kouoh’s introduction to In Minor Keys