Disagreeable Inquiries: Curating as Knowledge Work

Critical Curating
Written By Emily Roemer

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

Mick Wilson • 7/15/25

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOTES

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

Emily Roemer
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Of Snakes and Mirrors