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.
Steven Henry Madoff • 10/21/25
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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.
Berlin Biennale logo, 2025.
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.
Ryan Gander, I Need Some Meaning I Can Memorize (The Invisible Pull) (2012).
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.
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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).
