Curating / The Curatorial
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.
-
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).