Disagreeable Inquiries: Curating as Knowledge Work
Curating and art-making as knowledge practices seem to me to hold out the possibility of asking, “What is to be done?,” “What is to be known?,” and “What sense can be made here?”—and of asking these questions in the company of those already in disagreement with one another.
By Mick Wilson
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
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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, Mick Wilson discusses the potentialities of art and curating as forms of knowledge production, touching first on four critical approaches that he takes issue with: pro-aestheticism, anti-academicization, anti-institutionalization, and ideology critique. “Wary and distrustful of the claims made for curatorial and artistic knowledge practices to produce a radical break with some monolithic established system of knowledge-power,” Wilson asks whether there is another way forward that avoids nostalgia for liberalism’s notion of a public sphere that promises emancipation while veiling its exclusions. As he notes, the essential question of how curatorial and artistic practices produce knowledge is of the highest urgency today, considering the example of the US government’s fervent attack on research and knowledge work in academic and cultural institutions—a playbook, as he puts it, in common with related versions in Hungary, Slovakia, Turkey, India, and elsewhere. At the heart of Wilson’s deeply thoughtful exploration of how knowledge production can move forward under the current cultural conditions of capital and political division, he voices the most pressing question that all of us in the field must ask each other now, whatever the setting for our artistic and curatorial efforts to produce meaning: “Does the incubation of spaces of convivial dissent become a fundamental imperative in attempting to resist neofascism’s culture of enmity?”
The arts must be taken no less seriously than the sciences as modes of discovery, creation and enlargement of knowledge in the broad sense of advancement of the understanding.
—Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking1
The curatorial as a regime of the management of aesthetics between the institutional and the artistic field is where the idea of epistemic disobedience might be fostered.
— Silvia Franceschini, “Translating lifeworlds: curatorial practice and epistemic justice” 2
This essay began life as an attempt to think through the claims that curatorial and artistic practices can engender new ways of knowing; claims for art that echo older ones such as Nelson Goodman’s wholesome endorsement of art-as-inquiry above. These more recent claims, now familiar across the expanded contemporary art field, stand in opposition to various Enlightenment and Romantic formulations of the aesthetic as noncognitive and the championing of art as an autonomous domain of value. These curatorial and artistic knowledge projects are also in tension with the contemporary derivatives of these eighteenth-century constructions of the fine arts and the aesthetic.3 However, they might in some instances appear to resonate with other formulations of the aesthetic to be found in the “aesthetic education” of Schiller or in the bildung of the Humboldtian tradition.
The assertion of curatorial and artistic practices as knowledge practices often comes with two complementary moves: (i) claiming to radically break with established knowledge paradigms and (ii) claiming to produce democratic and emancipatory effects and potentials. Although often manifesting common themes and formats, the various programs and projects to realize contemporary art and curating as forms of knowledge production are not uniform and have played differently in different parts of the world. They have been mobilized under different headings: artistic research, curatorial research, the curatorial, practice-based/practice-led research, situated knowledges, sensuous knowledge, and even xeno-epistemologies. They have operated across diverse initiatives and platforms, such as basis voor actuele kunst;4 The Forest Curriculum;5 Red Conceptualismos del Sur;6 Àsìkò;7 the Glossary of Common Knowledge;8 the Expanded Art Research Network (EARN);9 and Asia Art Archive,10 to name only a very small sample.
The first line of Asia Art Archive’s self-description—“Art is knowledge”—provides perhaps the most succinct and indicative encapsulation of this broad swathe of practices and positions. However, I will be at pains here not to reduce these undertakings of curatorial and artistic knowledge to a single phenomenon. While these very different programs and networks have in common a broad commitment to curating and contemporary art as—in part, at least—matters of knowledge work, they do not generically reduce curating and art practice exclusively to a mode of knowledge. The Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos’s site for “expansive and self-critical forms of inquiry”11 at the core of its mission in West Africa, and the Riga-based Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art’s ambition to “look for fresh and alternative approaches to research,”12 as part of its mission in Northeastern Europe, speak to the broad distribution of this alignment of artistic and curating practices with knowledge production. However, they might also be seen to suggest the different stakes at play across different geopolitical frames. This framing of artistic and curatorial work as knowledge work is often (though not always) positioned as part of a wider cultural political project or some form of civil-society-building program. This is made especially clear in the work of the Tranzit network:
Tranzit is a unique network of civic associations working independently in the field of contemporary art in Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia and Romania and across the borders of a wider Europe. Its main goal is to support and articulate emancipatory practices, establish connections between culture and society by moving across geographies, generations, and political realms. [...] Activities range from exhibitions, thematic projects, seminars, publications based on long-term research and participatory interventions into the public discourse. […] We believe in the relevance of contemporary art institutions as places of liberty, as egalitarian spaces of unbiased, poetical and political research and education.13
These three moves—(i) framing curatorial and artistic work as knowledge work; (ii) claiming a break with established knowledge paradigms; and (iii) orienting this new knowledge work in turn to broader emancipatory social and political goals—are characteristic of a broad variety of practices. They have been challenged and contested from several different, though partly overlapping, positions. In what follows, I will indicate and problematize four of these critical approaches: pro-aestheticism, anti-academicization, anti-institutionalization, and ideology critique. Having done so, I will then propose a different approach that, while not wholeheartedly endorsing these practices and their claims, advocates for their more careful and less generic consideration.
The first, and perhaps most familiar critical approach, comes from a conservative aestheticism that sees a category error in positing the values of knowledge production for curatorial and artistic practice, which are seen properly to be the realms of sensibility, taste, and aesthetic judgment. For others, the problem is not that cognitive value is attributed to curatorial and artistic practices, but rather that the valorization of art’s knowledge risks colonization by the academic protocols and value forms of the university instead of those appropriate to art and the art world. Such critiques are in part turf wars over who or what has legitimate authority to pronounce on value and saliency, and therefore set the discursive and pragmatic norms with respect to judgments of art.14
This approach most often relies heavily on pronouncements about “what-art-is.” Typically, art is posed as that which, by its very nature, is intrinsically contrary to dreary old academia and its dull formulaic (un)thinking.15 It appears from this perspective that artists “seek to create new questions and new forms of knowledge, using the kinds of embodied-material-conceptual thinking that go hand in hand with art making.” Meanwhile, their colleagues languish in the departments of medieval studies, quantum physics, public health, engineering, pediatrics, history, earth sciences, and anthropology, left with no option but to just repeat the same old disembodied, immaterial, and abstracted Cartesian drone. Worse still, these academics seek to subordinate curatorial and artistic practices to this same numbing regime of accountability and legibility.
In other instances, the even less sober advocates of art’s social exceptionalism and transcendence protest not simply against an expansionist takeover by the academy, but rather any form of “institutionalization” at all. In this formation, they see curating and art as knowledge as a threat to art itself, institutionally captured and confined. These nouveaux fauves contre l’institutionalisation are champions of art’s excess. They claim the space of art as a zone of radically autonomous potential “beyond” institutionalization.16 For these advocates of radical autonomy, it is as if the wilds of biennales, museums, and galleries were being enclosed and domesticated by the deadening conventions of academies and research centers. Such polemicists defend the right of undomesticated artist-beasts to roam wild and free, unharried and untamed as they drift from art site to art site, at one moment hiding in the gaps between the oligarch yachts moored in the Venetian lagoon and at another, galloping excitedly in herds across the vast plains of museum fundraisers—only later to withdraw to the temporary cover afforded by a quiet residency program or the safe margins of a catalogue launch or private view.
A notably more critical approach, rooted in the tradition of ideology critique, is instantiated in Tom Holert’s popular e-flux volume, Knowledge Beside Itself: Contemporary Art’s Epistemic Politics, published in 2020.17 Introducing the volume, Holert outlines his suspicions of curating and contemporary art’s “deep involvement with a global political economy of knowledge” and the broad emancipatory claims that come with this. He notes that the multiplication of “signifiers of research and investigation” in recent practice indicates that knowledge has become fetishized in the era of “cognitive capital.” This latter term invokes a diagnosis of the current conditions in which “knowledge functions more as a principle of social stratification or a source of capital development” and “not as a form of inquiry.”18 He writes that “as much as contemporary art is invested in the promotion and showcasing of nonstandard, transdisciplinary, experimental, informal, and oppositional modes of knowledge production, research, archival work, philosophical speculation, and pedagogy,” it must inevitably feed the demand for “constantly updated knowledge products and educational commodities.”
In this reading, the imperative of consumption negates any purportedly critical or activist impulse. Despite his investment in critique, the sly phrase, “suggesting a consumerist rather than politically empowering experience,” allows him to reduce a globally distributed body of practices to the luster of commodity fetishism by mere insinuation. This easy rhetorical subordination of a vast swathe of practices to the master term of “cognitive capital” enables a cascade of suspicion. These suspicions open up to what seems his gravest concern: “Is the claim of art as a mode of knowledge production, and more precisely as an epistemic practice involved in a politics of knowledge, incompatible with a notion of aesthetic autonomy?”19
Each of these four critiques tends to gather undertakings of curating and art as knowledge somewhat reductively under one heading as one single phenomenon. It then allocates this unitary phenomenon its appropriate place within some mythic ordering of the world. Conservative aestheticism blandishes its commitment to the niceties of a separation of spheres: dinner in the dining room; art in the senses; knowledge within reason; and politics out there in the mess of the world. Art as knowledge as emancipation is an aggregation of category errors, quite simply putting things together that belong apart. As well, the champions of anti-academicization are invested in another separation of spheres: the precious dichotomy of art world and university, where the protocols of the art world’s reputational economy appear as natural law and the writing of footnotes and citations as the treacherous artifice of mere clerks who want to make art beholden to the wrong authority.
For the nouveaux fauves of anti-institutionalism (shapeshifting from artist-beasts to artist-priests), it is a matter of keeping the sacred mystery of “aesthetic incalculabilities” free from the secular contaminations of explanation, from the profanation that would make of art not enigma, not mystery, but only the empty transparency of mere understanding. For critical scribes such as Holert, who champion notions of “aesthetic autonomy” and authentic “politically empowering experiences,” it is most important to keep one’s thinking free from the devious ideological maneuverings and coopting pull of cognitive capitalism and the cunning forces of misrecognition that damn all those fools out there to their neoliberal conscription.
These four approaches to various projections of curating and art as knowledge practices are not at root operating the same discourse. However, although different, they each make use of an appeal to some form of appropriate separation between essentially different modes of practice. In the production of each position, there is a sorting operation that shores up properly artistic art and/or properly critical critique against other contaminating forces or agendas. Whether they are outright critics or advocates-with-critical-caveats, there is a common call to order at work in each case cited, a call that tries to locate a specific difference within the constitution of art through a form of foundational or criteria-setting move. We see this move made in four different ways, invoking respectively: the disinterestedness of the aesthetic; the absolutely open horizon of art contra the closures of academia; the uninstitutionable excess of “aesthetic incalculabilities”; and the tried and tested old reliables of “aesthetic autonomy” and properly critical art practice.
These foundational approaches typically lead to lines of argument that favor treating the wider distribution of curating and art as knowledge—not as a dispersed field of pluralities, but rather as a matter of some unitary essence, principle, foundational difference, or world-historical prescription. (After all, who could possibly doubt that we all live under the same global regime of cognitive capitalism?) However, given the fundamentally unsettled and contested status of accounts of “what-art-is,” of the nature of knowledge, and of current heterogeneous geopolitical and historical conditions, and given that many of these curatorial and artistic experiments announce themselves as interrogations of precisely these terms and conditions, it seems that we need to find different forms of address and styles of thinking to engage these knowledge claims on something of their own terms.
Is it possible to respond to the various specificities of these practices and frame a broad view of their field of differences, while not resorting to a general announcement or an over-arching creed of categorical differences and global conditions? Rather than summarily gathering all instances of curating and art that claim some agency as a form of knowledge, as one undifferentiated monolithic formation, perhaps they could be accorded their pluralities, their similarities, their differences, and perhaps even their incommensurabilities? How might such a perspective be formed? In what follows, I try to indicate just how such an approach might be possible and why it might be of consequence.
To begin with, let’s return to the opening observation with which this essay commenced. There exists a wide range of different artistic and curatorial practices that propose themselves as knowledge practices. These show some readily discernible patterns and recurrent devices that other commentators have already noted, including, for example, the widespread invocation of the figure of the archive. This includes practices such as the exhibition of archival holdings; the mobilization of archival formats as formats of display; the nominating of non-archives as archival entities; the speculative (re-)constitution of archives; and the making of new archives with respect to different artistic and curatorial practices and artist-led organizations.
Another recurrent concern is embodiment and the production and instantiation of knowledge through corporeal encounter and affective relays, rather than primarily or exclusively through the work of language and inscription. Paradoxically, this insistence on embodied knowledge is frequently rehearsed through an effusive discourse on the saliency of embodiment, situatedness, and the extra-linguistic. This regularly coincides with an interest in the possibility of transgenerational vectors of trauma and in practices of “care,” “reparation,” and “rememory.”
Often appearing in conjunction with these themes is the motif of collective process in knowledge-making. Sometimes this comes with a caveat that knowledge is not a thing—possessed or shared as an object—but rather a process or relation whereby a world is lived and not simply appropriated as possession or dominion, nor parsed as a text or a sign. Across this wide range of practices, there are the now-familiar invocations of decolonization—for some as metaphor, for others as existential horizon or as realpolitik. This is typically associated with practices of “aestheSis” and accompanying ideas of irreducibly different onto-epistemologies, worldings, and cosmologies.20
For some, these terms may seem an unnecessary mystification. For others, they are sharpened analytical tools that anatomize Western constructions of the aesthetic and of knowledge to disclose colonial violence as the determining ground for Western knowledges. Importantly, there are recurrent claims for curatorial and artistic practices as knowledge practices that break with the long arc of Eurocentric domination. The emancipatory promise is most often predicated on presenting these curatorial and artistic practices as breaking from the established regime of Eurocentric cultural domination and symbolic violence.
The wide distribution, repetition, and interaction of these themes is notable. However, in spite of these apparent commonalities, the different geopolitical contexts and the different conditions for these curatorial and artistic practices recommend that these are not approached as a generic set of formulaic conventions or as mere variations on a theme, but instead as a field of differences. Before proceeding, it is worth pausing to consider what is at stake or what motivates this kind of impulse to map relations across widely dispersed practices. To what end am I constructing this account of a field of differences across curatorial and artistic practices as knowledge practices? And from what vantage points am I attempting to do so?
This desire to produce an account of a wide field of practice or a state-of-the-art is not innocent. It is a process of sense-making that proceeds from situated agency and the ambition to make meaningful. I am a formally embedded educator and researcher, based in Western Sweden, employed by a public university and working in alliance with different constituencies and across different institutional dispensations regionally, nationally, and internationally. My working language is English. The topic connects with my threefold interest in: (i) artistic and curatorial knowledge practices that, in part, overlap with but remain irreducible to formal educational apparatuses; (ii) the potential continuities and discontinuities at work in the multi-unstable ecologies of contemporary knowledge practices; and (iii) the changing conditions and dynamics of emancipatory and internationalist cultural politics.21 This is also a matter of my wish to be part of wider communities of practice, and to participate in conversations and exchanges across curating, art, and education, which do not assume implicitly or explicitly that an exhibition is the epitome of curatorial practice.
My hope is that among the many different projects of curating and art as knowledge, there are some that can generate insights even without direct participation. I believe that some—even among those that centralize embodiment—can offer ways of thinking, ways of doing, that have a degree of dialogical translatability or mobile agency toward other locations, sites, and conditions. While there is a risk that this travelling capacity is merely coopted in an extractive mode by institutions, markets, and all manner of agents, this is not an inevitable or exhaustive outcome. My sense is that across some of these formations, there is a lively tension between those cultural political frameworks that come from the oppositional moments formed specifically within, and substantially determined by, Euro-Atlantic hegemonic cultures, and those that have been formed under different circumstances.
Rather than importing their protocols from, for example, US campus culture etiquette, some have been formed with respect to different histories of violence and via different constellations of resistance. (Here it may help to indicate such diverse platforms as Gudskul, Indonesia;22 Grupo Contrafilé, Brazil;23 The Question of Funding, Palestine;24 Harvest School, India;25 and the Institute of Radical Imagination, operating across several different countries.26) I am also motivated by a wish to contest some of what already circulates by way of claims for and against this field of difference, such as the four positions I have indicated above. I believe that the four approaches I indicated above misrecognize this field of difference by subordinating it to their preferred covering theories and rhetorical priorities, and most particularly because they do not give sufficient weight to differences of geopolitical positioning.
No doubt, for some it may seem somewhat tedious (indeed, merely academic) to quibble over different readings of the cultural politics of art and curating as knowledge work. However, over the months during which I have tried to reflect on these curatorial attempts to foster alternative knowledge practices, the typically contested arena of knowledge has become subject to profoundly intensified conflict in the US—an intensification that seems to greatly increase the stakes of these readings. There is a long history of knowledge conflict that includes ideological struggles to shape state education along axes of gender, race, class, nation, and language; the skewing of research agendas to prioritize political, military, and corporate interests; and the systematic attempts to subvert public knowledge (e.g., the tobacco lobby, the Mont Pelerin Society, and innumerable think tanks). We witness something that seems qualitatively different in the current assault on knowledge infrastructures and the concerted attacks on common understanding that emanate from the newly ensconced US version of neofascism.
Illustrative of the changing terms of engagement, it has now reached the point where research, funded wholly or in part by the US federal government, is subject to an audit for red-flag terms that trigger manual review. Such review carries the significant risk of having funding withdrawn.27 Researchers across all disciplines—arts, engineering, health, humanities, medicine, social sciences, technology—are reframing, distorting, and transforming their work to avoid falling into disfavor with a regime that has set itself to rewrite the history of US democracy, disavow human-caused climate crisis, and delegitimize race and gender as terms of social and political analysis, doing so in order to reverse the hard-won gains of organized labor, civil rights, and generations of feminist activism.
This new putsch seeks to reengineer the infrastructures of knowledge, becoming fully empowered instruments of ideological reproduction in service to oligarchic rentier capitalism. This battle is no longer shaped along the familiar contours of Kulturkampf or ideological struggle. In the US, it has become a moment of full-blown epistemic warfare, and as with all US wars, the theater of conflict reshapes international spaces far beyond US borders. Nonetheless, it remains important to not totalize US conditions and to acknowledge the multiple precedents for these conditions in the long arcs of colonial and postindependence regimes across the world.
In proposing that there has emerged a thoroughgoing systemic war on knowledge production, devastating research and education in the US, I am not proposing a diagnosis of contemporary global conditions. Rather, I am noting a changed horizon within the broad sphere of US cultural hegemony. The playbook unfolding there has related versions also rehearsed in Hungary, Slovakia, Turkey, India, and elsewhere with similar recurrent themes and effects, but again with important differences of geopolitical positioning. The joyful viciousness in destruction and devaluation of knowledge, the vicarious popular pleasure in the humiliation of all manner of researchers, scholars, and public servants amplified through social media and mass media, are intended to demean all who are not aligned with the populist strong man. Those who do not embrace the rule of billionaire oligarchs and celebrate the unbridled assault on difference and dissent are subject to increasingly imaginative and illegal actions to force them into submission, silence, penury, or exile.
Given the gilded crassness of the US regime, we might expect to see all manner of new, sophisticated aestheticisms emerge in response, as it may seem to some reasonable to appeal to patrician cultures of taste or l’art-pour-l’art as forms of critique and resistance. Under these circumstances, the conviviality of collective inquiry, the enlivening of conversational disagreement without the menace of threat or violence, and the sensing of worlds in common—all of which have been part of the rhetorical framing of many of these curatorial attempts at knowing otherwise—take on a new saliency.
I am not suggesting that we should uncritically endorse the desires and impulses of curators and artists who turn to knowledge work as an emancipatory practice. In the same manner that these emancipatory themes acquire a new saliency against neofascist horizons, the urgent critique of these practices also takes on a new prominence, as we must consider whether such forms of collective inquiry and curatorial knowledge can operate within divided and violently polarized societies. Can these practices do more than simply rehearse a nostalgia for liberalism’s public sphere with all its opaque, and not so opaque, exclusions? Or does the incubation of spaces of convivial dissent become a fundamental imperative in attempting to resist neofascism’s culture of enmity?
On this last question, I would like to return again to Holert’s book and his affirmative proposition in summoning his readers to action:
When knowledge has been disowned, corrupted, and displaced by the opacity of financial transactions, neoliberal market epistemology, platform capitalism, and right-wing populism’s denigration of truth, it is urgent to dislocate it once again, deploying the epistemic strategies developed by marginalized or disobedient thinkers and practitioners, schools, and collectives, making positive use of their relocations and redistributions in contemporary art’s epistemic engagements.28
It is important that Holert does not simply reaffirm the liberal credos of “free science,” “open knowledge,” and “public good” here. Instead, he proposes a further dislocation, a further redistribution of knowledge-power via learning from other sites and other conditions. However, there is an important caveat needed here, for to simply valorize “disobedience” and “marginality” as the indexes of authentically critical and politically emancipatory knowledge practices is to get distracted by the shimmer of oppositionality. These simple inversions of valuation—“so the last will be first, and the first last”—and invocations of “epistemic disobedience” (as per the Franceschini epigraph at the top of this essay) risk reproducing the dogmatism and dichotomous logics of social division that sustain the neofascist moment rather than proceeding by inquiry.
It is for this reason also that I am wary and distrustful of the claims made for curatorial and artistic knowledge practices to produce a radical break with some monolithic established system of knowledge-power (such as coloniality, Eurocentrism, Western science, Cartesian dualism, etc.). These rhetorical formulae, characterizing an overarching singular and cohesive system of knowledge, seem overblown and reductive in their own right. They shrink the space of dissent and inquiry by setting up one-dimensional accounts of the dominant knowledge culture as the foil for announcing difference, radicality, and the promise of emancipation.
Curating and art-making as knowledge practices seem to me to hold out the possibility of asking, “What is to be done?,” “What is to be known?,” and “What sense can be made here?”—and of asking these questions in the company of those already in disagreement with one another. In so doing, these curatorial and artistic practices can perhaps open many different joyful-painful paths of doing, knowing, and sensing otherwise. But such paths would seem not to be readily opened when we gather in the belief that we already know our position, we already know the enemy all too well, and that our collective desire to disobey need only be affirmed. To inquire and to come to know differently seem to be processes that risk our cherished images of self, other, and enemy by subjecting them to the transformative flux of thinking-doing with others. This, then, is a curatorial proposition of non-fascism rather than anti-fascism.29
NOTES
1. Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1978), 102.
2. Silvia Franceschini, “Translating lifeworlds: curatorial practice and epistemic justice,” Alliances, no. 1 (2021), unpaginated. https://urgentpedagogies.iaspis.se/translating-lifeworlds-curatorial-practice-and-epistemic-justice/.
3. The relation between art and knowledge, and the relation between the faculty of aesthetic judgment and the faculty of understanding, are complex themes already set in play within the classic discourse on taste, the fine arts, and the aesthetic among the precursors of the Kantian Critique of Judgment. Centuries downstream from these historical developments, there is a sense for many inheritors of the lexicon of the “fine arts” and aesthetics that “Science” as the cognitive practice par excellence sits in uneasy tension with “Art” as variously another way of knowing, or as a non-cognitive mode of apprehending the world. In contemporary analytical philosophy (if we can use such a term), there is an ongoing contest between cognitivists and non-cognitivists in the philosophical discourse of aesthetics where a version of this game is still in play. My point here is simply that there is a kind of residual afterimage of these older quandaries of the aesthetic and the understanding that surfaces as a suspicion that artmaking is constitutively and essentially different from any species of knowledge work.
4. See https://www.bakonline.org/. See also https://formerwest.org/Front.
5. See https://www.onassis.org/people/the-forest-curriculum. See also https://atlas.smartforests.net/en/radio/.
6. See https://www.museoreinasofia.es/en/museo-tentacular/red-conceptualismos-sur. See also https://redcsur.net/2020/11/26/escuchar-el-susurro/.
7. See Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh, “Oyindamola Fakeye: ‘Not Knowing Is Our Pedagogy’” ArtReview, 75:2, March (2023): 42-44. https://artreview.com/oyindamola-fakeye-not-knowing-is-our-pedagogy/.
8. See https://glossary.mg-lj.si/.
9. See https://www.artresearch.eu/.
10. See https://aaa.org.hk/.
11. Bisi Silva, “Creating Spaces for a Hundred Flowers to Bloom” in ÀSÌKÒ: On the Future of Artistic and Curatorial Pedagogies in Africa, (Lagos: CCA, 2017): xv.
12. See https://lcca.lv/en/about-lcca/.
13. See https://tranzit.org/en/about.
14. Lucy Cotter succinctly expresses this by asserting that “academic protocol[s] often drown out art’s sensibilities” within academic settings, while “claiming interest in art’s epistemological possibilities.” The academicization that is resisted here is not of quite the same nature as, for example, the academicization of the nineteenth-century French salons, when a tight system of formulae covering technique, genre, motif, and representational norms regulated artistic practice. Here the term “academic” indicates a kind of universal house style in knowledge work that is attributed to higher education in general. This contrast between “the academic” and “the properly artistic” is eminently amenable to mythic thinking and ideological figuration rather than requiring attentive description, close analysis, and reflexive problematization. In such an approach, the pluralities of latter-day conflicts of the faculties become somewhat ungenerously reduced to the only-ever-one “idea of the university.” See Lucy Cotter, “Reclaiming Artistic Research— First Thoughts…” in MaHKUscript: Journal of Fine Art Research, 2 (1) (2017): 1-6; and see also Lucy Cotter, “Research in a World on Fire” in her Reclaiming Artistic Research, 2nd Edition, (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 202X).
15. In the opening passages of her important essay, “Becoming Research,” Irit Rogoff describes research as being imagined as a “highly academic activity: consulting great tomes of knowledge, burrowing in dusty archives, interviewing certified actors in certain scenarios, conceptualizing experiments in a laboratory, or relying on expertise from elsewhere to give credibility to a claim.” Irit Rogoff, “Becoming Research” in The Curatorial in Parallax, eds. Song Sujong and Kim Seong Eun (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, 2018), 39. Other advocates of artistic and curatorial ways of knowing “otherwise” declare that the established practices of academia merely “homogenize different forms of knowledge so that they can fit the imperatives of particular disciplines” and consolidate “disciplines and existing modes of production and dissemination.” Pujita Guha and Abhijan Toto, “Notes Towards a Univers(e)ity Otherwise,” in Institution as Praxis: New Curatorial Directions for Collaborative Research, eds. Rito and Balaskas (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2020), 252.
16. In a very entertaining instance of this style argument, Silvia Henke, Dieter Mersch, Thomas Strässle, Jörg Wiesel, and Nicolaj van der Meul have argued that “Art is … a form of exceedance, of transgression and exaggeration into the non-decidable, the occupation of heterotopies as sites of impossibilities.” Manifesto of Artistic Research: A Defense Against Its Advocates (DIAPHANES, 2020), 52. They speak of “aesthetic incalculabilities” in these transcendent terms that would make even the most stout-hearted of old Eurocentric humanists blush.
17. Tom Holert, Knowledge Beside Itself: Contemporary Art’s Epistemic Politics (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2020).
18. Holert citing Steve Fuller, “Can Universities Solve the Problem of Knowledge in Society without Succumbing to the Knowledge Society?” Policy Futures in Education 1, no. 1 (2003): 106.
19. Holert, Knowledge Beside Itself, 184.
20. Walter Mignolo and Rolando Vazquez, along with many other authors, employ the term “aestheSis” as a critical refusal of the colonial ordering of the lifeworld, arguing that: “Decolonial aestheSis starts from the consciousness that the modern/colonial project has implied not only control of the economy, the political, and knowledge, but also control over the senses and perception. Modern aestheTics have played a key role in configuring a canon, a normativity that enabled the disdain and the rejection of other forms of aesthetic practices, or, more precisely, other forms of aestheSis, of sensing and perceiving. Decolonial aestheSis is an option that delivers a radical critique to modern, postmodern, and altermodern aestheTics and, simultaneously, contributes to making visible decolonial subjectivities at the confluence of popular practices of re-existence, artistic installations, theatrical and musical performances, literature and poetry, sculpture and other visual arts.” “Decolonial AestheSis: Colonial Wounds/Decolonial Healings,” Social Text, 2013. https://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/decolonial-aesthesis-colonial-woundsdecolonial-healings/. In a similar manner, other authors have proposed the terms “onto-epistemology,” “worlding,” and “cosmology” as ways of conceptualizing the plurality of lived worlds often in explicit contrast to what are seen as extractivist worldviews that posit the world as an inert standing reserve of lifeless material resource that can make no ethical demand upon human agents.
21. There are, of course, multiple strands knotted within my desire here, and in matters of desire, there is likely more blindness than insight. What I believe I seek is the possibility of doing and thinking elsewise in a way that has a bearing on my own approaches to knowledge work, collaborations, and teaching, and those of my immediate colleagues. I am also pursuing professional positioning, recognition, and affirmation as a peer among wider networks of colleagues who are curious about, and active within, some of these curatorial frameworks of art-as-knowledge.
22. https://gudskul.art/en/about/.
23. https://urgentpedagogies.iaspis.se/grupo-contrafile/.
24. https://thequestionoffunding.com/Home.
25. https://afield.org/person/dharmendra-prasad/.
26. https://instituteofradicalimagination.org/2017/11/15/institute-of-radical-imagination/.
27. See Carolyn Y. Johnson, Scott Dance and Joel Achenbach, “Here are the words putting science in the crosshairs of Trump’s orders,” The Washington Post, February 4, 2025, https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2025/02/04/national-science-foundation-trump-executive-orders-words/. See also Matt Novak “The List of Trump’s Forbidden Words That Will Get Your Paper Flagged at NSF,” in GIZMODO, 5 February 2025, https://gizmodo.com/the-list-of-trumps-forbidden-words-that-will-get-your-paper-flagged-at-nsf-2000559661.
28. Holert, Knowledge Beside Itself, 61.
29. See BAK, “Propositions for Non-Fascist Living,” https://www.bakonline.org/en/making+public/long+term+projects/propositions+for+non+fascist+living/.
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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).
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 • 7/1/25
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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
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Nina Liebenberg
Curating involves careful consideration of the following aspects: sensory material (a collection), concepts (an intention), context (both original and evolving), displacement (across time and geography), and visual and sensory strategies (metaphor, visual suggestion, analogy, and juxtaposition, to name a few). Through the format of exhibition-making, curating explores—especially—how the visual can be made to speak and celebrates the many ways in which it does. In an interdisciplinary sense, it creates a dynamic tension with knowledge production in other disciplines, where outcomes are primarily conveyed through verbal and textual means.
Hongjohn Lin
Curating encompasses the process of exhibition-making, functioning both as a professional practice and as a form of intellectual engagement. It requires managing the venue and infrastructure, communicating with artists, negotiating with institutions, selecting and classifying artworks, fostering knowledge production in art history and theory, and sometimes, securing funding. Curating is not tied to a fixed definition, as its practice adapts to the complexity of topics, media, and sociohistorical contexts, as well as the variability of participating authors and artists.
Henk Slager
At first glance, curating is seen as a scenographic activity, i.e., building a spatial constellation for encounters. But curating can also be understood as a way of thinking in terms of connections: linking objects, images, processes, people, and discourses. See Maria Lind, “The Curatorial” in Selected Maria Lind Writing (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010). And thus curating, as an entanglement of actors, is deeply involved in the politics of display, the politics of site, the politics of transfer, translation, and regimes of visibility.
Vipash Purichanont
Curating encompasses various acts within a single action. It involves selecting, assembling, listing, and displaying. My reference to “curating” does not strictly adhere to the contemporary art domain from which it may have originated, but rather to its broader application and understanding in everyday contexts since the 2010s. When I conducted research on the use of the term “curating” a decade ago, it was a glamorous term that content creators preferred to justify their selection, which, in return, framed them as connoisseurs. It was employed to differentiate and justify the outcome or a list of certain topics. If a list created by a blogger or YouTuber was “curated,” it would imply that a degree of research underpinned the selection—this is quite ironic, considering the art world always insisted that curating ought to be critical. Fast forward to today, the “curation” of Spotify playlists is conducted through algorithms, which, it seems, has historically been the product of thorough research as well. Global capitalism is pouring capital into training artificial intelligence so that it can curate content and information on our behalf (as our assistants?). Curating, as a human activity, too, is going to be replaced if it continues to be cognitive labor. Gone are the days that we need to make a list every time we go grocery shopping.
Mick Wilson
“Curating” enjoys extensive and diverse use. Nora Sternfeld and Luisa Ziaja, “What Comes After the Show? On Post- Representational Curating,” in From the World of Art Archive, ed. Saša Nabergoj and Dorothee Richter, Issue 14 (Zurich: On Curating, n.d.), 21–24.] The primary historical layers in the meaning of the term are the caring for a collection or an apparatus, the making of a public show or exhibition, and the mediation of cultural works. The Royal Society had a role in the 17th and 18th centuries for a “curator of experiments” who oversaw the safe-keeping of various apparatuses and also staged public demonstrations with these. Today, curating is used typically to indicate a broad spectrum of professional practices such as conceiving, selecting, producing, orchestrating, mediating, and actualizing occasions of artistic or other cultural works being made public. This “making public” includes many different possible formats such as publishing, exhibiting, and programming all manner of events, residencies, and platforms. “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 already twenty years ago that curating increasingly provides discursive resources for contemporary art to some extent displacing traditional art criticism. Gillick in conversation with Saskia Bos, indicated that criticism “has become either a thing of record, or a thing of speculation whereas the curatorial voice has become the parallel critical voice to the artist that contributes a parallel discourse.” [Saskia Bos “Towards a Scenario: Debate with Liam Gillick” in Bos et al (eds.), Modernity Today: Contributions to a topical artistic discourse, De Appel Reader, No. 1. (Amsterdam: De Appel, 2004): 74].
For the non-specialist, curating is, however, very strongly correlated with the idea of choice or selection for attention, connecting it to the image of “gatekeeping.” This is curating understood as the brokering of opportunity and validation. For specialists, the activities of curating have long since decentered—if not fully detached—from the caring for collections, the making of exhibitions, and the mediation of cultural materials.
Carolina Rito
Curating is the professional practice of organizing, planning, devising, and delivering an exhibition or a cultural program involving artifacts, artworks, conversations, talks, workshops, commissions, publications, screenings, and performances, among other cultural formats. Typically, the activity of curating entails the selection, conceptualization, and presentation of what is made public to an audience. The relationship between the display, its interpretation, reception, and communication is also an integral part of curating. This activity can be learned and improved. This definition was written as complementary to my definition of “the curatorial” in the Lexicon published on The Curatorial.
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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.
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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).
Exhibition / Exhibitionary
Exhibitions have changed their approach and function over time. They have not only reacted against the idea of a prescribed political or natural order of display, but they also have questioned their space as a privileged site of capitalist forms of representation.
By Multiple authors
Multiple authors • 7/1/25
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The Lexicon is an ongoing project begun by the international Curatorial Studies Workshop, which is part of the Expanded Artistic Research Network (EARN). The initial idea was to locate each member’s take on key terms often taken for granted in the curatorial field—such as curating, curatorial, exhibition, exhibitionary, representation, and so forth. We quickly discovered that as fundamental as these terms are, they didn’t carry the same meaning for each of us. The Lexicon stimulated a process of mutual understanding while forming a common ground for a cumulative, multi-perspective dialogue. It was an exercise focused not on finding the “most valid” argument, but on the cumulative—and, in a lot of ways, curatorial—juxtaposition built on the collective reflection and dialogue. For The Curatorial, we will continue to build on what we started, adding new definitions/propositions for terms over time to continue a dialogue that we hope will be beneficial and provocative for all those interested in the field and who appreciate the plasticity of meaning and experience so essential to the work we do. The Lexicon is, therefore, not intended to suggest or offer a clear and single definition for the terms proposed. Instead, it aims to generate a productive dialogue between definitions that can help map the variety of curatorial approaches, aesthetic imaginaries, and forms of practice. The Lexicon will stage this dialogue with monthly contributions from curators, artists, organizers, activists, academics, and critical thinkers.—Carolina Rito, Lexicon section editor
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Nina Liebenberg
We can define “exhibition” as an event varying in duration that is curated for an audience and includes the display of objects, text, audio-visual elements, and performances. As a format, it can function as a tool to facilitate inter/trans/cross-disciplinary engagements that promote multiple interpretations of single objects (loosening the taxonomic framework to which disciplinary objects and images are usually subjected).
In his catalogue essay for the exhibition Away from Home, held at the Wexner Center for the Arts (2003), the curator Jeffrey Kipnis calls an exhibition a “roundtrip,” positing that its basic form—home (a), away (b), back (a’)—finds its most fertile incarnation in the sonata of classical music. In a sonata, the exposition (a) introduces themes in the home key before departing. In the development (b), these themes undergo transformations across various keys, creating a sense of adventure. Key changes, or chromatic shifts, add color and render the material unfamiliar or strange. Finally, the recapitulation (a’) brings the themes back to the home key, altered yet familiar. An exhibition functions similarly. [See Jeffrey Kipnis, “Away from Home,” in Away from Home, ed. Annetta Massie (Columbus, OH: Wexner Center for the Arts, 2003), 40–41.]
Vipash Purichanont
An exhibition is a series of objects on display. It manifests a set of relations woven together with images, signs, discourse, and power. It is something brought forth to be looked at, to be walked into, to be experienced immersively. Unlike other display technologies, such as cinema (which requires the viewer to remain still while the images move), an exhibition requires the subject to move through a series of relations. It need not be housed in a confined space, as an exhibition possesses an internal quality that draws viewers in, acts on them, and participates in shaping perception and subjectivity.
It is also temporal. Even a museum’s “permanent exhibition” must eventually be rehung or rearranged. As a form of display, an exhibition rearranges its viewers as well as its objects; the process of viewing can initiate subjectivation, potentially altering one’s worldview.
Exhibitions are physical. Yet the rise of virtual reality and the metaverse has made exhibitions in virtual space possible. A third-person view, where the user sees their own avatar from an external perspective, exemplifies an exhibition’s power: it enables both observation and the control of a subject undergoing transformation.
Bige Örer
The definition of what constitutes an exhibition and what is contained within it is evolving, with many now seen as dynamic, participatory spaces where art, knowledge, and experience are shared and produced. While traditionally curated by a small group of experts, or a single curator, recent practices have shifted toward a more inclusive, audience-centered approach driven by collaboration, community engagement ,and social participation. Typically showcased in a gallery, museum, or a similar venue, exhibitions are increasingly occupying public and digital spaces, extending their global reach. Exhibitions have the potential to enrich public life by making culture, history, and creativity accessible to everyone, addressing pressing societal issues, fostering critical reflection, and inspiring new ideas.
Henk Slager
Until recently, the exhibition was primarily a dispositive, a unitary system of unambiguous “expression” or completed display, reflecting in its fixity the imagined self-sufficiency of the autonomous work of art that the exhibition is supposed to mediate. Over the past decade, a paradigm shift has taken place: exhibitions are now understood much more as platforms for knowledge-in-the-making than as static forms of dissemination. The exhibition has the potential to be a mode of research action.
Cătălin Gheorghe
An exhibition is commonly understood as a medium, a setting for artworks, or a statement. It is a display of artifacts, structures, ideas, and gestures in an organized way. The production and presentation of an exhibition are co-dependent on an institutional capacity or self-organized initiative, presented in a given space (i.e., museum, white cube, black box, public space, landscape), and to be received by different audiences.
Exhibitions have changed in approach and function over time. They have not only reacted against the idea of a prescribed political or natural order of display but also have questioned their space as a privileged site of capitalist forms of representation. In these conditions, the understanding of “exhibition” as predominantly a medium for displaying evocative manifestations of power would compromise the chances of seeing the exhibition as a process based on imaginative instances of criticism.
A radical use of the exhibition would be the transposition (as a trans[ex]position) of the actual political space and historical time of its event modeling, in Michel Foucault’s words, a relational heterotopia but also manifestations of heterocronia. The trans[ex]position of time and space would have the quality to intervene in multiple specific contexts creating different perspectives and unexpected situations. There would be different kinds of trans[ex]positions, from interventions based on hacking, to complex installations based on research. Opening new reflections on the potentiality of an exhibition, the trans[ex]position would make use of xeno-practices, redefining spaces of perception as xeno-spaces (as non-familiar spaces of thought and counteraction).
Hongjohn Lin
For any exhibition, we are always searching for something novel, original, or better yet, unprecedented. It is true that there is a plethora of exhibitions across diverse settings—museums, galleries, art fairs, community interventions, and biennials. Moreover, the expanding field of exhibitions is increasingly shifting from the physical to the virtual. Both spectators and art communities eagerly await the next event, just as social media feverishly fabricates fleeting memories of the latest spectacle—fifteen minutes of web fame, all too soon forgotten. We live in an era of hyper-metabolism of memory, where everything must go viral and fade rapidly, even faster than fashion trends. The more exhibitions proliferate, the less spectators seem able to recall what they have seen. This phenomenon promotes “exhibition amnesia,” an ideology that emphasizes the new while neglecting the past. Every new opening closes a door to what came before. The white cube, a dominant mode of exhibition display, symbolically ‘whitewashes’ memory, replacing it with interior installations surrounded by sterile drywalls. Exhibition spectatorship is driven by the demand for the novel, the immediate, and the up-to-the-minute, while past exhibitions serve only as references, easily becoming obsolete and forgotten. The genealogy of exhibitions reflects this shift, intertwined with the rise of modern museums in the 18th century and the development of capitalism, where the burgeoning bourgeoisie played a significant role in shaping museums as “public” spaces. As museums became more accessible, they began to reflect and reinforce the values and ideologies of emerging capitalist society, positioning exhibitions not only as new standardized displays but also as expressions of social relations mediated by capital.
Carolina Rito
An exhibition is a selected and curated presentation of objects in an institution of display or in an off-site where the display of artifacts is identified as an exhibition. It is typically curated by someone or a group of people and who are likely identified in the credits of the show as its curators.
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Nina Liebenberg
The exhibitionary relates to the power structures (mostly unseen) that accompany the making of and running of an exhibition or institution with an exhibition program. The “exhibitionary complex,” first introduced by Tony Bennett [“The Exhibitionary Complex,” New Formations, no. 4 (Spring 1988), 73–102], was revealed in practice through the work of artist-curators (such as Daniel Buren, Marcel Broodthaers, Hans Haacke, Andrea Fraser, and Fred Wilson) practicing institutional critique from the 1960s onward. Students in the curatorial program at the University of Cape Town, in which I taught for many years, engage with the exhibitionary by interrogating how the apartheid ideology influenced the categorization, storage, and display of the collections housed in the city’s museums and institutions. They are then asked to consider the task of local curators in relation to justice and restoration, latent collections and absence, as well as public vs. private space, along with ownership and agency.
The term “exhibitionary” refers to a system of protocols, institutions, and frameworks that shape how exhibitions are conceived, presented, and experienced. It highlights the often-unseen mechanisms behind these presentations, unfolding power relations, historical narratives, and institutional forces that determine what gets exhibited and how. In this sense, the exhibitionary is an invisible but pervasive structure that extends beyond institutional spaces, influencing everyday life, affecting how people understand and engage with the world around them. By challenging traditional power dynamics, the exhibitionary fosters collaboration and co-creation while questioning established norms. It reflects and shapes cultural practices in an ongoing cycle of reinterpretation and critique.
Henk Slager
In the current paradigm, new forms of interaction (collaboration, co-production, current visual technologies), and transgressive practices (crossovers between the different topologies of visual and performative art, oscillations between various epistemic registers) are taking place. Such modes of meaning-making require more dynamic and expanded exhibition formats, such as archives, community-based projects, concept exhibitions, meeting spaces, and interventions in the public space. See, for example, Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995).
Cătălin Gheorghe
The exhibitionary apparatus generates certain perceptions of its intentions that often obscure its actual political privileges. It seeks to influence beliefs, reasons, and behaviors; and its rationale and modus operandi are ordering discourses that mask its power structure. These are consequences of its paradoxical presence, acting from a political distance but speaking in full proximity to the audience. In this way, its dominant normative views are mediated through direct concrete displays that, in effect, regulate its viewers’ perceptions. This only underscores the fact that its constitutive colonial derivation inflects it with a deeply negative political condition of hierarchical power.
Even if the exhibitionary moment seems to be not only ideological but also epistemologically compromised, there are substituent chances to overcome institutional conspiracies. Imagining a new, even radical, exhibitionary (social) design that would presuppose the use of present exhibition infrastructures to mediate reformations and reparations, or even revolutionary formulations against the reproduction of the exhibitionary’s underlying privileges.
Hongjohn Lin
In contrast to conventional exhibitions housed in the white cube, the "exhibitionary" moves beyond the gallery ideology, expanding into new forms of public engagement through screenings, performances, experiments, talks, and gatherings. These participatory actions reveal how the gallery ideology is constructed and how (art) histories are generated. The exhibitionary, in short, exposes the backstage mechanisms through which realities are shaped. By reconfiguring the dynamics between acting and enactment, the exhibitionary denaturalizes traditional exhibition formats. The conventional roles of artist, spectator, and curator are rewritten, disrupting the symbolic order to reveal how exhibitions construct reality. This approach aligns with various contemporary curatorial practices, including institutional critique, performativity, criticality, the educational turn, and the expanded field of exhibition-making.
Carolina Rito
The exhibitionary is the network of protocols and regimes (material, conceptual, epistemic, institutional, etc.) through which exhibitions are seen, conceptualized, and signified. Despite being mainly invisible, the exhibitionary is made manifest in very concrete forms. An exhibition’s arrangement of objects and discourse can be understood as the manifested artifact of the exhibitionary. In other words, and similar to Michel Foucault’s notion of “episteme,” the exhibitionary is a regime of intelligibility that pertains to displays as historical constructs. We can say that the defining frame of an exhibition is always a subset of the exhibitionary, which cannot be contained or even provide a totalizing view. Simply, the exhibitionary is the apparatus through which exhibitions surface or are made to surface. Instead, it is larger than the sum of its parts, in a cycle of constant evolution and transforming norms. As Keller Easterling has written about infrastructure, it can be said as well about the exhibitionary that it “is too big and not at one and the same place. It cannot be addressed through its shape or outline, but rather via its disposition—potentials unfolding in time and territory.” The exhibitionary depends on its activation in order to make sense.
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Nina Liebenberg is a South African curator, currently conducting her post-doctoral research at the University of the Arts, Helsinki. Before moving to Finland, Liebenberg spent the last ten years working at the University of Cape Town’s Centre for Curating the Archive, convening a selection of courses for its curatorial program. She uses curation as methodology to explore various overlaps and connections between diverse university departments, drawing on their disciplinary objects collections to curate exhibitions that surface uncanny cross-disciplinary connections and extend the meaning of how these materials are understood in their host departments. She is a member of the Curatorial Studies Workshop, part of the Expanded Artistic Research Network (EARN).
Henk Slager’s focus has been on research and visual art for the last twenty years. He was a Lecturer at De Appel Curatorial Program (1995-2020), Visiting Professor of Artistic Research (Uniarts Helsinki 2010-2015, 2024-), and Dean of MaHKU Utrecht Graduate School of Visual Art and Design (HKU Utrecht 2003-2018). He is currently working for the same school on the development of a practice-based doctoral program. Slager co-initiated the European Artistic Research Network (EARN), a network investigating the consequences of artistic research for current art education through symposia, expert meetings, and presentations. Departing from a similar focus on artistic research he published The Pleasure of Research, an overview of curatorial research projects (a.o. Shanghai Biennale, 2008; Tbilisi Triennial, 2012; Aesthetic Jam Taipei Biennial, 2014; 5th Guangzhou Triennial, 2015; Research Pavilion Venice, 2015-2019; and 9th Bucharest Biennale, 2020). A follow-up publication will be presented in 2025. Slager is currently co-convening the 6th Asia Triennial Manchester (2025).
Cătălin Gheorghe is a theoretician, curator, editor, and Professor of Curatorial Research and Practices at “George Enescu” National University of the Arts in Iași, Romania. He is the editor of Vector Publications, including the recent volumes Learning by curating. Current trajectories in critical curatorial research (2022) and Exhibitionary Acts of Political Imagination, co-edited with Mick Wilson (2021). He is also the curator of Vector Studio, a platform for critical research and art production based on the understanding of art as experimental journalism. He is a member of the Curatorial Studies Workshop, part of the Expanded Artistic Research Network (EARN).
Hongjohn Lin is an artist, curator, and Professor at Taipei National University of the Arts, holding a PhD in Arts and Humanities from New York University. His notable exhibitions include the Taipei Biennial (2004, 2012), Asian Manchester Triennial (2008), and Guangzhou Triennial (2015). Lin curated the Taiwan Pavilion’s Atopia at the Venice Biennial (2007) and co-curated the Taipei Biennial with Tirdad Zolghadr (2010). He authored introductions for the Chinese editions of Art Power (Boris Groys) and Artificial Hells (Claire Bishop), and his publications include Poetics of Curating (2018). Lin is the founding editor of Curatography and is currently curating Asian Manchester Triennial 2025. He is a member of the Curatorial Studies Workshop, part of the Expanded Artistic Research Network (EARN).
Carolina Rito is Professor of Creative Practice Research at the Research Centre for Arts, Memory, and Communities, Coventry University, UK. She is a researcher and curator whose work is situated at the intersection of knowledge production, the curatorial, and contested historical narratives. Rito is an Executive Board Member of the Midlands Higher Education & Culture Forum and a Research Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary History (IHC), Universidade Nova de Lisboa. She has served as the Executive Editor of The Contemporary Journal and has published in international journals such as King’s Review, Mousse Magazine, Wrong Wrong, and The Curatorial. From 2017 to 2019, Rito was Head of Public Programs and Research at Nottingham Contemporary, leading the partnership with Nottingham Trent University and the University of Nottingham. She holds a PhD in Curatorial/Knowledge from Goldsmiths, University of London, where she also taught from 2014 to 2016. She lectures internationally—in Europe, South America, and the Middle East—on her research and curatorial studies. She is a member of the Curatorial Studies Workshop, part of the Expanded Artistic Research Network (EARN).