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.

Mick Wilson • 7/15/25

• Abstract

  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/.

---

• About Mick Wilson

  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).

Download PDF

An Enfolding: The Exhibitionary Complex and the Self

Steven Henry Madoff • 4/9/25

• Abstract

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

  This essay reflects on the role and agency of curatorial work through the lens of personal and collective introspection, invoking a memory of the poet William Everson, who used silence and vulnerability to express profound human struggle. It argues that curatorial practice embodies a complex interplay between institutional power, the so-called “exhibitionary complex,” and acts of curatorial care that foster individual growth through what the author calls “elaboration.” Ideas concerning the self are essential to this argument. This turn to individuality as distinct from exhibitionary quantification not only addresses viewers but also curators themselves. Drawing on theorists such as Tony Bennett, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Karl Marx, the text advocates for a curatorial ethics that takes into account these notions of selfhood toward activism in the face of dominant power structures.

I begin with a memory. Around 1980, the American poet first known as Brother Antoninus, and then as William Everson when he left the Dominican brotherhood, came to my school to give a reading. Everson was dying of Parkinson’s. He came to the podium, and then he did something unexpected. He walked out in front of it and stood with his right arm extended, shaking uncontrollably. He didn’t say a word. He just let his ravaged arm quake in the air as he stared at us. It must have been thirty seconds, though it felt terribly longer. Without saying a word, he returned to the podium and read his poems. When he died, I thought of that sign of embattled life held up to his audience as foretaste, resistance, resignation, an aperture opening onto grief. This came to me again the other day amid more news of the devastations of war, and the obvious occurred to me that so few people even have the chance that Everson did so long ago to express their disastrous sense of loss, the briefest sign of mortal contestation.

I come to this now in thinking about curating’s agency, who it addresses, and the ways in which it produces knowledge: knowledge as production, expansion, beneficence, as a collaborative mode of being, as a perceived and enacted form of care since that’s so often spoken of.

To begin this way is meant only to say that what it is to be human, have empathy, produce knowledge, to understand strife and disaster—as well as to experience generosity—redound to the curatorial in its broadest sense and its most practical one of offering frameworks for making, knowing, and feeling into which we pour forms of labor whose mechanisms and protocols are intricate while encompassing all the complications of life.

As with all labor, the work of curators involves infrastructures that support its systemic flows of production and reception, some visible and much of it, like the mechanisms of all machines, not apparent to the eye. The parsing of infrastructure in the case of curatorial work reaches back to Tony Bennett—the late Australian art historian and theorist who coined the term “exhibitionary complex”—and offers a now standard understanding of this work within a larger system that includes the history of museums and their relationship to nationalist power structures. Particularly, he’s speaking of the ways in which cultural institutions metabolize nation-state ideologies and maintain those power structures, with museums mirroring and amplifying ideological positions that further entrench social orders. It isn’t much of a leap, then, to return to where I began in relating mortality to the apparatus of the exhibitionary complex in which curatorial labor resides, as Bennett writes:

The space of representation constituted in the relations between the disciplinary knowledges deployed within the exhibitionary complex thus permitted the construction of a temporally organized order of things and peoples. Moreover, that order was a totalizing one, metonymically encompassing all things and all peoples in their interactions through time. And an order which organized the implied public—the white citizenries of the imperialist powers—into a unity, representationally effacing divisions within the body politic in constructing a “we” conceived as the realization, and therefore just beneficiaries, of the processes of evolution and identified as a unity in opposition to the primitive otherness of conquered peoples.1

Bennett contends that by the nineteenth century, exhibitions became ever-more pliable in serving the “hegemonic strategies of different national bourgeoisies. They made the order of things dynamic, mobilizing it strategically in relation to the more immediate ideological and political exigencies of the particular moment.”2 His thinking rises from Michel Foucault’s writings concerning institutions, power, and governmentality, particularly Discipline and Punish, though it’s all the more (and sadly) apropos of what’s weighing on us now as deaths mount in conflagrations and authoritarian regimes rage and flourish. Bennett’s ideas are foregrounded by Foucault’s notions of biopower, in which he concerns himself with technologies of the self and governmental power over life. Yet in Bennett’s thinking about the exhibitionary, it’s worth considering another avenue in Foucault’s thought, his discussion of the dispositif, or in English, the “apparatus.” Let me quote Foucault from a passage cited in Giorgio Agamben’s essay about him in this regard, “What Is an Apparatus?” Foucault states:

What I'm trying to single out with this term is, first and foremost, a thoroughly heterogeneous set consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral, and philanthropic propositions—in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the apparatus. The apparatus itself is the network that can be established between these elements. [...] The apparatus is precisely this: a set of strategies of the relations of forces supporting, and supported by, certain types of knowledge.3

As an apparatus, the exhibitionary complex can be understood as an imperialist model of expansionism, a dispositif deploying corporate mechanisms of manipulation, control, and profit; an apparatus defined earlier by Marx in his Grundrisse, with its full English title being Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy, written over the course of the winter of 1857–58. In a passage known as “Fragment on Machines,” Marx writes:

Once adopted into the production process of capital, the means of labor passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the machine, or rather, an automatic system of machinery (system of machinery: the automatic one is merely its most complete, most adequate form, and alone transforms machinery into a system), set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages.4

This moving power that moves itself presents a way to think about the exhibitionary complex, or apparatus, when considering the ecology of the art world and how curating moves within it. But this immediately raises a quandary. On the one hand, thinking critically about the exhibitionary complex invokes a critique of power, of imperialism and expansionism, and today we have to add neoliberalist capitalism and its extractivist methods as part of the critique in order to envision ways of subverting and overcoming this moving power that moves itself. The challenge is to acknowledge that our curatorial means for doing this still live within the machine, within the orbit of its centrifugal ambitions, while also recognizing a difference fundamental to what the curatorial is and gives it its significance, its strength as an encompassing activity, its pleasures and its power.

Bennett spoke of the supra-national mission of self-interested imperialist “improvement,” as he put it, in the historical institutionalization of power that shadows the exhibitionary complex. “Improvement” here has the troubling toll of acquisition by any means, and then of manipulation, exclusion and revisionism, suppression and oppression, nuanced or brutal forms of control. Artistic and curatorial knowledge production are of a different stripe both in terms of what improvement and expansion invoke: the more of knowledge and its disciplines—history, sociology, anthropology, economics, linguistics, the hard sciences, knowledge about specific industries and their processes and products, religions and spirituality, theories of race, of pedagogy, studies of climate change, local and global studies of populations, of contemporary technologies such as AI—the breadth is endless, tentacular, deep. And why not?

These are differences that can’t be ignored if we’re to understand most clearly what the ambitions come to mean when we lay out the landscape of the exhibitionary today. Two kinds of expansionism are at play, the regimes of dominant power as they filter into cultural institutions and curatorial practices and the inexhaustible practices of research and knowledge production for audiences toward their individual and collective intellectual and empathic expansion. So: on the one hand, the exhibitionary automaton; on the other, exhibitionary care. On the one hand, curatorial work within the shadow of power; on the other, what we know also exists locally and globally: not cultural institutions that bow to power, but those that speak to it. Curatorial activism can right the long tilt of entrenched prejudicial determinations of what can be collected, displayed, analyzed, and fitted to posterity. This, too, is expansion, but, as I say, of a different kind: exhuming, revivifying, reframing, reconsidering, and puncturing the brackets of power.

These acts are congruent (in a sense not so fanciful) with Everson’s arm shaking in front of us to propose that there is no one way to act in the face of terrible things, in what can be done and remembered as a counterforce of activist being. Which is to say, not merely, in Marx’s words, workers “merely as conscious linkages,” but laborers in the fields of cultural production who aren’t simply linkages within the automaton but willfully autonomous workers moving toward other ends.

A way to think about this is to upend an unspoken assumption when we speak of the exhibitionary complex’s many parts, and that’s to move away from mathematical thinking, from thinking primarily in terms of quantities, of numerousness and aggregation, of a monolithic totality. Instead, it’s crucial to remember who all of these institutions are intended for and are dependent on for their own survival. And that’s to speak of individuals, of viewers as self-moving cognitive workers of reception whose motivation is toward internal growth. This sensory, cognitive “I” has been lost sight of in the quantification of the apparatus and its form of expansionism linked to imperialist/capitalist power.

In writing this, I’m not speaking of each viewer’s formation in the act of entering the special zone of attention we call a museum, a Kunsthalle, a gallery. I’m speaking of elaboration as a process that each “I” may undergo. In the cognitive crucible of being in the world, there is no “we” without a preceding “I,” primary before gathered, self-centric in relation to the whole in the constant avalanche of sluiced reciprocities between self and world—“self,” a construct of presence and reminiscence simultaneously presenting the mind to itself and to the world as representational reflection. And so it is for each self in experiencing an exhibition for which the curatorial task, in its most atomized remit, is essentially and crucially, a form of care that’s addressed not to the roar of the crowd but to the murmur of individual selfhood, personhood. Of course, people do go to exhibitions for sheer amusement, and a capitalist pressure on cultural institutions is to amuse their publics, to enter into a competitive stream of visual moments that captures the thrilled transience of contemporary attention.

But here, if we’re to think of the curatorial task of care as an elaboration of the self that deepens and surprises, encouraging the viewer to leave an exhibition incrementally changed, it’s to elaborate this elaboration and say that it not only magnifies the grain of each viewer’s comprehension but also brings a new transparency to comprehension, a clarity that makes plain. This aspiration is enfolded in the curatorial act that creates an eventfulness for the self, understanding each viewer as a self-moving mover autonomous in introspection and not merely a matter of the automaton’s massification or solely owned by Bennett’s description of a relentless exhibitionary imperialist expansionism.

An irony of our moment is the aporia within the art world that swoons in its dance with capitalism while crowing about freedom and autonomy, celebrating an antique idea of Romantic genius while counting numbers at the museum gate, the biennial gate, the festival gate, the gallery and the auction house. Yet if this elaboration of each self is possible, it’s also possible to argue for introspection and communion as curatorial levers to wedge open and revise institutionalism: not a remaking of the exhibitionary complex if we’re to be realistic, but another vision of what a complex of artistic and curatorial practices could be alongside it.

The Jakarta-based artists’ collective ruangrupa helped us envision this in their collection of collectives for Documenta 15 in 2022. Their invocation of the Indonesian lumbung—the communal rice barn, or gathering house, in which folks join the tumult, negotiation, and collaboration among selves toward a broader kinship. It could be that the very idea of “system” itself, so dear to the exhibitionary complex, might be loosened by the casual convening of an alter-complex in which the felt presence of artistic and curatorial practices articulates a greater valence of personhood over quantifications bracketed by capitalist strictures. Even before the example of ruangrupa, these ideas about cultivating selves individually and in collaboration were approached by Maria Lind when she transformed the Tensta konsthall, from 2011 to 2018, into a center that sought to service the immigrant community on the outskirts of Stockholm, offering them ways to consolidate their fellow-being in an otherwise indifferent Swedish society.

And it occurs to me that this artistic and curatorial inclination toward seeing and recognizing the presentness of individuals has been on my mind for a long time. In December 2010, I published an essay in Artforum titled “Service Aesthetics” in which I differentiated a kind of artistic practice from what Nicolas Bourriaud famously laid out in his 1998 book Relational Aesthetics. I argued that various artists since the 1960s specifically practiced an art not of relations to a generalized audience but of individual address, inviting single people, one at a time, to enter a space with them for a meal, a conversation, even a confrontation.5 And, of course, it’s in 1964 that Susan Sontag writes her essay “Against Interpretation” that concludes with her edict: “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”6

I extrapolate that here to say that we need to honor the individual self in pulling it free from the monolith of the exhibitionary apparatus and its regulated systems in order to recognize not only that it’s the individual viewer we always need to acknowledge at the center but that there is, in this sensorial foliation for the viewer and for viewers in communion, a feeling labor in the act of curating that lives alongside the analytical, the research-based, the professionalized practices—the embodiment of a curatorial erotics for the curator, as obvious yet unsaid as this generally is—and in this way, a still more encompassing consideration within the exhibitionary complex of selfhood.

But how to think about this move, this gesture toward selfhood in curatorial care first toward viewers and then toward curators themselves? After all, what I’ve been pointing to is introspection, an inwardness that expands personal meaningfulness, personal being. This brings me back to Foucault by way of another philosopher, Judith Butler. Toward the end of her book Giving an Account of Oneself, she’s trying to untie the knot of Foucault’s thinking about the self and particularly his own self in his final years. In the process, she touches on Foucault’s analysis of the act of confession, and she notes that confession as a public manifestation of the self requires what she calls “a certain performative production of the subject” [...] that “constitutes the aim of confession itself.”

In confessing, Butler writes, “the manifestation of the self dissolves its inwardness and reconstitutes it in its externality.” So, she continues, for Foucault, “In this sense, manifestation does not ‘express’ a self but takes its place, and it accomplishes that substitution through an inversion of the particular self into an outward appearance,” which she also characterizes as a “publicized mode of appearance.”7 Yet that doesn’t mean the self is only identified as an object. It means that the self is a subject for itself and with others. This “mode of reflexivity,” as Butler calls it, is an ethical practice that the self needs in order to conserve itself in the face of external pressures. That’s to say, the self needs to maintain introspection, which is a form of self-sufficiency, precisely in order to avoid becoming that Marxian mereness of workers regulated by external powers.8

Those questions are pressing here as well. As I’m assuming, again, that the self stepping across the threshold of the experiential space of an exhibition is there to contemplate a work of art, a room of artworks, an exhibition of works, ready for the exhibition’s haptic, sensual, cognitive, and ruminative pathways to unfold in the name of elaboration, and that the encounter, query, and care for the self figure into the implicit struggle, the unsaid and the said, between subject and object, in keeping with Foucault’s notion of the apparatus as a “relation of forces.”

So, Foucault asked, “How might and must one appear?” And Butler comments: “If I ask, ‘Who might I be for myself?’ I must also ask, ‘What place is there for an “I” in the discursive regime in which I live?’ and ‘What modes of attending to the self have been established as the ones in which I might engage?’.”9 If we can continue to claim that the self stepping across the threshold of an exhibition is there to contemplate the works for elaboration, that the exhibition’s haptic, sensual, cognitive, and ruminative pathways unfold in the name of elaboration, then Foucault’s notion of the dispositif, of the apparatus, as a “relation of forces,” can be reframed by the curatorial remit of care—particularly as a trajectory for the self in a mode of reflexivity that welcomes the conversion from inward to outward, first individually, then collectively.

Even with the production of the subject that Butler describes, proposing this outwardness of individual being in the confessional mode, there remains the sturdiness and luminous possibility that the self maintains its sufficiency in contrast to the operation of confession that always fixes the self within regulatory social and religious strictures. All of this is to say that the oscillation between individual being and collective being imposes an urgency on curatorial care to dance between the cultivation of individual being, the possibility of collective growth, and an acknowledgment that the strictures of power are real and present. The enunciation of curatorial care toward the conservation of the self and the encouragement of agency must inevitably take those limitations into account. As Butler says, the subject “is always made in part from something else that is not itself—a history, an unconscious, a set of structures, the history of reason—which gives the lie to its self-grounded pretensions.”10

Still, there’s the calling out, the invitation to each self-attending self, the viewer going toward the work in order to enter into introspection, and here the curatorial gesture is a kindred expression of selfhood, just as Butler proposes: “I give an account of myself to you. Furthermore, the scene of address, what we might call the rhetorical condition for responsibility, means that while I am engaging in a reflexive activity, thinking about and reconstructing myself, I am also speaking to you and thus elaborating a relation to an other in language as I go.”11

It’s as if, in the same slow accretion of time and light, each viewer’s sedimented life can both deepen and extrude feelings through what comes to be known in the sensual and cognitive experience of viewing things. We’re all drawn into the narrative of an exhibition, seduced (if it’s any good), offered the pleasures of agreement or challenge, animation, respite, or even the pleasure to reject. (And for the curator, of course, pleasure includes the optical, spatial, and haptic aspects of exhibition-making.) For a moment, this narrative enters each of us, pulls us into the swell of images and objects that become elements in constellations of ideas. Naturally, the edges of pleasure and its depth, its placement within feeling, are unpredictable and personal, as is its duration.

But then what? What is taken in further, metabolized, if this pleasure lasts more than a moment, enters not only the inner world of the self but also the economies of distribution (memory, discussion, reaction, criticality, writing, broadcast), the address to what Franco Bifo Berardi calls “solidary bodies,” bodies accounting for one another. Naturally, this is toward community—an aggregation, a matter of numbers again—but also, I’ll argue, toward the singularity of positioning my “I” in relation to others. That is intrinsic to the viewer’s pleasure and the curator’s responsibility.

This orchestration of selves, of curator and each self brought into its care, is a politics of linkage, transfer, and affiliation in an aspiration for kinship—and it isn’t without a cost. If, in some deeper sense, every curatorial project is also a kind of confession, an exposure and divulging for the public that is its purpose for being, then it’s also a matter of both joy and taxing work, a weight and unburdening that is, at times, trying. The curator’s unknowing toward knowing, that path broken out and broken open, that responsibility, ethics, politics of self toward others, that imagining of a way alongside the automaton, comes with the question Foucault asks: “How much does it cost the subject to tell the truth about itself?”12

But no one asks this of the curator, what the toll of the task is, only the outcome, the surface glint. No one remarks about curatorial labor in the way that Butler observes in response to Foucault’s question: “Our capacity to reflect upon ourselves, to tell the truth about ourselves, is correspondingly limited by what the discourse, the regime, cannot allow into speakability.” So, she remarks, “We must recognize that ethics requires us to risk ourselves precisely at moments of unknowingness, when what forms us diverges from what lies before us, when our willingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance.”13

What’s at stake for both the curator and the viewer is the dilation of the self that comes with inventing narratives that disorder the scaffolding of unquestioned truths, finding in the path of unknowing the chances of knowledge, and, in our case, marking the risk and promise of the curatorial chance. In the pastoral sense of responsibility for others and for oneself, curatorial work moves from the internal labor of conceptualization, the path of unknowing, to the outward, confessional divulgence that is the exhibition (or any other form of curatorial project) produced in the name of caring and knowing—whatever that knowing is toward: justice, the subversion of givens, the release of beauty into the world, the realization that there is another way to look, understand, react, determine, be, the sense of the proximity to truth.

Let me be quick to add that issues-based exhibitions aren’t the only ones to be made or are made. The exhibitionary complex lies along a continuum of political geographies, some more punitively restrictive than others. What is allowed into speakability and what is not, driven by ideologies and economics, advance different breadths of curatorial thought and production. How to define entertainment and how to calibrate pleasure are operations that live within the constraints of discourses and regimes. Yet those pleasures of looking, of beauty, visual surprise, mystery, the hint of what is being left in the shadows of the mind to imagine, the delicacy of a thing, the leavened flight of what artistic practice can unleash, all of this remains germane to sustaining the self as the curator lays out the table of our visual and intellectual repass, conceptualizing and presenting what entertains, what stirs, what disturbs. This work, in the account of feeling and knowing, of recognition of self and selves, in the responsibilities of transmission and affiliation with the goal of what Donna Haraway calls “making kin,”14 is the curatorial task sensually, intellectually, politically, imaginatively, and practically—the broadest and most specifically planned and executed task of exhibitionary care, which is both speculum and speculation, mirror and window.

This is a way through or alongside the monolith of the automaton. The will of the curator and the will of each viewer, which is to say the position of the self in and toward the world, are to be acknowledged, to be de-algorithmicized; an erotics of exhibition-making calling to each of us, and each of us answering as we need to, as we can.

NOTES

1. Tony Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex,” New Formations, no. 4 (Spring 1988): 92.
2. Bennett, “Exhibitionary Complex,” 93.
3. Giorgio Agamben, What Is an Apparatus and Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 2.
4. Karl Marx, Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Penguin Books, 1973), 620.
5. Steven Henry Madoff, “Service Aesthetics,” Artforum 47, no. 1 (September 2008): 165-169.
6. Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), 14.
7. Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 113-114.
8. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 114.
9. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 114.
10. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 116.
11. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 50.
12. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 120.
13. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 121, 136.
14. Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).

---

• About Steven Henry Madoff

  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, The Power of the Unseparate: Network Aesthetics and the Rise of Interdisciplinary Art, 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.

Download PDF

The Curatorial: From Epistemic Capacities to Curatorial Research

Carolina Rito • 2/1/25

• Abstract

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

  This essay examines curatorial research as a critical epistemological practice intersecting artistic research, curatorial methodology, and critical theory. Drawing on the work of Irit Rogoff, Maria Lind, and others, it explores how curatorial research operates beyond traditional exhibition-making, emphasizing processes of exposure, relational assemblages, and speculative inquiry. The essay argues that curatorial research resists conclusive answers by prioritizing exploration, dynamic inquiry, and audience participation, offering a transformative approach to cultural knowledge production and critical engagement.

Much ink has been spilled over the last twenty years concerning the specific characteristics and relevance of artistic research. To cite just a few examples: the work of Tom Holert on conceptualizing artistic research as an agent of neoliberal politics, the editorial texts of the Journal of Artistic Research, the numerous events exploring the subject (including the annual conferences of the Society for Artistic Research and the European Artistic Research Network), and the many doctoral programs in artistic research that continue to proliferate around the world.1 However, much has been said, experts question the degree of novelty that seems to animate these conversations, seeing that some of the questions raised appear to ignore the fact that artistic research has been around at least since the 1990s, if we consider the first PhDs in the field. A much longer history could be traced back at least to the nineteenth-century debates about science and art in their particular forms of knowledge production.

I agree with the critique of the relentless sense of novelty in these discussions and the perpetual start-from-scratch tone of most conversations about artistic research. Still, I would like to argue that the same cannot be said about the bourgeoning field of curatorial research, which, like artistic research, is conducted through the means of practice, but this time curatorially. Often confused with the curation of research exhibitions, curatorial research is the process by which curatorial formats are used to articulate questions, advance investigations, and provide new insights into the subject matter to which they are applied. Although curatorial research is far from being the new kid on the block, it is fair to say that it has never attracted the same kind of attention as artistic research. This lack of attention is evident both in the nature of the debates and, most fundamentally, in the lack of resources devoted to supporting and enabling these investigative practices. In what follows, I will discuss some of the reasons that have led to the lack of resources for curatorial research, and I will trace some of the prominent references in this debate. Most importantly, I would like to suggest a few ideas to frame the epistemic qualities of curatorial research.

Before outlining some of the contributions and specifics of curatorial research, it is important to acknowledge that, for some of the scholars who have engaged in these debates, the curatorial is a field that benefits from being left without a clear definition so that its practice, together with its needs and urgencies, determines its behavior and how it manifests itself. And while I agree with the principle of letting practice determine the direction of the field, I am also wary of the lack of a clearer framework, which has arguably limited the development of curatorial research in both the cultural and academic fields. These drawbacks include, for example, the lack of recognition of the field in research funding, in doctoral programs in practice studies, and in curatorial programming in cultural institutions, where research is usually limited to the domain of exploring the museum’s collection.

As I have noted above, curatorial research has often been confused with the curation of exhibitions in which the results of a research process are displayed and shared with a wider audience. This is what I would call a research exhibition. Research exhibitions can be the result of an investigation in any field and discipline, from the arts and humanities to the sciences, and are organized to display and represent the results, interpretations, and findings. More than occasionally, this is taken to simply signify exhibitions that involve some degree of research in their preparation—which is arguably always the case, since a curatorial process typically involves the exploration of a wide range of ideas and artifacts toward the ultimate selection to present.

Another common misconception is that curatorial research is the result of a thematic exhibition, where a theme is represented by the objects/artifacts/documents on display. This is often the case in the arts, where artworks are brought together to represent an idea, concept, or argument. A simple example would be an exhibition exploring the impact of climate change on the planet, with the presentation of artworks representing natural disasters such as floods, droughts, and the displacement of peoples and species caused by CO2 emissions into the atmosphere.

What I want to explore is curatorial research, not as a representation of the given subject, but as a process of investigation in which the subject is set in motion through curatorial formats. These methods, such as exhibitions, talks, workshops, events, publications, and more, make public the questions, doubts, propositions, and ambiguities of the process of knowing. So, we can say that curatorial research is a methodology of knowledge production situated symbiotically with the field of artistic research—or, as it’s sometimes known, as practice research in the arts—where artistic research is conducted through the means of curatorial methods, formats, and modus operandi.

The Curatorial and the Production of Knowledge: The Debate

In the first decade of the 2000s, the intersection between knowledge production, research, and curating has led curators and researchers to claim that this new arena of practice was a place where knowledge was constituted differently. These claims go hand in hand with the expansion of curating, from the presentation of a set of objects to convey an idea and/or a narrative, to a much broader cultural activity from which questions, knowledge, and concerns are addressed by bringing together people, materials, and ideas in the larger field of the artwork and the exhibition. It is with these new ideas in mind that such scholars and curators as Irit Rogoff, Maria Lind, Beatrice von Bismarck, and Paul O'Neill and Mick Wilson, among others, have begun to explore the potential of curating as a forum for critical debate and knowledge production.2 Despite the differences in their arguments, there is a common denominator in the points they share: the field of curating has given way to a new kind of cultural engagement and conceptual formulation. In their writings, they called this new approach “the curatorial.”

As the curatorial began to emerge as a new concept, it was useful for these authors to explain the differences between curating and the curatorial. Although both terms are related to the practice of giving-something-to-be-experienced, the curatorial is seen as a departure from the professional activity of organizing exhibitions. Instead, the curatorial is located in the expanded field of curating, with a role that goes beyond displaying objects and points to the epistemic functions of cultural production. As Lind put it:

Seen this way, “curating” would be the technical modality—which we know from art institutions and independent projects alike—and “the curatorial” a more viral presence consisting of signification processes and relationships between objects, people, places, ideas, and so forth, that strives to create friction and push new ideas—to do something other than “business as usual” within and beyond contemporary art.3

In the wake of the second millennium, curating was enjoying its own success with the heyday of the never-ending proliferation of biennials, large-scale exhibitions, and the increasingly prominent stardom of curators that some felt was annoyingly overshadowing the space that once belonged exclusively to artists. While the glitter danced in the air, there were practitioners and thinkers who were intrigued by the new possibilities that curating was opening up beyond the spectacle and the spotlight. One could even say that other curatorial ambitions, which seemed to be set against the increasing neoliberalization of cultural production as a spectacle commodity, were ready to be apprehended. These debates were concerned with finding a space for a long-term, process-driven, collective forum to exchange ideas and energize contemporary debates among participants in the field. The idea was to promote the field’s radical interdependence with every discipline of knowledge production, getting rid of the long and monotonous discussion about the autonomy of the artwork, and the exhibition.

In 2006, Rogoff published “Smuggling—Embodied Criticality,” which has become one of the seminal texts on the curatorial. It explored the epistemic possibilities of the curatorial from a different standpoint. It started from the complex position of the curator/researcher and their socio-political conditions to generate new questions and methods of approach. Rogoff argues that the inherited disciplines in academia no longer "accommodate the complex realities we are trying to live, nor the ever more attenuated ways we have of thinking about them."4 In this way, Rogoff makes a clear distinction between curating and the curatorial. While curating stands for the professional skills of exhibition-making and the task of representing worlds, the curatorial is far removed from illustration, intention, and exemplification. The curatorial is critical thinking that does not rush to embody itself, does not rush to concretize itself, but allows us to stay with the questions until they point us in a direction we might not have been able to predict.5

A few years later, Lind took up the debate about the differences between curating and the curatorial to locate the latter in the tensions and frictions of the connections between things; in the “linking objects, images, processes, people, locations, histories, and discourses in physical space like an active catalyst, generating twists, turns, and tensions.”6 In this way, the curatorial is not the result of an intended message, but the generator of a new social and political situation. For Lind, following Chantal Mouffe's notion of “the political,” the curatorial performs something in the here and now, rather than merely mapping it from the there and then, or representing what is already known. This new space of signification is also where the potential for political resignification can take place, with new dynamics, roles, functions, meanings, and social relations becoming moving parts.7

These lively debates demonstrated that the space opened up by the curatorial allowed for the exploration of forms and concepts of practice that operate away from, alongside, or in addition to the main work of curating as exhibition-making, an approach considered from various perspectives in O’Neill and Wilson’s Curating Research.8 Further to this, Irit Rogoff notes:

[…] the curatorial makes it possible for us to affect a shift in emphasis to a very different place, to the trajectory of activity. So if in curating, the emphasis is on the end product—even if that end product is often very complicated and ends up performing differently than one might have assumed—in the curatorial, the emphasis is on the trajectory of ongoing, active work, not an isolated end product but a blip along the line of an ongoing project.9

This implies a process of signification that inevitably changes in the new assemblages of things, the performance of meaning in the making. Here the questions are: How does the curatorial investigate and constitute the world around us? How is knowledge articulated differently from the inherited disciplines and protocols of academia?

The Epistemic Capacities of Curatorial Research

Defining the epistemic qualities of the curatorial has implications for how knowledge is perceived outside the traditional institutions of knowledge production, such as the university and the museum, as well as for the continued belief in the hegemony of the inherited protocols of academic research based on rigor, originality, and objectivity. The impact of the debates about the characteristics and modes of the curatorial is as much an epistemic shift in perceptions of where and how research is conducted and valued as it is a political consideration—who has the power to validate it and who is it for. What I mean to present here is to present a few ideas for a possible framework for curatorial research that academia explore, enable and support.

The curatorial, as a situation or event of knowledge, emerges from the juxtaposition and relations between materials and ideas. And that these relationships are enacted and activated within and through the exhibitionary conditions present in the socio-political context. “Exhibitionary” here refers to the apparatus that incorporates and activates these materials and their meanings in their relation to one another, or in their exposure to one another. “Exposure” is central to my thinking in what follows, and I use the term in alignment with Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion of “touching,” which refers to how the meanings and perceptions of materials in relation to one another are established, as well as the relationships among more abstract forms, such as concepts and ideas.10 These relationships emerge from the materials that constitute the objects in any curatorial production—or even outside of it. They define those objects in their co-relations, modifying their meanings, how they are perceived, and actualizing them in time and space.

This is not only a matter of the physical arrangement of objects and their proximity to one another but also a matter of their remote correlation—the way that connections are established among objects even when they are not in proximity. Exposure also relates to the correlation (as it is with people and ideas) over geographic and temporal distances. This is like two people in different countries who remain “in touch,” mutually influencing each other over space and time. The exposures of the curatorial are aesthetic, as they are established as the forms of the historical, the social and the political in the instability and plasticity of meanings and affects. It is in the tensions between things that the singularity of the curatorial situation is generated, a unique situation that is provoked precisely thanks to and in the instability between (un)fixed meanings and affects.

In the curatorial, the subjects and objects of inquiry are set in conversation, mutually influencing one another, and neither subject nor object remains the same throughout the research process. This is in keeping with the fact that, arguably unlike traditional research, curatorial research does not aim to reach a conclusive outcome, providing a fixed answer or solving a problem. It is not about knowing more and better. The curatorial is not concerned with the idea of immanent knowledge or the meaning intrinsic to things in the world, but rather with historical systems of truth, genealogies, and the plasticity and performativity that these materials carry with them. In this way, the curatorial aims to critically engage with the material and immaterial formations that are exposed in a historically situated world, while critically perform within aesthetic and epistemic formations. In that way, we could say that the curatorial contribution to the subject matter to which it is applied is essayistic and exploratory rather than evidence-based.

The methods of the curatorial are the so-called formats of curating, which include, but can’t be reduced to, exhibitions, talks, publications, workshops, public programs, and essays, to name just a few. These events (or what I would like to call “operative exposures”) come into being when propositions are made public and meanings are challenged, resisted, and reimagined. Because of its public nature, the methods of the curatorial are simultaneously outputs, and means of dissemination of the investigation. The intersection of methods, outputs and dissemination in curatorial research raises new questions about audiences in their different formations as participants and recipients. The audience becomes one more exposure to what is being set in relation, and so is an active participant in the sensory experience and resignification of the work. The audiences’ co-engagement (whether profound, superficial, or tangential) continues beyond the temporal end of the curatorial event.

In conclusion, I believe that curating has a great deal to contribute to the ways in which we perceive the functions of cultural production as well as the potential of research in the arts to navigate the complexities of contemporaneity. If the epistemic and methodological dimensions of the curatorial are further developed, it holds the prospect of establishing a curatorial way of understanding the material world around us. This approach is critical, relational, and performative, grounded in the instability and interconnectedness of meanings, objects, and ideas. By prioritizing exposure, juxtaposition, and the dynamic interplay between materials, concepts, and audiences, curatorial research resists definitive answers and instead embraces essayistic inquiry, enabling critical engagement within the forms of the historical, social, and political. In this sense, the curatorial is not merely a medium for disseminating knowledge but a transformative space in which understanding is continually reimagined through collective participation and dialogue. For it to thrive, though, it is crucial that academia and the cultural sector avoid imposing rigid protocols on this kind of research, instead using it as an opportunity to expand their epistemic and practice-research horizons.

NOTES

1. Tom Holert, Knowledge Beside Itself: Contemporary Art’s Epistemic Politics (Cambridge, MA: Sternberg Press, 2020). Michael Schwab, "Editorial," Journal of Artistic Research, no. 24. https://jar-online.net/en/issues/24.

2. Irit Rogoff, “‘Smuggling’ – An Embodied Criticality,” Transversal - EIPCP Web Journal, no. 08 (2006). https://eipcp.net/dlfiles/rogoff-smuggling/attachment_download/rogoff-smuggling.pdf. Irit Rogoff, “The Expanded Field,” in The Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating, ed. Jean-Paul Martinon and Irit Rogoff (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 41–48. Maria Lind, “The Curatorial,” Artforum, October 2009. https://www.artforum.com/columns/the-curatorial-192127/. Maria Lind, Selected Maria Lind Writing, ed. Brian Kuan Wood (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010). Maria Lind, ed., Performing the Curatorial: Within and Beyond Art (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012). Beatrice von Bismarck, Jörn Schafaff, and Thomas Weski, eds., Cultures of the Curatorial (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012). Curating Research, eds. Paul O’Neill and Mick Wilson (Amsterdam: Open Editions/de Appel, 2014).

3. Lind, Performing the Curatorial, 20.

4. Rogoff, “‘Smuggling’ – An Embodied Criticality,” n.p.

5. Rogoff, “‘Smuggling’ – An Embodied Criticality.”

6. Lind, Selected Maria Lind Writing, 63.

7. Lind, Selected Maria Lind Writing.

8. O’Neill and Wilson, Curating Research.

9. 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, 23.

10. Jean-Luc Nancy, “Touching,” in The Sense of the World, (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 59–63.

---

• About Carolina Rito

  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).

Download PDF

Changing Concepts of Curatorial Enquiry: Care, Ethics, and Research

Henk Slager • 2/1/25

• Abstract

  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, the current debate about paradigm formation in artistic research is chosen as a starting point. The way in which artistic research operates as a convergence of creative practice, artistic thinking, and curatorial strategies shows strong similarities with the definition of care proposed by Maria Puig de la Bellacasa: a dynamic, triangulated interaction between labor, affect, and politics. This proposition will be briefly elaborated on the basis of three research projects. Starting from the statement “Research is another word for Care” (Marion von Osten), a further reflection on the significance of this perspective for the topical discussion about curatorial research will be developed.

Today, there is an encroaching sense that our relationship with the world is more and more disturbed. As a result of omnipresent technological acceleration, we are now running up against psychological, political, and planetary limits. This escalation manifests itself in topical forms of precarization (self-exhaustion), the crisis of democracy (politics that are no longer responsive to citizens), and the environmental crisis (treating nature only as a resource for extraction). It seems that we have lost the very pathways and rhythmic relationships to the world as such.1

This awareness is reinforced by the contemporary technological compulsion to transform everything into data. Through this new epistemic regime, we are no longer autonomous producers of knowledge but are forced, because of the imperative of transparency, to cede our sovereignty to processes of abstraction, quantification, digitization, calculation, and algorithmic regulation.

This whole constellation leads to alienation, which has affected many of us in various intensities as an inability to feel, sense, or hear ourselves. In addition, a large part of mankind has lost the common understanding of what a better society might look like. It even seems that our utopian energies are fully exhausted. Philosopher Boris Groys, for example, describes this current state of mind as follows: “Today no one has any idea what will happen in the future. The only hope people have is that the future doesn’t bring anything terrible. The hope is that everything remains as it is—that is the best hope that we can have.”2

Is it feasible to escape this rationalistic, instrumental, calculated, and disengaged relation to the world? Is it conceivable to overcome the current orientation toward the logic of unbridled growth and its cost to our humanity? In other words: Can we achieve a “way out” that resonates with the world and draws attention to other forms of knowledge, agency, solidarity, and community?3 Can we foster shifts in awareness that, as Marina Garces argues in her essay, “Conditio Posthuma,” could lead to a new revolution of “looking after ourselves”?4

In what follows, I’d like to put forward a series of artistic and/or curatorial propositions that might put us on the path to this transformation. For that purpose, the urgent question to be asked is what should be done to “maintain, continue, and repair our world so that we can live in it as well as possible.”5

Political scientist Joan Tronto introduces the concept of care as a tool to repair the connections between world, existence, and life. She does so by deploying this concept strategically: an understanding of care that goes beyond neoliberal capitalism’s calibration of individualist perspectives and preferences that emphasize self-care (a reductive appropriation of the ethical ideologies of care, focusing on lifestyle, fitness, and family). To free care from this hegemonic machine—or better to reclaim care—the concept will have to be recalibrated in its full complexity and ecology: “care shapes what we pay attention to, how we think about responsibility, what we do, how responsive we are to the world around us, and what we think of as important in life. That world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web.”6 From Tronto's perspective, care is not something an inherently isolated and selfish individual needs to be forced to engage in through considerations of self-interest or duty. On the contrary, it comes naturally to us because we are all involved in and dependent on the ecology of this life-sustaining web. And with that, care is also a critical practice and concept. Starting from collective and multivocal enactments, it stands for strategies of survival, resilience, and resistance in a more-than-human world that is characterized by global inequality, climate crisis, and loss of biodiversity.

Precisely this disruptive understanding of care resonates with the field of artistic research that has played a significant role in art discourse from the beginning of this century. This relatively new form of research is characterized by intertwining creative practice, critical epistemologies, and engaged strategies of dissemination. This specific mode of inquiry enables artistic research to rehearse topical issues concerning planetary urgencies—such as the ecological crisis and social injustice—in a completely different way, namely from the transformative potential to imagine, initiate, or negotiate other ways of living together.

A striking example of this modus operandi is Gustafsson & Haapoja’s research project, “Becoming. Manual for Earthly Living.”7 This project departs from how the capitalist dictate of chronopolitics—that is, using time as a tool for social control in every precinct of life from work, production, and school schedules to health care to transportation—affects our Earth’s ecosystems by asking: Is it possible to live as a human being in a world that is dominated by Western models of progress that are exhausting our planet?

To find a possible answer, Gustafsson & Haapoja conducted thirty-seven video interviews to identify ways of relating to ourselves, others, and the world. They contemplated phenomena that are budding at this very moment and that should be nurtured. In these video conversations, the specific question arises: How can art contribute to forms of subjecthood and citizenship that are no longer determined by anthropocentric frameworks that use the rhetoric of exclusivity or human exceptionalism? In this way, a future world could be built where care forms the basis of coexistence and communality; a world based on another biopolitics where the dominant perspective of the homo economicus is replaced by homo ecologicus, i.e. substituted with a perspective characterized by a polyphonic imaginary, a collective empowerment, a sustainable existence, and a more-than-human community.

Gustafsson & Haapoja, Becoming. Manual for Earthly Living, installation view of Farewell to Research, MNAC, Bucharest, 2021.

Ursula Biemann’s research offers us another excellent example of this approach. Her practice emphasizes the speedy course of climate change into unknown futures that is forcing us to fundamentally rethink the relationship between humans and the Earth. For instance, the video essay Subatlantic juxtaposes the science of geology and climatology with human history, proposing that the fully imaginary globe that has been constructed in the disciplinary field of humanities fails to resonate with the mighty planetary grammar.8 Therefore, if we think from the perspective of a posthuman future, it is extremely important to develop a mode of contemporary art that brings the Earth on stage, so to speak, so that we see it as it is: an unstable living environment reconnecting us to infinite, untameable forces that animate extra-historical dimensions. “Perhaps from there, we can envision a less divided future that can harbor a post-human way of being in the world.”9

Ursula Biemann, Subatlantic, installation view (right side), Re-Imagining Futures, OnCurating, Zurich, 2019.

A similar postcapitalist perspective is articulated in the research project “Stones Have Laws” by Lonnie van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan.10 The film portrays how the Western model of linear time has played an important role in processes of colonization and exploitation, as well as in the loss of self-determination for a wide range of cultures and creatures. “Stones Have Laws” attends to the current situation of the Maroon community in the interior of Surinam and to another aspect of capitalist chronopolitics: a process that exchanges ecological time for a growth-oriented, measurable time. As a consequence, a system came into being in which nature became commodified, i.e., understood as an object for consumption. Meanwhile—and this is central to Van Brummelen & De Haan’s research project—a social protest is developing in Latin America that demands another ecology of care: a living world that requires different ways of organizing knowledge, time, and ontology that trouble the traditional direction of progress and the speed of technoscientific, productionist, future-driven interventions.

Lonnie van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan, Stones Have Laws, installation view, Any
Speculation Whatever, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana, 14th Havana
Biennale, 2022.

These projects emphasize that the urgencies of care ethics and the imagining of potential “ways out” are also high on the agenda of artistic research. María Puig de la Bellacasa's book, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds resonates with this.11 She describes care as a dynamic triangulated relationship of labor, affect, and politics; and it should always have these three ontological dimensions actively present: the practical (work), the affective (engagement), and the ethico-political (involvement). Only then can care present itself as both a speculative and existential domain: open-ended, with room for possible reconfigurations.

With Puig de Bellacasa’s characterization of care, we see clear similarities with a possible definition of the practice of artistic research.12 This mode of inquiry can also be described as a dynamic triangulated relationship: between creative practice (experimentality, art-making, the potential of the sensible); artistic thinking (open-ended, speculative, associative, nonlinear, haunting, thinking differently); and dissemination strategies (curatorial formats, topical modes of political imagination, performative perspectives, transformational spaces for encounters), comprehending these different kinds of conceptual space in their mutually vibrant and coherent interrelationships.

From whatever conceptual space one departs, an artistic research practice should always signify a transversal constellation—as a creative proposition for thought in action. Yet, that mode of research should never be reduced to a method of one of the three constituents. Artistic research cannot be exactly equated with creative innovation or disciplinary knowledge production or political activism. Consequently, it seems urgent now to profoundly challenge and question the issue of how to articulate and present the condition of the intersection between creative practice, artistic thinking, and the ways they are made manifest.

What does this triangulated connectivity mean for thinking about the curatorial dimension? In the symposium, Going to the Limits of Your Longing, Research as Another Name for Care, organized by the Basel Academy in 2021 to honor the late curator and artist Marion von Osten, a constructive and inspiring perspective was presented.13 The point of departure for the symposium was Von Osten’s empathetic curatorial approach to the medium of exhibition-making. This revolved around artistic research devoted to collective issues and modes of meaning-making, putting forward ideas on community, access, agency, gender, and ecology. And here we see a topical interpretation of curatorial care and responsibility: to work against repression, exclusion, and marginalization. Or to put it differently, curatorial care requires attention to other modes of being and thinking that are sensitive to difference. In this way, the curatorial also shows its political potential, i.e., making an ethics of care public in a strategic manner based on an understanding of the politics of display: how care is disseminated, how care is performed, how care is propagated, and how care ultimately resists categorical modes of thinking.

Beatrice von Bismarck also describes how curating involves modifying and generating meaning in acts of assembling in public. It constitutes a coming-together for processes of negotiation, but also for proclamation, demonstration, or argumentation. In this approach, curatorial processes are essentially performative. Exhibits find themselves in new juxtapositions, entering into relations with altered spaces and social, economic, and discursive contexts. Attention focuses on the interplay of all factors, and in particular on “the transformative, but also self-transforming relational fabric of the curatorial situation, its conditions and preconditions, and the options for actions they offer.”14

In this moment of making things public, we notice a challenging task for both thinking and practicing curatorial care and artistic research. This includes investigating the disruptive potential, the triangulated condition, the topical role of speculation, the perspective of change vectors, and different modes of agency, focusing on other ways of living together as a performative exploration of possible ways out. All of this could lead to the mutual enrichment and reassessment of the concepts and ecologies of research and care, and consequently afford a more profound thinking about matters concerning all of us and imagining future scenarios.

NOTES

1. In his book Resonance, A Sociology of our Relationship to the World (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018), Hartmut Rosa looks for possibilities to restore our relationship with the world. Can we recover the phenomenological condition that makes it possible again to resonate with the world and hear its polyphony? 
2. Boris Groys, Philosophy of Care (London/New York: Verso, 2022). See also “Philosophy of Care: A Conversation.” https://www.e-flux.com/notes/499836/philosophy-of-care-a-conversation.
3. The curatorial project “The Way Out” (Steirischer Herbst, Graz 2021, curators: Ekaterina Degot, David Riff) contrasts the disappointment of self-regulatory markets with a different, confrontational model of care. https://2021.steirischerherbst.at/en/program/2293/the-way-out-of.
4. Marina Garces, “Conditio Posthumana,” in The Great Regression (Cambridge: John Wiley & Sons, 2017), 7.
5. Joan Tronto, Who Cares, How to Reshape a Democratic Politics, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015), 3.
6. Tronto, Who Cares, How to Reshape a Democratic Politics, 8.
7. Presentation of “How to Become Human” in the context of the 9th Bucharest Biennale publication MaHKUscript, Journal of Fine Art Research, 5, After the Research Turn, 2020. See also Terike Haapoja’s presentation “Vulnerability, Animality, Community,” EARN Conference, The Postresearch Condition, BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, 2021.   MaHKUscript: https://mahkuscript.com/5/volume/4/issue/1. https://www.hku.nl/en/study-at-hku/creative-transformation/pre-phd-programme/the-postresearch-condition.
8. This work by Ursula Biemann was shown in the research presentation “Re-Imagining Futures,” OnCurating, Zurich, 2019. “Re-Imagining Futures,” https://oncurating-space.org/re-imagining-futures/.
9. Quote from Ursula Biemann, Subatlantic, 2015. https://vimeo.com/123399928.
10. The research project Stones Have Laws was part of the second iteration of Re-Imagining Futures, titled Any Speculation Whatever, Futuro Y Contemporaneidad, 14th Havana Biennial. Stones Have Laws: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McQjpqbRjj0.
11. Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).
12. First steps toward this paradigm formation were given in “Farewell to Research” (9th Bucharest Biennale, 2020-2021) and the publication The Postresearch Condition (Metropolis M Books: Utrecht, 2021). Farewell to Research: https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/410540/farewell-to-research/. Postresearch Condition: https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/410536/metropolis-m-books-publishes-the-postresearch-condition/.
13. Symposium Going to the Limits of Your Longing, Research as Another Name for Care. In Memory of Marion von Osten, Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW, March 17-18, 2021. https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/381063/going-to-the-limits-of-your-longing-research-as-another-name-for-care-in-memory-of-marion-von-osten/.
14. Beatrice von Bismarck, The Curatorial Condition (London: Sternberg Press, 2022), 9. In her description of the curatorial, von Bismarck also uses the model of dynamic triangulated relationships, consisting of the following constituents: constellation, transposition, and hospitality. “The curatorial is characterized by transpositional processes generating constellations that are determined by curatoriality and that are situatively, temporally, and dynamically shaped on the basis of the dispositif of hospitality.”(28)

---

• About Henk Slager

  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. Henk 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. Henk Slager is currently co-convening the 6th Asia Triennial Manchester (2025).

Download PDF