EXHIBITIVE CARTOGRAPHIES II Critical Instrumentation, Exhibitive and Curatorial Narratives (original) (raw)

2024, EXHIBITIVE CARTOGRAPHIES II Critical Instrumentation, Exhibitive and Curatorial Narratives

The aim of this conference is to present, examine and contextualise curatorial practices in contemporary art, in Croatia and the region, but also specifically in regard to our lecturer Pedro Lorente’s thesis on “museums as cathedrals of urban modernity”. It is important to note that the history of curatorial practices is a relatively little studied area in Croatian art history, while it is increasingly present at the international level. Our objective with this conference is to address this important subject at the crossroads of art criticism, theory and practice. There has been increasing interest in exhibition history and contextualisation of curatorial practices in art-historical research. While we can trace back exhibition history in the modern sense of a universal right to publicness to the revolutionary turmoils of the late 18th century, it was the avant-garde tendencies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries that gave the history of exhibition practices a new dimension, paving the way for innovative methods, participation and the questioning of existing institutional policies, contextual frameworks and models of presentation. The emergence of neo-avantgarde and the institutional critique of the 1950s and 1960s destabilised the conventional meanings and institutional positions of artists, artworks, curators and audiences, which led to a more active role of curators in mediating new artistic expressions, but also to radical questioning of their own position. Curators became increasingly active in the creation of meaning, assuming more and more often, with their gestures or texts, the role of meta-artists, especially in the domain of conceptual art. Redefining the position of the curator-author has increasingly come into focus since the emergence of conceptual/neo-avantgarde tendencies in art. The starting point of the conference is the curatorial figure of Želimir Koščević, the 2018 laureate of AICA Croatia’s Annual Award and Lifetime Achievement Award. Exposed to late modernism but also to counterculture in former Yugoslavia, as a relatively young art historian, Želimir Koščević won a fellowship from Stockholm’s Moderna Museet.