Curatorial Theory Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

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- Contemporary Art, Modern Art, Curatorial Practice (Art), Theosophy
- by Elliott Jenkins
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- Eastern European Studies, Romanian History, Contemporary Art, Romani Studies

My MLitt dissertation is concerned with how connections between human and nonhuman objects, hyperobjects and temporality are represented in contemporary anthropocene literature, namely Ben Lerner's novel 10:04 and Tom McCarthy's Satin Island. Through an ethical and aesthetic framework, I ask: how can the novel explore the ecological thought and how is narrative form uniquely capable of synthesising other artistic and textual practices in a way that conveys and embodies the feedback loops of irony, aesthetic causality and ‘deep time’ characteristic of hyperobjects, ecological disaster and object encounters within the anthropocene?

- by Maria Sledmere
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- Future Studies, Contemporary Literature, Ecological Art, Dark Ecology

This PhD thesis engenders new approaches to the understanding, appreciation, and experience of modern and contemporary ceramic art. It focusses on two recent outputs. The initial, Scorched Earth: 100 Years of Southern African Potteries (2016), a scholarly publication, and the latter, Post-colonialism? (2016/2017), a socially-engaged international exhibition, held at the Benyamini Contemporary Ceramics Centre in Tel Aviv, Israel. The moral philosophy ubuntu was proposed as a component of self-reflexive methodology for research and curatorial projects. The term cryrator was advanced as constituting an approach to curatorial praxis in conflict zones. These concepts make an original contribution to existing methodologies and research that historicise, de-westernise, and decolonise knowledge.

- by Wendy A Gers (PhD)
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- Art History, Peace and Conflict Studies, Contemporary Art, Identity (Culture)

Since the mid-1980s, the new, socially responsive role that museums have assumed and the critically engaged positions of chief curators and directors have led to a variety of practices that attempt to break the old canon of exhibitions, to promote new and interactive ways of communicating their collections to the public and to achieve the much-desired engagement with museum objects. In this framework, artists are often invited by art and other museums (historical, archaeological, ethnographic, etc.) to display or to produce their work as artists-in-residence, creating different contexts for existing exhibitions. But what happens when contemporary artists are called to " reorganize " parts of a museum's permanent collection, commenting in parallel on the institution's own history and function? In our paper, we discuss curatorial projects undertaken by artists that critically assess the museum's historical role, its epistemological background and its power to legitimize culture. Artistic installations and redisplays of historical collections by artists become the focus of our inquiry, especially in the now fashionable display format of the Renaissance Wunderkammer. Our aim is to examine how artistic knowledge and practice can illuminate aspects of art-historical and museological practices, aspects which are rendered invisible when working separately in our academic fields. Keywords : curatorship and art practices; museum's epistemology; artists-as-curators; Wunderkammer If we are now living in " Liquid Times " as Zygmunt Bauman proposed (2000), then what are the role and the raison d'être of museums? How can these powerful by-products of an outdated modernity attract new audiences, offer new narratives using aging collections and respond to current sensitivities? How do they manage to survive as they try to come to terms with current institutional criticism of their authority and social utility? In this paper we discuss one such " survival strategy, " namely the curatorial projects undertaken by artists that critically assess the museum's historical role, its epistemological background and its power to legitimize culture. Our thoughts stemmed from museums' and artists' apparent fascination with a rather unexpected historicism, which is characterized by several contemporary artworks presented, in particular in museums that are not directly devoted to art. Artistic installations and new exhibitions of historical collections put on by artists become the focus of our inquiry, especially in the now fashionable display format of the Renaissance Wunderkammer. 1 ARTICLE

- by Esther Solomon (Εσθήρ Σολομών) and +1
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- Museum Studies, Curating, Curatorial Studies and Practice, Museology

Performance at Tate explores the history of performance art at Tate from the 1960s to 2016. Arising from a two-year AHRC-funded research project, this online publication offers a new appraisal of the place of performance art and performativity in the museum through essays and case studies on individual artworks and events. It also publishes for the first time audio, films and videos, photographs, museum documents and reviews drawn from Tate’s Archive.
**Link to full publication: http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/performance-at-tate

- by Jonah Westerman
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- Art History, Museum Studies, Performance Studies, Contemporary Art

I advocate that museums are active institutions in the life of our communities and I argue that the decolonization of knowledge is a simultaneously academic and citizen endeavor to which museums are particularly apt. To develop this argument, I venture into an ethnographic exploration of the University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology, in Vancouver, Canada, mobilizing the categories of ethnography of absences and ethnography of emergences, inspired in the work of Boaventura de Sousa Santos. I conclude illustrating my argument with a proposal for an ethnographic installation at the Théo Brandão Museum in Maceió, on the ‘Muzzle Law’, intended both as a meta museological comment and as a pragmatic civic strategy of opposition to the coup against democracy currently unfolding in Brazil.

- by Nuno Porto
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- Museum Studies, Decolonial Thought, Curatorial Theory

Dalla fine del XX secolo, i tentativi di rileggere le collezioni museali sono stati declinati in alcuni casi attraverso narrazioni non lineari che non rispettano le tradizionali categorie della storia dell'arte. L'articolo intende indagare le cause di questa tendenza globale dal punto di vista culturale, sociopolitico e teorico. Queste pratiche si sono avvicinate alle collezioni museali come ad una forma di archivio e sono state sviluppate negli ultimi trent'anni in particolare da diverse istituzioni dedicate all'arte contemporanea, rimodellando gli allestimenti e il loro ruolo istituzionale. Attraverso l'analisi di tre casi studio, il Centre Pompidou di Parigi con la mostra Modernités plurielles (2013-2015), il Van Abbemuseum di Eindhoven con The Making of Modern Art (2017-2021) e il Museo Sztuki di Łódź con Atlas of Modernity (2014-oggi), l'articolo analizza la necessità istituzionale dei musei contemporanei di rileggere e riscrivere la storia della "modernità" e delle loro collezioni nel XXI secolo attraverso l'uso di narrazioni dialettiche. Il rapporto tra l'istituzione, le collezioni e la loro narrazione sarà analizzato come carattere distintivo dell'identità e della missione del museo.

- by Alice Labor
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- Museum Studies, Contemporary Art, Curating, Curatorial Studies and Practice

The questioning of traditional classifications and their implicit hierarchies in museum displays currently leads to what Sharon Macdonald called the “re-centering of the object". Our case studies show that mixing at the level of objects or materials has indeed the effect of leveling out or “flattening” hierarchies that are inherent to prior forms of categorization and allows for new insights, different relations between objects, as well as between objects and viewers. However, we also show that this does not automatically lend objects more agency or “activates” them, as is often implied.

- by Ann-Sophie Lehmann and +1
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- Museum Studies, Curatorial Practice (Art), Curatorial Theory
- by Jenny Walklate
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- Museum Studies, Ethnography, Documentation, Authorship

Un espacio no puede borrar a otro, pero puede arrinconarlo. También los espacios ocupan un lugar, En otra dimensión que es más que espacio. Hay espacios con una sola voz, Espacios con muchas voces Y hasta espacios sin ninguna, Pero todo... more

- by Lucrecia Piedrahita
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- Art History, Humanities, Design, Architecture
- by Michele Drascek
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- Art History, Performing Arts, Theatre Studies, Architecture

Recensione della mostra “Dalì. Il sogno del classico” a Palazzo Blu a Pisa fino al 19 febbraio 2017

In this interview, curator Federico Baeza tells us about his work with the collection of Fundación Federico Klemm.

Every curator is a storyteller. He or she tells big stories-metanarratives-and small stories-micronarratives. Curating is a metanarrative as it embodies a narrative about narrative dealing with the nature, structure and signification of... more

- by Paco Barragán
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- Communication, Art History, Art, Art Theory

Meyers plumbs the boundaries between contemporary art and music. In his artistic practice Meyers explores the immaterial and social nature of music and searches at the same time for new formal and visual languages to display it. In his work the constant permutation of different levels of time and space creates situations in which a 'series of futures' are produced – thereby modifying the present by opening endless possibilities. This interview with Ari Benjamin Meyers highlights a multifaceted body of work by an artist who works not only with different media but also at the border of the arts. In this conversation, Meyers explains his artistic practice and reflects on his own status in the field of art, or what it means to be a visual artist with musical training and history. Thus one of his principle artistic engagements is how to present and display music.

- by Marie-France Rafael
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- Music Theory, Art History, Art Theory, Contemporary Art

Ecologie complesse: Pensare l’arte oltre l’umano è una rac- colta di articoli dedicati al tema dell’arte e del postumano. Cinque degli articoli – di Alberto Micali e Nicolò Pasqualini, Edith Doove, Vincenzo Di Rosa, Federica Fontana e Massi- miliano Viel – sono stati selezionati tra quelli già pubblicati nei numeri 10 e 11 della rivista Scenari nella sezione sotto il titolo “Fare il postumano: Un nuovo scenario della teoria e della pratica artistica”, e ai fini di questa nuova pubbli- cazione rivisti ed estesi. Due di essi sono stati appositamente tradotti in italiano ed è stato elaborato un nuovo articolo di Gabriela Galati, curatrice del volume.
Questo lavoro nasce da una riflessione necessaria e attuale sulla declinazione degli sviluppi teorici e critici del postumanesimo nelle diverse aree della pratica artistica.

- by Gabriela Galati and +1
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- Musicology, Art Theory, Posthumanism, Critical Posthumanism

Flash Art no. 342, Dicembre 2018 – Febbraio 2019

- by Vincenzo Di Rosa
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- Art Theory, Contemporary Art, Museums and Exhibition Design, Art Criticism

Introduction to the book When Attitudes Become the Norm
The Contemporary Curator and Institutional Art
Some sentences from the cover by Mary Anne Staniszewski:
"Beti Žerovc has not only written an insightful and provocative book, but an especially timely one.
In this book devoted to the field of curating and “institutional art”, Žerovc raises questions about the character and limitations of the “exhibition-maker as artist” and the “exhibition as a work of art”, asking whether the socio-political objectives for the latter actually manifest contradictory or even opposite effects given the inescapable conditions of capitalism.
The book culminates with Žerovc’s queries about the ritualistic function of contemporary art exhibitions, and this is evocatively expressed in her introduction: “There was once great discussion about how removing artworks from their original context and installing them in the museum meant their certain death. Today, it seems, we need to be thinking about different questions. Does the institution of visual art bring something to life … what, in fact, are we summoning to life?”

- by Matthew Ryan Smith
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- Indigenous Studies, Museum Studies, Canadian History, Canadian art

We cordially invite you to participate in the conference "EXHIBITIVE CARTOGRAPHIES" with the subtitle "Critical Instrumentation, exhibitive and curatorial narratives," an international expert scientific and arts conference conducted in English and Croatian, and co-organised by the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Split and the Croatian Section of the International Association of Art Critics (HS AICA) from 10 to 12 March 2022. The Conference will be held online on the Google Meet platform, in English and in Croatian.

Interview with art historian and sociologist Peter Bengtsen for Inchiesta about the exhibition “Street Art – Banksy & Co. L’arte allo stato urbano” in Bologna and the resultant removal by the Italian artist Blu of all his remaining... more

- by Peter Bengtsen
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- Critical Theory, History, Cultural History, Sociology

This text was published in "The Biennial Reader. An Anthology on Large Scale Perennial Exhibitions of Contemporary Art" (Bergen Kunsthall and Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern 2010). Expanding on their respective doctoral research on biennials, Federica Martini and Vittoria Martini look closely in their new collaborative essay at the evolution of the curator as auteur.

This paper discusses the processual ontological transitions of the curatorial after Paul O’Neill’s “curatorial turn”. Studying the curatorial from its discursive conception to a new materialist approach, it explores what can change when the curatorial is considered both a discourse and a practice, with no hierarchical distinctions or separations between them. To envisage the curatorial as a materia-ldiscursive practice is to admit that matter and meaning emerge together and one does not exist in the same way in the absence of the other. In this epistemology, the question changes from what the curatorial is to what the curatorial does, considering it as a mode of production of different kinds of knowledges.

A review of Bridget Cooks, Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum

This exhibition explored the shift in meaning that the term "fetish" underwent from its beginnings as a derogatory description of African art to its Freudian and Marxist applications in contemporary art. Stunning examples of African art from the Fowler's collections were on view, including Akan gold from the Asante peoples of Ghana and nkisi, widely-misunderstood objects that traditionally served in religious, healing, and judicial practices for several ethnic groups of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Works by such modern and contemporary artists as Marcel Duchamp, Barbara Bloom, Mary Kelly, Yayoi Kusama, Monica Majoli, Renee Petropoulos, Lari Pittman, and Naomi Talisman were on view to express the psychoanalytic and political connotations of fetishism.

- by Nizan Shaked
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- Museum Studies, Contemporary Art, Historiography, Colonialism

Curatorial work and museum education seem to sometimes be on completely different tracks. Even though artistic and curatorial discourses are increasingly interested in research and education, they are still full of practices of distinction; the codes for reading contemporary art seem closed, except to the very few. Meanwhile, contemporary art audiences are increasingly comprised of those who know little or nothing about it, and might seem “incapable” of reading artworks. All this positions contemporary educators in the middle of contradictory and problematic practices of “inclusion” and “exclusion”.
Asja Mandić, a Sarajevo based curator, art educator and professor, is a perfect candidate to meditate on contemporary art museum education and all the kinds of problems it faces within contemporary art institutions. Mandić used to work at Ars Aevi Museum/Centre of Contemporary Art, Sarajevo, and was searching for an educational approach that can help audiences who don’t know much about contemporary art to find ways to access it. She became interested in the Visual Thinking Strategies methodology, first writing a PhD, and then a book about her research (Izazovi muzejske edukacije, 2014, Bosnian language only).
Museum Educators arguably have the task to attract as many people as possible, and to take care of them. But methods of care can be debated. One of my primary questions to Mandić is therefore, what does it mean—for art, and for us as a society— if we're welcoming and encouraging art audiences to lose all fear about asking the “wrong” questions, and prompting them to be opinionated without any real knowledge?

- by Beti Zerovc
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- Museum Studies, Museum Education, Curatorial Practice (Art), Museology

American Anthropologist (Visual Anthropology section), Vol. 117, No. 3, September 2015.

- by Erica Lehrer
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- Museum Studies, Museum Anthropology, Jewish - Christian Relations, Curating

'Documentary Intersect' was published on the occasion of an exhibition of the same name at Adam Art Gallery, Te Pataka Toi, Victoria University Art Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand. The book includes an essay by Patrick Pound. Edited by... more

- by Patrick Pound
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- Photography, Museum Studies, Archives, History of Collections

The author is trying to show the idea of unhygienic literature

- by Andrzej Marzec
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- Critical Theory, History, Cultural History, Cultural Studies

Paper written in the course of Curatorial Models 1 for an assignment to find a "next-step" exhibition.
Analyzes George Didi-Huberman's and Arno Gisinger's 2014 exhibition Nouvelles Histoires de Fantômes (New Ghost Stories), summarizes its precursors and theoretical sources, and critically examines its methodology, modes of presentation, and concept of Image.

- by Cihat Arınç
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- Film Theory, Cultural Memory, Collective Memory, New Turkish cinema
- by Vincenzo Di Rosa
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- Art History, Art Theory, Installation Art, Contemporary Art

As inherently changeable artworks, computer-based installations are amongst the most demanding when it comes to their continuation, perpetuation and muzealisation. And yet, up to now, this topic has attracted little attention in the specialist literature, essentially due to gaps in professional training in the area of technology-based art and a requirement for in-depth interdisciplinary collaboration. Computer-based works may exist in a number of different versions, variations, and clones, pushing the boundaries of the traditional paradigms of museum collecting, archiving, and conservation practices, and questioning what has for so long been understood as a static, stable, and fixed “object.” The existent variants of a work may generate variations
and further developments that are not necessarily associated with one another or that might only be loosely connected with the artist’s initial idea. Instead of determining an artwork, its conservation or recovery may lead to the fabrication of yet further versions. Computer-based works also provoke the most arduous disputes among professionals regarding the limits of their classification, as well as the display aesthetics and preservation standards. Next to the conservators, archivists, and curators, the artists, too, become caretakers and even decision-makers that shape the work long after it enters a museum collection and then reaches its presupposed stability. The archival turn suggests a radical change in the conceptualization of these artworks, with consequences for the normative framework of conservation.

- by Hanna B . Hölling
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- Archival Studies, Art History, Media Studies, Digital Curation
- by Atreyee Ghosh
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- Architecture, Curatorial Studies and Practice, India, Indian architecture
- by Paola Nicolin
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- Art History, - Architecture history, Curatorial Theory, History of Exhibitions