Critical spatial agency in public space: towards a framework for collaboration and contestation through curatorial spatial practice

MoRe is a digital museum, founded in 2012 and produced by the Others Association with a team of scholars from the University of Parma: it is presented here as a case study to reflect on similarities and differences between curatorial, art historical and archival practices. This digital resource is devoted to the collection, management and dissemination of unrealized artwork projects from the 1950s onwards. It is at the same time an archive of research data, in the spirit of Open Access, and an archive of documentation of the work of the artists. This paper is organized in two sections, through which the dual dimension of the digital resource, institutional and private, will be analysed. The first section explains the structure of this digital museum, while the second analyses acquisition and digitizing policies, and cataloguing rules. The distinction between different generations of artists has been chosen to demonstrate how the work of the curators can change while working to build a digital museum (through the interaction with other private or institutional archives, and the participatory work of artists and curators). From this analysis, the interaction between the peculiarities of contemporary art research and the digital dimension of MoRE will emerge.

Between Intentionality and Reception: The Politics of Curatorial Intervention critically interrogates the theoretical construct and professional practice identified as curatorial intervention. It does so to determine if, and if so how, the actions of curators mediate the artist–audience exchange. The research proposes that, contrary to the extant structures of classical reception theory, curatorial intervention is an essential third component within the artist–audience exchange. The research argues that historical and contemporary constructions of reception theory have not to date adequately accounted for the role of the curator, and, consequentially, those same models cannot account for curatorial agency. As a result, the research asserts that reception theory cannot effectively position curators as agency participants within the artist–audience exchange. On the contrary, curatorial intervention emerges at the site of the artist-audience exchange as an agency relationship that is a manifestation of the structures and methods of curatorial power. To verify the efficacy of this model, it was necessary to determine the extent to which artists, curators, and administrators working in the museum sector acknowledged the roles curators played in mediating artists' works within audiences' experiential encounters. To date, the existing models that have sought to position curatorial roles have instead examined declarations of curatorial authorship, which radically shifts intentionality and agency from artists to curators. To the detriment of both, little research has examined how curators mediate the conception, construction, presentation, and experience of works of art in instances in which a declaration of curatorial authorship is not made. Based on the existing literature, this research is one of the first sustained examinations of the theory of curatorial intervention. It relies upon interviews conducted with artists, curators, and administrators working in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States — ten from each sector — who provide in-depth responses to detailed questions concerning curatorial practice and their individual experiences and perceptions of curatorial intervention. These responses, coupled with analyses of the current literature on curatorial practice and reception theory, provide parameters that frame the research, that enable conclusions regarding the existence or absence of curatorial intervention, and which facilitate the construction of a theory for its operations. The participant responses were evaluated against existing theory and practice, including a wide range of recent writings that have appeared in the curatorial field. What is noted, generally, is that although most of these writings address curatorial authorship at length, few (if any) address the notion or construction of curatorial intervention. The analysis models the research findings using a tri-nodal matrix — identified as the TAP Matrix — which examines curatorial practice, and curatorial intervention, against the variables of transparency, agency, and power. The conclusions, based on the totality of the findings contained therein, propose curatorial intervention as the third element of the artist–audience exchange. They offer an alternative model for the visual experience. Instead of intentionality and reception, the research proposes a structure of intentionality, intervention, and reception, thereby situating curatorial intervention as the foundational framework for interrogating the artist–audience exchange.

Curatorial Intervention: History and Current Practice, is a critical analysis of the dynamic roles curators play in shaping, mediating and, at times, redefining the artist-audience exchange. Focusing on contemporary curatorial practice, this work critically examines the ways in which curators impact artists’ intentionality, and how this alters audiences’ experiences of reception. Through discussions with leading artists, curators, and arts administrators, Brett Levine posits a new paradigm for defining and contextualizing curatorial practice, while exploring how the former dialectic of intention and reception is today defined by the triad intention-intervention-reception. After situating the more traditional artist-audience relationship, he explores how extant theories of the art experience fail to either provide for curatorial practice or contextualize its operations while also overlooking questions of transparency, agency, and power. Offering a new professional and operational model, Curatorial Intervention highlights how the artist-curator and curator-audience relations displace and, at times redefine, the experience of works of art. In response to the disenfranchisement of curatorial practice, and the emergence of every act of discernment being transformed into curating—as little more than a fashionable pastime—the author reasserts the dynamic roles that exist between artist, curator, and audience, and between object, operation, and experience.

This paper examines the precarious relationship between artist, artwork and curator in contemporary curatorial practice and identifies a number of problematical issues in the context of material thinking concerns, embodied experience and current artistic practice. For the purpose of this discussion, curatorial practice is defined as exhibition production and design. It is differentiated from those activities normally associated with permanent collections and museums. Constructing meaning through art exhibitions is a process largely dependent on the essential roles of artist and curator but also influenced by the physical environment and the various contingencies of installation practice. The core premise underlying this investigation is that a curatorial intervention should be no more or less than an opportunity to work with a designer, an artist, a collection or a group, to create a transitory moment in which an idea is proposed and conditions are set up for people to react to it. The focus of the investigation is on the increasing level of misinterpretation and perplexity that seems to surround so many curatorial interventions, prize exhibitions and international biennial ventures. Since the early 1990's, the group exhibition emerged as the leading platform for curatorial experimentation. It opened a new and ideological discursive space where the individual, private concerns of artists were displaced and flattened under the artificial conceptual frames imposed by the curatorial concept. Individual artistic vision has been relegated to a minor position under a curator's propositional or speculative stratagem. Increasingly, the unique, reflective unfolding of an artist's philosophical, political or artistic intentions and the relating of that thinking to a contemporary or historical context has almost become an irrelevant curatorial endeavour. The contemporary institutional demand is for local versus global comparisons, public concerns, disparate juxtapositions and trans-cultural contexts. In conversation with artists and curators, several themes have been identified and issues analysed for improving future strategies for making meaning through exhibition.

The corporate group is an important legal construction enabling the parent company to prosper on the global platform. This chapter offers a regulatory approach to corporate behaviour within the corporate group. The foundation for corporate group governance is born out of two feminist theories: spatial justice and the ethic of care. The two theories align closely with an emerging jurisprudence manifesting in an example of recent case law, two pieces of legislation and two legal procedures. This chapter investigates whether or not the emerging jurisprudence can withstand two legal doctrines in corporate law; the corporate veil and limited liability. Spatial justice and the ethic of care define the corporate duty of care by providing better structure and substance. The parent company’s role in the parent-subsidiary relationship centres on legal due diligence which the parent must conduct on its corporate group. The parent company is therefore obligated to promote business sustainability across all subsidiaries by ensuring all entities are financially well-resourced, environmentally respectful and place ample importance on workers’ wellbeing. With a concrete legal structure for the corporate duty of care, parent companies and their corporate groups are required to operate in a way that respects the planetary boundaries.

I propound that the collection exhibition of Afro Brasil Museum located in São Paulo, Brazil, features characteristics that well represent intersections between art creation and curatorial work, besides its dealt with institutional memory through less conventional exhibit designs. Thus, I seek a reflection about the interchange between curatorial work, art making and metalanguage arrangements within this museum. I introduce this exhibition as an institutional memorial – based on conversations and interviews with the museum staff, “absent dialogues” with its curator-director-artist and by the analysis of bibliographic material, so as the collection itself – due to my understanding of the exhibition as an imagery formed by composite images set by Emanoel Araújo. In order to communicate the singularity of this exhibition I bring a perspective of the objects exhibited, by means of the registers of fieldnotes and on, undertaking a dialogue with scholars from arts and humanities about curatorial work, the polysemy of image and the role of scenography. I discuss the art making of curatorial work and Emanoel Araújo’s métier as curator artist, supported by his concept A Mão Afro-Brasileira (The Afro-Brazilian Hand). In conclusion, I stress the relation textimage-public in order to communicate the singular aspects of its exhibition. Whilst the absence of consensus toward creativity and art agency while designing exhibitions, I assert that Araújo and his team strain the usual expectations on curatorial practice hence the limits of topographic arrangements and scenography schemes as a sensorial tool are extrapolated.

This paper explores how tactical and temporary feminist urban design can address gendered spatial inequities in peri-urban areas of Victoria, Australia. Drawing on intersectional feminist theory and design justice frameworks, this examination explores how small-scale, community-led interventions, utilising participatory mapping and co-designed processes, might provide more immediate and inclusive responses to the spatial challenges faced by women individuals in these contexts. While based in an Australian context, the research responds to conditions typical of rapidly growing outer suburbs in global north cities, where car dependency, inadequate infrastructure, and planning delays limit equitable access and safety. Through examining international case studies including, Making Space in Dalston , London (2007–2010), The Garden Library, Tel Aviv (2009), Homebaked, Liverpool (2010-ongoing), and Mutfak Workshop , Istanbul (2007–2010), this paper identifies shared feminist interventionists practices including co-design, care ethics, spatial agency, and adaptability and argues that these approaches offer transferable approaches to improve public space. The paper aims to identify common feminist principles from these case studies that can inform design practice in peri-urban Victoria. It concludes that the tactical applications of feminist spatial principles offer a promising approach to testing context-sensitive, participatory design strategies that may support more equitable urban design outcomes in peri-urban settings.

Marginalized communities around the world are disproportionately impacted by the distribution of unjust infrastructure and environmental conditions. However, through distributive, procedural, and restorative frameworks, it is possible to teach spatial designers to challenge, inform, and reshape the world toward a more just and equitable future. This chapter delves into the various themes developed as part of the “Spatial Justice” professional elective at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, which offers an interdisciplinary perspective on urban studies, urban design, and the roles that social, environmental, and ecological justice play in designing a more just and equitable urbanity. In this course, students explore critical urban theory, justice, counter cartographies, design activism, participatory systems, and spatial agency using alternative mapping methodologies to render legible latent sociospatial asymmetries.

The research analyzes the right to the city through the role of public squares in the urban periphery of the southern region of Santa Cruz do Sul, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. It is based on the assumption that access to and use of public spaces are essential for building fairer cities. The methodology involved a comprehensive set of qualitative and quantitative data collection methods, including semi-structured interviews, participant observation, documentary analysis of urban legislation, photographic records, and secondary data collection. These methodological approaches aimed to understand the perceptions, experiences, and demands of the local population regarding public squares. The southern urban periphery was chosen due to the concentration of low-income populations and the historical lack of quality public squares. The results indicate that access to and use of squares are influenced by factors such as location, infrastructure, safety, maintenance, and the activities on offer. There is a significant demand for improvements in these aspects, particularly in infrastructure, safety, and cultural and sporting activities. Content analysis identified patterns, trends, and contradictions in the interviewees' perceptions, highlighting the complexity of public squares in the periphery, their role as spaces for social interaction, and the challenges related to the right to the city, spatial justice, and urban and regional development. The research contributes to the debate on urban public policies that promote access to and the democratic use of public squares, recognizing their importance as spaces for meeting, coexistence, and citizenship, especially for residents of peripheral areas.

Purpose of the article. To find the most effective methods of curatorship, based on P. Hudimov’s (famous Ukrainian curator) experience. Methodology. Conceptualization of experience, skeptical empiricism, scientific criticism are used. Scientific novelty. This research is the first attempt at a scientific conceptualization of a professional interview. It is shown that the essence of curatorial practice is not visualization of popular narratives, but in specific research work that creates new meanings. According to P. Hudimov, curatorial practice can be considered as "thinking design". Conclusions. As a result of the study, it was established that curatorial work, including museum, is a creative process, far from patterns and routine. Curatorship excludes routine, templates, imitation. So, it’s hard to speak about curatorship robust models, that can use by different curators. Even if borrowed models were succeed. Curatorship approaches are ties close with the person of curator. That’s why, models of curatorship are not in competition, in which the best one survive and worse – eliminate. Each approach of curatorship is curator’s self-expression. Despite this, P. Hudimov identifies the most common curatorial methods, among which he especially emphasizes the productivity of denial. This brings the curatorial methodology closer to the scientific one, which is based on a refutation. In addition, Hudimov emphasizes the benefit of intentional stress for both the methods themselves and curatorial representations. The stress method also brings curation to science closer together, since the refutation is closely related to criticism and testing. The method of negation proposed by Hudimov, more broadly, the method of "trial and error" is integral not only for curatorial practices, but also for science, art and empiricism in general. P. Gudimov considers it necessary for the curator to overcome patterns (template-realm of social consciousness). For that, in his opinion, the synthesis method is optimal, which consists in combining phenomena, artifacts, and ideas that are not at first glance. The most innovative method Gudimov calls the research approach in the work of the curator. In this regard, further investigation shall be directed on the scientific aspect of curatorial practice.

This is the first book to closely examine the curatorial work that the celebrated poet Frank O’Hara (1926-1966) undertook for the Museum of Modern Art in New York and abroad. Upon his premature death, the New York Times obituary ran with the headline: ‘Frank O’Hara, 40, Museum Curator / Exhibitions Aide at Modern Art Dies – Also a Poet’. However, in the half a century since, O’Hara’s fascinating career as a curator, where he oversaw exhibitions of the likes of Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, David Smith, and Larry Rivers, among others, has been eclipsed by the critical attention given over to his poetry. Drawing on a broad range of unpublished archival material, the book reveals the impact O’Hara’s curatorial work had both on the reception of American modern art abroad and on the curatorial profession itself. It focuses on his travelling exhibitions for MoMA’s International Program, a vehicle for soft power during the fraught years of the cultural Cold War, exposing him to new art, artists, and cities, while developing important transnational networks far from New York, from Madrid to Venice, Zagreb to Otterlo. Bringing together close readings of O’Hara’s poems and unpublished letters with a selection of archival illustrations, Holman argues for O’Hara’s sense of exuberant continuity between life as a writer and a curator, an American and a cosmopolitan – revealing that he was so much more besides the quintessential New York poet. It is perfect reading for anyone interested in American art in the mid-20th century, curatorial and museum studies, or simply this lesser known but fascinating aspect of the legendary poet’s career. Upon his premature death, the New York Times obituary ran with the headline: ‘Frank O’Hara, 40, Museum Curator / Exhibitions Aide at Modern Art Dies – Also a Poet’. However, in the half a century since, his fascinating career as a curator, where he oversaw exhibitions of the likes of Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, and Seymour Lipton, among others, has been eclipsed by the critical attention given over to his poetry. This is the first book to closely examine the curatorial work undertaken by the celebrated poet Frank O’Hara (1926–1966), principally for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, from 1956 to his death. It traces O’Hara’s distinguished curatorial career at home and abroad, situating his work for MoMA’s International Program within the Cold War politics of the day. Considering seminal moments in transatlantic curatorial history, such as the 1958 Venice Biennale and Documenta II in 1959, flashpoints when the status of American modernism shifted dramatically in Europe, to heartfelt memorial exhibitions of close friends Franz Kline and David Smith, Holman stresses the ways in which O’Hara’s personal exuberance and poetic flair came to shape how American art was perceived, celebrated, and remembered. Drawing on a broad range of unpublished archival material, Curating Modern Life reveals the impact O’Hara’s curatorial work had both on the reception of American modern art abroad and on the curatorial profession itself. Through close examination of O’Hara’s curatorial practice and career, the book illuminates the organization and reception of modern art exhibitions during the 1950s/1960s Cold War period more broadly, and considers the ways in which O’Hara’s style of thinking and writing about art were prescient in terms of the methodologies championed today.

Curatorial practice is one of the most discussed but least analyzed subfields of museum practice. In this chapter, the author offers a broad survey of a multi‐faceted topic based in part on a literature review, a specially convened seminar, and also his own experience making exhibitions at the Wellcome Collection in London. After reviewing a range of developments driving a change in the way curators work – expansion of the museum profession, new museum spaces and places, and different ways of thinking about collections and exhibitions, research and scholarship, media and audience – he argues that new forms, models, and approaches are appearing: broadly speaking a shift from caring to creating. In this “new curatorship” we see curators as political activists, artistic directors, and public investigators. However, sometimes the skills involved are the same as they have always been, for example the kind of “thinking out loud” found in the exhibition experiments of the new interdisciplinary cultural centers of which the Wellcome Collection is an example. In this particular form of new curatorship, the chapter concludes, a premium is placed on the idea of seeking and marshalling visual and material ideas in order finally, with an inspired flourish of showmanship, to just stand back and point.

女性主義倫理與香港的墮胎問題

The paper seeks to redefine curatorial practices through the lens of care and solidarity, particularly in times of war. By examining the ongoing work of Ukrainian artists and curators, the authors aim to highlight how curating, as a practice of care, can serve as a vital tool for preserving cultural heritage, fostering community, and resisting geopolitical violence. By positioning curatorial care within the framework of solidarity, the contribution explores how curating can act as a form of collective resistance and survival. In this context, curating is no longer just about representing art but also about protecting and sustaining it in times of crisis. The feminist dimensions of this discussion further emphasize the need for curatorial practices that are attentive to the social, economic, and gendered contexts in which they operate.

Reflecting on the experience of curating Veronica Ryan’s work for the 2021 exhibition Life Support: Forms of Care in Art and Activism at Glasgow Women’s Library, this essay contextualizes the artist’s recent sculptures in relation to the theories, philosophies, and ethics of care that have recently gained increasing prominence in artistic and curatorial practice. Drawing on the philosopher Virginia Held’s understanding of care as inherently intersubjective, it proposes that Ryan’s sculptures model a comparable understanding of caring relations through their associative yet ultimately elusive operations. Ryan is recognized for her use of abstracted organic forms, particularly seeds, pods, husks, and fruits. Since moving to New York from Britain in 1990 and developing a career between the two countries, Ryan has engaged with industrial and mass-produced receptacles, molds, and packing materials, an interest which has expanded to include fishing wire, plastic bottles, and take-away food containers, alongside textiles. Yet, although many of these elements remain identifiable, the resulting works delight in category confusion between organic and prefabricated, instigating uncanny textural effects that engender perceptual uncertainty. Their chains of allusion resist singular, fixed meanings, generating a continual back and forth of association and dissociation that constitutes a sustained meditation on care’s relational complexity.