New Research

Abstract

Abstract Visible Assemblages: Six Affordances of Curating from the Peripheries In this article, the author offers a rationale of her understanding of self-curation. From her position as a native culture-bearer singer of Karnatik music from Southern India, now settled in Australia, a settler colonial country, she elaborates on the characteristics of curation that emerge as important from her perspectives on being and knowing. The key line of inquiry in this article is the role of artist-curators in giving voice to culturally diverse perspectives. Drawing on correspondences between theory and praxis, she proposes that curation is a transactional and interactive sphere of operation where the everyday lives of artists intersect with their roles as transnational creatives who must negotiate their migrant identities, cultural strengths, and multiple belongings. Curating Art/Archaeology: Excavating Through/With Material and Artistic Performativity The transdisciplinary practice of art/archaeology has created a new relationship between post-processual archaeology and contextual arts, allowing archaeologists and artists to strengthen their investigative and performative work. Curating art/archaeology presents new possibilities for experimenting with the present and the past. The performative gestures in art and archaeology challenge hegemonic perspectives and expand tools for surfacing narratives, presences, and absences. This essay presents an experiment in which curating art/archaeology methodologies were used to (re)interpret the archaeological spatiality, narratives, and artifactual records of the Ovil Mount, a proto-historical village in the northern region of Portugal. Through contemporary art formats and gestures, the static fixation of the past is resignified and mediated in dialogue with the present. The article serves to question the definition of artifact, archaeological objectivity, and the ways we relate to the creation of narratives in the past. It assumes the material and artistic performativity of the site and enacts its immaterialities. Curatorial Contemplations on the Conditions of Sound Arts in Diaspora This article is a revised version of an assessment I wrote before (Tabandeh 2022) in response to the conversations, debates, and shared concerns circulated among the participants of a music forum entitled Soundings: Assemblies of Listenings and Voices across the Souths that took place in August 2022 at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. A few weeks after the forum, the outburst of urban manifestations and civil upheavals in Iran in search of gender equality and social justice, followed by the sustained resistance of the Iranian people against oppression, stunned the world. The events of the consecutive months, alongside the ongoing war in Ukraine and several other concurrent conflicts around the globe, support the conjecture that more and more artists will probably keep crossing borders to end up in diaspora. In contrast, many others struggle to avoid becoming strangers in their homelands. In this text, I describe the sounds and voices of both groups as migrant sounds: those who have actually migrated and those who manage to project their voices beyond the border, even if they have never physically crossed it. This predicament is, of course, common to all live artists who need the presence of performers who must deal with real dangers to themselves and others. Nevertheless, the sociopolitical complexities of our time and the many ambivalences in the art of migrant voices, especially those of sound artists and composers, still invite further inquiry. In this article, I aim to reformulate the arguments of my earlier report to investigate the subject matter from a curatorial standpoint: What can event organizers and curators learn from gatherings of artists and researchers such as the Berlin forum? What can such events tell us about the challenges of survivance in diasporic conditions? And finally, how might this knowledge help us to encourage and facilitate similar “intercultural” encounters between sound artists from different ethnographic backgrounds in a community of new audiences and collaborators? Hybridity within an Expanding Field: Entry Points To Curating Contemporary Music And Sound Art In this article, we take a closer look at the issue of (dis)placement from both the spatial and a symbolic point of view introducing to the contemporary music and sound art curatorial field the term “entry point,” broadly used in migration or border studies. This term, both spatial and symbolic, illustrates the Other entering the porous borders between countries and cultures, or borders between disciplines, genres, media, communities, practices, and forms of artistic expression. In our study, we use the term “entry point” to analyze the variety of the backgrounds (both professional and artistic) of the young curators entering the field, the participants of two Sounds Now Curating Diversity Courses taking place in Athens, Greece, and Viitasaari, Finland. We are particularly interested in their personal and professional motivation, responsibilities, and reasons to enter the field of curating as well as the challenges and issues they face.