Taking a seat: Curating spaces of (un)learning

Abstract

Through an edited conversation, curator-educators Amy Halliday and Clare Butcher engage with artist-scholar Helina Metaferia whose work acts as a catalyst for further discussion around various inheritances, questions and approaches shaping curatorial and artistic methodologies in relation to spaces of ‘knowledge production’ and practices of study in a more expanded sense. Be it within university gallery settings, biennial programming or in research-based collaborations, the pedagogically grounded curatorial and artistic models Halliday, Butcher and Metaferia activate and learn with often sit uncomfortably between hierarchies of visibility and value, process and product, learning and unlearning, education and representation. By sharing a number of exhibition, programming and artist-led case studies – including Halliday’s work with Helina Metaferia – in the development of the Against a Sharp White Background () exhibition and Butcher’s collaborations shaping recent programming and learning projects, informed by the work of artists such as Annette Kraus (on the ‘hidden curriculum’) and the collective work of Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures – the authors reflect on the generative lines of inquiry prompted by socially engaged, context-responsive artists’ practices working in these uncomfortable intersections. Halliday, Butcher and Metaferia also consider their own embeddedness in colonial, institutionalized art histories and the curatorial ethics that might transform these canons. Through the conversation, various questions emerge: what are the shared and uncommon vocabularies and positionalities that emerge through critical and collaborative curating and creative practice across colonial histories and presents? How are roles and accountabilities determined where participating stakeholders – such as artists, students, faculty or community members – are both authors and audiences? Who is acknowledged as expert or knowledge keeper in such conflicting value systems? Which voices and genealogies of practice inform the curricula we collectively create in pedagogical processes? Can we practise care in careless systems that are temporally bound and often output-oriented?