Contemporary Curatorial Practice Research Articles

Curators of Global Buddhism: A Critical Genealogy and Decolonial Reading of Contemporary Curatorial Practices in Buddhist Studies

Abstract This article offers the first critical genealogy of scholarship on the category of “global Buddhism” and its related literature. The category was first theorized around the turn of the millennium and has since been used in multiple publications, yet in all this scholarship, there is no clear definition, classification, or critical evaluation of the term. This article, therefore, details the different histories, taxonomies, and examples associated with global Buddhism, the relationship between power and knowledge in such representations, and clarifies what, if anything, any of this has to do with the category of “religion,” a question whose critical dimensions have been ignored by scholars on the topic thus far. Since the category rose to prominence alongside a series of others like “Buddhist Modernism,” “postmodern Buddhism,” and “global religion,” the article also draws attention to the curatorial practices that inform the academic study of Buddhism and religion and critiques the remnants of colonialism, orientalism, and universalism still operative in late capitalist scholarship. Theoretically, the article is informed by critical theory from the study of religion and Decolonial thought. Overall, it suggests deep ties between global Buddhism and what Anibal Quijano calls the coloniality of power but also suggests critical ways to employ the category going forward.

Why Curate a Festival Without an Audience?

Why curate live arts without the bodily presence of external live audiences? After all, are the latter not the omphalos of live arts? This article responds to the above questions through a case study of the 2018 GAN and GAN International Performance Art Festival that took place on May 1, 2, and 3—an annual off-the-grid festival in the village of Meibei in the Southern Chinese province of Jiangxi. As a festival without an external live audience, GAN and GAN challenges both the central position of the audience in the conceptual framework of live arts curating and established concepts of audiences. I examine the curatorial practice and philosophy of the festival’s two curators, Xiong Yunhao and Xiao Shang and demonstrate how their live arts festival—curated for its artists—not only preserves the endangered genre of Xingwei Yishu (performance/behavioral art from China) but widens the scope of contemporary curatorial practice.

Clothing displayed in museums: from conservation to innovative design representations

The presentation in museum exhibitions of samples of historical clothing, fashionable costumes from different periods and conceptual costumes of our time has acquired particular relevance. The development of exhibition design has attracted the attention of gallery owners, curators and representatives of the scientific community. The general cultural significance of the practices of preserving the heritage of material and artistic cultures and their representations synthesises traditional and innovative approaches to reconstruction, conservation and perception of costume, while remaining poorly studied. The strategies of contemporary curatorial practices form alternative approaches to fashion exhibitions and their organisation. In the information society, fashion exhibitions have become self-sufficient art projects that require careful scientific consideration.

Introduction

Beginning with consideration of why the term ‘curation’ has come to be so ubiquitous in popular culture, this special issue looks at the ways in which curation work today happens across an array of popular music activity. More than simply selecting a range of interesting objects, the imperative to be community-oriented is embedded within contemporary curatorial practice. Hence, much modern curation work is narrative in nature: telling a compelling story not just through a static collection and presentation of artefacts to a single, monolithic audience but through dynamic and multiply iterated discourse with a range of audiences, communities and stakeholders. The articles in this collection all examine how the work of music curation illustrates a form of community and belonging, either through participation and engagement with some type of music activity or in acknowledgement of how others are either liminally or overtly excluded from it. Whilst cultural commentators and writers tend to treat the application of the word ‘curation’ in extra-museum environments with an element of disdain, the articles in this special issue demonstrate that the ultimate value of curation in both popular culture and popular music is its power to communicate stories that foster new forms of community, identity and collectivity in an increasingly disaggregated and isolating world.

Contemporary Curatorial Practice: A Case Study of Curation on Site-Specific Consideration—Research and Practice Based on Birmingham City, UK

This evaluation relates to the “...publication as a site” and contemporary art exhibitions for artists held on website and portfolios. I will discuss the concept development in the project within my role, through to the management of artists and the publication of design. This will also give consideration to “site-specific” curatorial practice theory and obtain comments from artists and audience. Moreover, the commissioning process is the significant considerable elements.

Curating as (Expanded) Art History in Southeast Asia: Recent Independent Projects in Ho Chi Minh City, Luang Prabang, and Phnom Penh

A small yet influential strain of independent contemporary curatorial practice has emerged in Southeast Asia, which is performing (expanded) art historical functions. This mode of independent curating now constitutes an important base for exciting new research—making use of diverse archives as well as other methodologies—to study the often little-known histories of the region's modern arts, including its architecture, cinema, and photography. That such research is taking place in the context of independent contemporary curatorial practice is significant because it locates modern art history largely outside of large and state-funded institutions, including museums and universities, thus enabling the development and proliferation of art historical research in areas of Southeast Asia, including its mainland sub-regions, which have comparatively little funding and official infrastructure for the arts. This article explores the emerging practice of independent curating as (expanded) art history in Southeast Asia, through comparative discussion of three case studies: the Roung Kon Project in Phnom Penh, which researches histories of cinema in Cambodia; the Buddhist Archive of Photography in Luang Prabang, which researches histories of photography in Laos; and Spirit of Friendship in Ho Chi Minh City, which researches histories of artist groups in Vietnam.

Collaging Cultures: Curating Italian Studies

This essay aims to contribute to current debates about how to research and teach within the disciplinary frame of modern languages in light of the knowledge that recent patterns of global migration have made the conventional fusion of national territory and language untenable. The challenge is to reimagine histories of cultural practice and production critically in spite of the national frame that continues to shape our thinking. Starting from theoretical prompts by Doris Sommer and Okwui Enwezor, I suggest that contemporary curatorial practice offers one model for reworking how we practice Italian Studies in light of the decolonizing imperatives of work in diasporic, postcolonial, and transnational studies. Emphasizing a spatial model of cultural connectedness, I work with a notion of the haptic to investigate (as a kind of case study) how an encounter with the variegated traces of Italian culture in Scotland may lead researchers and students toward a pragmatic understanding of connectivity that does not depend on the blood lines of what Sommer calls “inherited frameworks.” I argue that contemporary curatorial practices revising both the optics and ownership of (Italian) culture can radically alter the presuppositions of our research and pedagogy.

‘The Museum of Today’: Harald Szeemann’s Science Fiction

Abstract Harald Szeemann’s 1967 exhibition Science Fiction is ripe for re-examination. Insights gained from unpublished handwritten notes reveal Szeemann’s endless listmaking as a connective curatorial methodology that sought to re-create an expansive science fiction ‘state of mind’. The resulting exhibition of over 3,000 diverse objects stands in contrast to the sterile space-age aesthetics of the white cube that was, at the same moment, becoming the pre-eminent form of contemporary art display. The popular response to Science Fiction stimulated Szeemann to conceptualize a ‘Museum of Today’ that would dynamically reflect its moment in time – a concept that resonates in Szeemann’s subsequent work and in contemporary curatorial practice.

6. The Art of Absence: The Practice of Contemporary Curating

In fall 2016, ARTH 422: Contemporary Curating had the unique opportunity to curate an exhibition for the spring 2017 season at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre. Under the guidance of Jennifer Kennedy, our curatorial team of 12 students worked closely together to develop a theme, set out objectives, select art works from the Agnes’ Contemporary Collection, and organize an exhibition catalogue.
 The curator has gained a significant role with the emergence of Contemporary Art, which predominantly de-emphasizes the tangible object and relocates it to the idea. Whereas traditional concerns included style, mode, medium and ideology, contemporary artists express interests encompassing place making, world picturing, and connectivity. As a mediator between artists and audiences, the curator treats art as a verb: transforming a constellation of silent objects into a moving, illuminated, dynamic experience.
 Our process began with researching and developing a theoretical and applied understanding of a curator's role and contemporary curatorial practice. Our collaborative process involved investigations of ‘absence’ along with the affective, existential, and relational intensities that live beyond our perceptive abilities. As a team of 12, we collectively worked through the challenges of reaching an open audience, limitations of physical space, time constraints, and adapting to unforeseen complications. As curators, we worked to create an affective experience/dialogue that goes beyond the initial encounter of art and offer a space to bridge the gap between art and life. Our aim in the exhibition was to reassure the viewer that confusion is positive and welcome and encourages critical dialogue and thinking.

Archival Predecessors and Indigenous Modernisms: Archives in Contemporary Curatorial Practice on the Northwest Coast

Les projets d’expositions archivistiques — et leur documentation — sont des lieux de production de connaissances en histoire de l’art, ainsi que des interventions politiques, qui placent les documents dans un autre contexte afin d’interroger les canons et les façons de voir des colonialistes-colons. À partir de ces relations discursives, visuelles et archivistiques, cet article examine deux rétrospectives solos des oeuvres sculptées et peintes des artistes modernistes kwakwaka’wakws, Doug Cranmer (‘Namgis) et Henry Speck (Tlawit’sis), présentées à Vancouver en 2012. En considérant comment les conservateurs ont fait appel aux archives familiales intimes et à des documents du domaine public, il traite de l’utilité des archives du modernisme pour activer des liens affectifs, ancestraux et familiaux au-delà des modes de compréhension canoniques et historiques des mouvements esthétiques et des contextes de production.

Navigating the Cyber Museum: Reconstructing Indigenous Living History in A Journey into Time Immemorial

This article closely examines aspects of the Virtual Museum of Canada’s website A Journey into Time Immemorial to investigate the relationship between the poetics of new media and contemporary curatorial practices in Indigenous cultural heritage. In this interactive cyber museum, detailed reconstructions of a longhouse village, engaging motion graphics and video interviews with Elders are combined to represent the historical practices of Stó:l̄-Coast Salish peoples and their enduring significance today. The objective of this research is to reflect on how computational tools and spatial design were used to express temporal aspects of tangible and intangible heritage preservation and transmission.

Invisible motion: Paratactical curation of bio art and performative political imaginaries

Abstract Bio artworks tend towards social reflection, conveying political and societal criticism through the combination of artistic and scientific processes. Some bio artworks also challenge to subvert hegemonic political imaginaries. In this article, focusing on the curation of a bio artwork and making an ethnographic research based on my participatory observation, I suggest a new conception of contemporary curatorial practice, ‘paratactical curation’, which aims to create performative political imaginaries and alternative futures. The article focuses on The Invisible Life, a series of a bio artwork of Joseph A. DeGiorgis and Ayse Gul Suter. This series was exhibited in Contemporary Istanbul Art Fair – Plugin New Media Section that I have curated in 2015. The main discussion is developed by paying attention to the giant squid axon work, in which the article responds to the emergence of a new political realm that reflects the communication problems of post-control societies: connection failures, memory loss and noise.

Institutional Engagement and the Growing Role of Ethics in Contemporary Curatorial Practice

In recent years, generating social impact through less conventional curatorial practices has become a primary target and a remit among contemporary and modern art museums in Europe. These particular curatorial practices have involved three characteristics: formulating a new narrative for collection display; involving artists, designers and architects in the creation of these curatorial narratives; and developing forms of institutional engagement with the public. Modern and contemporary art museums are increasingly rethinking the potential role of exhibitions and public programming initiatives to engage substantively with the audience, formulating curatorial research questions that hold an ethical drive. The paper examines and analyses how, in the past few years, ethics has had a strong influence on curatorial practices, leading to new forms of institutional engagement that have fostered social impact. Recently, museum ethics have been reconsidered in the light of more dynamic museum programming, which has ensured the opportunity for all—from artists to the public—to engage with the work of the museum. This paper analyses the influence of ethics on curatorial practice and the features characterising curatorial ethics as a form of institutional engagement shaping either curatorial practice, research questions or research methodologies. Specifically, it investigates Tate Liverpool's curatorial initiatives that have demonstrated how, through different forms of institutional engagement, the museum produces social impact while achieving a new ethical role.

Curating the Soul: Foucault's concept of hupomnemata and the digital technology of self-care

ABSTRACTThis paper explores how online actions such as the practice of digital self-writing shape our offline identity. We start with an examination of the concept of hupomnemata – a practice of self-writing in which notes are kept as a ‘material record of things read, heard, or thought’ in the intent of shaping the self [Foucault (1997). Self writing. In P. Rabinow (Ed.), Ethics, subjectivity and truth. The essential works of Foucault, 1954–1984. Volume 1 (pp. 207–222). New York, NY: The New Press p. 209] – before arguing that the practice of digital content curation can be understood as a modern-day variant of the Greco-Roman hupomnemata. Although the work of the digital curator is conducted online, this paper positions contemporary curatorial practices as acts of self-exploration, self-cultivation, and self-care, which nourish offline identity and which ultimately work to shape the offline, corporeal self.

The Curatorial Avant-Garde: Surrealism and Exhibition Practice in France, 1925–1941 par by Adam Jolles

Jolles, Adam. The Curatorial Avant-Garde: Surrealism and Exhibition Practice in France, 1925–1941. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 2013. ISBN 978-0271 -06415-4. Pp. 270. $90. Through his refreshing look into the world of the museum according to the French Surrealists, Jolles delves into exciting new territory about the debates and the critical discourses of their exhibitions and works of art. These surrealist artists posed as curators and did not have any professional experience. They included the usual suspects such as André Breton and Louis Aragon, as well as lesser-known figures, who often showcased their art in strange and curious venues. Divided into five chapters, complete with many amusing anecdotes, Jolles’s book offers an interdisciplinary approach of the exhibitions and the Surrealists’ artistic and intellectual development in interwar Europe. The book explores the creative forces at work in terms of curatorial activity and the ways in which the French Surrealists upended, at times literally on its head, artistic practice and promotion of their works in the public sphere. Original in its content and insightful in its analysis, the book provides a thorough reading of the artistic practices of the Surrealists from their introduction in Paris in 1925. The impressive range of images including digital scans of paintings, sculptures, lithographs of the works which populated these exhibitions and of the exhibitions themselves (many currently housed in formal museum settings) are exquisitely rendered and complement Jolles’s detailed descriptions. The author provides crucial insight into the conflicting views Surrealist works should be made, displayed, and promoted. The chapter “Denouncing de Chirico” sheds new light on the public censuring of one of surrealism’s most formative figures while“Colonists by Vocation”tackles the daunting task of mounting an exhibition promoting precolonial ritual artifacts. In his fourth and fifth chapters, Jolles focuses on the representation of objects spanning the gamut from mundane, ordinary objects to surrealist objects, and how these objects could both commercialize surrealism and subvert commercialism. Overall, the book highlights the significance of the aesthetic experience and explains how visual media and language can effect change in new and innovative ways, an issue which remains critical to contemporary curatorial practices. The conclusion entitled “Looking Back on Adorno” redefines the limits of traditional artistic boundaries and suggests the challenges curators may face in the future, including the public museum as an institution and the superficiality versus market value of artworks. Finally, the extensive bibliography and endnotes provide a wealth of information for further study into the complex world of the French Surrealists. This book will certainly appeal to those readers with a keen interest in alternative curatorial practices as well as those who appreciate modernist art history and French culture. University of Toronto Catherine Gaughan 248 FRENCH REVIEW 89.2 ...

Lucy R. Lippard’s Numbers Shows and the Dilemmas of Contemporary Curating

The Exhibition Histories series––within which we find the volume devoted to Lucy R. Lippard’s Numbers Shows that she curated between 1969 and 1974––is an attempt to offer a response to some of the challenges of contemporary curatorial practice by examining a selection of key shows drawn from the last fifty years of exhibition history. The selection the editors of Afterallhave offered so far––Magiciens de la terre, the thirdBienal de la Habanaor Op losse Shroeven and When Attitudes Become Form...

Breathing Space for 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.

Anti-Humanist curating: Finding a way further in

ABSTRACTAs a brief introduction to the new research project Anti-Humanist Curating, this essay focuses on the limits and problems of liberal Humanism, the prevailing ideological framework of our societies in the post-industrial Western nations, and how these limits and problems may be explored, expanded and exploded to consider new formulations of the politics of contemporary curatorial modalities. The contemporary operations of this ideology are interrogated as manifest specifically through the workings and ethics of contemporary curatorial practices: i.e. within the technologies that make art visible and the conditions of the reception of contemporary art. This introduction also discusses how curatorial practices might regain more stringent political valence for the production and reception of contemporary art more broadly.