Research Curation Research Articles

Archaeology of Ruderal Futurism

Language used to describe plant life and their environments is shaped by how plants are perceived. In turn this language reproduces how plants continue to be perceived and contributes to the further shaping of attitudes toward them. This essay presents the ruderal as a framework for understanding and envisioning being-with more-than-human others in a world altered by colonial and capitalist exploitation, extraction and expansion. Enacting an archaeological tracing of language and cultural thought towards ruderal plant species, consideration is given to: vernacular language applied to vegetal beings; identities of belonging applied to the movement of vegetation at a planetary scale; and decolonial modes of thinking-with and being-with vegetal others in the aftermath of colonialism and capitalism. Particular consideration here is given to the classification systems of botanist Albert Thellung, the thought of gardener and landscape architect Gilles Clément and the work of artist Andrea Callar. This paper extends an ongoing area of research I have previously examined in the curatorial research project Ruderal Futures (2022) for SixtyEight Art Institute and the essay ‘A brief constellation towards a ruderal futurism’ (2020).

Multisensory Technologies for Inclusive Exhibition Spaces: Disability Access Meets Artistic and Curatorial Research

This article discusses applications of technology for sensory-disabled audiences in modern and contemporary art exhibitions. One case study of experimental artistic and curatorial research by The OtherAbilities art collective is discussed: a series of prototype tools for sensory translation from audible sound to vibration were developed to be embeddable in the architecture of spaces where art is presented. In the article, the case study is approached from a curatorial perspective. Based on bibliographical sources, the article starts with a brief historical reference to disability art activism and a presentation of contemporary accessibility solutions for sensory-disabled audiences in museums. The research for the case study was conducted during testing and feedback sessions on the prototypes using open-ended oral interviews, open-ended written comments, and ethnographic observation of visitors’ behavior during exhibitions. The testers were d/Deaf, hard of hearing and hearing. The results focus on the reception of the sensory translation of audible sound to vibration by test users of diverse hearing abilities and on the reception of the prototypes in the context of art and design exhibitions. The article closes with a reflection on how disability scholarship meets art curatorial theory in the example of the article’s case study.

Forever Becoming: Teaching “Transgender Studies Meets Art History” and Theorizing Trans Joy

Academics often comment that their teaching affects their research, but how this manifests is often implicit. In this essay, I explicitly explore the artistic, scholarly, and curatorial research instantiated by an undergraduate class titled “Transgender Studies meets Art History,” which I taught during the fall of 2022. Alongside personal anecdotes—both personal and connected to the class—and a critical reflection on my pedagogy, I discuss the artwork and public programming connected to a curatorial project, “Forever Becoming: Decolonization, Materiality, and Trans* Subjectivity, I organized at UrbanGlass, New York City in 2023. The first part of the article I examine how “trans” can be applied to thinking about syllabus construction and re-thinking canon formation for a class focused on transgender studies’ relationship to art history. In the second half, I theorize trans joy as a felt vibration between/across multiplicity and singularity, belonging and unbelonging, and world-making and world-unmaking. Overall, I consider trans as a lived experience and its utility as a conceptual tool. As a coda, I consider the precarity of teaching this course in the current political climate of the United States.

Reinventing curatorial research: The museum as a laboratory for artistic learning during lockdown

AbstractThis paper engages in a reflexive analysis of a curatorial research project conducted in the museum when access was restricted due to the 2020 lockdown. This case study follows an action research design and was located at the Luis Seoane Foundation (A Coruña). This is a physical and virtual space for artistic and educational experimentation. This space emerges from the need to reinvent museum didactics and participant guidance from a new perspective. Thus, an online community was activated where museum staff, artists and other contributors could participate, showing how cultural spaces seek a more direct relationship attuned to their environment. The authors used an ethnographic method based on participant observation, including visual archives and artistic production as fundamental tools of this Arts‐based Educational Research.

Klimata

Abstract This article explores the notion of “curatorial research” within the realm of the live arts through the case study of the perfor mance exhibition Klimata (2019) curated by Léna Szirmay-Kalos, Dániel Kovács, and Jasna Layes Vinovršky, at the Berliner Flutgraben. In the article, I accentuate the transdisciplinarity of the project, which constitutes a paradigmatic example of curatorial research in exhibition settings. I argue that the project underscores the transformative potential of integrating the live arts with time-based media, or installation art, while foregrounding the embodied knowledge of the vulnerable body. Additionally, these forms are combined with non-art/scientific forms, enriching the transdisciplinary dialogue and expanding the boundaries of curatorial knowledge production. This investigation contributes to the progress of curatorial studies by providing insights into the dynamic intersection between curation and research.

Book and Performance/Exhibition Reviews

Folkerts, Hendrik & Julia Born, eds. Alexandra Bachzetsis: Show Time Book / Book Time Show. Amsterdam: Roma Publications. Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969. Exhibition and performances at the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, June 24 to November 26, 2023. Curated by Candice Hopkins, with curatorial research led by Amelia Russo.

Photography and the glitch

Within the last decade, a growing number of artists, media activists and theorists have been engaged with the potential of the glitch – with processes and aesthetics that arise from visual errors in digital technologies. But glitches also offer clues to understanding normative knowledge and power systems, and to challenge these. This is relevant in critical approaches to photography and its historical role in forming, controlling and colonizing systems as well as conventional understandings of the medium as a transparent window onto the world/reality. In this introduction we outline our approach to the glitch in the artistic and curatorial research project ‘Photography and the Glitch’, to which the contributors to this issue have contributed in various ways.

Plazas of sovereignty: Curatorial imagination in times of expanded borders

This article explores the dispersed geography of the so-called plazas of sovereignty, the Spanish strongholds formed by a group of rocks, islets and archipelagos, that stretch along the northern coast of Morocco, from a curatorial perspective. These territories, which have been occupied by Spain since the end of Middle Age, are today inaccessible to documented or undocumented citizens. My curatorial research Dispositifs of Touching has created a space for studying the enclaves through the activation of a methodology that has helped to approach and generate knowledge around their forbidden status. Their lack of accessibility has encouraged the development of a curatorial production that included site-visits, reading groups, public platforms for debate, documentary materials, artistic productions and installations. Beyond this, the study of the strongholds facilitates the configuration of a criticality ( Rogoff, 2003 ) on terms that are fundamental for curatorial research and practice as much as for contemporary urgencies related to the contemporary migratory crisis between Africa and Europe.

Transcultural curation and the post-COVID world

New and complex forms of entanglements and power dynamics have taken place via a transcultural curation ethos of Chinese contemporary art in recent decades – the frictions of which have amplified during pandemic times. This Special Issue of the Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art (JCCA) focuses on curatorial research and debates on the transcultural and the post-COVID world in China and beyond. The editorial sets out the key conceptual framework for assessing the significance of transcultural curation and Chinese contemporary art, both before and after the COVID-19 pandemic. The editorial unpacks key concepts and ideas such as transculturation as theory, method and practice; interrogates the processes and challenges of curating Chinese contemporary art in a transcultural context and the post-COVID world; and maps the issue content and structure. The Special Issue invocation to transcultural curation in a post-COVID world serves as a provocation to think carefully about the connections between past, present and future, and what continues and what is new for curatorial imaginaries.

Divas and dynamos: Decolonizing Senegalese histories through fashion

Fashion has been seen as either a rejection or an embracing of history and the past. In reality, fashion is constantly changing – is fragmentary, transitory and borderless. Because fashion has no borders, it can be brave, bold and often contradictory, just as the women who design and wear it can themselves present unique ambiguities worth exploring. Grounded in field and curatorial research with three generations of Senegalese fashion designers, this article explores the ways in which women in Dakar and Saint-Louis reinscribe problematic histories in sartorial expressions and shift the narrative away from a ‘colonial’ past and into a potential and ideological future imaginary. Each designer envisions and amplifies women’s voices, concerns and constructions of histories, despite discrepancies. And yet, in these very discrepancies lie the defiance of a colonial articulation of the past. As this article argues, decolonial creativity lies in the fault lines of history and can be selectively mined. This interpellation of the traditional/historical highlights an association of tradition with fixity and a distancing of fashion from the past that does not recognize the reality of African experiences. Instead, as a constant renegotiation of the past in the present, it blurs these boundaries and is constantly in flux.

Experimental persistence of change: collages of the palimpsestic temporalities of Freixo's Thermoelectric Power Station (Campanhã, Porto)

This paper presents an artistic work developed as part of the curatorial research Persistent Materialities, that experimented with different modes of documentation and mediation of loss of the post-industrial ruins of Freixo’s Thermoelectric Power Station (Campanhã, Porto). Whereas this building becomes less legible as an official object of industrial heritage and yield into continuous ruination and post-human condition, the collaged photographs presented here constructs a narration and interpretation of a retrospective history. The visual representations usually surrounding the imaginary of this landscape highlight two fixed modes of its existence: historical photographs are instrumentalized in a conservative discourse of preservation while architectural collages and technical drawings project a possible future where the building is no more. Distancing from these visual representations that conceive the landscape apart from its contingent and material reality, the retrospective collages stage the complexity of layers that assemble and reassemble this palimpsestic landscape. The recollection of segments, traces and fragments of a dynamic and mutable history quest for the endurance of the transformed and transforming aspect of this heterotopic space rather than the landscape itself.

Case Studies in the Treatment of Asian Scroll Paintings

Works of art in the diverse Asian collections at the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) are regularly requested for display. These collections are routinely condition checked and, where appropriate, interventive treatments undertaken. Storage, in particular, has been continually improved. With the closure of the NGA during the initial Covid lockdown in March 2020, and the subsequent decreased demand to prepare works for exhibition, loan and travelling exhibitions, there was an opportunity to investigate Asian works in the NGA Study Collection, with the objective of identifying those excluded from display because of condition. The time available meant that the NGA Paper Conservation team could examine and treat a number of Asian scroll paintings in this collection. The focus of this paper is three Japanese paintings and two Chinese paintings, all on silk supports, with various degraded paper and fabric mounts and backings. After initially viewing the works with Curatorial colleagues, treatment expectations were discussed and established. Background research was undertaken, in terms of generic style and period, together with limited analysis on supports and pigments in order to inform treatment. While further Curatorial research is ongoing, it was possible to agree appropriate potential mounting styles and materials, allowing treatments to progress.

Harappa and cultural ownership: The Inheriting Harappa internship programme at the Lahore Museum

ABSTRACT The 2015 summer internship programme connected to a special exhibition on the Indus Valley Civilization was a watershed in the history of the Lahore Museum. Rediscovering Harappa: Through the Five Elements opened on the 21st of November 2015, showcasing original Harappan artefacts from the museum’s permanent holdings in conjunction with interpretive artworks that had been produced by the ‘artist-interns’ within the internship programme. This paper provides an overview of this internship – one that offered opportunities for curatorial research documentation and artistic production to college students, under the mentorship of museum experts. Conducted by the Inheriting Harappa Project, a major challenge taken up by this internship was to cultivate a sense of ownership of Harappan cultural legacy amongst the youth of Pakistan.

Terroir as Territory: Frybread and Fermentation as Critical Settler and Decolonial Practice

In this text, I reflect on the relationship between terroir and territory as part of a critical settler practice of sourdough bread-baking in the prairies of Treaty 4 lands, Saskatchewan. I propose that a framework of terroir-as-territory is one way of conceiving of and practising decolonialization within land-based food systems. Writing through conversation, reflection, and provocation, I consider the place of fermentation practices—specifically wheat fermentation—in settler and Indigenous communities in Saskatchewan, where fermentation (the chemical changes brought on by microbes) embodies simultaneously the processes of preservation and transformation. As I write, I draw from my ongoing curatorial research into contemporary art and fermentation as well as my long-standing interest in food security and food justice, pivoting, in this short textual performance, into food writing and criticism as activism.

Curatorial Research as Boundary Work

AbstractCuratorial research is a new field only emerging in the last few years within museological discourse. The notion of curating as research offers useful suggestions on how to escape historically induced binary oppositions between theory and practice, the academic and the artistic. Moreover, curatorial research instigates critical questions on the significance of knowledge production in the context of public museums, particularly the relationship between research, display and museum audience. This article explores different notions of curatorial research as they emerge through current museological discourse. Three models of curatorial research are identified, each conveying a distinct – yet related – understanding of knowledge production through curatorial practice in the museum setting. The article then uses the exhibition In Between as a case to explore these models further. Building on the analysis of the case and the three models, a fourth research model is proposed. The new model is based on the concept of “boundary work”, emphasising the multiple epistemological contributions curatorial research entails as it traverses borders between the domains of science and culture, thereby blurring the distinctions between theory and practice, the discursive and the immersive, the systematic and the creative.

Revealing the Hydrocene: Reflections on Watery Research

This reflective paper shares considerations of curatorial research of art and water during the current climate crises as part of both contemporary art and Blue Humanities fields. This paper shares water-based methods utilised to develop the Hydrocene, the water-based curatorial theory I have named and defined as an act of curatorial planetary caretaking. In my doctoral thesis, Ingesting the Hydrocene, I argue that water, this most vital of materials, is the central figure of the climate crisis and that a zeitgeist of groundbreaking artists cultivate critical and collaborative methods of relating with water from which we must learn. The Hydrocene as a curatorial theory reveals hitherto unexamined curatorial perspectives on the interrelation of art and water in acts of planetary climate care. The act of naming and defining this artistic tide as the Hydrocene, is a curatorial act of caretaking returning to the epistemological origins of the curator as caretaker. The flow-on effect of the art of the Hydrocene is the potential for more radical ways of relating to water ethically. Sharing the Hydrocene and the complexities of a sustained dedication to learning from and with water in the field of art, this paper aims to illuminate the way water offers intellectual, emotional, physical and metaphorical sustenance to myself and the artists I work with. In return for this wealth of knowledge from water, I aim to recognize waters own agency, power and adaptability, and to enter into principled collaborations with it.

Post-photography: Lens-based methodology and practice-led ways of critical thinking

Contemporary photographic practice has evolved into a broad field of possibilities, a ‘post- photography’ moment that comprises fluxes of representational modes to represent experiences, feelings and emotions. In parallel the depth and layering of places offers an exciting challenge to researchers and artists whom are willing to creatively explore the multi- sensorial and spatial ‘reality’ of places. These thoughts underpin my recently completed practice- led PhD research at Te Awa River Ride, a shared pathway that edges the banks of the Waikato River from Ngāruawāhia to Cambridge, in the central North Island of Aotearoa New Zealand. I explore notions of place and place- making by presenting an installation of photographs titled South of the Rising Sun. I offer this photography installation as a creative milestone which resulted from a methodology of iteration and artistic expression.
 The lens- based component of my PhD research covered the construction of a body of photographic work aiming to represent the ways photographic practices and technologies are embedded within the ways we perceive place and create place-making. My lens- based practice is primarily informed by post- photography methods underpinned by the idea that photographs do not function as pure depictions of reality or single objective representations. On the contrary, I understand photographic practices and images as sources for the construction of multiple meanings. Within this context, I explore the possibilities of a range of camera apparatuses and modes of photographic representation such as documentary, portraiture, landscape and fine art photography.
 Lens- based practice therefore is located at the core of my critical thinking processes; a space, which feeds both theoretical and practice- led research approaches. This is the crucial moment when I try to align theoretical frameworks with photographic image construction processes and subsequent curation, sequencing, compilation, design and presentation of images. Processes such as curation, sequencing, compilation and photo narrative construction are key to my lens-based practice. These processes are integral to an iterative methodology of place-making inquiry connected to four different creative milestones. The stepping through of the creative milestones is intended to allow an understanding of my theoretical framework and research methods and how these work together as part of a complex practice- led research system. 
 Creative milestones are curatorial research products. They mark points within the overall research time frame. Each creative milestone involved the construction of a photo narrative. The first creative milestone covered the outputting of a photobook while the second involved explorations of digitally based platforms. The third and fourth creative milestones marked further explorations around sequencing, photo montage and photo narrative within photography installation platforms. 
 My presentation at the 2020 Link Symposium will unpack my lens- based methodology, arguing the ways post- photography practice informs methodological research approaches en route to critical ways of thinking and outputting of artistically based research products. This research model can also be argued as an artistically informed practice- led methodology of place-making.

From the Shore to the Coast: Curating the Front Line of Climate Change

Ephemeral Coast (2015–present; ephemeralcoast.com) is a curatorial research initiative by the author that identifies the coastline as a site and indicator of the radical shifts in geography that are literally taking place in the ocean as a result of the Anthropocene. This article discusses how exhibitions and events associated with the project have considered ephemerality as a poignant curatorial concept within and through which to consider the vanishing of healthy coastal regions. In creating a comparison with other exhibitions that address the climate crisis and related environmental devastation, it argues that the kinds of local, place-based and interdisciplinary curatorial research involved in this project allow for a reconsideration of the Anthropocene epoch as more of a ‘boundary’ event, which necessitates crossing disciplinary divides and questioning the development of new models of understanding and counteraction based upon curatorial engagement with ephemerality.

Futurescaping the Archive (Part 1. Artistic Intelligence and Creative Archiving of Artist Residency Experience)

AbstractWhile art residencies have become an integral infrastructural feature of the international contemporary arts ecosystem, their perceived value is largely under‐researched and the transformative impact they have upon the actors and agencies involved – not the least of those being the artists themselves – remains ill‐defined and inadequately documented. This article provides the first instalment in a series of texts designed to account for and synthesize various investigative aspects of an interdisciplinary action research project that has taken the Visual Artist Residency program hosted by Monash University at its Centre in Prato, Italy as its subject. The Prato Visiting Artist Residency Archive research project (PratoVARarchive) seeks to illuminate the distinctive qualities associated with archiving art residency experiences from an artist‐centred perspective by cross‐fertilizing curatorial research processes with the records continuum model. The nature of artist‐led processes, creative collaboration, extra‐institutional relationships and the persisting influence of residency experience on an artist’s practice has been investigated through a combination of conventional qualitative research (i.e. artist interviews) and unconventional research through practice, including exhibition and paracuratorial formats that were called upon to focus the issue of art and archives at the Community Informatics Research conference hosted in Prato in 2017. For its part, this initial essay establishes some of the key values (i.e. artistic intelligence; artistic/performative research processes) and archivistic approaches (i.e. present‐tense, creative archiving) informing the project’s inquiry‐based approach.

Some Relations between Ethics, Aesthetics and Politics in Contemporary Art in Times of Crisis

The inclusion of ethics and politics into artistic creation process is for many contemporary creators/artists an essential motivation while they consciously act in an aesthetic space polluted with the realities of a world in crisis. Art, which produces visible and sensible forms, can reveal aesthetic ideas and fundaments through aesthetic objects: drawing, video-installing or poem/poetry. And artists can make someone feel with their creations—whether these are beautiful, sublime, tragic, or ironic—ethical contentions violated by human action or the exertion/exercise of political power. Works of art that are not only guided by the categories signed by beauty, because in artistic languages, violence and suffering also make/create form. And times of crisis are the ideal sphere/dimension for an art that gives a vivid way of seeing/watching the uncertainty, the perversion, the terrible. In bringing these philosophical—ethical, aesthetic and political—topics, I do it from an approach that departs form artistic creations and curatorial research. I try to penetrate the narrow thread between an ethical topic and the plastic form in which it incarnates/embodies itself, or between a political action and the aesthetic structure of language as a creative, expressive consequence.