Curatorial Research

The term ‘knowledge society’ is used to refer to the increasing relevance of non- manual knowledge-producing labour in current post-industrial economies. Contemporary art, especially since 1989, has not been left out of this trend, to the extent that today it is not rare to see artists and curators described as knowledge producers and exhibitions and art works as instances of knowledge production. Acts of Research: Knowledge Production in Contemporary Arts between Knowledge Economy and Critical Practices analyses this development.
The academic discussion of knowledge production in the arts has taken place mostly in seminars and articles, in which knowledge is often discussed as an intrinsic quality of the artwork. Acts of Research, however, is devoted to studying the rise of knowledge production in contemporary art from the perspective of artistic, curatorial and educational research with an awareness of larger political, economic, geographical and art-related aspects. The concept of ‘acts of research’ is suggested as a way to understand knowledge production as a creative act in which research carried out in relation to a specific material challenges and resists the protocols of conventional knowledge production and norms. It is argued that knowledge production is not a stable concept, but may indicate a series of acts of research that allow each art practice to participate in a collective constitution of both the term and its practice.
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The conclusions are based on two different methodological approaches that structure the thesis. First, Chapter One traces the conceptual history of the term ‘knowledge production’, originally coined in economics and entering arts discourse as a critical term deployed against the rapidly growing global economy of the 1990s, and subsequently becoming a contested term in the new millennium due to its parroting of the discourse of that same global economy. Second, Chapters Two, Three and Four provide close readings of practices of artistic research in relation to the image and war (Hito Steyerl, The Otolith Group and Rabih Mroué), curatorial research in relation to global dynamics (Home Works: A Forum for Cultural Practices 2002-2013, III Bienal de La Habana and dOCUMENTA (13)) and educational projects in relation to knowledge and market economy (Tania Bruguera’s Cátedra de Arte de Conducta, Henriette Heise and Jakob Jakobsen’s Copenhagen Free University and Boris Buden’s Learning Place, part of the Former West Congress 2013); these readings are undertaken in order to understand the practices and workings of the specific mode of knowledge production unfolding through acts of research in the contemporary arts.

This paper discusses the processual ontological transitions of the curatorial after Paul O’Neill’s “curatorial turn”. Studying the curatorial from its discursive conception to a new materialist approach, it explores what can change when the curatorial is considered both a discourse and a practice, with no hierarchical distinctions or separations between them. To envisage the curatorial as a materia-ldiscursive practice is to admit that matter and meaning emerge together and one does not exist in the same way in the absence of the other. In this epistemology, the question changes from what the curatorial is to what the curatorial does, considering it as a mode of production of different kinds of knowledges.

This paper proposes a reflection about the Artist's Book as a space for curatorial experiments, resulting on an innovative authorial practice. For such, it is intended to raise questions about the Digital Art and the Artist's book potential on the field of cyberculture, expanding the physical limits of paper. We analize also some Artist's Book created in Brazil and abroad in the last years, by the artist Hellen Douglas e by the art curators Joanna Zylinska, Celina Lage e Jade Liz.

Propomos uma reflexão sobre o Livro de Artista como espaço de experimentos curatoriais, resultando em uma prática autoral inovadora. Para tal, levantamos questões sobre a arte digital e o potencial do Livro de Artista no âmbito da cibercultura, expandindo os limites físicos do livro de papel. São analisados casos de Livros de Artista produzidos no Brasil e no Exterior nos últimos anos, produzidos pela artista Hellen Douglas e pelos curadores Joanna Zylinska, Celina Lage e Jade
Liz.

This article turns on a curatorial project that Trine Friis Sørensen conducted in relation to the Danish Radio Archive (the DR Archive) by commissioning two artists, Kajsa Dahlberg and Olof Olsson, to engage with the archive and produce artworks in relation to it. Focusing on the practice of commissioning rather than its outcome, the article proposes to consider commissioning as a curatorial mode of inquiry into the DR Archive and in turn asks why we commission, how the commission works and what kind of thinking the commission engenders. Drawing on Bruno Latour, Michel Foucault and in particular Jacques Derrida, this thinking with and through the practice of commissioning eventually prompts her to reinvigorate the obsolete notion of curatorial care.

This article follows on the research on the ethics and politics of care and how they have been corroded by neoliberalism, and its individualist idea on care, while looking into the contrasting legacies of indigenous, first nations, feminist, activist trajectories and the way they understand the politics and ethics of care through an interdependent spectrum. by looking into this binary and its ripple effect on cultural production and work, the essay attempts to speculate on the future of institution building and artistic practice.

"Solidarity in Struggle: Photography on the Threshold between Revolution and Humanitarian Violence," is a peer-reviewed essay published in Issam Nasser and Salim Tamari (eds.), Jerusalem Quarterly, number 67, Winter 2016, pp. 28-41. 

http://www.palestine-studies.org/jq/fulltext/208472

The essay departs from an image that was taken in a room in the Hotel Beau Rivage in Beirut in 1980 while the East-German photographer Horst Sturm and his Palestinian-Lebanese bodyguard Khaled ‘Mein Sandokan’ took a rest. It was taken in a political moment when the Palestinian struggle for the people changed from armed resistance against Israel’s occupation towards the continuation of the militant struggle by the means of photography. It is a moment when the Palestinian press agency searched for a new image strategy for the internationalization of the Cause while the Cold War fought its last territorial combats in proxy battles. It is the same moment when the term ‘solidarity’ equated the declaration of socialist internationalism during the global Cold War exactly in a situation when the Human Rights discourse became a declared objective of United Nation’s rhetoric. It is a moment when the revolutionary image, that portrayed the strength of the people’s struggle, changed towards a humanitarian image that exposed the people’s defeat as an economy of suffering. It is a moment when ‘Showing solidarity had become a bureaucratic act’ as the East-German filmmaker Iris Gusner concludes. Within the double-bind of the informal and the official, or the micro-political and the macro-political, it will become possible to discuss solidarity in struggle between the act of political (socialist) friendship and the beginning of humanitarian violence.

This paper discusses the Exhibition Project and Research Process Up Till Now – Reconsidering historical performance and actionist Art from the former German Democratic Republic (8th March - 26th May 2013, Museum of Contemporary Art, Leipzig, Germany).
Up Till Now was particularly interested in experimenting with different curatorial strategies, which help to initiate and enable an updated reception of historic performative works. By questioning the relationship between performance and its documentation or ‘mediatization’ (video, photo, oral narratives, texts, scores, requisites etcetera), the curatorial team questioned what it meant to work with these artefacts today, and to stage this documentary material. How could artistic approaches, which denied importance of ‘the object’, be shown in an appropriate way? Moreover, questions around the archive arose: who works with what material, who gets access, how is/was the material contextualized, and what is put on show or not?

In the article, the results of a practice-based (curatorial) research are presented. The case study of an international exhibition is used to show how ideas turn into artworks by interacting with a concrete location and its inner and outer context through material transformations. In this analysis, the hybrid character of both the location, the process of an artwork, and artistic activity itself is revealed. The change of the author’s role from a curator to an art critic in the process of project implementation and reflection is also traced. This kind of standpoint allows us to look at the inner workings of that process and reveal the course and circumstances of building a show that are usually invisible to the viewer and reader.

The following research paper was prepared in reflection of Steele’s boundary blurring public exhibition “Art as seen in the public sphere” at the University of Sydney. This paper investigates and identifies the ever evolving role of the art curator and their irreverence for the traditional notions of authorship, artistic genius, and cultural heritage

Introduction
Born in the age of digitalisation, I am part of a group of young curators referred to as “The Diamond Generation.” (as coined by Hans Ulrich Obrist). We share an irreverence for the traditional notions of authorship, artistic genius, and cultural heritage.

Unfortunately authors of this book are not allowed to share the pdf of their chapters. Please find a few lines concerning the content of my paper.
"The Master and Siena: the 1912 Duccio exhibition" addresses the history, cultural context and impact of the exhibition "In onore di Duccio di Buoninsegna e della sua scuola" held in Siena in 1912 to celebrate, with a one-year delay, the six-hundredth anniversary of the installation of the Majesty by Duccio in the Cathedral of Siena. The main purposes of this exhibition were to make the works of Duccio better known, displaying less-known panels next to his famous masterpiece, and to present the production of Duccio’s close and distant followers. It can be considered the first monographic exhibition ever dedicated to a painter in Italy, that’s why the local and national context of retrospective exhibitions is anaylised in order to place this scholarly event in historical perspective; Siena was not new to imposing exhibitions of ancient art, the 1904 one was an authentic path-opener in terms of ambitions, scale and impact.
With more than eighty pictures and over eighty photographs on show, the 1912 exhibition sanctioned the proud tribute of the city to the father of the Sienese school of Painting and the crucial role played by Duccio in the Central Italian art scenario. The event is presented in its preparation, development and effects on the studies in the short as well as in the long term, through an examination of the documentary, photographic and printed material available. The two editions of the catalogue and the new and old issues there contained are examined, along with the reviews and reactions to this exhibition and the studies it generated.  A new vision can be registered also in more practical  aspects, as the pioneering role given to single photographic reproductions (not albums) for visualizing, contextualizing and eventually attributing the works both of Duccio and of his followers. Most important, In onore di Duccio threw a new light on the artistic personality of the founder of the School of Siena and represented the first structured appreciation and attempt to organize the production of his numerous followers, active through most of the fourteenth century. The early Sienese masters started to be the object of serious researches which reached a pick with the 2003 exhibition Duccio. Alle origini della pittura senese and are still producing their effects today.

Il progetto Casa dei Saperi presso Fondazione Pini (Milano) vede alternarsi talk, workshop, lecture e proiezioni sul tema delle “Nuove Utopie”, cui è dedicato il biennio 2019/20.
--- Ideato da Valeria Cantoni Mamiani e a cura di Sonia D’Alto, Elisa Gianni, Itamar Gov, Cristina Travanini e Alessia Zabatino.

The term ‘knowledge society’ is used to refer to the increasing relevance of non- manual knowledge-producing labour in current post-industrial economies. Contemporary art, especially since 1989, has not been left out of this trend, to the extent that today it is not rare to see artists and curators described as knowledge producers and exhibitions and art works as instances of knowledge production. Acts of Research: Knowledge Production in Contemporary Arts between Knowledge Economy and Critical Practices analyses this development. The academic discussion of knowledge production in the arts has taken place mostly in seminars and articles, in which knowledge is often discussed as an intrinsic quality of the artwork. Acts of Research, however, is devoted to studying the rise of knowledge production in contemporary art from the perspective of artistic, curatorial and educational research with an awareness of larger political, economic, geographical and art-related aspects. The concept of ‘acts of research’ is suggested as a way to understand knowledge production as a creative act in which research carried out in relation to a specific material challenges and resists the protocols of conventional knowledge production and norms. It is argued that knowledge production is not a stable concept, but may indicate a series of acts of research that allow each art practice to participate in a collective constitution of both the term and its practice. 277 The conclusions are based on two different methodological approaches that structure the thesis. First, Chapter One traces the conceptual history of the term ‘knowledge production’, originally coined in economics and entering arts discourse as a critical term deployed against the rapidly growing global economy of the 1990s, and subsequently becoming a contested term in the new millennium due to its parroting of the discourse of that same global economy. Second, Chapters Two, Three and Four provide close readings of practices of artistic research in relation to the image and war (Hito Steyerl, The Otolith Group and Rabih Mroué), curatorial research in relation to global dynamics (Home Works: A Forum for Cultural Practices 2002-2013, III Bienal de La Habana and dOCUMENTA (13)) and educational projects in relation to knowledge and market economy (Tania Bruguera’s Cátedra de Arte de Conducta, Henriette Heise and Jakob Jakobsen’s Copenhagen Free University and Boris Buden’s Learning Place, part of the Former West Congress 2013); these readings are undertaken in order to understand the practices and workings of the specific mode of knowledge production unfolding through acts of research in the contemporary arts.

Cuando se visita un museo -de cualquier índole- y se recorren sus salas de exhibición se pueden apreciar piezas de todo tipo: arqueológicas, etnográficas, históricas, artísticas, científicas y demás clasificaciones que se nos ocurran (incluso “museográficas”). Estas obras contienen información sobre los más variados aspectos del tiempo y el espacio en que fueron elaboradas y son producto y reflejo de la sociedad que las produjo -ya sea pretérita o contemporánea-. En este sentido, los museos permiten tener un especial acercamiento a las culturas que exponen, ya que son depositarios y partícipes dinámicos de un proceso de creación de información sobre las mismas. Uno de los aspectos más importantes en un museo es la información, la cual -a pesar del halo científico y objetivo que tenga- es creada por personas de carne y hueso que, en muchas ocasiones, pasan totalmente desapercibidas para el público. A estos personajes se les conoce con el nombre de “curadores”, término que las más de las veces causa desconcierto y confusión. Con el fin de tratar de dar respuesta a algunas de estas interrogantes en estas breves líneas describiré algunas de las tareas más relevantes que realiza un curador en un museo.

This practice-based Ph.D. addresses the complex relationship between politicised curating and performativity in contemporary curatorial practice. It chooses the representation of activism as a critical perspective within the field curatorial research, using this as a way into the notion of curatorial practice as a politicised process. With a focus on the social dimension of curatorial encounters, it teases out the rapport between the individual and the collective, arguing that the notion of performativity frames politicised curating. By unpacking the notions of politicised practice and tackling concepts of publicness in art and political theory, the thesis finds the context of radical . Through the analysis of the curatorial projects Collateral Effects - Beyond a Radical Milan (2013/2014) and Curating as a Form of Assembly (2015), which apply notions of the assembly through performative curating, this practice based doctoral research contributes to the field of curatorial studies and political theory by questioning whether performative curating can be framed as a politicised process, and whether the radical imaginary can be considered as a politicised process of embodied political imagination, enacted through the experience of performatively curated encounters. The concepts of the radical imaginary and radical imagination are two of the most important contributions to political theory of the Greek-French philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis. Castoriadis hypothesises that the process of autonomy involves both the human psyche and political discourses of change. Alongside the writings of Castoriadis, the critical production of American feminist philosopher Judith Butler, inform this research. These authors focus attention on everyday life within capitalism and envision this micro-dimension as the possible grounding for radical social change. Bringing together the performative dimension of art and politics, this practice based doctoral research builds on renewed interest in the work of Castoriadis. Whilst acknowledging the importance of his ideas within the field of art and politics, it claims that it is through the performative dimension that his writings are key to the further development of politicised practice.

The displacement of items from the Nova Zembla collection from History Department of Rijksmuseum and their re-location into a contemporary art context through the CTP exhibition project at De Appel was guided by the principle of re-contextualization: a process of cultural value exchange between two major cultural institutions. In this sense, the aim of including the Nova Zembla collection in a contemporary art context was to offer a new reading on the collection, in which a reexamination of the story served as a metaphor for questioning the linearity and authorship of complexly layered historical “sites.” One of these is the former socialist landscape of Central and Southeastern Europe, which has been engaged in a process of renegotiating its historical heritage for over fifteen years. With the EU enlargement, this whole area has become more accessible to the western consumer. Opening to the East has been almost a random process, in which the West takes a quick look to see “who” is ringing at its door, indifferently inspects “the visitor” through the peephole, and then decides whether to engage or simply register the given identity as “other.” One navigational path through the exhibition Mercury in Retrograde—through the works of Sven Johne, Dimitry Gutov, IRWIN, David Maljkovic, and Fernando Sanchez Castillo—represents a process of engagement in discussions of hidden histories that were long trapped in ice, due to a frozen political environment—societies where the politics, cultural, moral and ethical values were fixed. The moment when the ice breaks is the notorious “zero point” in history, a starting point for renewal and revisionism. Here, the point of departure is Nova Zembla, a site where artifacts were trapped in the ice for over 300 years and a Dutch historical narrative played out on the distant island, Novaya Zemlaya, now on Russian territory. Only through the thawing of the Cold War and the effects of Glasnost and Perestroika were the Dutch able to successfully set foot once again on the site of Barents’ winter camp, 400 years later, to search for material remnants of a distant past in a changed landscape.

This curatorial research is a site for reflecting, questioning and theorising the practices and tendencies of curating. Instead of just looking at the mechanisms of staging and exhibiting, this thesis is an attempt to theorise and analyse the process of positioning oneself within the often unsettling sphere of curatorial practice. The subject of study rises from confusion and experiences of displacement which occurred during my studies in Aalto University’s MA programme in Curating, Managing and Mediating Art in 2012-2015.

The research is a case study on the process of becoming other, which stands here for a series of events that have altered my being and thinking in such degree that I have felt myself changing. With the framework of cohabitation, recognition and transformation, this study reflects and speculates the altering movements of knowledge formation, learning and unlearning together with the theory of “Becoming-Animal” by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. While interrogating the politics of representation and exhibiting in curatorial practices, this research is delving into the possibilities of cohabitation, reciprocity and recognition.