Dorothee I Richter
Prof. Dr. Dorothee Richter
Professor in Contemporary Curating
Since 2005, she has been head of the Postgraduate Programme in Curating (MAS/CAS), www.curating.org, at the University of the Arts Zurich (ZHdK). She also co-founded with Susanne Clausen the "Research Platform for Curating, Practice-Based Doctoral Programme" a collaboration of the Postgraduate Programme in Curating and the Department of Fine Arts, University of Reading, now the PhD in practice in curating. From 1999 to the end of 2003, Richter was artistic director of the Künstlerhaus Bremen, where she curated a discursive programme based on feminist issues, urban situations, power relation issues, and institutional critique. She has worked as a curator ever since, curaring a Fluxus Festival at Cabaret Voltaire, curating a programme at the Museum Baerengasse / Gasthaus zum Baeren in Zurich, the White Space in Zurich, and at the moment the OnCurating Project Space also in Zurich. See also projects with students here: shared projects www.curating.org.
Since 1998, Richter has held lecturing posts at the University of Bremen, the Merzakademie Stuttgart, the École des Beaux Arts in Geneva, and the University of Lüneburg alongside the travelling Exhibition / Archive “Curating Degree Zero Archive”. She has co-curated numerous symposia, like “Re-Visions of the Display" 2009, with Jennifer Johns, Sigrid Schade, Migros Museum in Zurich; "Institution as Medium. Curating as Institutional Critique?" in 2010 with Rein Wolfs; the symposium "Who is Afraid of the Public?" at the ICA London in 2013, with Elke Krasny, Silvia Simoncelli and the University of Reading; and the symposium with the Manifesta Journal and the Institute of Contemporary Art of the ZHdK “Third, fourth and fifth spaces: Curatorial practices in new public and social (digital) spaces” at the Migros Museum in 2013. In 2016 she curated with Elke Krasny and Lara Perry "Curating in Feminist Thought" and the Panel "Work, Migration and Personal Geopolitics" as a parall event of Manifesta 11. in 2017 with Ronald Kolb Decolonising Art Institutions at the Kunstmuseum Basel. Also in 2017 with Elke Krasny and Lara Perry "Unsettling Feminist Thought" at the Academy of Fine Art in Vieanna. One of her 90 publications is her PhD, Fluxus. Kunst gleich Leben? Mythen um Autorschaft, Produktion, Geschlecht und Gemeinschaft, (Fluxus. Art equals Life? Myths on Authorship, Production, Gender and Community) and the new Internet platform www.on-curating.org, which presents current approaches to critical curatorial practice, with 35 Issues of OnCurating, both in print and online.
In 2013, she released a film together with Ronald Kolb: "Flux Us Now! Fluxus explored with a camera", which was screened for the first time at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart in April 2013, at the Migros Museum in Zurich, and different European art academies. In September 2013, she was appointed as mentor for POOL, (Collection of Hoffmann and Ringier) Zurich. In 2014, the Cultural Department of the city of Zurich appointed her as the curator/ programmer of half of Gasthaus zum Baeren / Museum Baerengasse, where she ran a programme together with young curators under the title “Curate Your Context”. As a collaborative project with the Centre of Art and Media (ZKM) Karlsruhe, Dorothee Richter and Ronald Kolb are working on a video archive of interviews with contemporary curators. The working title is “CURATING politics of display, politics of site, politics of transfer and translation”, with 70 detailed video interviews with internationally acclaimed curators, such as Peter Weibel, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Stella Rollig, Rein Wolfs, Beatrix Ruf, Grand Hotel Cosmopolis Augsburg and Daniel Baumann.
Since 2012 she is together with Susanne Clausen, director of the PhD in Practice in Curating, a collaboration of ZHdK and the University or Reading, which is supported by swissuniversities.
> www.curating.org
> www.on-curating.org
> www.fluxusnow.net
Supervisors: PhD Supervisor for a PhD in Practice in Curatin** I welcome proposals to dorothee.richter@zhdk.ch or d.i.richter@reading.ac.uk
Professor in Contemporary Curating
Since 2005, she has been head of the Postgraduate Programme in Curating (MAS/CAS), www.curating.org, at the University of the Arts Zurich (ZHdK). She also co-founded with Susanne Clausen the "Research Platform for Curating, Practice-Based Doctoral Programme" a collaboration of the Postgraduate Programme in Curating and the Department of Fine Arts, University of Reading, now the PhD in practice in curating. From 1999 to the end of 2003, Richter was artistic director of the Künstlerhaus Bremen, where she curated a discursive programme based on feminist issues, urban situations, power relation issues, and institutional critique. She has worked as a curator ever since, curaring a Fluxus Festival at Cabaret Voltaire, curating a programme at the Museum Baerengasse / Gasthaus zum Baeren in Zurich, the White Space in Zurich, and at the moment the OnCurating Project Space also in Zurich. See also projects with students here: shared projects www.curating.org.
Since 1998, Richter has held lecturing posts at the University of Bremen, the Merzakademie Stuttgart, the École des Beaux Arts in Geneva, and the University of Lüneburg alongside the travelling Exhibition / Archive “Curating Degree Zero Archive”. She has co-curated numerous symposia, like “Re-Visions of the Display" 2009, with Jennifer Johns, Sigrid Schade, Migros Museum in Zurich; "Institution as Medium. Curating as Institutional Critique?" in 2010 with Rein Wolfs; the symposium "Who is Afraid of the Public?" at the ICA London in 2013, with Elke Krasny, Silvia Simoncelli and the University of Reading; and the symposium with the Manifesta Journal and the Institute of Contemporary Art of the ZHdK “Third, fourth and fifth spaces: Curatorial practices in new public and social (digital) spaces” at the Migros Museum in 2013. In 2016 she curated with Elke Krasny and Lara Perry "Curating in Feminist Thought" and the Panel "Work, Migration and Personal Geopolitics" as a parall event of Manifesta 11. in 2017 with Ronald Kolb Decolonising Art Institutions at the Kunstmuseum Basel. Also in 2017 with Elke Krasny and Lara Perry "Unsettling Feminist Thought" at the Academy of Fine Art in Vieanna. One of her 90 publications is her PhD, Fluxus. Kunst gleich Leben? Mythen um Autorschaft, Produktion, Geschlecht und Gemeinschaft, (Fluxus. Art equals Life? Myths on Authorship, Production, Gender and Community) and the new Internet platform www.on-curating.org, which presents current approaches to critical curatorial practice, with 35 Issues of OnCurating, both in print and online.
In 2013, she released a film together with Ronald Kolb: "Flux Us Now! Fluxus explored with a camera", which was screened for the first time at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart in April 2013, at the Migros Museum in Zurich, and different European art academies. In September 2013, she was appointed as mentor for POOL, (Collection of Hoffmann and Ringier) Zurich. In 2014, the Cultural Department of the city of Zurich appointed her as the curator/ programmer of half of Gasthaus zum Baeren / Museum Baerengasse, where she ran a programme together with young curators under the title “Curate Your Context”. As a collaborative project with the Centre of Art and Media (ZKM) Karlsruhe, Dorothee Richter and Ronald Kolb are working on a video archive of interviews with contemporary curators. The working title is “CURATING politics of display, politics of site, politics of transfer and translation”, with 70 detailed video interviews with internationally acclaimed curators, such as Peter Weibel, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Stella Rollig, Rein Wolfs, Beatrix Ruf, Grand Hotel Cosmopolis Augsburg and Daniel Baumann.
Since 2012 she is together with Susanne Clausen, director of the PhD in Practice in Curating, a collaboration of ZHdK and the University or Reading, which is supported by swissuniversities.
> www.curating.org
> www.on-curating.org
> www.fluxusnow.net
Supervisors: PhD Supervisor for a PhD in Practice in Curatin** I welcome proposals to dorothee.richter@zhdk.ch or d.i.richter@reading.ac.uk
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Papers by Dorothee I Richter
Dorothee Richter’s argument understands curating or the curatorial not as a philosophical concept but as a practice that is deeply involved in the politics of display, politics of site, politics of transfer and translation, and regimes of visibility. It is based on a concept of critical research that takes as its starting point the investigation of what is often the overly simplistic understanding of the curator as a new agent in the fields of art and culture. Richter understands the curatorial as a multi-authored approach to the production of meaning, which is intrinsically linked to transformations of contemporary societies, the reorganisation of labour, cultural policies, politics of inclusion/exclusion, and issues posed by points of intersection.
Curatorial practice and theory have been developed in the context of cultural analysis, theories of power, and theories of communities based on feminist, queer, postcolonial, ecological, post-Marxist and other political and emancipatory positions. Many of these positions emerge out of political struggles or social movements. Ideally, curatorial knowledge production can be seen as a space for the negotiation of social, political, cultural, and economic conflicts. It understands curating as agency from which new constellations emerge. These could be represented in the format of an exhibition but equally in other forms of meaning production through a context-related media conglomeration, which involves a critical review of contemporary curatorial practices and theories. By engaging with these trajectories, the conditions and the foundations of knowledge production in the curatorial field become the subject of critical research leading to their re-positioning.
Dorothee Richter is a professor at the University of Reading, a professor at the Zurich University of the Arts, publisher of OnCurating.org, and a filmmaker, see FluxUsNow.net.
Dorothee Richter’s argument understands curating or the curatorial not as a philosophical concept but as a practice that is deeply involved in the politics of display, politics of site, politics of transfer and translation, and regimes of visibility. It is based on a concept of critical research that takes as its starting point the investigation of what is often the overly simplistic understanding of the curator as a new agent in the fields of art and culture. Richter understands the curatorial as a multi-authored approach to the production of meaning, which is intrinsically linked to transformations of contemporary societies, the reorganisation of labour, cultural policies, politics of inclusion/exclusion, and issues posed by points of intersection.
Curatorial practice and theory have been developed in the context of cultural analysis, theories of power, and theories of communities based on feminist, queer, postcolonial, ecological, post-Marxist and other political and emancipatory positions. Many of these positions emerge out of political struggles or social movements. Ideally, curatorial knowledge production can be seen as a space for the negotiation of social, political, cultural, and economic conflicts. It understands curating as agency from which new constellations emerge. These could be represented in the format of an exhibition but equally in other forms of meaning production through a context-related media conglomeration, which involves a critical review of contemporary curatorial practices and theories. By engaging with these trajectories, the conditions and the foundations of knowledge production in the curatorial field become the subject of critical research leading to their re-positioning.
Dorothee Richter is a professor at the University of Reading, a professor at the Zurich University of the Arts, publisher of OnCurating.org, and a filmmaker, see FluxUsNow.net.
The compilation of texts are to be read in the context of two key problems related to arts funding: The art market’s speculative value production and the state-based public funding paradigms and the reproduction of unequal relations.
With practices of commoning entering a large-scale exhibition like documenta, a novel approach meets the curatorial-artistic complex. And with that, various conflicts loomed on the horizon, not to mention the internal difficulties of “scaling” a resource infrastructure and its principles of sharing, originally intended for a rather small village community or small group of people, to a global scale. The question is in what form, with what instruments, with what knowledges, and with what new alliances this apparent paradigm shift will come about. We offer a critical review from different perspectives.
Romane Bernard, Nanne Buurman, Sofia Cecere, Ève Chabanon, Emelie Chhangur, Anna Colin, Angela Dimitrakaki, Berit Fischer, Jennifer Fisher, Thelma Gaster, Nandita Ghandi, Janna Graham, Althea Greenan, Jeanne Guillou, Husseina Hamza, Merete Ipsen, Joyce Jacca, Tracey Jarrett, Daria Khan, Sharlene Khan, La Sala (Alba Colomo and Lucy Lopez), Barbara Lefebvre, Séraphine Le Maire, Oksana Luyssen,Rosa Martínez, Alex Martinis Roe, Erin McCutcheon, Rose Moreau, Camille Morineau, Adele Patrick, Madeleine Planeix-Crocker, Jeanne Porte, Laurence Rassel, Helena Reckitt, Maura Reilly, Dorothee Richter, Secretariat for Ghosts (SKGAL), Nizan Shaked, Cornelia Sollfrank, Ann Sutherland Harris, The Two Talking Yonis, Miska Tokarek, Elena Zaytseva, Catherine de Zegher
eds. Martin Patrick, Dorothee Richter
Fluxus Perspectives
Although the Fluxus art (non-)movement is often read as a historical phenomenon, the breadth of its innovations and complexities actively thwarts linear and circumscribed viewpoints. The notion of Fluxus incorporates contradiction in challenging and enduringly generative ways. More than five decades after its emergence, this special issue of OnCurating entitled Fluxus Perspectives seeks to re-examine the influence, roles, and effects of Fluxus via a wide range of scholarly perspectives. The editors Martin Patrick and Dorothee Richter asked notable writers from different locations, generations, and viewpoints, all of whom having written about Fluxus before, to offer their thoughts on its significance, particularly in relation to contemporary art. With its emphasis upon events, festivals, and exhibitions, Fluxus may also be interpreted as an important, prescient forerunner of contemporary strategies of curating.
Contributions by Simon Anderson, Jordan Carter, Kevin Concannon, Ken Friedman, Natilee Harren, John Held, Jr., Hannah B Higgins, Hanna B. Hölling, Natasha Lushetich, Billie Maciunas, Peter van der Meijden, Ann Noël, Martin Patrick, Dorothee Richter, Henar Rivière, Julia Robinson, Owen F. Smith, Weronika Trojanska, and Emmett Williams.
This book arises from the 2018 activities of the MA Fine Arts program at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). It reflects the conviction that an arts school can be a pedagogic nexus dedicated to the transmission of knowledge, experimentation, and research, as much as a locus for civic and critical debate and exhibition, involved in its community, locally and globally.
Contributors
Agustina Andreoletti, Rasheed Araeen, Defne Ayas, Marco Baravalle, Alessia Basilicata, Julia Bethwaite, Amy Bruce, Sabeth Buchmann, Vasyl Cherepanyn, Sven Christian, Ana Paula Cohen, Giulia Colletti, Catherine David, Ekaterina Degot, Diana Dulgheru, Per Gunnar Eeg-Tverbakk, Okwui Enwezor, Brandon Farnsworth, Rime Fetnan, Patrick D. Flores, Natasha Ginwala, Eva González-Sancho Bodero, Resmi Görüş, Martin Guinard, Bregtje van der Haak, Catalina Imizcoz, Răzvan Ion, Andrés Jaque, Melody Du Jingyi, Anni Kangas, Daniel Knorr, Omar Kholeif, Ronald Kolb, Panos Kompatsiaris, Yacouba Konaté, Daniela Labra, Ilse Lafer, Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli, Bruno Latour, Teobaldo Lagos Preller, Eva Lin, Yung Ma, Anna Manubens, Sarat Maharaj, Oliver Marchart, Federica Martini, Vittoria Martini, Lara van Meeteren, Louli Michaelidou, Christian Morgner, Gerardo Mosquera, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Rafal Niemojewski, Ksenija Orelj, Anita Orzes, Shwetal A. Patel, Delia Popa, Farid Rakun, Raqs Media Collective, Dorothee Richter, Roma Jam Session art Kollektiv, Miriam La Rosa, Mona Schubert, Henk Slager, Robert E. D’Souza, Nora Sternfeld, Fatoş Üstek, Katerina Valdivia Bruch, Mirjam Varadinis, Raluca Voinea, Wilson Yeung Chun Wai, Bart Wissink, Beat Wyss, Xinming Xia, Nathalie Zonnenberg
Artistic and curatorial practices can be seen as the prime testimonies of transformative movements—on the one hand situated in a specific site and region, and on the other, transgressing disciplines, classes, norms—proposing new forms and relations of living and establishing these practices (building centres along the way) but at the same time always changing their positions, never staying at the centre, but instead unfolding on the periphery of social life.
In this OnCurating Issue, we searched for and researched projects and institutions that hold at their core something between the lines of centres–peripheries with their transversal practices and modus operandi. For many of our interview partners, the question of oppositionality is less important than the equal networking of their own artistic and curatorial practices in an international exchange, which is informed by the historical and local references of the particular place. These projects do not establish a distinction—aesthetically and personally; they open up to a broader public (and not only the “art insider”), and they relate to an embracing mode of encounters with “other” cultures, identities, and ideas, and present an inclusive gesture. Instead of voicing one view on the complex constellations of centres–peripheries in the arts, we have decided to propose different introductory statements to show the multifaceted approaches to this topic.
Issue 36: Spaces of Anticipation
Edited by Emanuele Guidi, Lorenzo Sandoval
www.on-curating.org/issue-36.html
With contributions by Antonia Alampi, BAR Project (Juan Canela, Andrea Novoa, Verónica Valentini), Luis Berríos-Negrón, Sol Calero, Binna Choi, Valentina Desideri, Jonatan Habib Engqvist, Doris Krüger and Walter Pardeller, Teobaldo Lagos Preller, Alex Martinis Roe, Christian Nyampeta, Justo Pastor Mellado, Alec Steadman
Spaces of Anticipation is a research project by Lorenzo Sandoval and Emanuele Guidi that looks at artistic and curatorial practices so as to explore the role and potential of artistic and cultural institutional models. So far the project has emerged publically as a symposium with the same title at EACC (Castellón, Spain) and in the research exhibition Making Room, Spaces of Anticipation at ar/ge kunst (Bolzano, Italy). The term ‘anticipation’ aims at proposing an affirmative approach to the research as intends to elude the use of ‘post-isms’ and ‘future-ism’ terminology, which have been largely employed as parameters to discuss present conditions and their responsibilities.
‘Anticipation’ responds therefore to the immanent need of ‘moving forward’ (of ‘becoming’) – as precondition for any cultural institution - but being grounded in the present and escaping the past/future rhetoric in favour of a cross-temporal dimension. Anticipation seems to be a central responsibility for cultural and artistic institutions who have to act as a porous ‘we’ so as to make possible for a collective desire to emerge.
In these terms Spaces of Anticipation aims at gathering practices and relations able to ‘re-territorialize’ existing models of institutions through a genuine ‘desire of becoming’ by acting within present and unexpected conditions.
Edited by Ronald Kolb & Dorothee Richter
www.on-curating.org/issue-35.html
With contributions by Sabih Ahmed, Marie-Laure Allain Bonilla, Binna Choi, Eyal Danon, Claire Farago, Yolande van der Heide, Nkule Mabaso, Same Mdluli, Shaheen Merali, Ivan Muñiz-Reed, Shwetal Patel, Rohit Jain, Raqs Media Collective, Dorothee Richter, Sophie Vögele and Philippe Saner, Woon Tien Wei, Sophie J Williamson, Claire Wintle, Michelle Wong
Oncurating Issue 35 compiles the outcome of the symposium at the Kunstmuseum Basel and a summer academy at the Zurich University of the Arts. The symposium “De-colonizing Art Institutions” took place at Kunstmuseum Basel, June 21 and 22, 2017, with the speakers Sabih Ahmed (Asia Art Archive), Jeebesh Bagchi (Raqs Media Collective), Binna Choi (Casco), Eyal Danon (Holon Digital Art Archive), Kadiatou Diallo (SPARCK), Same Sizakele Mdluli (Lecturer, Wits University), Rohit Jain (ISEK, Uni Zürich), Shwetal A. Patel (Kochi-Muziris Biennale), Dorothee Richter (Postgraduate Programme in Curating, ZHdK) and Søren Grammel (Kunstmuseum Basel).
You will find contributions by the guests of the symposium and additional articles by scholars and practitioners connected to this topic.
The symposium was accompanied by a Summer Academy in Zurich held by the Postgraduate Programme in Curating, Continuing Education, Zurich University of the Arts from 13–24 June and an exhibition with the same name at the Oncurating Project Space in Zurich. The outcome of this exhibition is published in Issue 34.
Edited by Ronald Kolb & Dorothee Richter
www.on-curating.org/issue-34.html
With Artists Contributions by Maria Thereza Alves, Song-Ming Ang, Priscila Arantes, Stefan Baltensperger + David Siepert, Fabiana de Barros, Mabe Bethônico, Flavio Cury, Jimmie Durham, Gabriel Flückiger and Vera Leisibach, Hikaru Fujii, Szuper Gallery, Patrick Hamilton, Ana Hupe, Balz Isler, Daniel Jablonski, Kai Fong Pai Dong, San Keller, Astrid S. Klein, Marinka Limat, Nkule Mabaso, Filippo Minelli, Lisl Ponger, Raghavendra Rao K.V., Roee Rosen, Sally Schonfeldt, Katrin Stroebel and Simo Laouli, Túlio Tavares, Navid Tschopp, Maíra Vaz Valente, Claire Wintle, Casa da Xiclet, Zou Zhao
Curatorial Team
Giovanna Bragaglia, Emilie Bruner, Ronald Kolb, Miwa Negoro, Swati Prasad, Dorothee Richter, Silvia Savoldi, Regula Spirig, Laura Thompson
For the Oncurating Issue 34, we asked artists, theorists, and researches to send us their proposals for a decolonized art practice, or how to deal with institutions in that regard. The 34 invited artists were given a carte blanche to contribute to the topic of decolonising art institutions. The aim: to provide a platform for a multiplicity of voices from the arts. These voices would propose an image of a decolonised art practice, all the while raising questions with regard to how one can engage with pre-existing institutions in a congruent manner. The material was then displayed as printouts by us and the audience of the exhibition in the Oncurating Project Space. You can download the material and assemble it in your preferred way: a book, an exhibition, or something else. The curatorial role liberated, it stands open and available to any reader of the issue, mutable between various local contexts.
With contributions by Anna Sigrídur Arnar, Angela M. Bartholomew, Beatrice von Bismarck, Nanne Buurman, Kathryn M. Floyd, Anthony Gardner & Charles Green, Walter Grasskamp, Ayşe Güleç, Kristian Handberg, Dorothea von Hantelmann, Susanne König, Vesna Madžoski, Nina Möntmann, Philipp Oswalt, Dorothee Richter, Elpida Rikou & Eleana Yalouri, and Nora Sternfeld.
On the occasion of documenta’s 14th edition, this special issue scrutinizes the ways in which the Kassel-based periodic exhibition has been contributing to curating the history of the present since its inception in 1955. From diverse perspectives, the authors engage with questions of how documenta’s iterations played a significant role not only in the making of a history of contemporary art but also in the canon of the relatively young field of curatorial and exhibition studies. Focusing on documenta’s engagement with artistic and broader cultural developments, as well as its implication in shifting socioeconomic and geopolitical contexts, the texts assembled in this issue touch upon documenta’s continuous dedication to instituting and reconfiguring the contemporary throughout its history. Its characteristic dedication to contemporaneity and institutional temporariness have continuously challenged researchers to reflect and revise their methodologies and epistemological foundations. Due to documenta’s specific character as a recurring large-scale exhibition with a relatively stable framework that has to be reinterpreted anew every five years, documenta’s potentials for mediating ideologies and power structures, notions of authorship and agency, as well as relations between the local and the global have furthermore fueled negotiations of the relationship of art and politics from the outset. The texts in this issue call attention to how it not only scripted paradigmatic models of subjectivity but also gradually widened its scope from a Eurocentric vision to a more worldly frame of reference, provoking reflections on its role in the globalization of the arts and its entanglement in (neo)colonial and (neo)liberal power relations in capitalism at large.
Contributions by Simon Anderson, Jordan Carter, Kevin Concannon, Ken Friedman, Natilee Harren, John Held, Jr., Hannah B Higgins, Hanna B. Hölling, Natasha Lushetich, Billie Maciunas, Peter van der Meijden, Ann Noël, Martin Patrick, Dorothee Richter, Henar Rivière, Julia Robinson, Owen F. Smith, Weronika Trojanska, and Emmett Williams.