Curators and their partners are working in a contested field, in which the meanings of institutions, their power structures and modes of participation can be debated and reshaped. The number and diversity of high-profile major museum exhibitions in the twenty-first century that have been devoted to the themes of feminist and women’s art has attracted an unprecedented critical attention to the practice of feminist curation. The diversity of the ways in which feminism has been represented in curatorial projects—from Womanhouse (1972) to Gender Battle (2007)—is explored here most fully in the essays by Amelia Jones and Hilary Robinson, which identify ...

This issue is the result of more than two years of intensive engagement with aspects of commoning in curatorial and artistic practice, stemming from our encounters with ruangrupa on the way to documenta fifteen. At its core, this issue follows our research into the discourse on commons and its implications for the exhibitionary complex. We have conducted interviews with lumbung members, curators, theoreticians, art historians and artists. 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” ...

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 ...

“Instituting Feminism,” this issue of OnCurating, reflects on the efforts of curators, artists, and community organisers to move beyond identifying inequities in the cultural industries to devising tools that can foster structural change. Exploring how curators have developed projects informed by feminist politics and aesthetics, contributors also look beyond representational formats to highlight the infrastructures and co-dependencies upon which cultural production relies. They understand that feminism’s integration into the mainstream art world has been accompanied by a tokenistic “pink-washing,” and thus raise questions about the terms under which gestures of “inclusion” and “participation” occur. Envisaging feminist instituting as an active, ...