Dan Perjovschi’s 2005 drawing that precedes these pages laconically addresses the hierarchies operative in an art institution’s value chains, and it does so on the basis of an inventory of whoever holds agency in this context. Strikingly, this list doesn’t at a first glance seem to be in any way exhaustive, as it apparently lacks a varied range of other roles and functions at play in art institutions, such as security guards, visitor and technical services staff—as well as gallery educators. Is their absence from the work due to their evanescent significance within the hierarchy Dan establishes in his diagram, ...

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 ...

Biennials are each in their own way a complex constellation of different economical and geopolitical, and representational cultural aspects within its own power relations. With all their underlying deficiencies (canonical, hegemonic, colonialist, hot money-funded, politically influenced, hierarchical), biennials tend to establish international discourse, at best, rooted in local cultural specificities and contexts. With this edition of the journal, we wanted to include a variety of cases and research areas, not ordered along a historical trajectory, but rather, ordered by theme. With a mix of over sixty new contributions and reprints of important articles for the biennale discourse this issue is ...

What are the roles of the curator in the music field, and how does the work materialize? What kind of practices are involved? Defragmentation – Curating Contemporary Music was a project that attempted to highlight some of the problems and urgent questions that we find in today’s contemporary music scene. Within the frame of ideas around gender, diversity, decolonization and technology, Defragmentation looked at – and tried to understand – structures in various institutions of contemporary music. The ambition was to investigate how the urgent sense of fragmentation and disconnection that exists in the public sphere at the moment is materialized ...

Curating Dance : Decolonizing Dance is one of the first publications within an international context to deal with the curation of dance as a performative art as well as a sociocultural practice. With this issue, we aim to develop the relevant theoretical and methodological foundations of curating dance with a particular focus on decolonization in the field of performing arts.

When we started a discourse on curating in 1998 with the conference “Curating Degree Zero,” we could not have imagined the intensity of interest in this subject in the coming years. In 2003 we wanted to re-examine the field together with Annette Schindler, but when we failed to organise enough funds, we changed the concept and concentrated on the archive, which originally should have just accompanied the symposium. This decision, half by chance and half out of a deeply felt interest in archival practices, proved to be valid, insofar that the archive grew and developed rapidly. Curating Degree Zero Archive ...

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 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), Roma Jam Session art Kollektiv (RJSaK), and Søren Grammel. You will find contributions by ...

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 ...

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 ...

This draft edition of OnCurating began life by a group of scholars and researchers asking a series of questions about the nature of art production and curating today and what role, if any, biennials play within this paradigm. We wanted to examine and question the underlying assumptions and factors that are generally attributed to the rise in the number of large-scale recurring exhibitions and create a draft-working document that may spur further research and analyses by practitioners and scholars in the field. Is the biennial format really a worldwide phenomena? And if so, to what extent? Do biennials look the ...