The issue 1,2,3, — thinking about exhibitions combines discussions, interviews, and articles concerning recent discussions in Rotterdam and Hamburg. The symposium in Rotterdam, The Curators, at Witte de With emphasized the role of the curator-subject. This issue includes two interviews which critically review the contributions and results of the symposium, revealing different aspects and controversial facets of their topics. The two featured interviews include one with Nikolaus Schaffhausen and Zoe Gray, those responsible for the organization of the symposium, as well as one interview with Paul O’Neill, a contributor…

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, ...

This edition of On-Curating.org places ontological and political perspectives on notions of community at the centre of its debate. We believe that such an explicit discussion of community on a theoretical level is an urgent requirement in the context of ‘curating’ since cultural articulations always implicitly or explicitly address and produce communities. It was Jacques Rancière in particular who in The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible pointed out the importance of access to visibility and audibility since these are what enables or prevents access to a community. “The distribution of the sensible makes visible who can participate ...

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 ...

The reader presents a cross-section of the voices that populate the ongoing debate about, on the one hand, how and in what terms curating functions as a critical cultural practice, and on the other, what methodologies and histories exist with which we can critically analyse curatorial work today. This collection of essays was first published in 2007 by Revolver, in Frankfurt am Main and ICE, Institute for Curatorship and Education as the first ICE Reader…

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 ...

This latest edition of On-Curating.org presents seven interviews with curators who work primarily with the format of film and/or video. These interviews were all conducted in May 2009 during the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival. In the past years, there has been an increasing presence of film and video works in art exhibitions. Where does it come from, this growing predilection for a medium which is not particularly easy to present in an art show setting?…

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 a series of perspectives on art-making and curating that consider forms of production through contemporary digital networks as well as increased reliance on digital technologies. We consider the issue as a much-needed start to discuss curating under digital conditions on our platform. Each interview, artwork, and article thinks through contemporary practices that rework or examine what the relationship of place, automation, labour, and archives have in relation to technological effects in production under neoliberalism. Four interviews focus on art practice and digital art-making and also how the digital is an asset in the making and production of ...