On Curating
OnCurating.org is a non-profit association based in Zurich, Switzerland that runs the OnCurating Journal and an exhibition space in Zurich (oncurating-space.org). The On Curating Journal is independent with focus on curating both on the web and in print. The publications are openly accessible on the website. It collaborates with different partner institutions.
Series Titles
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Welcome to the first issue of the international web-journal www.on-curating.org, a new web-based publication focusing on curatorial practice and theory. The interest of all those involved in the journal, whether curators, lecturers, researchers or participants of curating programs is to create a platform for presentation, discussion and research about this growing area of knowledge. To expand the pool of those involved we aim to cooperate with different institutions and people for every new issue… -
Recent years were marked by a growing interest in the forms and formats of presentations and exhibitions. In artistic production as well as in theoretical and historical reflection, the attention increasingly shifted towards how artistic practices are conferred with meaning through their presentation and mediation (from aspects of interior design or labeling, to questions of accessibility), and not only through the works themselves. Especially through examples of exhibitions or displays of museum collections, historical research analyzed the interplay of artistic works and their presentation, which ultimately aimed to connect art and its contextualization within a political sphere. Seminal contributions in ... -
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?… -
Can curating make a change? And if so: how? As a result of the expanding market for contemporary art, the upsurge of biennials, art fairs and large group exhibitions, and the construction of numerous new museums for contemporary art during the 1990s, the role of the curator has undergone profound changes. From being a marginal character working within the confines of the museum, the curator has come to inhabit a freer and more centralized position within the artworld at large… -
On DVD editions of feature films, it is almost a matter of course: in addition to audio comments, an alternative ending, scenes shot and later omitted, a selection of funny slips of the tongue and various trailers, the so-called bonus material also includes a ‘Making of.’ The ‘Making of’ is usually a short documentary which takes a look behind the scenes during production, explains special effects, shows persons involved in the production process at their work – persons who will no longer be seen later, in the actual movie. Naturally, on the one hand this and other extra material merely serves ... -
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… -
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 ... -
The symposium Institution as Medium. Curating as Institutional Critique?, organised by the Kunsthalle Fridericianum and the Zurich Postgraduate Program in Curating (Institute for Cultural Studies, Department of Cultural Analysis, Zurich University of the Arts), attracted an international audience to Kassel on 26 and 27 March 2010. The two-day discussion was opened with the provocative question in how far it is possible to exercise institutional critique by curating exhibitions… -
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… -
Ready to Print was a project conceived as an innovative format, a crossover between contemporary art, media and design. We asked thirteen artists with differing backgrounds and formal interests to produce PDF editions. Each of them produced a work consisting of 16 DIN A4 pages of paper which in most cases were assembled to form a single two-dimensional work in DIN A0 format. These contemporary editions are downloadable as PDFs at www.oncurating.org, issue 10. The editions are available to everyone in the world who has a computer, a printer, and tape at his or her disposal… -
This edition of On-Curating.org deals with aspects of the public sphere, public space, and public art in seven different metropolises around the world. The point of departure was a competition that was held for a master plan for public art in the new Europaallee district in the centre of Zurich, the first such plan in Switzerland… -
“Museums, cemeteries!” the Futurists exclaimed at the beginning of the last century. In spite of their debatable chauvinist tendencies, their protest was, together with that of the Dada movement a few years later, a precursor of institutional critique. Nonetheless, their works also ended up in museums. Discourse and interactive projects have taken hold of museums only since the 1960s. New genres such as Fluxus, happenings, performance, and site-specific installations gave artists direct opportunities to criticize the museum from inside. But again, the remains of these artistic actions arrived in numerous museum collections. The once critical voice of the now dead ... -
The second part of the publication for the symposium, Institution as Medium. Curating as Institutional Critique?, organised by the Kunsthalle Fridericianum and the Zurich Postgraduate Programme in Curating (Institute for Cultural Studies, Department of Cultural Analysis, Zurich University of the Arts), deals with notion of art-mediation and addressing publics in the realm of institutional critique. The question remains: how can a practice that intends to radically show the conditionality of art, its financial entanglements, and its function as a means of distinction, be related to institutions and curators’ activities therein? Is this not a contradiction in terms? The aim of ... -
The cooperation between the World of Art programme (in frame of of the SCCA−Ljubljana, Center for Contemporary Art) from Ljubljana and the Postgraduate Programme in Curating , Zürich, has taken place on different levels from spring 2011 till summer 2012; it has involved intensive visits of students and lecturers in both cities as well as a shared project that was carried out at International Centre of Graphic Arts (MGLC) in Ljubljana; this is being followed up by the present anthology of articles taken from the World of Art Archive archive of lectures and conversations from 1997 till today. Texts, conversations ... -
This issue of the journal brings together contributions from an international group of art practitioners, curators and theorists exploring the relationship between performance and installation in the context of the contemporary art exhibition. Key amongst the concerns of the journal is the possibility for rethinking the static model of exhibition and exploring the way in which ‘performative’ approaches, adopted by artists and curators alike, can reframe the exhibition as an environment undergoing formal or relational transformation… -
The general shift from manufacturing to services as a source of employment has effected also the field of visual art, changing the labour market for curators. Their position in the division of labour has become closer to the one of artists, in the sense becoming much more unstable, short term, flexible, and exploited. An important aspect of the new working conditions is the demand for physical and mental mobility. This is affecting both the curators with “steady” jobs whose working places and working hours are becoming fluid, and even more so the freelance curators who offer their services to a ... -
Does the activity of exhibiting resemble the process of assigning meaning in language? By showing cultural artefacts of different authors, one necessarily makes links. If an exhibition is presented to an audience and retold in conversation, its spatial choreography gives rise to a syntax. Experience and perception are translated into linguistic expression. Thus, the act of exhibiting has close ties with the communicative activity of organizing the show, and with texts and discussions. Design then adds an action-based level to this communicative dimension — actions which, as one walks through the exhibition space, are at least imaginable, and in some ... -
In the process of conceiving the current issue of On Curating, the debate between Claire Bishop and Grant Kester, which in 2006 occupied the pages of Artforum with a vehement discussion about the impact and merit of relational art, or what is most commonly referred to as socially engaged art, re-emerged as an unfinished discussion, especially in the context of the publication of each of their books in 2011 further developing their positions. Therefore, Cătălin Gheorghe and myself, decided to revisit the topic and in this issue of On Curating, Social Curating and Its Public: Curators from Eastern Europe Report ... -
This issue of ONCURATING.org brings together a range of interviews and essays, inspired by the symposium, “Why Artists Curate,” held by the Kunstbüro der Kunststiftung Baden-Württemberg in cooperation with Columbus Art Foundation in July 2011. The feedback from this conference prompted a discussion on authorship in contemporary art, from artists, curators and artist-curators. Walter Benjamin’s well known essay, The Author as Producer, outlines that artists became producers when they shifted their labour from an independent creator relent on conventional artistic apparatus, to an operative, in which the skills and accomplishments of the artists are transformed by the advanced technical content of ... -
This issue of OnCurating, Total Abstraction began in 2011 as one of the manifestations of the exhibition project Abstract Possible. The Zurich Test, which was held at White Space in Zurich between May and June 2011. The exhibition was curated by Maria Lind and mediated and produced by students in the ZHdK Postgraduate Programme in Curating. Abstract Possible explored different key characteristics of abstraction – intended as formal, economic and “withdrawal.” It travelled in a variety of forms to different venues, before arriving for its last episode in Stockholm between January 2011 and April 2012, where it was presented at ... -
The present issue of On Curating contributes to a critical re-engagement with New Institutionalism. This conceptual framework is used to encompass a series of curatorial, artistic and educational practices that, in various places around the turn of the Millennium, developed concrete ideas to change art institutions, their mandates and formats: art institutions were to function as sites of research and socially engaged spaces of debate. The fact that discussions about the function of and demands for change within art institutions have become increasingly topical in the context of the controversial and much criticized revised Swiss cultural policy for 2012-2016, and ... -
This issue of OnCurating consists of a variety of texts and interviews, which were developed out of interviews from participants connected to the Postgraduate programme in Curating (www.curating.org). Many of the authors and interviewees gave lectures and participated in the programme over the last four years, adding to the dialogue in the postgraduate programme, as well as other curators in the field. In the spirit of slowing down, in sometimes rather a hastily discourse, we would like to present them to a broad public, which engages with our main topics: politics of display, politics of site and politics of transfer and ... -
This edition of OnCurating is based on the panel “The Future of Short Film,” which was held at the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur. The former artistic director Reto Bühler invited Lars Henrik Gass (Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen), Maike Mia Höhne (Berlinale Shorts), Peter van Hoof (International Film Festival Rotterdam), Jukka-Pekka Laakso (Tampere Film Festival) and Laurence Reymond (Quinzaine des Réalisatuers Cannes) to present a short film not longer than 10 minutes and to talk about the future of short films from an artistic point of view and not from a technical one, knowing that this often cannot be separated… -
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, ... -
We share our interest in Social Practices in the arts. Therefore I initiated a curatorial project for the Postgraduate Programme in Curating, ZHdK, Zürich around the topic of Social Sculptures. The project took place in four different steps over a period of time of one and a half years, the curatorial concept was changed and further developed and produced by the artists, students/ participants and lecturers. The first step was to initiate an archive on artistic practice which an interest in communities, which was shown twice, once at the White Space, Zürich and secondly at Kunstmuseum Thun. The archive was ... -
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 ... -
Ephemera: Invitation cards, press releases, inserts and other forms of artistic (self-)marketing On CuratingThis issue of OnCurating is dedicated to artistic ephemera on the occasion of the exhibition project They Printed It! Invitation cards, press releases, inserts and other forms of artistic (self-)marketing at Kunsthalle Zurich (21 November 2015 – 7 February 2016). Along with the presentation at the Kunsthalle, which will change on a weekly basis, the project also includes seminars for university students in Zurich, a blog, and a public workshop with international participants. The first part of this issue aims to contextualize the broad category of ephemera, including the invitations, press releases, and magazine advertisements mentioned in the title, and ... -
This special issue of OnCurating has been conceived with the intention of inquiring into the relation between law and art as it is manifested in a variety of recent artistic and curatorial projects and legal writings. Based on the notion that the law holds an abiding influence on all terrains of society, our aim was to unravel tactics and mechanisms used by art and legal practitioners alike as they deconstruct, reconstruct, and appropriate legal matter and form… -
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 ... -
“Work, Migration, Memes, Personal Geopolitics” is being published within the framework of the Parallel Events accompanying Zurich’s Manifesta 11 devoted to the theme “What People Do for Money: Some Joint Ventures.” Unlike the Manifesta concept, the contributions to this journal relate the changes that have come about in working conditions and circumstances since the early 1990s directly to the multifarious migration movements in Europe. To this day, changes in working processes and migration movements are usually regarded as mutually isolated “problems.” However, we see the connection between them as a geopolitical reality rooted in political and economic power structures, aspirations to ... -
“We often have in mind the example that Brecht uses to describe the interval, the suspended time where in the middle of a play on stage the actors aren’t playing – so they are no longer actors – and the spectators don’t have anything to watch – so they are no longer spectators, it is a very beautiful picture of a moment of de-subjectivization, a small human strike.” Originating in Viktor Shklovsky’s analysis of Russian formalism, ostranenie describes the strategy of estrangement – the moment in an artwork that briefly overturns the sense that things have always been as they seem. ... -
Collaborative work is of a special interest because it raises complexities questions on the fundaments of curating and artistic work through questioning the exhibitionary complexes. These concerns extend through to the biennale form where the thematic and their aesthetics move from formalist, object-bound sensibility to practices based on experimentation and agitation, processes, ephemerality, political and social ideas that are locally embedded. The practices represented in this issue are not collectives and collaborations in the traditional sense, but practices that follow more self-instituting strategies grounded in their immediate socio-political contexts. This issue of OnCurating consists of two parts: the first part ... -
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 ... -
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 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 ... -
This issue developed from 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, Spaces of Anticipation has taken the form of a symposium with the same title at EACC (Castellón, Spain, 2014); the research exhibition Making Room. Spaces of Anticipation, and a second symposium and workshop (2015) both 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 ... -
Queer Theory understands gender and sexuality as relational constructs, subject to significant historical and cultural variation. Refusing to stabilize these variations into any singular norm, queer curating thus presents a challenge to the museum as a normalizing, meaning-making entity and asks how these concerns can be addressed in museum-practices, that have, for the most part, silently and unknowingly reproduced and solidified contemporary heteronormative structures and desires. How have queer issues, queer curators, and queer exhibitions at one and the same time both shaken the foundations of traditional curatorial practice, and found their potential for intervention papered over or silenced? How ... -
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 ... -
This issue of OnCurating takes political resistance and sanctuary as its subject, with Herman Melville’s nineteenth-century literary avatar Bartleby—famous for his refrain “I would prefer not to”—as its tutelary spirit. Forms of civil disobedience and tricksterism are coterminous agents in artistic and curatorial practices, both historical and contemporary. How to subvert and subvene, how to recast structural mechanisms of suppression and oppression, how to avoid, deny, magnify, spatially disjoint, and refute (earnestly, comically)? By what means can we, as cultural producers, refuse, while fostering a discourse of reparation? The activism now crucial in the face of ascendant political forces bent ... -
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 ... -
This issue focuses on HIV, culture and curation, edited by scholar and organizer Theodore (ted) Kerr. The print and online issue features over 40 contributions—including essays, conversations, visual projects, reprints, and personal reflections—from artists, activists, academics, and writers from around the world, exploring AIDS-related culture in the 21st century, through four themes: forgetting, seeing, collecting, and making, all of which reflect on both the historical turn in contemporary AIDS cultural production, and the ongoing need to keep an eye on the present. -
The symposium “Revisiting Black Mountain College: Cross-Disciplinary Experiments and Their Potential for Democratization (in Times of Post-Democracy)” asked questions in relation to anti-democratic tendencies in many countries worldwide. How can education still hold up democratic values, while at the same time presumably measuring its success by careers in the market? This issue brings together contributions from participants of the conference and adds further contributions by Andres Janser, Olga von Schubert, Caroline Adler, Boris Buden, Lucy Bayley, Sascia Bailer, Simon Fleury, Gilly Karjevsky, Asli Uludag, and Mieke Matzke.The interview by Ronald Kolb with Bitten Stetter, Brandon Farnsworth, Dorothee Richter, Jochen Kiefer, Martin ... -
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 ... -
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 ... -
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 ... -
Even before the current pandemic, contemporary music existed in a state of crisis. Its structures and institutions struggle to support any minority, let alone artistic practices outside of a narrow Western European style, meaning fundamental change is inexorable if this field is to remain societally relevant. With this issue of OnCurating journal, the curatorial collective GRiNM (Gender Relations in New Music) gathers texts based on its 2019 conference at the Zurich University of the Arts that explore practical and theoretical approaches to opening and diversifying the field. Our intention with this issue is to articulate these voices as central to ... -
This issue seeks to bring to the forefront the various positions and strategies of the most diverse art initiatives, from project and off-spaces to personalities within the art field, as well as those of established galleries and institutions and city officials based in Zurich in 2020. Originally, this issue was intended to draw a picture of the Zurich art scene and was meant to be published parallel to Art Basel 2020. Though with the current pandemic’s additional layering, the main focus of the precariousness of the independent art scene in Zurich has increased dramatically. In this respect, we would like ... -
The two events (ArtSearch, March 2017 and Third Space Symposium, August 2017) from which these contributions are drawn took place at an exceptionally volatile moment in South African higher education. The Fees Must Fall movement which started in October 2015 while, on the one hand challenging tuition and tuition increases, highlighted on the other hand, the structural inaccessibility to higher education. Moreover, it brought into stark relief the legacies of racial privilege sedimented in institutional structures that had not been responsive to the growing urgency for transformation in art institutions and universities: its hiring practices, student recruitment, the curriculum, the ... -
Extreme exposes art and curating cultivated through unique modes of production and creation in the margins of the globe, reflecting a dynamic developed through ongoing colonial realities. The issue is a compendium of partial, situated knowledges, originating from the four corners of the globe that, when combined, create a pluriverse of visions and a hopefully a momentary community that sustains contradictions inherent in the joining of a variety of vantage points. The issue deals with such pertinent issues such as: the colonization of knowledge as a driving force that abandons experimental and open-ended forms of knowledge; cross-cultural collaboration between non-binary identities ... -
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, ... -
“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, ... -
This issue gathers contributions that emerged from the conference and workshop “Situated Knowledges – Art and Curating on the Move” in June 2021 and exemplify the partiality and situatedness of one’s own position in our respective fields of expertise, within our educational frameworks and contact zones. The term “situated knowledges” coined by Donna Haraway declares that all scientific knowledge is fundamentally conditional. Against an assumption of the apparently neutral and unmediated knowledge of the (male, white) Western idea of science and its representation through totalizing visualization techniques, Haraway develops her concept of situated and embodied knowledges. -
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” ... -
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.
