Topic outline

  • General

    TAI-L0009 - Contemporary Curating (2021)

     

    Curating and its Futures

     

    Format

    Contemporary Curating as a curatorial course for doctoral students adopts the concept of the roundtable – a relaxed forum for debate and discussion - as its general format. The course consists of five sessions the first four of which will start with an approx. 1-hour lecture. Each lecture will address a particular facet of the general framework Curating and its Futures. Curating in this course is understood as a research field in contrast to the professional activity of curating bound to museum practices and exhibition making. Curatorial work – as part of an expanded field of art, artistic research, and creative practices - is facing a considerable number of societal, economic, political and technological shifts that force it to constantly reconceptualise and rethink its core alliances and identity as well as its social and political impacts. Each one of the first four sessions will be dedicated to investigating a particular issue together. The issues are 1. Art, Financialization and Counter-Speculation 2. Algocurating (algorithmic curating) 3. What do we mean when we say Knowledge Production? 4. Curatorial Ethics. Through debate and discussion around these issues the idea is to picture and speculate on the different pathways that curating might take in the future.

    Coursework

    The readings and/or links/materials related to each session will be uploaded a week prior to the course’s starting date. Participants in the course are expected to have some idea about the topic through the readings and/or general research of their own. After the lecture, we will open up the discussion through questions, further examples and queries that the participants bring to this online roundtable. The final session will be dedicated to presentations by the course participants. The participants are tasked with situating themselves sometime in the future (example: 2051) and to develop a short report on the field of curating to an audience who remains in 2021. What has changed, what concerns, practices and ways of doing have been dropped and what new ones have emerged? How are the issues that we discussed during the course reflected in this report from the future? How are institutions behaving, how and what are artists and curators organizing and researching? The report can be read out, be a power-point or take up some online performative characteristics.

    Sessions and Dates

    03.03.2021 – 13.15 – 17:00, Zoom: https://aalto.zoom.us/j/7409986395

    Art, Financialization and Counter-Speculation (Some Curatorial Approaches)

    “Financialization, in the narrow political economic sense, names an historical epoch in the capitalist mode of production when profits increasingly accrue through financial channels, rather than through production-oriented activity. For example, non-financial organizations now derive profits from financial activities while disinvesting from core production and service activities. Financialization, in the broader sociological sense, also names the process whereby individuals, households and organizations bear more of the risks which the state, the would-be lender of last resort to the banking sector, had previously assumed.” [1]

     

    In recent years considerable research has emerged on the effects of financialization on the arts, but more importantly we have noticed the development of practice-led research on how artists, curators, and institutions might respond to financialization as a generator of inequality, scarcity and precarity in societies. This has meant that artists and curators have had to learn the language and vocabulary of financialization, understand financial instruments and develop tactical approaches for working with and through finance. The lecture will first look at financialization and the way writers/philosophers (e.g., Michel Feher) have addressed and come up with positions on how to creatively counteract its effects.  It will then look at an array of artistic practices that have engaged with these ideas and attempted to repurpose the logic of financialization towards the social good or the benefit of artistic communities.

     

    10.03.2021 – 13.15 – 17:00, Zoom: https://aalto.zoom.us/j/7409986395

    Algocurating (algorithmic curating)

    The automation of curatorial processes has already been part of curatorial work for a long time, although we might not recognize them as such. There is often a sentiment of deep caution and/or lament towards popular platforms (Instagram, Tumblr, TikTok) that have both democratized and domesticated content curation, how can professional curating compete with the mass reach, accessibility and power to transform social norms of these platforms, or so the sentiment goes?  This session looks at the topic of algocurating and the debates and discussions around it? It considers the writings and research of curators thinking with and through the automation of curatorial processes, the impact of this automation on the field, what kind of curatorial work is already being shaped by algorithmic infrastructures and how its being adopted by different stakeholders within curatorial practice and the wider creative industry.

     

     17.03.2021 – 13.15 – 17:00, Zoom: https://aalto.zoom.us/j/7409986395

    What do we mean when we say Knowledge Production?

    The readings, materials and lecture for session revolve around the question of art understood as form of knowledge production. Since “knowledge production seems deeply entrenched in specific artistic practices, be they individual or collective, in institutional programming and curating, in the discourses led in the field, and in the curricula of art academies”[2] how are we to understand this ‘knowledgization’ historically, in relation to current challenges and as a socio-economical and socio-philosophical question that can support and rethink future curatorial practices. It has long been argued that art does not afford us knowledge in any conventional sense of the term, as opposed to the sciences for example, yet within the contemporary context the drive towards an understanding and framing of art and curation as research and inherently productive of knowledge is becoming the predominant discourse. If this drive is a contemporary (economy-driven) phenomenon then how can we understand its disadvantages and advantages, taking up the possibilities it affords us to achieve certain social ends? We will embark on a close reading of Tom Holert’s book ‘Knowledge Beside Itself: Contemporary Art’s Epistemic Politics’ and bring it into conversation with recent writings on the economy such as Mariana Mazzucato’s conceptualization of ‘mission economics.’ As a non-disciplined discipline at its very core, what roles can curatorial practice play in shaping the future of knowledge production vis a vis art?  

    24.03.2021 – 13.15 – 17:00, Zoom: https://aalto.zoom.us/j/7409986395

    Curatorial Ethics, a discussion

    This session discusses the work of a number of theorists who have thought through the wider questions of ethics in relation to curatorial practice, philosophically and theoretically. It looks at ethical expectations within the field and engages with some ethical codes set by prominent institutions such as ICOM – International Council of Museums. The aim is to consider a number of questions: can there be an ethical gold standard in this field? To what degree are such institutionally formed codes realistically applicable across borders, sites, mediums (online curating) and across working conditions such as the precarity that many freelance curators endure. These and many other questions will be the subject of our roundtable after the lecture.

    31.03.2021 – 13.15 – 17:00, Zoom: https://aalto.zoom.us/j/7409986395

    Reports from the Future on Curatorial Practice, presentations and discussions prepared by course participants.

     

     

    ∞∞∞∞∞∞∞


    [1] Dunne, Stephen, Jo Grady, and Kenneth Weir. “Organization Studies of Inequality, with and beyond Piketty.” Organization 25, no. 2 (March 2018): 165–85

     

    [2] Christoph Chwatal, BOOK REVIEW: Tom Holert, Knowledge Beside Itself: Contemporary Art’s Epistemic Politics, Third Text Online, 12 October 2020