Curating beyond exhibition - On the post-exhibitionary condition in a post-political world
The informal hypothesis of the book is that the representational paradigm of exhibition-making is subject to a process of rethinking and reconstruction across a range of curatorial practices, in part as a response to the undermining of democratic values, the erosion of public culture and the pervasive degradation of political life.
Summary
While we witness the rise of various authoritarian and neo-fascist formations across multiple geopolitical contexts, we consider post-exhibitionary curatorial practices as both the partial echo and the substantial revision of the democratic, egalitarian and solidaristic hopes and values previously elaborated with respect to aesthetic and cultural edification.
However, it is important to indicate that we see the trajectories of neoliberalism and the (post-)political not as constituting a uniform global historical process. Rather, we see the depoliticization effected by neoliberalism as substantially inflected by different geopolitical distributions and different historical trajectories of state formation. We are interested in the contradictions and tensions across the multiple and changing landscapes of the curatorial and the political in the register of different modes and strategies of practice.
The book comprises a series of first-hand accounts of curatorial practices that, in different ways, are situated at the intersection of questions of the post-exhibition and the post-political.
The project is a collaboration between Vector, CAPIm (Centre for Art and the Political Imaginary), ICMA (Institute for Multidisciplinary Research in Art) at UNAGE Iași, EARN (European Artistic Research Network) – Curatorial Studies WG, “George Enescu” National University of the Arts (UNAGE), Iași, Romania, and the University of Gothenburg, HDK-Valand Academy of Art and Design.
