This course will include lectures, seminars, a discussion and readings covering critical theory and socio-cultural practices that form a new curatorial reflective approach that is not based on aestheticizing the display of art or emphasizing virtuality, but on the relevance of methodological approaches, bodies politic, and contextual relations. Trying to put the concepts of curating, the curatorial, performing arts, visual arts, institutional, non-institutional and related notions and concepts into larger contexts, and in relation and interaction in order to bring together knowledge and experiences that would/could be performing other meanings and understanding.
THEMES:
Institutional and Non-Institutional Curatorial – what is curating in institutional frames, and what could destabilization of the given institutional frames bring, that is to say, what are the new forms of institutions and models this brings, by taking into consideration and understanding diverse economic and political circumstances, including gender and postcolonial aspects.
Feminism/Queer/Gender/Curating – related to the research on diverse concepts and practices – such as: orientation-disorientation; queer Marxism, femonationalism/or questions such as: How to curate ephemeral and marginal queer cultural practices that are not recognized by and resist official institutional, art and curatorial canons, and which mobilize marginal social spaces?
Curatorial Feminism – aiming to explore the non-hegemonic forms of curating, sociality and cultural practices that have been historically opened and developed by feminist theories, collectives, curators and artists, and critically rethink the ways in which historically sedimented masculine morphologies, privileges, and epistemologies structure and organize the curatorial. Considering the importance of feminist explorations of power/knowledge/embodiment, as well the feminist cutting-edge interventions in the field of performing arts, specific focus is on those concepts and material/praxis – based innovations.
LECTURES / SEMINARS / DISCUSSIONS:
SEMINAR – Suzana Milevska (North Macedonia): Becoming-Curator vs. Becoming a Curator
SEMINAR – Goran Sergej Pristaš (Croatia): Theatre by Other Means
WORKSHOP – Una Bauer (Croatia): Dictionary of Anger and Frustration
LECTURE – Goran Pavlić (Croatia): To Queer or Not to Queer: A Non-Normative Approach to Curating
LECTURE – Silke Bake (Germany): In-between (what we are used to believe in and what we actually execute)
In recent times, curating has provided a point of cross-disciplinary interchange between several distinguished disciplines and professions that deal with art. The courses and university departments that initially taught curating as a subject, mainly focused on its practice, but such a dichotomy no longer exists now that curating is taught as a subject or course in many different departments and universities, and the term itself is used in much broader terms. This presentation will therefore address the question of how the concept of curatorial relates to both the theory and practice of curating. I want to argue that “curatorial” and “curatorial knowledge” have advanced into terms that encompass the condition in which philosophy, theory and epistemology are intertwined and produce a new discourse and culture that are not limited to the understanding of curating as merely theory or practice. I will focus on the Deleuzian concept of “becoming” in the context of the self-differentiation and self-actualisation of an art curator. I particularly intend to discuss the conundrums that stem from the event(s) of “becoming-curator”. The main challenge is to unravel how a person knows what he or she knows as a curator, and how one reconciles the differences and contradictions between “being-curator,” “becoming a curator” and “becoming-curator.” I will also address some related empirical issues such are the problem of historicising curating, while attempting to understand curatorial and the differences between the role of the independent curatorial practice and the institutional(ised) one.
Excerpts, references and quotations:
1. Introduction: Philosophical, epistemological and institutional definition: Jean Paul Martinon, The Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013.
2. Philosophical ignition: Deleuze, Gilles/Guattari, Félix 1987, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. London: The Athlone Press, p. 291.
3. Feminist commentary on Deleuze based on: Colebrook, Claire (1999): “A Grammar of Becoming: Strategy, Subjectivism, and Style.” In Elizabeth Grosz (ed.): Becomings – Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures. Ithaca: Cornell University Press
4. Personal becoming: Suzana Milevska, “With Special Thanks To: A Balkan Curator in First Person Feminine,“ Open Space Journal, 2013. http://www.openspace-zkp.org/2013/en/journal.php?j=3&t=9
5. Suzana Milevska: Becoming-Curator vs. Becoming a Curator.pdf
6. Suzana Milevska_abstract_becoming_readings.pdf
BIO SUZANA MILEVSKA: Suzana Milevska is a theorist and curator of visual art and culture. From 2016 to 2019, Milevska was Principal Investigator of the Horizon 2020 project TRACES, Polytechnic University Milan, and she curated its final exhibition Contentious Objects/Ashamed Subjects. She was Endowed Professor for Central and South Eastern European Art Histories at the Academy of Fine Art Vienna (2013 – 2015). She has curated numerous international exhibitions including The Renaming Machine (2008-2011), Roma Protocol, Austrian Parliament, Vienna, and Call the Witness, BAK Utrecht (2011). She initiated the project Call the Witness–Roma Pavilion, Venice Biennale (2010-2011). In 2015, she curated the exhibition Inside Out: Not So White Cube, City Art Gallery, Ljubljana (with Alenka Gregorič). She holds a PhD in visual cultures from Goldsmiths College London and she was Fulbright Senior Research Scholar. In 2012, she won the Igor Zabel Award for Culture and Theory. She published the books Gender Difference in the Balkans, 2010, The Renaming Machine: The Book, 2010, and On Productive Shame, Reconciliation, and Agency, SternbergPress, 2016.
If we attempt to approach theatre not as an empty space but as infrastructure of watching, then it is a space already overwhelmed and prestressed by different dispositives of watching and showing. Could we imagine a stage of watching and not a stage of showing, an ideal space for theatrical work, an atelier, a dance studio, an auditorium, a white box, a film studio, a forensic laboratory, an archive.. and all at once? Is it a space that does not have to be filled but cleansed to be able to accommodate production, rehearsing, exhibiting, disassembling, folding, archiving, watching…etc.
Thought experiment for 28.08 (Thursday):
Imagine a white box and fill it with rows of chairs until you fill the whole space. It is as if you create a space in which only watching happens. There are only white walls and there is no stage in the surroundings. How can you change the chairs and reorganize in order for something to happen even without bringing any artworks? What could happen at the stage of watching instead of the stage of showing? How does the difference between the place of showing or place of watching appear or disappear with these interventions?
BIO GORAN SERGEJ PRISTAŠ: Goran Sergej Pristaš is a dramaturge, co-founder and member of BADco. (www.badco.hr), performing arts collective. He worked as a researcher and curator in the Centre for Drama Art (CDU) from 1995 to 2007. Associate Professor of Dramaturgy at the Academy of Dramatic Arts, University of Zagreb. He is also one of the initiators of the project Zagreb – Cultural Kapital of Europe 3000. With his projects and collaborations (BADco., Frakcija) he participated at Venice Biennale 2011 and 2016, Documenta 12, ARCO and numerous festivals and conferences. He was mentoring and teaching at DOCH (Stockholm), JLU (Giessen), Statens Scenekunstskole (Copenhagen), P.A.R.T.S. (Brussels), etc. Teaching courses in performance dramaturgy, writing on performance, analytical writing, dramaturgy and choreography, collaborative practices, and other. He was the first editor-in-chief (1996-2007) of Frakcija, a magazine for the performing arts. His latest book is Exploded Gaze (Multimedia Institute, Zagreb 2018).
The COVID-19 pandemic made more visible what people in the disability community already knew: 1. that the lives of those with disability are considered expendable in relation to the able-bodied majority 2. that accessibility issues can be addressed overnight when the abled-bodied majority needs them to be addressed. I do not have a lived experience of disability, but it seems to me that the requirement to educate, inform, contextualize should not be placed solely on the shoulders of the disability community or other marginalized communities. In the context of curatiorial practice and curatiorial studies, I think it is crucial to address those issues and to see how different marginalized experiences intersect, and what happens when they co-exist and inform each other (disability, queer, race, gender, sexuality). In this workshop, I would like to look into the language used to describe negative social experiences and the tension within marginalized communities in relation to questions of representation and practices: patterned invalidation of lived experience, comparative suffering, transphobic rhetoric, weaponized identity politics, racial gaslighting, interpersonal anti-blackness, power hoarding, white-centering, examining the privilege, able passing privilege, monopoly on victimhood and suffering. How to curate marginal cultural and art practices with regards to complex situation of often frustrating intensities of misunderstandings and “good intentions”?
BIO UNA BAUER: Una Bauer is a theatre scholar and writer based in Croatia. She is Associate Professor at the Dramaturgy Department, Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb. She holds a PhD from Queen Mary University of London. Her research interests include dance, physical theatre and experimental performative practices, history of ideas, theories of affect, networked publics, public sphere, travel writing, community, death studies and crime fiction. She writes theatre and dance reviews, analyses, travelogues and essays, which have been published and radio broadcasted in Croatia, Slovenia, Romania, Italy, Canada, and the UK. Her first book on theatre and everything else, including tea cosies and bicycles, Priđite bliže: o kazalištu i drugim radostima (Come Closer: on Theatre and other Joys) was published in 2015.
In my presentation, I will try to outline some of the problems we face when we try to curate the liminal fields, i.e. those spheres which defy clear-cut academic categories. More precisely, what do we mean when we say ‘queer’? Does it denote only sexual or gender identity, or can it be understood as a tool in political struggle? Is this alternative viable at all, or does it only misrepresent always fluid categories of subject’s agency and structural constraints. Borrowing some of the theoretical tools from queer-Marxist political theory, I will propose a materialist approach to the problem of curating ‘marginal’ cultural practices. To put it more concretely, we will investigate in what manner our academic apparatus with its established categories inhibits our attempts to approach the complexity of queer experiences. Finally, we will propose alternative epistemological stances when dealing with communities which depart from normative societal standards.
Organised within the program of the International Summer School “Curating in Context”, the citizens’ association Lokomotiva – Centre for New Initiatives in Art and Culture from Skopje, organizes a lecture by Goran Pavlić (Croatia) on the subject “To Queer or Not to Queer: A Non-Normative Approach to Curating”. The lecture is realised in partnership with/and as part of this year’s programme of Skopje Pride Weekend.
The lecture was recorded, to watch the video on YouTube click below:
BIO GORAN PAVLIĆ: Goran Pavlić is assistant professor at the Academy of Dramatic Art (Zagreb). His research interests include political theory, performance theory, political economy of art. In 2019, he published a book on Krleža’s political economy Glembajevi: dvojno čitanje (The Glembays: A Dual Reading). He co-edited two volumes (with S. Petlevski): Theatrum Mundi. Interdisciplinarne perspektive (Theatrum Mundi. Interdisciplinary Perspectives) (2015), and Spaces of Identity in the Performing Sphere (2011).
There is no such thing as curating outside context. Programming performing arts takes place in a specific region, city, district, institution, time, political environment, etc. It is embedded in current discourses and in the historiography of one’s field/discipline. It is made by and with certain people, within institutions and social frames, charged with narratives and economies. Curating performing arts should also focus on modes of production, how art works are being produced and developed. This includes economical or ethical questions, parameters of sustainability, power relations within a team, shared authorship, etc. All these aspects resonate in art works (and their reception). Contemporary dance/performing arts have furthermore shaped a number of job profiles the protagonists of which, such as curators, are mostly living and working under the same precarious conditions as artists do. Nevertheless, curators are often being addressed in the same ways as institutions – for they seem to have and to exercise a superior power position. This lecture will address questions of how to define these (work) relationships between the various players that have emerged in this web of positions, resources and affinities. By means of own programs – focusing on a city and the artists who are working within (f.e. Tanznacht Berlin) or coming from outside and knowing little about a city and its scene – this lecture is about understanding how much the working methods nourish topics, curated programs, aesthetics and work ethics, and what kind of working relationships are formed by them – and vice versa.
BIO SILKE BAKE: Silke Bake lives in Berlin, and works as curator, dramaturge and mentor. She has worked for diverse institutions (including TAT Frankfurt, Hebbel-Theater Berlin, Tanzquartier Wien) and realized programs for the House of World Cultures, the Academy of the Arts Berlin, Kanuti Gildi Saal Tallinn and Theaterformen Hannover/ Braunschweig. She worked as the dramaturge and project manager for the performing arts festival IN TRANIST at House of World Cultures in 2008 & 2009, she was the co-curator of the biennial NU Performance Festival On Hospitality on the occasion of the cultural capital program of Tallinn 2011, and of performance platform. body affects at Sophiensaele Berlin 2012, and the artistic director of the biennial program Tanznacht Berlin in 2016 (companions) & 2018 (Out of the Echo Chamber). In 2018, she was guest professor at the MA program SODA / HZT Berlin. Together with colleagues she is continuously working on formats for discussion and discourse.