Assembling a Praxis: Choreographic Thinking and Curatorial Agency - Open House: A Portrait of Collecting

Lauren O'Neal

“Open House: A Portrait of Collecting,” a curatorial project held at the Lamont Gallery at Phillips Exeter Academy in 2015, is part of my doctoral research on “Assembling a Praxis: Choreographic Thinking and Curatorial Agency.” The "Open House" exhibition was initially about collecting and caring for objects, a traditional function of museums. Curating with a choreographic mindset encouraged me to address other questions, including how objects and collections foster emotional connections. My initial question for the project, “How to do things with objects?” soon became “How do objects arrange spaces of relation between people and ideas?” Themes include community, memory, identity, taxonomy, preservation, accumulation, value, story, exchange, and display. [This exposition corresponds to Section Five: Arranging Spaces of Relation(s): What Can Objects Do? in the printed dissertation.]

Doctoral Thesis in Fine Arts, University of the Arts Helsinki

Lauren O'Neal: Assembling a Praxis: Choreographic Thinking and Curatorial Agency

Links to Curatorial Projects and Dissertation Text

Curatorial Project One: Open House: A Portrait of Collecting

This exposition corresponds to Section Five: Arranging Spaces of Relation(s): What Can Objects Do? in the printed dissertation available in the Taju archive.

Click the image to go to the exposition.

Open House explores connections between objects, collectors, and audiences, and between private storage and public staging.

Additional Curatorial Projects

Click the image for another curatorial project.

Dissertation Text

Click the image to access the Taju archive.

Assembling a Praxis: Choreographic Thinking and Curatorial Agency is a doctoral thesis that is part of the degree of Doctor of Fine Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts, at the University of the Arts Helsinki. The dissertation includes the written component, which takes the form of a published book (the adjacent image) and artistic components consisting of three curatorial projects, located within the Research Catalogue as online expositions (the images to the left).

The book can be accessed in the University
of the Arts's publication archive Taju:
https://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-353-440-7.
See the publication page for information about printed copies and educational discounts.

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