Curatorial Expediency & Algorithmic Organization of Exhibitions

Instructor: Mohammad Salemy Date & Time: Sundays, April 7, 14, 21, 28, May 5, 19, 26, June 2 11 AM - 1:30 PM ET

DESCRIPTION: This Seminar will focus on the influence of algorithms on the practice of curating as much as on the programmatic essence of curatorial practice in the historical perspective. The automation of curatorial practice might accelerate the reformation of the art world or go even further and realize the emancipatory dream of building a brand new world of art on the ruins of the old. By introducing the methodologies of a range of practicing guest curators, this seminar will focus on how the emergence of automated and algorithmic curation, like any new paradigm in meditation and communication, can provide opportunities for reforming the art world and injecting egalitarianism in the system. Moderated by Mohammad Salemy & Patrick Schabus, this seminar is lead by curators who have made a contribution to the field in the last five years.

 

April 7: Mohammad Salemy & Patrick Schabus /// Introductory session

April 14: Monika Szewczyk /// New Ancient Things

In her session, Monika Szewczyk will discuss her methodology in the context of her participation as a Curator in Documenta 14 as well as her work on the exhibition titled”The needle, the haystack, the thread” at the Arts Club of Chicago

April 21: Misal Adnan Yıldız /// Sky as a screen: Rethinking exhibitions and audiences

Originally written as proposals and selected through open calls, three exhibition projects; There is no audience (Montehermoso, 2009), A history of inspiration (Palais de Tokyo, 2013), and Mutterzunge (ongoing since 2017 in Berlin as a multi venue programme for events, installs and workshops; Curate Award co-organised by Fondazione Prada and QAM) clearly share a common ground for rethinking exhibitions and audiences. Potential links between imagination, inspiration and expression as well as location, environment, and reception including a list of references, experiments on exhibition format, display techniques and institutional tone will be related to a cognitive approach for imagining sky as a screen.

April 28: Raqs Media Collective (Monica Narula and Jeebesh Bagchi) /// Curatorial and Distributed Discursive Justice

Over the last two decades, curatorial practice has gained momentum and expanded beyond its formative cultural and intellectual composition. The expanded field of both cultural and knowledge production — and its transformation into economies of substantial scale — has brought in variables that were not anticipated before. Even though the domain of what transacts as “contemporary art” is insignificant in terms of economic value, yet it’s symbolic value, and prestige, power and privilege have risen. Furthermore, the enactive boundaries of contemporary art and it’s public interfaces are increasingly more porous, and with blurry edges. It is our understanding that a collision around epistemic equality and an alertness towards the questions raised around it, give curatorial modes and modalities their potency, and edge. It is within this context that we propose that curatorial practice has to be understood as a deliberation on distributed discursive justice.

May 5: Charles Esche /// The Demodern Possibility

The talk will discuss artistic and museum activities that seek to contribute to social change. Society and culture seem to be at a transition point and the modern / postmodern / altermodern explanation of the world no longer holds. The question is how to embrace a different way of seeing and thinking. The talk will suggest how we can begin to answer to that challenge.

May 19: Clémentine Deliss /// Clashing curatorial venues: reconsidering the metabolism of art research and production

This session focuses on curatorial theory and practice in relation to the constraints and complaints surrounding the current ramifications of the three key civic institutions in art: the museum, the university and the art academy. Questions will be jointly debated on the potential for developing new, experimental infrastructures for knowledge production that embrace transdisciplinary positions and center on the rights of access to sequestered ethno- colonial collections held in European reserves. What dramaturgical and technical configurations could contribute to the definition of a ‘museum of the commons’, enabling physical collections to become accessible and open-source? Can the museum as a quasi global organism, which is generating as yet unknown techne, begin to reformulate earlier conceptions of ethnographic collections and, in doing so, critically consider the architectural apparatus of museums, their economic imperative, and the constitution of audience relations? How can curatorial practice begin to remediate and thereby redefine the implicit conditions that frame our understanding of what a museum should be? Can we move away from the centralised museological ‘church’ to the peripheral, rural, or short-term 24-hour institution with its collection in a suitcase and the hawker as curator? Is this the disguise unconsciously adopted by biennials?

May 26: Serubiri Moses /// Autopoiesis and Affective Collaboration

The presentation follows The School of Anxiety, a project within the 10th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (2018). The School of Anxiety was an unteaching environment focused on subjective anxieties. Between August 2017 and August 2018, and travelling from Johannesburg to Nairobi to Berlin, the project brought together three members from diverse disciplines to collaborate on research and the exchange of ideas. The project aligned itself with terms such as unlearning, becoming, autopoiesis, self-production, entropy, and redundancy. The presentation will consist of an overview of collaborative practice within the year-long project in relation to cybernetic processes and psychoanalysis theories on affect and being.

June 2: Bassam El Baroni /// Computation as Curatorial Muse, Curating as Computational Muse

This talk looks at some of the ideas in circulation around curating in the post-internet era and attempts to understand what the implications of these are for curating moving forward. Computation is often interpreted as an algorithmic aid to the human curator and/or considered speculatively to signal the emergence and gradual realization of robo-curation and the withering of the human curator as was once understood. Both views seem to be highlighting curating in its “sortal” capacity as a form of selection and matchmaking but stop short of considering how the pressures exerted by computation contribute to the transformation of curation, seemingly directing it toward more epistemic concerns and an emphasis on conceptual synthesis. Between essentially thinking curating as a particular form of sorting, and, thinking curating as a practice with stakes and a role to play in the epistemic construction of world(s) is a type of gap; it is perhaps a “useful abyss” that dreams (or, for some, nightmares) about computational futures help bring to the fore. In what sense can the further automation of curatorial processes influence and shape the discussion on curating, its labor, and its education?

 

Image: Heather Dewey-Hagborg and Chelsea Manning, A Becoming Resemblance

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