OnCurating Issue: Feminist Perspectives in and on documenta.

www.on-curating.org
opencallcurating.org

With a new issue of OnCurating, we aim to examine documenta from a feminist perspective. For the first time, an all-female curatorial team is taking on the documenta institution. With this focus, we seek to establish an outside perspective and to counterbalance it with an inside analysis. How can the feminist call for gender parity among artists be expanded to include new forms of curating? What does this mean for artists and curators?

To find new ways of art production, of curating, mediating, distributing is evident in feminist curating. Will this also be mirrored in the structures of the project? And are profoundly changed relations between curators, artists and different publics, which also proposes changed infrastructures and speaking positions, leading to changed subject positions to be expected? Is there an understanding to consider the desire to "radically" rethink representational spaces like the museum and open them up to new audiences? If so, this might have far-reaching and speculative consequences at all levels of the institution.

The goal of this issue is to strive for situated knowledges, which might contradict each other, but nevertheless would open up into a future pathway for feminist curating. The ways to develop this hopeful momentum could be diverse, from activism to speculative fabulation, from theory as practice to hands-on manuals for mediation.

This is an open call for researchers working on the documenta through a feminist perspective.

We welcome contributions about:
-The relation of theory and practice from a feminist perspective; circulation of forms and ideas rewriting patriarchal art histories
- Current (and historical) constructions of femininity, masculinity and the positionality of non-binary and trans* politics of representing art and artists at documenta
- Dynamics of particularity and universality in feminist aesthetic theories shaping the making and reflection of documenta, including intersectional perspectives
- Feminist perspectives on the aesthetic organization of power/sexuality/violence, politics of victimization, and depolitization of art
- The role of sexuality in contemporary politics of identity and difference in art
- Art practice between ongoing gendered divisions of applied and autonomous art, global production conditions of contemporary art and labor conditions of artists, curators and mediators in (trans)national relations
- Community and individuality in feminist curating for documenta
- Promises and problems of new mothering, care and ecological discourses in the artistic field
- Existing feminist solidarity, taking into account different social, political and economic circumstances
- Documenta in relation to art education institutions from a feminist and queer teaching perspective
- gendered history of documenta
- Feminist approaches to understanding the causes, structures, and characteristics of nazism and fascism

Please send in a short abstract of 300 to 400 words.
opencallcurating.org

Deadline for abstracts 31st of October 2026