Symposium
Curating everything (Curating as symptom)

Dorothee Richter, Postgraduate Programme in Curating in cooperation with
Alena Nawrotzki, Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst

Cooperation partners:
Research Platform for Curatorial and Cross-disciplinary Cultural
Studies, Practice-Based Doctoral Programme, University of Reading, Fine
Art Department of Art and Postgraduate Programme in Curating,
www.curating.org, ICS, ZHdK

The ironic title "Curating Everything" proposes already to read the
activity of curating as a social symptom. We presume that the
contemporary urge for a curatorial position has an imaginary side: the
wish to gain authorship and agency as an illusionary closure in an
overall unsteady and precarious labour situation for cultural producers.
Undoubtedly CURATING is a new discursive formation, as defined by Michel
Foucault, which has rapidly developed since the 1970s. This new
profession has as its main tasks the production, the distribution and
the reception of cultural meta structures through the combination of
cultural products like art works, publications, film or performance
programmes, sound projects, digital media or projects in public space, a
single project often consists of a media-conglomerate. Also it
instituted a now hierarchical formation, when taking over the creative
side of organising projects and shows from the self-organisation of
artists' communities in the 60s.
In this conference we put an emphasis on the interrelation of CURATING
as a meta-discourse and a cultural production with post-Fordist
societies. We would like to discuss curating in relation to changes in
image production, to changes of experiences of distance and modes of
perception, changes in the conception of subjectivity and communities,
changes in ways of circulations of images and changes in digital and
material infrastructures. We would like to question curating in respect
to topics of race, class and gender.
What can we propose as a critical attitude in curating achieved through
ruptures, gaps, inconsistency, failures and dissent? All speakers share
an interest in political agendas in artistic and curatorial practices.


PROGRAM

Friday, 20th of March
1–5pm

1–1:45pm
Dorothee Richter
"Curating – politics of knowledge production"

1:45–2:30pm
Sergio Edelsztein
"Are boycotts the new 'Collective Curating'?"

2:30–2:45pm // Break

2:45–3:30pm
Sebastian Baden
"Terror Worldwide? Curating after the Stockhausen-Syndrome"

3:30–4:15pm
Katharina Morawek
"Involvements"

4:15–5pm
Panel "Curating and politics"

Exhibition Opening at ZHdK Gallery, Friday, 7 pm:
"Suzanne Lacy's International Dinner Party in feminist curatorial
thought",
curated by Elke Krasny, with: Aktion Arkiv, Queering Yerevan, radical
practices of collective care and Red Min(e)d;
ZHdK Gallery 1 + 2 (E05_5.K09 / E04_4.K13), Toni-Areal, Pfingstweidstr.
96, 8005 Zurich


Saturday, 21st of March
10am­–7:15pm

10–11am
Felix Ensslin
"Material and Thought: Contemporaneity and The Thing(s) of Curating"

11–11:15am
Panel Introduction/Moderation: Elke Krasny

11:15–12am
Marsha Meskimmon
"Feminism's ‚Curatorial Turn': What, Why and Whither?"

12–12:45pm
Frederikke Hansen
"The Drive to Remember: Kuratorisk Aktion's Curatorial Engagement with
Invisibilized Coloniality and Indigineity in the Nordic Region and
beyond"

12:45pm–1pm // Break


1–1:45pm
Fatima Hellberg
"Transformations – or how to deal with affect and method"

1:45–2:30pm
Panel "Feminist Turn in Curating", moderated by Elke Krasny

2:30–3:30pm // Break

3:30–4:15pm
Axel Wieder
"Critical Populism"

4:15–5pm
Ursula Biemann
"Making the World Matter"

5–5:45pm
Inke Arns
"Curating (in) a Post-digital/Post-media/Post-Internet World”

5:45–6:30pm
Ellen Blumenstein
"The Curator and Her Double: The Cruelty of the Avatar"

6:30–7:15pm
Panel "Curating/the public (and digital media)"


please register: kunstvermittlungmigrosmuseum.ch