Para Site has the pleasure to present Around Curatorial Practice: What do we do when we curate?, a lecture by art critic, independent curator and Chief Editor of Manifesta Journal
The lecture will draw upon s experience of working at , a venue for artistic research in the North of Paris, and on the U3 – triennial of contemporary art in Slovenia.will be exploring terms such as “situated artistic research” – implying a research that develops fully its opportunity through adaptation to its environment, or, to measure and experiment with the results of any modifications applied to that environment, which can in turn also modify the research; and “situated curatorial practice” where the need to situate a practice drives the creation of local projects that stand for their “contextual”, “community” or “participative” activity. Development of such projects needs a certain elasticity of time and the privilege of taking time. This is crucial for undoing the protocols of exchanges between the artist, institution and the public (visitors, participants, passers-by), which are set by art institutions, often just on the basis of abstract projections.
Furthermore, reflexivity, which in recent anthropological studies has been appreciated as an act of acknowledging one’s own subjectivity and the part one plays in one’s work, invites us to rethink what do we actually do when we curate. This is the main question around which the new series of Manifesta Journal – Around Curatorial Practices is focused on. The online platform of Manifesta Journal is reconsidering the meanings and the effects of curatorial practices today, focusing on urgent (geo)political, humanistic, queer, instigating and controversial potentialities. The new, encompassing subtitle, “Around Curatorial Practices” marks the trajectory from the previous subtitle, “Journal of Contemporary Curatorship”. The preposition “around” is devoted to what actually moves subjectivities when they adopt the notion of curating as responding to their practices, which are informed by drives, subversions, opacities, risks, desires, beliefs and solidarities.
This event is supported by Asia Art Archive.