Curatorial Work
This chapter examines the dominant concepts that form the so-called ethnographic turn in contemporary art, including the cross-cultural approach. It first provides an overview of the notions of montage and animation that have been added to the media anthropological repertoire before discussing post-Mexican assemblages. It then looks at Roger Bartra's notion of a ‘post-Mexican condition’, Silvia Gruner's archaeophobic video Don't Fuck with the Past, You Might Get Pregnant and Eduardo Abaroa's iconoclastic installation The Total Destruction of the National Museum of Anthropology, highlighting the lessons that can be learned from this assemblage of seemingly nihilistic gestures and post-anthropological attitudes. It also introduces the contemporary anthropologist's mode of curatorial work and argues that the stakes behind this ‘assemblage-work’ are nothing less than the differential futures brewing in the contemporariness of contemporary anthropology and contemporary curation.