Winner of the 2021 Journal of Curatorial Studies Emerging Writer Award and My Body Holds Its Shape

Review of: Winner Of The 2021 Journal Of Curatorial Studies Emerging Writer Award My Body Holds Its Shape Curated by Xue Tan, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong, 25 May–27 September 2020

heART space: Curating community grief from overdose

This article details the transformation of an empty store into a gallery honouring youth and others who have passed away from overdoses, and the creation of extensive harm reduction and grief support programming that accompanied the display of artwork. The outpouring of community interest, participation, and emotion that surfaced around heART space clearly shows how art, exhibitions and creative programming can help foster communities of care during times of crisis. Drawing from research into practices of care from harm reduction work, grief studies and participatory arts and curatorial studies, the authors explore how heART space comforted youth and others with direct experiences with overdose and disenfranchised grief while creating dialogues with visitors about the stigma of drug use and homelessness. The authors argue curating heART space produced an opportunity for community healing while nuancing and humanizing the way we see people who use drugs. As such, this youth-driven community project created a safe space to share stories, collaborate, honour trauma and transform grief into action.

Winner of the 2020 Journal of Curatorial Studies Emerging Writer Award

Review of: Winner of the 2020 Journal of Curatorial Studies Emerging Writer Award Tear Gas Epiphanies: Protest, Culture, Museums, Kirsty Robertson Toronto/Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press (2019), 432 pp., ISBN 978-0-77355-701-7, p/bk, CAD $39.95

Asserting the Vernacular: Contested Musealities and Contemporary Art in Lima, Peru

This essay examines three museums of contemporary art in Lima, Peru: MAC (Museum of Contemporary Art), MALI (Lima Art Museum), and MASM (San Marcos Art Museum). As framed through curatorial studies and cultural politics, we argue that the curatorial practices of these institutions are embedded with tensions linked to the negotiation of regional, national, and international identities, coloniality, and alternate modernities between Western paradigms of contemporary art and contemporary vernacular art in Peru. Peruvian national institutions have not engaged in the collection of contemporary art, leaving these practices to private entities such as the MAC, MALI, and MASM. However, these three institutions have not, until recently, actively collected contemporary vernacular Peruvian art and its by-products, thus inscribing this work as “non-Western” through curatorial practices and creating competing conceptions of the contemporary. The curatorial practices of the MAC, MALI, and MASM reflect the complex and contested musealities and conceptions of the contemporary that co-exist in Lima. This essay will address this environment and the emergence of alternative forms of museality, curatorial practices, and indigenous artist’s strategies that continually construct and disrupt different modernities and create spaces for questioning constructs of contemporary art and Peruvian cultural identities.

Curating on the Web: The Evolution of Platforms as Spaces for Producing and Disseminating Web-Based Art

By analysing a series of exhibition projects responding to central changes in web technology since its public unveiling (1991), this study identifies a historical trajectory for discussing the evolution of curating on the web. Such evolution highlights how curators have devised exhibition models that operate as platforms for not only displaying art specific to the web, but also for producing and disseminating it in a way that responds to the developments of web technology—and its socio-cultural and economic impact. With the massification of web tools, in fact, these platforms have generated distributed systems of artistic production free from the physical and conceptual limitations of the gallery and museum space. They have not only become spaces for displaying art, but also platforms that nurture its production, different modes of audience engagement and critique the canons of the institutionalised art world. Originating from the desire to reduce the historical fragmentation of this field of work and its partial mapping, this study follows a periodisation that starts from the early internet, with its BBS-enabled platforms such as ARTEX (1980), to introduce the 1990s experimentations with the web browser and the developments of projects like äda’web (1995). It then dives into the Web 2.0 when, with the platformisation of the technology, curators developed an array of approaches for adopting existing web services, as in the instances of CuratingYouTube (2007–present) and #exstrange (2017). Lastly, it outlines the trends of today’s web, which saw the birth of projects like the blockchain-enabled cointemporary (2014), to then draw conclusions about the relevance of this historical trajectory in the field of curatorial studies and the production of web-based and digital art.

Por uma revisão dos estudos curatoriais

Este artigo procura rastrear a recepção crítica dos primeiros gestoscuratoriais no Brasil e propor a necessidade de pesquisas voltadas para a curadoria de arte contemporânea em âmbito acadêmico. Pretende mostrar a importância de um campo específico e complexo, que requer um domínio em várias disciplinas correlatas, abrangendo a história das exposições e das instituições. Num segundo momento, o artigo faz uma revisão da implantação dos programas de especialização inspirados nos curatorial studies, difundidos na Europa nos anos 1990, e conclui que o modelo deveria contemplar uma formação conjunta de artistas e curadores para permitir relações de troca sem reproduzir a separação ocidental entre consciência e sensibilidade, filosofia e poesia.

Late North-African sigillata lamps: curatorship of museum collections and archaeological research

The Late African North African lamps of Terra Sigillata (African Red Slip Ware-ARS) are a category of objects which, alongside tableware, have acquired particular importance, not only for the volume of their production, but for their economic and commercial, iconographic and historical-religious implications. This article aims to present the development of fundamental research for the knowledge about the production and circulation of the ARS and in particular the lamps, taking as examples rich dialogues between the curatorial studies of museological collections and archaeological research that point the limits of the classical models of study of African ceramics and perform accurate reviews of dates, origins and contents of vessels, especially with archaeometric methods.

Curator—Curatorial Studies Towards Co-creation and Multiple Agencies

Erin A. Peters reflects on her objectives as a curator and educator, and the agency of museum visitors as co-creators.

Academic course: About and around curating: The technology of an exhibition process: The realization of project "Real World"

As an extended part of independent curatorial project About and Around Curating/Kustosiranje, art historians and freelance curators Bereta and Tunić developed a special academic course for the University of Belgrade, Faculties of Architecture and Fine Arts during the autumn semester 2012/13. Rooted in experience based methodology and inspired by contemporary curatorial studies in Europe, the official course curriculum gathered undergraduate students of Architecture, Fine Arts (Department of Sculpture) and Art Historians. The aim of the course was to encourage team working of students of different backgrounds in order to create newly produced artworks, as part of a group exhibition. The course itself was intended to be a reaction and constructive critique towards the lack of cooperation between art faculties, low rate of practical activities during studies and seeing curatorial studies solely as a world of ideas.