VECTOR – Curating beyond exhibition. On the post-exhibitionary condition in a post-political world

Content

Cătălin Gheorghe, Mick Wilson – Curatorial practices between the post-political and the post-exhibitionary

Maria Hlavajova – Exhibition Besides Itself

Ronald Kolb – Situated Knowledges & Pastoral Power in Post-Exhibitionary Practices

Vipash Purichanont – Non-Exhibitionary Practice: Rethinking CMSI in Global Assemblages

Saara Mildeberg – Curating a Socially Engaged Art Residency at the end of the Western World

Zian Chen – On the Staging of Labor Cinemas and Forums for Artistic Research

Andris Brinkmanis – Teaching as a Curatorial Practice

Biljana Ciric – What Could/Should Curating Do

Raluca Voinea – Life beyond Exhibitions

Description

We position this topic at the broad intersection of curatorial practice and the different political cultures that provide the conditions within which practices unfold. Our invitation was made in a spirit of open speculative inquiry where our hunch was that there is some significant correlation (though not necessarily a causative link) between, on the one hand, various post-exhibitionary practices (i.e., practices that do not privilege exhibition-making as their key curatorial operation; that do not understand exhibition as in essence an act of “representation” or “showing”; or that actively seek to disrupt, resist or otherwise negate the exhibitionary complex as described by Bennet) and, on the other hand, ongoing transformations within the realm of the (post)-political. Our informal hypothesis was that the representational paradigm of exhibition-making is subject to a process of rethinking and reconstruction across a range of curatorial practices in part as a response to the undermining of democratic values, the erosion of public culture and the pervasive degradation of political life. While we witness the rise of various authoritarian and neo-fascist formations across multiple geopolitical contexts, we consider post-exhibitionary curatorial practices as both the partial echo and the substantial revision of the democratic, egalitarian and solidaristic hopes and values previously elaborated with respect to aesthetic and cultural edification. However, it is important to indicate that we see the trajectories of neoliberalism and the (post-)political not as constituting a uniform global historical process. Rather we see the depoliticization effected by neoliberalism as substantially inflected by different geopolitical distributions and different historical trajectories of state formation. We are interested in the contradictions and tensions across the multiple and changing landscapes of the curatorial and the political in the register of different modes and strategies of practice. Necessarily, turning to themes of the (post-)political brings us into another lexical arena and other usages of (the rhetorically easy but semantically tricky) prefix “post-”.