09 Mar 2015

Symposium: Curating everything (Curating as symptom) – Migros Museum Zurich, March 20th + 21st

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.


Speakers:
Inke Arns, Sebastian Baden, Ursula Biemann, Ellen Blumenstein, Sergio Edelsztein, Felix Ensslin, Frederikke Hansen, Fatima Hellberg, Elke Krasny, Marsha Meskimmon, Katharina Morawek, Dorothee Richter, Axel Wieder

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Exhibition Opening, 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, Toni-Areal, Pfingstweidstr. 96, 8005 Zurich
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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, ICS, ZHdK