Curating.info

Emerging Curators at GAMeC
18–21 November 2011 – GAMeC, Bergamo

4th Edition
QUI. ENTER ATLAS
International Symposium of Emerging Curators
18–21 November 2011

6th Edition
Lorenzo Bonaldi Award for Art – EnterPrize
Award Ceremony
21 November 2011 – at 7 pm


Via San Tomaso, 53
24121 Bergamo
T +39 035 270272
F +39 035 236962
www.gamec.it

Under the direction of Giacinto Di Pietrantonio, the Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo (GAMeC) in Italy presents the fourth edition of QUI. ENTER ATLAS. International Symposium of Emerging Curators. This four-day symposium, held from November 18–21, 2011 at GAMeC, and open to the general public, is a discussion-based event accompanying the Lorenzo Bonaldi Award for Art – EnterPrize.

For every edition of QUI. ENTER ATLAS, the symposium's discussion topics, format and participants change. This year, the symposium is titled The Billiard Effect and centres on exhibition histories in the making. Participants present their work along with case studies of influential exhibitions held from 1989 to the present, which may include anything from exhibitions or permanent collections, art biennials, and solo- or group-exhibitions, as well as discursive-oriented programming series, event-based or long-term initiatives shaped by atypical curatorial practices.

This symposium is realized by Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy, Curator for Contemporary Art at Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, and Alessandro Rabottini, Curator at Large, GAMeC.

Participants of The Billiard Effect include 14 curators under the age of 35 from Europe, the Middle East, Latin America and North America; nine curators in this group were convened by the symposium organizers, and five curators were nominated by an external group of international advisors to participate as runners-up for the Bonaldi Award.

Emerging art curators working exceptionally at public institutions, non-profit spaces or independently, will share their curatorial projects, methods and research.

These are the participants of The Billiard Effect:

Marwa Arsanios, Curator and co-founder, 98 weeks Research / Project space, Beirut
Ieva Astahovska, Curator, Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, Latvia
Yann Chateigné Tytelman, Dean of Visual Arts Department, Geneva University of Art and Design, Geneva
Vincenzo de Bellis, Co-founder and co-director, Peep-Hole, Milan
Luigi Fassi, Director, arge/kunst Galerie Museum, Bolzano
Fredi Fischli, Freelance curator, Zurich
Inti Guerrero, Independent curator, critic and researcher, Hong Kong
Loren Hansi Momodu, Curator, Tate Modern, London
Prem Krishnamurthy, Founder and director, Project Projects, New York
Sohrab Mohebbi, Critic and free-lance curator, New York
Jorge Munguía, Independent curator; co-founder of Salón and Pase Usted, Mexico City
Júlia Rebouças, Curator, Inhotim Institute, Belo Horizonte
Sarah Rifky, Curator, Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art, Il Cairo
Sandra Terdjman, Director, Kadist Art Foundation, Paris

QUI. ENTER ATLAS. International Symposium of Emerging Curators intends to be an occasion for professional development, through an exchange of ideas and experiences between peers and together with an audience.

For these reasons, aside from the symposium, a weblog has been especially created: The Billiard Effect Blog is an editorial project by Francesco Garutti available on the website www.enteratlas-gamec2011.com. This weblog is conceived as a conversation platform to share and cross-reference contents explored in the for The Billiard Effect.

The symposium's closing event, on Monday, November 21st, is the Award Ceremony for the sixth edition of Lorenzo Bonaldi Award for Art – EnterPrize. An award unique in its genre, it grants project support to a young curator under the age of 30. The awarded curator is invited to present an exhibition next year at GAMeC.

The five curators participating in the symposium that are considered for the Award are: Fredi Fischli, Loren Hansi Momodu, Sohrab Mohebbi, Júlia Rebouças and Inti Guerrero.

The jury's members for the Lorenzo Bonaldi Award for Art – EnterPrize are: Giacinto Di Pietrantonio, Director, GAMeC, Bergamo; Alex Farquharson, Director, Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham; and Viktor Misiano, Editor in Chief, Moscow Art Magazine, Moscow.


For further information: www.gamec.it.


QUI. ENTER ATLAS – International Symposium of Emerging Curators
18 November – at 6 pm
19–20 November – from 10 am to 1 pm / from 2.30 to 6 pm
21 November – from 10 am to 1 pm / from 5 to 6.30 pm

Lorenzo Bonaldi Award for Art – EnterPrize
Award Ceremony
21 November – at 7 pm

Free entrance

Curating Performance: Re/activation Strategies

Mexico City, March 17 - 25, 2012
Deadline: Sep 26, 2011

CURATING PERFORMANCE: RE/ACTIVATION STRATEGIES
A panel/workgroup/exhibition for the Hemispheric Institute's upcoming
Encuentro (conference) in Mexico City, March 17-25 2012

For more details and to apply online, visit:
http://hemi.nyu.edu/hemi/en/mexico-overview/enc-2012-workgroups/949-curating-performance/

5 curators/scholars and 5 artists will be selected for participation.

DESCRIPTION:
In 1968 Argentine artist Graciela Carnevale staged "El Encierro" (The
Confinement) locking her audience into a gallery until they were forced
to break through the front window in order to exit. In a related action
from 1979, Chile's Colectivo Acción de Arte (or CADA) censored the
Bellas Artes Museum by covering the entrance with a white sheet and
parking a row of delivery trucks in front of it, declaring that art
must be rediscovered in the landscape of everyday life. We might
interpret these performances as examples of curatorial interventionism,
or an attempt to redirect artistic production and audience attention
beyond the limits of elite galleries. Indeed, as part of the
transnational phenomenon sometimes referred to as the
"dematerialization of the art object" in the 1960s and 70s, artists
frequently worked with performance in direct opposition to mainstream
art institutions, believing their works could not be collected or
commodified. During the 1980s and 90s, artists like Coco Fusco,
Guillermo Gomez-Peña, James Luna, Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis and Andrea
Fraser continued to use performance as a potent mode of institutional
critique that denaturalized the museum's role in colonialism and social
control.

Today, and regardless of artist intentions, the remains or "leftovers"
of performance art have come to be incorporated into museums and
galleries (as well as classrooms) as surrogates for an event, mnemonic
aids, performative fragments, or art objects in their own right. What's
more, in recent years, performance artists and process-based works have
been increasingly featured in mainstream exhibitions. Markers of this
paradigm shift include the "laboratory" galleries of the Palais de
Tokyo, Marina Abramovic's popular and controversial retrospective The
Artist is Present (2010), Museo del Barrio's Arte No es Vida survey
exhibition of Latin American performance art (2008), the ongoing
Performa Biennale, along with numerous Hemispheric initiatives that
include the next Encuentro in Mexico. All of the above have led to a
variety of results, mutually transforming the identity of performance
art and its space of exhibition - and calling into question the roles
of the artist, the curator, and the audience. What limitations do
institutional spaces (such as the museum) pose for performance artists
and curators of performance? What is the role of the curator in
exhibiting new performances and/or reactivating those that have already
taken place? What is the significance of performance in the history of
exhibition, and what new display methods can it enable? How does the
recent museological shift towards interactivity relate to performance
and archival practices more generally?

We seek workgroup participants who are interested in developing a
collaborative, transdisciplinary, and historically informed approach to
curating performance. Activists, practitioners, scholars, amateurs and
seasoned professionals from multiple disciplinary formations are
welcome to apply. We will accept 300-350 word abstracts for conference
papers, manifestos, multimedia presentations, performances, and other
experimental formats that explicitly address curatorial concerns. We
will meet as a workgroup for all normal meeting times.The first two
sessions will consist of participant presentations of their work. The
remaining meetings will involve collaborations for curating an
exhibition at the end of the Encuentro. Attendance is mandatory for all
scheduled sessions.

POSSIBLE TOPICS:
Curating Contemporary Performance Art
Re-Performance
Histories of Exhibiting Performance
Display Dramaturgy, Experience-Driven Exhibitions
Curating "Laboratories"
Re/activating the Trace and the Index
Organizing Performance Biennials, Triennials, and Other Events
Performance Artists as Curators, Curators as Performance Artists
Performance and/as Institutional Critique
Curatorial Activism, Radical Curating
Performance and the Art/artifact Debate
Reverse Ethnography Strategies
Curating Tourist Itineraries
Performative Approaches to the Archives
Activating Museum Transgressions
Curating Feminist/Queer Acts
New Media Display Practices
Collecting and Documenting Performance
Exhibiting Postcolonial Repertoires
Commodification of Performance
Relaying Trauma in Museums Galleries
Collaboration and/or Curatorial Collectives
Performativities and Virtual Exhibitions
Provoking Visitors, Engaging Feedback

Welcome to January's Pick 'N Mix. I hope all readers had a great holiday and have big plans for 2009!

- Whether you have big plans for 2009 or not, here are some possible dates for your calendar: March 5-7, 2009. The excellent Witte de With contemporary art centre in Rotterdam is holding a symposium entitled "The Curators". It sounds terrific, especially the way they have balanced the programme of speakers. From their promotional text: "The practice of curating is a much discussed topic within the art world, but is often neglected by the media and thus remains largely invisible to the broader public. With our selection of speakers, we aim to put a wide range of faces to the often elusive and contested title of curator. Invited guests include freelancers, artist/curators and others fulfilling hybrid roles, curators working inside and outside of art institutions, those responsible for major international art events and those working on an intentionally local scale." For more info, check out the Witte de With's website.

- This recent interview with Ami Barak, the curator of ArtFocus 5, is especially relevant given the major news headlines of the moment on the escalating violence between Israel and Palestine. The article states: "When one is curating a large art exhibition in Jerusalem [...] One must deal with the conflicts this city generates for those working in it." Later, the curator says: "All the Palestinians we had invited didn't want to come - those from the territories and those with Israeli citizenships. They told us that they didn't wish to participate in an exhibition being held in 2008, Israel's 60th anniversary, and also because the exhibition was being held in Jerusalem. [...] I'm not criticizing them. They fear being a victim of manipulation and that they would be used for propaganda and demagogy, I can understand that." This is a fascinating interview that highlights the political role of the curator in a very candid way.

- The deadline for the De Appel curatorial programme in Amsterdam is fast approaching - January 31!

- A fascinating discussion about artist/curator ethics has been developing on the CRUMB mailing list. The debate covers the perennial topic of ethics around artists who also work as curators (and vice versa), and the methods of selection for exhibitions that are employed by such hybrid workers. You can read the thread online, although I highly recommend subscribing and also checking out CRUMB's work online!

Call for Registration: Banff International Curatorial Institute Symposium: Trade Secrets
Education/Collection/History
Conference dates: November 12 - 14, 2008
Application deadline: October 31, 2008

The latest in the ongoing series of the Banff International Curatorial Institute (BICI) conferences, Trade Secrets will re-focus the collective discussion about the curatorial profession by exploring specific issues regarding: the education of curators; the challenges facing collection-based curators; trends in curatorial research; and the writing of curatorial histories.

Invited guests include François Aubart, Wayne Baerwaldt, Sabine Breitwieser, AA Bronson, Heather Diack, Joseph del Pesco, Rosemary Donegan, Sam Durant, Barbara Fischer, Richard Flood, Teresa Gleadowe, Matthew Higgs, Candice Hopkins, Céline Kopp, Ken Lum, Francesco Manacorda, Marc Mayer, Cuauhtémoc Medina, Lourdes Morales, and Joanna Mytkowska.

To apply to attend, visit the Banff International Curatorial Institute website.

Tales of the Unexpected: the Future of Curating Contemporary Crafts
Thursday 8th November, mima (Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art) 9.45am-4.30pm

Organised by the Crafts Council and MA Curating Contemporary Design, Kingston University (in partnership with the Design Museum), Tales of the Unexpected is a conference that will explore the challenges of curating contemporary craft through a series of exciting and innovative case studies. Examples of best practice have been drawn from fine art, architecture, design, fashion and craft to explore and provide a platform for discussing future strategies for approaching curating contemporary craft. The themes for the day are:

- Craft and the Visual Arts: Pushing Boundaries
- Curating Craft in Public Spaces
- Curating Outside the Vitrine: New Approaches
- Curating Craft as Performance

Continue reading "Curating Craft: Conferences at mima"

To start off the new month (and I promise none of these will lead you to a silly April Fool's joke) I thought I'd provide a little "pick 'n mix" of what I've browsed lately that is of interest to curators:

• Hanne Mugaas and Cory Arcangel have compiled (curated!) a very interesting list of art videos on YouTube, as part of a larger project entitled Art Since 1960 (According to the Internet). Definitely worth a look, set aside a bit of time if you dare click here!


• Interviews on curating.info are coming up in the next few months (they are still in the incubator!) but for now go read this good (though brief) interview with curator Lu Jie on Artkrush.


• In a détournement of the office football pool, Leisure Arts has created a championship pool for curators. While I'm unsure how it works precisely (sports pools are clear since there are matches of one team versus another, and I'm uncertain how one curator is pitted against another) it is an amusing concept nonetheless. Check it out here.


• The Museums and the Web conference is in just ten days! Read the conference abstracts and full papers here.


• d/Lux/MediaArts has just released the Coding Cultures Handbook, which offers some interesting perspectives on digital tools, social networks, and open labs - all concepts which have, will, and in some cases, truly should influence curatorial and museological models.