Juliette Blightman, “nothing of significance grows under the shade of a large tree – as tears go by” (2012) at Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin. Installation view.
To mark the end of 2012, SYNAPSE.info initiated a curators’ questionnaire, sent to the first round of SYNAPSE curators, who participated in 2011. Responses ranged from the theoretical to the practical, reflecting the heterogeneity and breadth of curatorial voices. This is part 1 of 3.
Question: What would you single out as the most significant phenomenon or trend in curating this year?
“Materiality and what might be termed ‘the curatorial gesture’.” (Trine Friis Sørensen)
“Playing with the immateriality of a work of art.” (Elena Yaichnikova)
“Community. Community is the new international.” (Alvis Choi)
“Over the past few years I’ve read again and again critics who’ve complained that the mainstream art world has become stale, repeating and mashing the art of past generations. Finally I’m beginning to see curiosity and questioning. While I think she pretty much missed what she was looking for, Claire Bishop’s article in the September Artforum did at least question the ‘Zeitgeist blindness’ of the last decade. Here in Berlin the 2000s and their spirit of ‘retrogeist’ has also been challenged. Now I think it’s time to look at art that deals with the issues of the new decade and move on.” (Christian de Lutz)
Martin Beck, “Untitled,” 2012. Courtesy 47 Canal and the artist.
“Curating has become a trend itself, the practice of curating has become ubiquitous, embracing different fields of knowledge, patterns of creations but also of consumption.” (Manuela Lietti)
“I think one of the more interesting trends in curating this year is the way it has gained momentum as a concept in popular culture and marketing. What I mean is the way in which several websites and web commentators have used this term to refer to events as diverse as organizing an online conference to the commonplace activities of maintaining a Tumblr or Instagram account. We had declarations such as ‘everyone is an artist’ some decades back. Today, it would seem that ‘everyone is a curator.’ In this sense, perhaps non-professionals have, through the past two decades of immersive mediated experiences (with still and video cameras, smartphones, websites, etc.), come to grasp some basic principles behind the emerging discipline of experience design. Such non-professionals (and I use this term simply to distinguish these from those identified as ‘artists’) understand the importance of building and responding dynamically to a globalized and diversified audience, they experiment with and manipulate aesthetic effects for maximum impact (quantified in number of ‘likes,’ views, and comments), and essentially compose collective experiences featuring mediatic objects and processes.” (Leon Tan)
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“Para-Institutions. Emerging from the field of “Artistic Research”, artists have expanded their practice to include research and becoming “one-person bands”, taking on roles of critics, curators, and publishers. Biljana Ciric, an independent curator in Shanghai and Sally Lai of the Chinese Art Centre in Manchester, published “Institution for the Future” which examined this trend in 2012. These para-institutions mimic in many ways the operational modes of larger institutions on a much smaller scale and their relationship fluctuates from the symbiotic to the parasitic.” (Richard Streitmatter-Tran)
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“The politics of exhibition design and the strategies of curatorial practices of display .” (Dr. Elena Agudio)
“I haven’t perceived any patterns so far, but I just happen to know that “knowledge production” (whatever that means) was a buzzword in many successful funding applications. There you go.” (Gabriel Menotti)
“The continuing erosion – or perhaps more accurately, the mutation – of the auteur aura of Szeeman-style curating. Rather than an exclusively singular model for the most prominent and visible exhibitions in the world, we see the proliferation of curatorial teams, collectives, braintrusts and councils. Documenta13 and the Berlin Biennial were headlined by marquee names, but built collectively with/by large teams. Gwangju assembled a quintet of able curators, while the WHW collective continues to travel the world and animate their agency. In the exhibitions that come out of these group dynamics, individual signatures are simultaneously blurred and obscured – creating a more non-linear, democratic infrastructure within the highest echelons of exhibition-making.” (Steven Matijcio)
“It seems that the topic about art and science, art and urbanity, art and ecology gain growing interest in the art scene. It is interesting to see the development, we had in the 70’s and 90’s the similar phenomenon, however, with stronger accent on the art and ecology and now, twenty years later we discover the high potential of this topic in the art production and curatorial practices.” (Keumhwa Kim)
“[I]f frequency is what you mean, I would say the phenomenon of “artistic research” caught my attention a few times. I think it is one of those terms that mean everything and nothing. (Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung)
“Theme-making. Preparations.” (Luis Barrios-Negron)