The Curatorial Conundrum (published by MIT Press, April 2016)
Overview
Today curators are sometimes more famous than the artists whose work they curate, and curatorship involves more than choosing objects for an exhibition. The expansion of the curatorial field in recent decades has raised questions about exhibition-making itself and the politics of production, display, and distribution. The Curatorial Conundrum looks at the burgeoning field of curatorship and tries to imagine its future. Indeed, practitioners and theorists consider a variety of futures: the future of curatorial education; the future of curatorial research; the future of curatorial and artistic practice; and the institutions that will make these other futures possible.
The contributors examine the proliferation of graduate programs in curatorial studies over the last twenty years, and consider what can be taught without giving up what is precisely curatorial, within the ever-expanding parameters of curatorial practice in recent times. They discuss curating as collaborative research, asking what happens when exhibition operates as a mode of research in its own right. They explore curatorial practice as an exercise in questioning the world around us; and they speculate about what it will take to build new, innovative, and progressive curatorial research institutions.
Contributors
Nancy Adajania, Thomas Boutoux, Mélanie Bouteloup, Nikita Yingqian Cai, Luis Camnitzer, Eddie Chambers, Zasha Colah, Galit Eilat, Annie Fletcher, Lia Gangitano, Liam Gillick, Vladimir Jeriç, Koyo Kouoh, Miguel A. López, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Paul O’Neill, Tobias Ostrander, Joao Ribas, Sarah Rifky, Peter J. Russo, Sumesh Sharma, Simon Sheikh, Lucy Steeds, Jeannine Tang, David Teh, Jelena Vesiç Mick Wilson, Vivian Ziherl
Copublished with the Center for Curatorial Studies Bard College/Luma Foundation
The Curatorial Conundrum contains a text by Eddie Chambers, Black-British Artists and Problems of Systemic Invisibility and Eradication: Creating Exhibition Histories of That Which Is Not There.
See https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/curatorial-conundrum