Collecting Otherwise: Anarrangement — a roundtable on collaborative curatingCollecting Otherwise: Anarrangement — a roundtable on collaborative curating

For its public gathering at Thursday Night Live! on 22 September 2022, Collecting Otherwise welcomed Working Group member and respondent for the evening Joseph Steele, for a roundtable bringing together different approaches to curating from unconventional angles. With speakers Vivian Ziherl, Jo-Lene Ong and Dr Thomas Berghuis, the session imagined curating as ‘anarrangement’ – Fred Moten's term for a contrapuntal kind of conviviality. In the roundtable, we hoped to define curating in the communal sense, as a coming together, not just a being together. When an artist curates an exhibition, the curator reliquishes part of their authorial role, yielding to rearrangement and making room for new spatial relationships. What is the grammar of an artist-curated exhibition? These exhibitions are things we think with; occasions for coming together, provocations that presume not to know, but rather to see potential and movement in the encounter between objects in an exhibition and the public. This roundtable argued for studying the process – not just the outcome – of curating an exhibition, in order to understand working with artists and archives as a collaborative process characterised by interdependence and exchange. Speakers and panelists presented various case studies of curatorial practice, followed by a discussion with the audience.

Joseph Steele is an artist and filmmaker, currently a PhD candidate in Critical Media Practices at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he is writing about the practice of artist Renée Green. A short experimental documentary related to this research, Untitled Essay Film, is in production. He is also an affiliated researcher at CLUE+ Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He holds an MDesS in Art, Design and the Public Domain from Harvard GSD (2016), was a fellow at MIT's Open Documentary Lab, and also works with film collectives such as Filmwerkplaats in Rotterdam and AgX Collective in Cambridge-Boston.

Vivian Ziherl is Research & Programme Manager at Kunstinstituut Melly. She is an art critic, curator and researcher who grew up in Australia and works in the Netherlands. From 2016 – 2019 she was the founder and director of the art and research foundation Frontier Imaginaries, which produced travelling exhibitions, art commissions and symposium projects together with programme partners including Columbia University, e-flux Projects, the Institute of Modern Art (Brisbane), the QUT Art Museum and the Van Abbemuseum among others. Ziherl is a PhD candidate in Curatorial Practice at Monash University, Melbourne.

Jo-Lene Ong is an independent curator and educator based in Amsterdam and Ipoh, Malaysia. She got her start in the field at the intersection of social activism and art in Kuala Lumpur. Her practice is rooted in feminist and decolonial concepts of epistemology, always intersecting with sexuality, race, class, gender, ability and species. She often collaborates with people and initiatives that are interested in cosmovisions, countercultures, syncretisms, vernaculars, and pop. She currently teaches at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague and in Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam where she is co-developing a module that makes the connections between colonialism, neoclassical economics and the climate crisis tangible.

Dr. Thomas Berghuis is a writer, curator and the former director of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Nusantara (MACAN) in Indonesia. He holds an MA in Sinology from Leiden University, and a PhD in Contemporary Chinese Art from the University of Sydney. Between 2017 and 2019, Berghuis was a board member of the Framer Framed Foundation, and a member of the Supervisory Board for the period 2019-2022. Thomas Berghuis is currently based in the Netherlands.