Collecting Otherwise: Anarrangement — a roundtable on collaborative curating
How does the force of an archive shape curatorial work? What forms of sociality emerge from the process of working with artists, curatorial staff, and other collaborators— and how do curators navigate the power dynamics and institutional roles that mediate this process? What roles do care and facilitation play in curating? How might curating be understood as "anarrangement", meaning a collaborative practice of arrangement that works up and over, across, through, back and against?
14 September 2022
For its upcoming public gathering at Thursday Night Live! on September 22, Collecting Otherwise welcomes working group member and this evening's respondent Joseph Steele for a roundtable that brings together different approaches to curating from unconventional angles, through speakers Vivian Ziherl, Jo-Lene Ong, and Dr. Thomas Berghuis. The session imagines curating as “anarrangement”—Moten’s term, which is a contrapuntal kind of conviviality. In the roundtable, we wish to define curating in the communal sense, as a coming-together, not just being-together. When an artist curates an exhibition, the curator cedes part of their authorial role, yielding to rearrangement and providing a space for new spatial relations. What is the grammar of an artist-curated exhibition? These exhibitions are things we think with; occasions for coming together, acting as provocations, which presume not to know, but rather to see potential and movement in the encounter between objects in an exhibition and publics. This roundtable makes a case for studying the process of curating an exhibition, not just the outcome, in order to understand working with artists and archives as a collaborative process characterised by interdependence and exchange. The speakers and respondent will elaborate on different case studies relating to curatorial practices, inviting the audience for a discussion afterwards.
Speakers
Joseph Steele is an artist and filmmaker, currently a PhD Candidate in Critical Media Practices at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he writes about the practice of artist Renée Green. A short experimental documentary Untitled Essay Film related to the research is in production. He is also an Affiliated Researcher at CLUE+ Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He holds a 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 & Programs Manager at Kunstinstituut Melly. She is critic, curator and researcher of contemporary art, raised in Australia and working in the Netherlands. From 2016 - 2019 she was the founder and director of art and research foundation Frontier Imaginaries that staged internationally mobile thematic editions through 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 Ph.D. candidate in Curatorial Practice at Monash University, Melbourne.
Jo-Lene Ong is an independent curator and educator based in Amsterdam and Ipoh. 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 epistelomogy that is always intersecting with sexuality, race, class, gender, ability, and species. Often she collaborates with people and initiatives that are interested in cosmovisions, counter-cultures, syncretisms, vernaculars, and pop. Currently she teaches in The Royal Academy of Art, The Hague and in Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam where she is co-developing a module that makes tangible the links between colonialism, neoclassical economics, and the climate crisis.
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 was a member of the Supervisory Board in the period 2019-2022. Thomas Berghuis is currently based in the Netherlands.