Conference of PhD in Practice in Curating
November 16, 2019, 2pm
With a contribution by Farid Rakun, member of ruangrupa (artistic director of documenta 15) and presentations by PhD students Sascia Bailer, Katerina Valdivia Bruch, Antonio Cataldo, Hadas Kedar, Ronald Kolb, Lalita Radavić, and Maayan Sheleff
Feedback by Prof. Dr. Jérôme Glicenstein
Organized and moderated by Prof. Dr. Dorothee Richter
This conference will focus on methodological frameworks in curatorial practice through presentations by seven PhD students of the PhD in Practice in Curating programme. There will also be an additional contribution by Farid Rakun of ruangrupa on their artistic/curatorial practice, and Prof. Dr. Jérôme Glicenstein will respond to the presentations. We also present the latest issues of the magazine On-Curating.
All seven PhD researchers see curating as a dialogic, social and relational practice (of care, of participation, of governance), though they also reflect critically on these terms. Sascia Bailer asks, “How can curating be conceptualized as a radical relational practice which addresses issues of social justice?” Ronald Kolb scrutinizes Tony Bennett’s concepts of “governmental assemblages.” Katerina Valdivia Bruch will speak about curating as a dialogic practice with a focus on the audience. She will include examples of her projects grounded on this idea and give a short introduction on her upcoming project, the symposium Rethinking Conceptualism: Avant-Garde, Activism, and Politics in Latin American Art (1960s-1980s). Maayan Sheleff researches participatory artworks and curatorial assemblies that manifest the human voice in a collective and examines their relation to recent protest movements. She will focus in her talk on (Un)Commoning Voices & (Non)Communal Bodies (2019), a project she curated together with Sarah Spies for Reading:International, UK. Antonio Cataldo questions the “care-taking” aspect of curating in the hope of reinventing art institutions that bear witness to those whose words remain unheard or are silenced. Lalita Radavić will discuss the constellation of theoreticians she uses to question the role artist residencies play in proliferating the neoliberal agenda of the art system in the 21st century. Hadas Kedar deals with artistic practices and curatorial formats in remote areas with an awareness of colonial pasts and hegemonic presents. The lecture will focus on three test cases from the Naqab desert that subsist under cultural erasure due to ongoing colonial rule.
PhD in Practice in Curating
A partnership between the Department of Art at the University of Reading (UK) and the Postgraduate Programme in Curating at the Institute for Cultural Studies in the Arts, Department of Cultural Analysis, Zurich University of the Arts ZHdK, supported by swissuniversities.
The Zurich University of the Arts and the Department of Art at the University of Reading are offering a new doctoral programme for research in and as curatorial practice, the “PhD in Practice in Curating.” Research students are enrolled at the University of Reading, and the Postgraduate Programme in Curating hosts a research group and offers opportunities for teaching and lecturing in higher education. The new PhD programme specializes in offering to established curators, artists, art critics and designers from all disciplines the critical framework within which to focus on specific curatorial and cultural research topics in order to earn a doctorate from the University of Reading through a combined theoretical and practical approach.
Participants will be able to engage with the ongoing international public programmes connected to the Postgraduate Programme in Curating Zurich, and with the independent OnCurating magazine.
Prof. Dr. Dorothee Richter is Director of the Postgraduate Programme in Curating, ZhdK, and Professor in Contemporary Curating at the University of Reading.
