Collective Curating. On Breaking Some Spells

Is the process of collectivising the curation indeed an answer to socio-political exhaustion of the curatorial endeavour? It certainly is not a wonder solution, that could work as a spell and change our field overnight. As we will see, a gesture of introducing more than one curator in a position designed for an individual will certainly cause some trouble, but will not bring a substantial change unless it operates simultaneously on many layers, including structural, symbolic and narrative ones.

Nevertheless, with all its pitfalls and entanglements, the collective curation might work well as a provocation and as a potential political project, offering a perspective to transform not only the way we work, but perhaps also the way we understand, create and maintain social relations. It might thus become a space for speculating on how a society could work otherwise - a condition enabling imagining and embodying social relations differently than in the hyperindividual capitalism.

The article is a revised version of the keynote speech given at the “Symposium: Collective Curating”, curated by Eva Neklyaeva and hosted by SAAL Biennaal in Tallinn on the 31st of August 2023.