THE CONTINGENCY OF CURATION

Conference at Tate Britain – Clore Auditorium

Friday 21 May 2010

10.00- 18.00

http://www.contingencyofcuration.org

Contributors Include:

Andrea Phillips, Roman Vasseur

Susan Hiller

JJ Charlesworth

Sound Threshold (Daniela Cascella and Lucia Farinati)

Simon Hollington and Kypros Kyrianou

Ron Wright

Neil Webb

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Despite the diversity of processes that make up the curatorial, its explicit presence in artistic culture, and its power to organise the reception and distribution of art, curation nevertheless seems to struggle to transform the conditions within which it operates.

This conference invites responses from a range of disciplines to address the contingency of curation and its consequences for culture and society.

The Contingency of Curation, curated by MA curatorial students from Chelsea College of Art and Design, The University of Essex and Sheffield Hallam University, takes up three primary figures of the curator as the framework for the days’ discussion. These include: ‘the autonomous curator and the institution’; ‘collaboration and authorship’ and, the curator as ‘the agent of social change’.

Speaking in a range of presentation formats, the conference moves across the terrains of art production, urban planning, art criticism, and arts’ reception, addressing the notion of the curator and the curatorial in its now, most pluralised form.

We seek responses and reactions as to how an understanding of these contingencies of curation demand, but may also create new modes of production for curatorial practice.

Panel 1: The Autonomous Curator

The role of the curator as a singular author/auteur, working either inside or outside of institutions, is more dominant today than it has ever been. In recent years this has been especially compounded by the increasing growth and popularity of trans-national shows and Biennales that have further moved the contemporary curator away from the traditionally invisible mediating role into an increasingly internationally recognised autonomous figure.

This panel will principally ask what the character and scope of this prevalent autonomy is for ‘the Curator’ today, and does the ‘hired-gun’ have more freedom to exercise greater creativity in the processes of making art visible?

Panel 2: Mediation as Production - Collaboration, Authorship and Contingency

The blurring of the separation between the roles of ‘curator’ and ‘artist’, emphasised by an increase in collaborative practice and the artist increasingly taking on the tasks of the curator, raises important questions regarding the notion of authorship and highlights that curation is no longer a central column of power in the art world.

By taking up the notion of mediation as production and creating a multi-authored curatorial event, we will be asking if these ‘expanded practices’ challenge received notions of creative agency.

Panel 3: Curating Friction – Between Complicity and Contingency

Cultural projects are playing an increasingly important role within urban regeneration programmes and the curator, bearing the cachet of producing a mix of cultural capital and creative critique, is a desirable agent for the proliferation of culture and economic wealth.

Complicit within these systems can the curator still be radical? Can critical friction exist within these curatorial practices? Where is the curator positioned within this tension between complicity and contingency?

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To book tickets and for more information on contributors please visit

http://www.contingencyofcuration.org or the Tate Britain website.

Press contact: press@contingencyofcuration.org