Post-representational curating

SCCA – Ljubljana

From the 1990s onwards, there was a “reflexive turn” in exhibition theory, in which all the conditions of exhibiting and representing and the associated types of institutional logic have come into focus. Following those more or less thorough institutional critiques and analyses of the conditions of production, in recent years an advanced segment of the field has increasingly been raising the question of curatorial agency. Even presuming there is no external standpoint for criticism, they nevertheless asked the question “What is to be done?” and it underwent a variety of deconstructive turns. The lecture traced these deconstructive turns and related them to developments in the visual and performative arts of the last decades that have not only questioned the representational but thwarted and undercut its logic. In this light it asked what kind of shadows post-dramatic theatre and post-representational art have shed on the format of the exhibition in order to think the very act of the curatorial differently.

The lecture by Nora Sternfeld and Luisa Ziaja (ecm – educating / curating / managing – Master Program in Exhibition Theory and Practice, University of Applied Arts Vienna) is part of a partnership project World of Art (Models of training and collaboration in contemporary arts) co-funded by the European Leonardo da Vinci Programme.