The Curatorial Conundrum Edited by: Paul O'Neill, Mick Wilson, Lucy Steeds(© 206 LUMA Foundation & The Canter for Curatorial Stucias, Bard Cologo llrightsreserved. Nopart ofthis book may be reproduced in any fim by ary electronic of ‘mechanical means including photocopying, recording. or information storage and retrieval without permissionin writing from the publisher, [MIT Press books may be purchases at special ‘quantity discounts for business or sales promotional use. “This book was set in Unica7,Larih Nove, lon, ‘and Hermes, and was printed and boundin Begin Librery of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Names: O'Neil, Paul, 1970-elitor. Wilson, Mick, ecitor.Steods, Lucy, ator ‘Tile The curstorial conundrum :whatto auc’? what ‘oresearcti? what to practice? / edited by Paul O'Neil, Mick ison, and Lucy Steed, Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts The MIT Press, 2016. Includes bibliographical references, enters: LOCN 2015050424 IISBIN 9780262525105 (pbk-:alk paper) ‘Subjects LCSH: Musoume--Curatorship— Philosophy.|Art museum curators, sifiention: LCC N408 C877 20161 DDC 708--de23 UCracord availabe athttpecn oc. gu/20%6050806 ChThe Curatorial Conundrum £,991}9DUd 0}.0UM (H31V asad e1LvHmM ,Apnig 0} EU MThe Curatorial Gonundrum What to Study? What to Research? What to Practice? Preface Maja Hoffmann 7 ‘The Curatorial Conundrum Introduction Paul O'Neil, Mick Wilson, Lucy Steed 28 39 nm 95 ‘What to Study? What Is the Future of Exhibition Histories? Or, ‘toward Artin Terms of ts Becoming-Public Ls Stoeds Obstacles to Exhibition History: Institutions, Curatorship and the Undead Nation-State DavidTeh Under the Sycamore Tree Curating as Currency: Actions That Say Something, Words That Do Something Jelena Vesié& Vadimir erie Black-British Artists and Problems of Systemic Invisibility and Eradication: Creating Exhibition Histories of That Which Is Not There Eddie Chambers ‘The Paradoxes of Autonomy: A Site of Critique Nikta Vingian Cai Redrawing Global Aspirations of Exhibition Making from a Southern Perspective: Latin American Biennial of Sao Paulo (1978) ‘and Coloquio De Arte No-Objetual 1981) Miguel A Loner On the Solo Show: From Resistance to Repression Jf Fibos ‘Onthe Case of Curatorial History Jeannine Tangwnat te researc? ‘The Source of Our Nobility and Our Path tothe Highest Things Ls Carnitzer| Its Reading That Counts Mélanie Boutelou Collectivity, Contlict, Imagination, Transformation Galteiat What Do You Want To Know? ‘What, How & for Whom /WHW. ‘The Incomplete Curator: AKA Fighting the Delineated Field Liam cick Curation and Futurity Simon Sheikh What to Practice? An Autodidact’s Practice: Investigating the Reserves of the Curatorial Moment Nancy Adsjanie Strategic Regionalism “Tobias Osvrander Being Africa: Contextual Narratives of Artistic Environments Koyo Kouoh Howto Put Ourselves between ‘the Closing Door and Its Frame? ZashaCerizze Coleh Faut Qu’on Se Bouge! Sumash Share Digging into the Past to Unearth the Future Hane Ulich Obrist In Search of a Fiashiight: The Intimate Politics of the Curatorial Vivien Zhe Qalgalah: Falling out of Memory ‘Sarah Ritey Image Appendix Contributors’ Biographies Image CreditsWile 2448 relly E9wW0I4 $2] puo 400q Buiso|5 au usamjeq SLES oer Kes wvey ih‘ronan oe meee ond fay apparent oben Serato ete seal uvestrsean heen Sengereced song tinger/t esonalparr rn Seyurnsee sot sey Seraerpotee bugera-o8 toome hand ermaange sna Teteaneab cero forms ‘hrrooassetathosoue Soterakirnravebeen 2 ‘ntharetorancine ingot Gioaend anatomy, ‘orasearen be ceraengray ‘tothdesNotieaer Sten aeacinTueears ‘ge Neg ostroen Inthe face of systemic injustice, presumed illegality ike itous generosity, become vital outlets. The invitation to about the future of the curatorial institution compels @ point taken from the perspective of those in perpetual and pressing movement, and from the perspective of the pr of illegality by nation-states. Where there is litte or no reca 10 judicial system, suffering somehow compels our dis to the law. Curating is telescoped here to the single event. staving open closing door. work that unfolds like a storyboard of va paintings captures one artist lending his sneakers by edgi them over a barrier, so that another artist wearing sandals is allowed to enter a private art event where his footwear ‘objected to. The series of paintings is by Nikhil Raunak, an artist-member of Clark House, whose subjects confront histories, from apartheid to the caste system, and the conti ance of those histories into the contemporary moment. His workis also a condemnation of how these issues play out the workings of the art system itself In this work the elitist barrier propels acts of generosity and cultural dissidence; simple exchange that humorously seeks outlets, but makes outlaws of both artists. This carnivalesque crossing ofa lines entry, is treated here as having conceptual continuum with other crossings! ‘As a member of an artist-curatorial collaborative called, ‘black rice’ we cut our teeth on the militarized treatment of ians at the peripheries of India.* In the border regions oft country, the un-constitutional Armed Forces Special Powers ‘Act (AFSPA), which gives absolute power and impunity to Ind soldiers over civilian populations to brutally curb insurgency and self-determination, has been enforced in vast swaths of forest and rural land that have been demarcated as ‘disturbed areas’ without public debate for tens of years. The Act was recently removed in the state of Tripura, but reinforced over the state of Nagaland, and continues to be enacted in the states of Manipur, Assam, districts in Arunachal Pradesh, and Kash ‘As continues the fifteen-year-long hunger strike protesting AFSPA bythe civil rights activist lrom Sharmila. f extra-military atrocities could happen in the 1980s and 1890s with impunity in major cities of border areas, what happened in small villages! ‘And how far was this from the decision-making power conter of Delhi? If paranoia accompanies our curating today, that paranoia wes learned. Every court has. veil ot justice, behind which certain ‘communities of people, or whole geographic areas, are deniedanoenuls range 2005, equal access to the law. If we acquiesce that all institutions of the nation-state carry systemic horizon lines that protect and privilege only a few—where those beyond remain hidden in ‘an unremitting state of vulnerability to injustice—then the invisible horizon lines necessarily become the invisible sites of exhibition-making, Theidea that curatingitselfmay be theorized— in addition to the indispensable duty to historicize forgotten exhibitions, and the political imperative to gather the traces of erased culture—is predicated on ‘speaking nearby’ cultural actions, artistic practices, and exhibition formats within places. that have been politically and culturally stifled. The title of my text attends to situations where political and social freedoms have been closing in or diminishing, seeking the cultural strate- gies—of dissent, of humor, camouflage and fiction—that have been keeping the remaining open doors ajar. In one instance in the Manipur hills, the artist Zamthingla Ruivah, facing an abyss of amnesia regarding the meaning of, various geometrical designs found within the suppressed ‘Tangkhul-Naga tribal visual culture, came to adjust and dwell on the humble, Kafkaesque movement of insects to describe the spirit ofa murdered young woman—her neighbor—and a ‘community's path to justice under AFSPA, in luminous red wool? Her woven skirt, called a ‘kashan’ came to be copied by ‘other women by hand, like Chinese whispers, over avast area ‘of more than 300 villages, like an interactive public monument to the Naga Hills. In an exhibition L'exigence de la Saudacie (atKadist Art Foundation, Paris, 2013), and later in /nsert (in Mati Ghar, New Delhi, 2014), the original woven kashan, as well as the kashans by other hands dating from 1990 to 2013, were displayed. The display mimicked the long scrolling line of the kashans worn by women of many villages when they gather once ayear, ‘as though each woman herself were standing together in the exhibition room, wearing these slightly varying geometric insignia of cultural resistance; a feat of solidarity and of collec- ‘tive imagination. To further the concept of crossing over some form of invisible threshold, the philosopher Adi Ophir, to whose writing my own work has been deeply indebted, arguing against the Israeli occupation in Palestine in his book The Order of Evils, does not resort to hope for a utopian new state system.’ Instead, when the institutional exchange systems are oppres- sive, he believes that people effect ‘conversions’ of the system. He writes: Conversion is an exchange relation in which capital is trans- ferred from one field of action to another, and its value, which was previously stated in terms of one field, is now translated What to Practice?app 304-308 6 Th story me Spec Cart sate testo med in nina 2000, oa er vont Koo Rae ‘eoldby Mannie nor Tcuesraoe™ etna being anenograrto nto! ‘helen Mareen 202 to another. It's impossible to convince the courte its verdict, but its possible to bribe the warden. Ii ble to change a poltical decision that causes suffe ‘tis possible to join the injured ones in a demonstra solidarity and share with them even a litle of thei Some channels of conversion are always blocked: ‘in which one cannot give love, work magic, activate, or give meaning... Such blacks can be coincidental, they could be a deliberate result of social actions. & often they are an unintentional but systematic anding coincidental consequences of social power-relatio, {tis possible to characterize social situations, social and political regimes in terms of the exchange relatia they enable or black ‘To Ophir, itis these processes of translation and ex sion that need to be kept open. And itis the sutfocationg recourses that amplifies suffering. Ophir prefaces an argument for his interest only in instances of real s and damage, and not in abstractions of ideological wro concepts. With this complicated, suspicious approach te and abstractions over real situations is the realization fiction, imagination, and illegality may often be the only op recourse to ‘conversion'—even more so when the abstract fictions are participated in collectively by those who live & the horizon line of the judicial and police systems, in a sta Perpetual discrimination and second-citizenship. Ifany 2 ‘accompanies our curatorial practice, it emerges from fo entanglements in the body of work of certain artists, and fictive elaborations. ‘When the Burmese artist Htein Lin was deported by back to Myanmar, he retumed to Yangon's law university, finished his degree, and began working with a troupe of A comedians—a traditional Burmese form of comedy whose Protagonists are a beautiful dancer and a comedian. On gra ating, Htein Lin decided he wanted to be an artist. Some yer later he was arrested by Myanmar intelligence on a faulty charge. While in prison, Htein Lin wrote his experience of t trial in a quickly set up Special Court into a short story, which. he circulated clandestinely to entertain the other prisoners.® Until the final hearing, he and 26 others had been locked into ‘separate cells, denied lawyers, and the advice of their familie and friends. Trained as a lawyer, he asked if he could defend himself. In the middle of a fiery plea, the judge interrupted hi saying, “You are wasting your time, | have no power to decide anything, the judgment will be given to me fram the intelli- gence officers. We are only waiting.” Htein Lin said, “Isat back.| stopped pleading my case. | was a comedian, an actor, who had studied the law and knew my rights. But then | looked at the judge, and realized he was no different from me, he was an actor too, acting the part of a judge.” When an envelope was passed to the judge, he read out their sentences. “While the judge read out our jail sentences, 40, 30, 10 or 7 years of impris- ‘onment, we began to laugh. We began to laugh irrepressibly, ‘congratulating each other on the number of years we were given. That night in prison, instead of separate cells we were allowed to come together, and could see our families forthe first time since we were forced to leave our homes.” They carried through the laughter, enacting elaborate rituals of celebration, toasting each other in their political prisonership, ‘as the prison guards looked on, foxed. In court, laughter restructures and denies the world order, and converts the court into how the prisoners saw it: farcical. The idiom of performance and the logic of parody, inserted into ‘the court of law, were amplified by collective participation. Htein Lin encoded pain and horror in a language of laughter and farce, and conjured a mirror-world, a meta-commentary of parody over reality, fiction that could address the law, from the other side of the systemic horizon line. Here the instances of collective imagination amount to a kind of ‘crossing’ The idea of collective imagination, as a fiction, is evoked in the face of blanket injustice, especially in situations where there is little or no recourse to a legal system, or when the system is unconsti- tutional or extra-legal. Perhaps the future role and premise of the curatorial is one that works precisely in this spatial dimension: effecting crossings of the invisible or sometimes brutally visible systemic horizon lines. Even as several of our exhibitions have appealed against the use of all sedition laws, we knew our cities were becoming further confined. The public institutions that are increasingly reducing access were to us the closing angles of open space, within legal, penal, educational, and even culture's hierarchical systems, purging intellectual vision, Losing ground slowly leaves time for guiltto settle. How do we stave this off, place our foot in the way of the closing door? The acrobats and tightrope walkers who collect at Clark House's street comer, have learned the practicalities and strategies of carving out space. The Dombari or Dom community—immigrants, from indigenous tribes, who have been pushed from their lands, for mining, or industry, have formed a ‘community working in the city as acrobats or musicians. They keep the doors open constantly, and disassemble and disperse ata moment's notice, when the police approach. From them we may learn how to never ask for permission to use the street. Itis the itinerants who can teach us ‘conversion! and from them What to Practice? 2 2\we often borrow exhibition space, circumventing the course of obtaining permissions. What has come to se necessary to away of thinking about public space, and of curating within itis to seek and leam strategies of ile itinerant practitioners, on howto maneuver through the: and occupy its spaces. The space of Clark House itself ‘own history of being a refuge for political dissenters du Indian Emergency from 1975 to 1977. As@ union of cultural dissent, Clark House has been tracing the city's legacy of solidarity movements—from the fiery PROYOM, the Prog Youth Movement active through the 1970s, especially thea the Emergency, when serigraphed posters were clande: putup in railway stations, factories, and bus stops over by artists like Navjot Altaf and Altaf Mohammedi, to Open Circle, which ran from 1998 to 2008, whose members we Tushar Joag, Sharmila Samant, Archana Hande, Shilpa Gus and the art historian Chaitanya Sambrani. In addition to the political content of this art history, italso forms an almost legacy of artin public space in the city, only just beginning? written and understood. Though promised to the public, what is open today’ ‘one day come to close. In The museum is where objects 20) die 2011), proposed as an exhibition reflecting on a collect ‘moving from private to public ownership, a small canvas by Krishen Khanna, called Betrayal (1950), was to be displayed such a way that a tiny inscription at the back of the canvas) also be read. The inscription reads: “This painting was sold! Rudy von Leyden, who bequeathed it with several other ings to the Prince of Wales Museum before he left India” Von Leyden was an Austrian art critic who came to Bombay inexilo, flooing World War Il. However, the painting did not re the Prince of Wales Museum until 2010, and must have been sold to private collector, and then traveled a very differents from the one intended. itis only serendipity thet the painting finally reached the very museum it was once bequeathed to. The story of the work's journey—a betrayal—highlights peculiarity of our Indian museum context; that what has co ‘0 the public realm needs protections for itto remain in the public realm, and then to remain visible. To me, the sound of jangling keys marks institutional time. The keys are double ‘edged. Doubly inscribed, they secure objects in safety, and have the potential to keep things away. Today the keys are also digital watermarks. From marking time, they now mark use, If heed sociologist Saskia Sassen’s warnings, the digital promise: of widely distributed knowledge will also find new forms of closing off cultural public property, with digital formats that will force us to pay for what was once free.Over the course of making exhibitions, ideas about collective imagination turned to related fictions of collectively endowed reality, which institutions—including museums—have a habit of fixing. We critiqued this in the exhibition Insert (Mati Ghar, New Delhi, 2014), following an invitation to debate the extant public cuttural infrastructure in India. Against the logic of institutions, we humorously referred to Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz’s obsession with the philosophy of form, especially displays of nationality as ‘forms, as a mask that gets stuck— ‘Polishness, ‘East European—as forms of habit that solidify into a facade, to underline our view of the outer facade of the art institution as an ideological fixing, Mati Ghar, meaning tempo- rary house or mud house, was a circular building with a dome, especially chosen for the exhibition. It was erected twenty years earlier as a temporary structure in the museum grounds fora conference on time, buthad somehow remained, and was being used as a second exhibition space. Taking the mud house atits material meanings, members of Clark House proposed several destabilizations, to restore its original temporality Apattern painted over half the building's exterior by Yogesh Barve, sought to make the building partially invisible, and merge itwith the surrounding tree cover. Amol Patil made the ground ‘of Mati Ghar tremble within the arc of the building devoted to his video and installation, Prabhakar Pachpute made drawings of migrations of people whose lands had been taken for mining, on treated plaster walls that in the course of the exhibi- tion would perpetually fal in pieces to the floor, revealing the ted mud of the original walls. Rupali Patil made a temporary structure of corrugated metal sheets that opened the building tothe elements and the open sky. Each work was proposed at some level as an unfixing of the institution. Throughout contemporary curating’s short history, many curators have put themselves in between the demands of collectively-endowed reelities—in front of the museum's own ideological prestige, in front of boards, between government tourism agendas, in front of elitism in education—to never entirely conform to the institution's ideological facades, its own stagnating fixing into normalization, {In solidarity with the resignations of our curatorial col- leagues end friends in museums and smaller institutions in Hungary with the rise of Victor Olban, we sought to subvert the revisionism of identity with quasi-fictional associations of identity, between the nomadic Banjara community in India, and the Roma in Hungary. Associations of Identity (2012) became Useful to highlight the nation-state's production of illegality, and ‘the meaningful mobility of nomadism. We were invited to curate an exhibition that took place within the Hungarian Information at to Practice? w3 & z . a rahe Howse tate tyr Haba ead aun Couns ofthe See isin rn eth and Cultural Centre in New Delhi, which we used as a sym ofthe government we wished to address. The Banjara’s a wooden caravan that we met with on a road in Rajasthan retains a worldview that is in clear opposition of the nation stata, and the sensibility of moving away from the routine: political organization of life. The itinerant, and illegal, is @ view from the imperative of survival, or from the spaces of meaningful mobility and the need to travel in which nothing complete or settled. To our paranoid world, this mey be the most adjusted voice.