ACT's spring 2016 lecture series "Curation: Agencies + Urgencies" addresses the contexts and forces shaping the practice of curation today. As an artistic research program, ACT is perennially concerned with emerging modes of exhibition and the evolving infrastructures and environments of knowledge production. From the book to the biennial, the spaces of curation influence our perception of where artistic research goes. Bringing together a cast of influential curators, critics, and educators operating across institutional boundaries and political scales, these lectures consider the curator—as diplomat, as researcher, as (para-)artist, as speculator, as provocateur, as censor—and the varying roles and forms of curation itself: What defines spaces of curation today? What are the politics pressurizing the practice? What role does the emerging discipline of curatorial studies play in the institutionalization of art? What are the limits and possibilities of curation as a mode of publicity? 

In many ways, these are timely questions for an evolving research program such as ACT. Indeed, ACT is in the midst of its own curatorial moment: The program is currently reconceiving the accessibility and presentation of its archive, experimenting with new forms of publication, and developing lines of pedagogy and research that naturally overlap with the basic associative impulse of curatorial praxis—that is, the drive to find new forms and spaces of relief, to form new associations and ecologies of works, people, venues, and sites.

February 29
"Empathy and Artistic Relations"*
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Director Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art and Galleria Civica D'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin

March 7
"Future Island: Cuba"
Jorge Fernandez Torres, Director Wifredo Lam Centre of Contemporary Art, Cuba, with Magdalena Campos-Pons (SMFA), Doris Sommer (Harvard), and Timothy Hyde (MIT) 

March 28
"Infrastructure"
Irit Rogoff, Professor of Visual Culture, Goldsmiths, London University; and curator of Bergen Assembly 2016

April 11
Hou Hanru Artistic Director of the MAXXI in Rome; and Consulting Curator at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (NYC)

April 25
Corinne Diserens, Director of ERG in Brussels; and curator of the 10th Taipei Biennial 

May 2
"Mediated Entities. In and out of curating."
Lars Bang Larsen, Co-curator of the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, Visiting professor at the Haute Ècole d'Art et de Design in Geneva
The Monday night lecture series was launched in 2005. The series draws together artists, cultural practitioners, and scientists from different disciplines to discuss artistic methodologies and forms of inquiry at the intersection of art, architecture, science, and technology.

ACT's Monday night lecture series is conceived by Gediminas Urbonas, ACT Director, and developed and coordinated by Amanda Moore, ACT alumna 2011, and Lucas Freeman, ACT Writer in Residence.

This series is made possible with the generous support of our partners and collaborators: The Council for the Arts at MIT (CAMIT), MIT School of Architecture and Planning, Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT (AKPIA), and MIT Department of Architecture.

*in collaboration with AKPIA at MIT


Associated workshops:
February
Bengler / NODE Berlin Oslo
Digital archive architecture and publishing

April
Ina Blom, Professor, University of Oslo 
The archive and its relation to social memory within the context of new media technologies


Please see our calendar for additional information on other ACT events.

Contact: T +1 617 253 5229 / act@mit.edu

Originaly published by art&education