Curating in the expanded field: Post-Institutionalism?

MAMAM - Recife
21st and 22nd of November
3pm to 6pm
10 participants
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This workshop is aimed at discussing changing curatorial positions, starting from the premise that the existence of art institutions and their employment of the ‘traditional’ format of the exhibition is -  in the Western Hemisphere -  increasingly being questioned in the context of an expanded (multi) cultural, economical and social-political field. Some critical voices predict that within this field, art institutions and their essentially ‘fixed’ structures and methodologies will end up as an anachronistic bastion of marginality. For a curator, whether or not affiliated with an institution, the immersion of art in this‘expanded field’and the implications/consequences it has for existing structures and formats of production, meditation and display of art aks for a continuous re-positioning. In the past decade the term ‘new institutionalism’, coined by Scandinavian writer Jonas Ekberg and German curator Nina Montmann, has been used to point at ‘alternative’ types of art institutions that are due to their participatory, open and discursive nature.

Recently the term ‘post-institutionalism’ has been used to refer to a new type of questioning. Charles Esche, currently director of the Van Abbe Museum puts it this way: ‘What might we mean by temporary when it comes the institutional public space of the museum, kunsthalle (art hall) or artists-run space? Temporariness or provisionalism, by which I mean projects or programmes that are constantly up for negotiation and alteration at every possible moment, can be, I believe, one trigger for a constructive remaking of art’s relation to the social and the emancipatory in our now firmly post-avant-garde (post-cold war) times..’

In general we can ask ourselves whether we have arrived in a time where extensive 'de-institutionalisation' is required ? Are permanent and stable organisations actually ‘necessary’, the most suitable format to work with and from in the current circumstances? Or as Danish-British theoretician Simon Sheikh will have it:  'The field of art has become a field of possibilities of exchange and comparative analysis. It has become a field for thinking, alternativity, and can, crucially act as a cross field, an intermediary between different fields, modes of perception and thinking as well as between very different positions and subjectivities. It thus has a very privileged if slippery and crucial position in contemporary society...the art institution not as the pillar of tradition and a stable social order, but rather as the producer of a certain instability, flux and negotiation.' Departure point for discussion in this workshop will be the question be whether a producer of this kind of ‘fertile’ instability should be stable itself, whether a similar institution that aims at producing manifold effects on different levels should not be in a positive sense ‘formless’ and ‘undefinable. Should we not rather look at models such as the Chinese project and the Indian initiatives Raqs and Koj  and express a preference for short-term, rather loose and definitively collective forms of organisation that are more flexible and have less difficulties adapting themselves to sudden changes in both artistic and social systems ? Do we really need an art institution – with or without fixed abode or building – in order to deal with the pluriformity of experiences that visual art encompasses and generates or should we rather opt for a more fluid organizational form that fulfils a certain need at a certain point in time and after that disappears or morphs into another form ? Do we need longevity and dedication or simply precise actions with a limited duration ? Should we focus on the development of temporary agencies or offices, instant collectives and mayfly-like inititatives , open structures attune to new developments in art ?. The workshop intends to discuss these issues and the influence it has on the practice of both institutional and free-lance curators in the form of a collective reading session and a consequent open dialogue and discussiant.