Expanding Exhibitions: Innovative Approaches to Curating

Online course by Node Center for Curatorial Studies with Mirjami Schuppert

Since the heyday of the white cube, curating has transformed and developed to become much more than staging an exhibition. This course delves into the many different ways that curators strive to find new, innovative ways of curating. Over five weeks, we will examine recent, groundbreaking curatorial projects and identify practical ways of realizing innovative concepts.

Through in-class exercises and group reflections, we aim to find new and experimental operational models and methods that can be carried forward into your curatorial practice. Together, we will develop ways of producing projects and exhibitions that expand beyond the expected; incubate new ideas and inspire the audiences to imagine a (better) future.

Week 1: Presentation

• The lecturer will introduce the program and participants will introduce themselves. No prior preparation is necessary, however, you could think of a project that has made an impression: either in a bad or good way

Week 2: Curator as organic intellectual

• Curator as an initiator
• Curatorial ethics and societal responsibility
• Artist-curator relationship: collaborative and dialogical ways of working
• From concept to realisation – how to prevent the dilution of ideas when negotiating practicalities

Week 3: Meaning-making through exhibition contexts – in the white cube

• Considerations on how different gallery and exhibition contexts change the work
• The longue durée of an artwork/project: each new presentation of an artwork is also its new incarnation
• Challenging the idea of an exhibition as a monolith, fulfilled, finished “thing”
• Durational projects

Week 4: How to prevent the artwork from being thrown into the river?

• Site-specific projects and the creation of context
• Expanding audiences – potential new audiences
• Practical challenges of working outside gallery and museum environments

Week 5: Beyond exhibitions – non-representational curating

• Non-exhibition focused curating
• Publications
• Programming as a way of curating spaces and institutions
• Interdisciplinary breeding grounds and collaboration with other stakeholders