with Lauren Reid

Duration: Apr 10 – May 1, 2019
Fee: 154€
Max seats: 30
Enroll before: Apr 6, 2019
Dedication: 3 hrs/week

Key Moments in the History of Curating is a course designed to provide curators with a guide to important turning points in the last 100 years of exhibition-making. Each week we will focus on key exhibitions that changed the course of contemporary curating in order to achieve a richer understanding of where we stand today, as well as to gain creative insights from some of the innovative ideas of the past.

By looking back to the context that each pivotal point arose from, we will dig into the history of why these exhibitions were so significant or groundbreaking. Further, we will then trace these turning points through to the present day to explore where their impact can be felt and what kinds of curatorial forms they have since transformed into.

Through concrete case studies, the course aims to give participants a grounding in the history of significant exhibitions as well as to provide inspirations for future directions in curating.

Program

Week 1: The Curator as Author

With his Documenta 5, Harald Szeemann cemented the template of the archetypal curator of contemporary art as one who had a unique voice and built exhibitions to form a cohesive whole. This week we will investigate the rise of the independent curator, analysing exhibitions that formulate an individual argument or take essayistic approaches to curating.

Week 2: The Big Stage

The first Whitney Biennial was established in opposition to the mostly conservative exhibitions of the time,carried out by academic judges. It launched as an annual art exhibition with ‘no juries, no prizes’ and allowed artists to reclaim power by choosing what works they would exhibit. This week we will focus on the goliaths of the exhibition-making world: recurring large-scale international exhibitions,tracing the paths of reactions and counter-reactions to their predecessors,shifts in the art world, and significant historical events.

Week 3: Thinking Globally

This week we will trace how different exhibitions have aimed to decentralise the art world from Western Europe and North America, be they by attempting more ‘global’ approaches, or by honing in on overlooked locations. We will start with Magiciens de la terre, which sought to correct the problem of “one hundred percent of exhibitions ignoring 80 percent of the earth” by including featured 50% Western and 50% non-Western artists.

Week 4: Transforming the Viewer

Nicolas Bourriaud’s exhibition Traffic, marked the first use of the term ‘relational art’, heralding the idea of art as creating a social environment in which people come together to participate in a shared activity. This week we will explore exhibitions that have sought to engage audiences, changing their role from passive viewer into active participant.