2016 - 2017 COOP Academy 2 (curating class): Curating Positions

A shot from the tarot reading Denise Ferreira da Silva did for the Dutch Art Institute class during her guest tutorial on Friday, 10 March 2017. Images courtesy Clementine Edwards.

Lead tutor: The Showroom (Emily Pethick and Leire Vergara )
Guests: Marysia Lewandowska, Alejandra Riera, Charl Landvreugd, Wayne Modest, Denise Fereira da Silva, Pedro G. Romero.
Students: Alejandro Cerón, Baha Görkem Yalım, Clementine Edwards, Floris Visser, Helen Zeru, Joy Mariama Smith, larose, Leon Filter, Maike Hemmers, Mirjam Linschooten, Nika Timashkova, Sanne Kabalt, Sergi Selvas, Sonia Kazovsky. 

INTRODUCTION

Curating Positions will explore discursive artistic and curatorial practices that challenge conventional exhibition thinking and formats.

This course departs from the idea that the curatorial can function as way to configure a dialogic public sphere, where art and knowledge are shared in a polyphonic experience. It proposes a list of texts, concepts, exercises, objects and guests, though which to produce new forms as well as critically examine the institutionalized protocols that frame artistic practice.

We see “positions” as being produced in different sites, and through different kinds of people and practice. Positions can come from behaviours, from political activity, from texts or artworks, from performances or the reinterpretation of museum collections.

With such diverse elements we will activate a discussion and way of working that challenges hegemonic representation and the habitual conventions of exhibition display. Over the year as a group we will invent a set of practical and conceptual tools and produce an experimental ground for presenting and connecting a series of different positions.

Curating Positions will include workshops, readings, the production of art works, exercises and discussions concerning the curatorial, mediation, documentation and display. Invited guests will include leading contemporary artists, curators and theorists engaged with what it means to take a position.

The course will build up to a live curatorial moment in a museum context and in relation to an audience, through an event staged at the Van Abbe Museum as part of their 2017 Caucus in June.

Guests include: Marysia Lewandowska, Alejandra Riera, Pedro G. Romero, Charl Landvreugd, Denise Ferreira da Silva and others.

Curating Positions from Month to Month