During the first week of October this year, a four-day symposium on curating took place in Helsinki. Initiated by Paul O’Neill and PUBLICS, it was called Positioning. A Symposium on Curatorial Thinking in the Nordic-Baltic Region and Beyond. This year, the event was co-hosted with Amos Rex and Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma; in the upcoming years it will be happening elsewhere in the Nordic and Baltic countries. Bringing together an impressive list of curators both from the region and elsewhere, the symposium aimed to grasp the idea of what a curator’s role is today and how this can vary across countries, institutions and initiatives. We asked Paul O’Neill, the organiser and a researcher on curatorial thinking about his motivation behind bringing together a network of international curators.
The aim is to establish a new nomadic centre for curatorial thinking – without a single main centre, or fixed location. Instead, it would be a centre that accounts for a cooperative decentring or recentring – one that is networked, unfixed, flexible and of regional significance while connecting to the breadth of knowledge here and beyond. This new Centre for Curatorial Thinking would focus on the significance of past and present thinking, knowledge and critiques within the practices of the curatorial.
This symposium aims to start with positioninga globally networked enquiry into current and future curatorial thinking in the Nordic-Baltic region during a time of urgencies, and of radical uncertainty for culture and human rights. We come together to consider how we can think and work together, how to position ourselves with others, and how to bridge the local-regional-global curatorial nexus within and beyond the region. We aim to provide a critical space for much-needed dialogue between diverse local and regional actors, agencies, and international contemporary art scenes, and all our extraordinary curatorial thinkers across generational and geographical boundaries.
I think the Nordic-Baltic region needs more curatorial thinking, productive dialogues and cooperation across institutions and between differently located practices. There are already many geopolitical concerns and commonalities across the region.
There is also considerable disbalance between institutional scales where there are a lot of large-scale museums, institutions and academic structures (albeit constantly under threat) without offering sufficient support for independent, co-dependent and smaller scale curatorial, emergent and organisational practices.
There is a huge gap between those two scales without middle ground and medium-scale support structures to provide links between more grassroots and the top level and more stable infrastructures for curators, artists and cultural workers alike. Work needs to be done but without competing for the same agency, access or resources.
At the same time, we have seen the emergence of curatorially-led, but relatively new modestly scaled biennials, triennials and regionally specific larger-scale exhibitions with global perspectives. These are happening simultaneously with even newer curatorial studies and nascent exhibition histories and programmes focusing on the region and its surrounding relations. With the Centre for Curatorial Thinking we wish to decentre the activities of publics from Helsinki into the regions, whilst expanding our activities and collaborations with institutions, curators and artists alike, offering opportunities and support for one another.
After more than 30 years of increasingly intense curatorial production and debate – considering the foundation of the first curatorial courses in the late 1980s and early 1990s as a starting point – one aspect within curatorial discourse is the continued contestation of the existence and legitimacy of a specifically curatorial field of praxis. It seems that we are experiencing an ongoing discursive cycle of consolidation around curatorial practice at an increasingly global level.
During a similar timeframe, all across the globe, we have increasingly witnessed an ever-aggressive and accelerating reaction to globalism in the form of rejection, xenophobia (even in form of multiple genocides), and anti-internationalism in the form of the march and success of the populist Right, and its preference for autocratic men with names like Erdoğan, Modi, Netanyahu, Orbán, Putin, and Trump. What these leaders and their followers share, among other things, is a disdain for the liberal and humanist values of contemporary art and its permissiveness. It is the ideology of global curatorial and contemporary art practices, its proposed value, and its economic support structure – globalisation, and thus its creation of surplus value – that are under direct attack. It should also be noted that their policies are a response to the economic effects of neoliberal deregulation and global trade in favour of protectionism and neo-nationalism.
So by focusing on the differences and commonalities of forms and modes of curatorial thinking we can bring into focus where we are positioned and how we might come to know more, and to share and to offer opposition or modest modes of resistance. I like to think of positioning as situated knowledge, or simply as the practice of locating where someone or something is located or sited; how we are arranging ourselves or something in a particular way, how someone or something is placed or arranged; putting or arranging (someone or something) in a particular location or specific way. Taking up a position, taking a stance, and of positioning oneself with others as a means of informing art, curatorial, educational and institutional practices as much as they shape the world around us.
Additionally, we need to consider how we position and with whom are we positioning ourselves, and to build and expand more productive collaborative and sustainable networks, partnerships and relationships across the region and beyond for the present and the future.