Curatorship Practices: A Realm of De-construction and Re-constructing

Speaker: Hasan Bülent Kahraman 

Curatorship has been rapidly evolving since the 2000s and the origin of the word possesses two meanings: a custodian and the act of curing. The understanding saying that curatorship has replaced the artist lately is a phenomenon debated extensively. But is the curator also an agent of cure? Looking beyond the scope of these questions, curating displays parallelisms with the fundamental principles and structural features of contemporary art. Furthermore, curating is an act that involves extremely radical interventions to the historical problems of art, to the reality and the uniqueness of the work of art, and in this aspect it is nurtured profoundly by social theory. After dissecting, dismantling and de-constructing the given and existing reality of the art work it re-constructs it through an operation of transference. Re-construction is a process fundamentally different from re-production that has been formerly debated at length.

The seminar will examine these processes in detail and through a reading and scrutinization intensively delved in social theory and philosophy of art. 

I.           Curatorship as a Practice of Questioning

1.            Contemporary art, contemporaneity, and politics as a stance
2.            Sources of curating: grand exhibitions and evolution
3.            Curatorship as question and answer: a realm of resistance
4.            Curating as intervention

II.          Curatorship as a Practice of Re-construction

1.            The work of art, uniqueness, and interpretation
2.            The milliard-faceted, divergent work of art
3.            Re-constructing: beyond interpretation/hermeneutics
4.            In search of a new artist: curatorship as an existentialist practice