Now online: Curating through Conflict with Care (CCC)

Collective insights from over three years of reading, research retreats and the 2023 Berlin symposium of the nGbK work group Curating through Conflict with Care (CCC) are now shared on the nGbK website.

Recently there has been an explosion of care discourse in the curatorial field. But if curation means to “take care,” who and what does the contemporary curator take care of?  We understand curatorial practice to be full of contradictions of care, (indeed, inherent in the semantic of curation is exclusion.) Curators are mediators that represent and distribute power, space and visibility in the art world - they facilitate interactions between institutions, artists and the public. But in a world where most institutions have been built on uncaring colonial legacies and in a time when publics are bringing decolonial criticism to the exhibition room, the role and responsibility of curatorial practice is increasingly aligned with conflict mediation. More often, the curator attempts to do “damage control,” where conflict is perceived as an obstacle to business as usual.

For CCC, curating means caring about conflicts, giving them time and space to be recognized. Some questions we ask include: When does criticism interfere and who does it interfere with? Which conflicts are struggles for resources? Who can survive conflicts? Which conflicts exclude? Who is allowed and able to speak when, about what and with what self-evidence?

To the platform