Resources
The Symposia: Visual Art Curators in Context
Thinking Through Curating
July 15 - 17, 2005
Banff, AB
Banff Centre
The position of the visual art curator today is based in critique, examination and assumption. Can curating be a practice? How do you define that? What is curating? What is the language of curating? What are the objects of curating? Testing assumptions present in the field specific to the language and historical implications of the terminology, we intend to move towards a clear expression, towards new thinking about curating. Where are the unspoken assumptions? Can a language of curating be defined? We examine the history and responsibility to that language and open up discussion for multiple definitions of curating, beyond presenting different models of practice.
Role Call: (re) Placing Curating
December 1 - 4, 2005
Toronto, ON
Art Gallery of York University, Blackwood Gallery (University of Toronto at Mississauga), Mercer Union
Contemporary art has long since expanded beyond its visual and plastic object-based underpinnings to embrace experiential, kinaesthetic, time-based, conceptual, relational and activist concerns. This dynamic, possibly post-disciplinary, environment challenges the form and roles of art's players–the work itself, but also artists, audiences, and the institutions that collect, preserve, exhibit, interpret and/or produce art. As artists redefine their practices, how is curating adapting to accommodate changing roles, forms and intentions? What new responsibilities and possibilities present themselves for the curator? Where do or should the curator's loyalties lie? This roundtable discussion explores the role of the curator not as a fixed position, but "in relation to" [artworks, artists, audiences, institutions...].