Curator as a Translator of Theory into Practice:

The Event of Curatorial Translation

Suzana Milevska

The main aim of this three-session workshop is to address the urgency of an epistemological debate about the positioning of contemporary curating in theoretical and academic contexts in parallel to debates surrounding curatorial practice. The usage of the term “translation” (rather than “application”) stands for the awareness of the confinements that appear whenever theoretical concepts are used as justification for curatorial choices of models, strategies and attitudes towards art, rather than as starting points for self-assessment and for pondering of our selection of art and curatorial models.

On the one hand curating is a cross-disciplinary profession that often “translates” different theoretical concepts uncritically into exhibitions or other curatorial projects and events, thus overrating theory and treating it as “prolepsis”. On the other hand cultural theories are informed and enriched by different curatorial practices without necessarily admitting this. Yet, what is that can make the curating based on scholarly concepts so different from curating that draws on various art projects that engage with socio-political issues and events? Are there any potential ways of reconciliation of these two models? On the first sight curating based on theoretical and historical research brings dilemmas not so much different from the ethical dilemmas of science. However, throughout the three working sessions we will be concerned with the points of differences, reciprocal influences, entanglements and confluences between theoretically/academically and artistically informed curatorial practices.

Contemporary curatorial practices have internalised many translational strategies when dealing with various theoretical, artistic, or cultural concepts but inevitably, some nuances and subtleties are lost in this process. Mediating, a concept often claimed by many curators in order to distance themselves from theory, is never pure distant and neutral intervention because it is “always already” contaminated by inhabited and internalised preconceptions about different arts, cultures and the world in general. Because of the inevitable loss of the idealised intricacy that takes place throughout the process of translating of theory into practice, or through “mediating” of these different fields, it is important to address the following questions:
-whether one of the roles of contemporary art curators, to address culturally complex and socially relevant questions, produces more versatile and contextually sensitive truth exactly because of that loss that happens throughout the process of reciprocal translation between theory and practice of curating
- how the processes of translation of various theoretical, cultural, and artistic concepts into specific projects embrace and promote (or betray) the pedagogical and epistemological responsibility.

24.09. 10:00-13:00
Real and Truth in the Event of Curatorial Translation
Archives as supposed venues for storing truth can be disappointingly “empty” confirming the old philosophical concern about truth being always already somewhere else. We will be looking at couple of projects and texts that, while dealing with archives, truth, and real as different from reality attempt on methodology that significantly differs from scientific. If we were going to use the concept of real in order to designate the space of existing but unsymbolizable reality that can only be thought retroactively through the truth procedures, what would then be truth of curating? While truth as a procedure is required to access the real, the real serves as an external obstacle on the possibility of its production and keeping fidelity to truth. Can then curatorial projects claim that they produce knowledge and truth or the curators are to be self-aware that they always already contribute to ever more constructivist concept of truth? Simultaneously it inflicts questioning of the concepts of accumulation and production of universal knowledge and relativisation of their effects. The translational performance of the curatorial “event” resides between these two different ends of knowledge: the epistemological and the critical.
Assignment (12:00-13:00):
the curators will try to think of projects’ models that would successfully negotiate the both: knowledge and critical thinking.

Texts:

• Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever. Trans. by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. 1-23, 91-95.
• Badiou, Alain. Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art. 10 June 2007 <http://www.lacan.com/frameXXIII7.htm>.
• Milevska, Suzana. EVENTfulness: Family Archives as Events/Folds/Veils, conference paper, Exposed Memories: Family Pictures in Private and Public Memory, AICA Conference, Budapest 10-11 November, 2006.

25.09. 10:00-13:00
Curating Gender Difference
Curating projects dealing with gender issues pressures curators to position themselves in the context of local feminist and post-feminist debates. Is global feminism possible at all or this is an impossible construct because it inevitably neglects and undermines gender specificity in cultural terms? What is at stake when the political and activist role of the curator conflates with theoretical concepts that are to be translated in curatorial practice? We will be looking at curatorial projects that question traditional gender roles, asymmetry of desires, identitarian politics, regimes of representation, pornography, etc.
Assignment (12:00-13:00)
Proposals of new models and strategies to overcome and subvert the known difficulties with curating of women artists’ projects that are split between feminist critique of gender stereotypes and miming of old models of representation that reinforce the very same stereotypes.

Texts:

• Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power. Theories in Subjection. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1997, 106-131
• Milevska, Suzana. “The portrait of an artist as a young ‘strategic essentialist.” Tanja Ostojić - Strategies of Success / Curators Series 2001-2003, La Box, Bourges and SKC, Belgrade, 2004, 33-43.

26.09. 10:00-13:00
Participatory Projects as a Curatorial Challenge
When new communities are formed they are not necessarily based on common identity and belonging but on participating and involvement. The new art tendency towards projects that invite the participation of the members of audience as active agents of the art process is both a response to philosophical texts re-defining of the concept of community and the communitarian, and a follow-up to the demand to make visible marginalised groups that have been excluded from public cultural life. What is there for curators and how are curators positioned within art projects with participatory objectives? If resistance is the retort to the omnipresent ideological call for participation are the ethical dilemmas in the framework of participatory art necessarily in opposition to the aesthetical ones.
Assignment (12:00-13:00)
The group will try to put together a proposal for an ideal participatory project.

Texts:

• Lind, Maria. Actualization of Space: The Case of Oda Projesi, 10 July 2006 <http://www.republicart.net/disc/aap/lind01_en.pdf>.
• Rogoff, Irit. We - Collectivities, Mutualities, Participations, 12 June 2006 <http://theater.kein.org/node/95>.
• Milevska, Suzana. Participatory Art: A Paradigm shift from objects to subjects, 15 December 2006 <http://eurozine.com/pdf/2006-06-02-milevska-en.pdf>.

Suzana Milevska (MK) suzanamilevska[at]yahoo.com http://www.gender-wise.blogspot.com/
Is a visual culture theorist and curator and is the director of the Visual and Cultural Research Centre / “Euro Balkan” Institute in Skopje. She received her PhD in Visual Culture from the Visual Culture Department at Goldsmiths College in London. In 2004 she was a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar at Library of Congress and she also received P. Getty Curatorial Research Fellowship (2001) and ArtsLink Grant (1999). Since 1992 she curated over 70 art projects in Skopje, Istanbul, Stockholm, Berlin, Bonn, Stuttgart, Leipzig, etc. She was one of the curators of the Cosmopolis Balkan Biennial in Thessaloniki (2004) and of the International Biennale of Contemporary Art 2005 – National Gallery in Prague. Her publications include “From a Bat's Point of View” in Eduardo Kac, edited by Peter Tomaz Dobrila and Aleksandra Kostić (Maribor, 2000), 47-58; Capital and Gender, edited by Suzana Milevska (Skopje, 2001); “The Readymade and the Question of Fabrication of Objects and Subjects” in Primary Documents - A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art since the 1950s (New York, 2002), 182-191; “The portrait of an artist as a young ‘strategic essentialist’” in Tanja Ostojić - Strategies of Success / Curators Series 2001-2003, (Belgrade, 2004), 33-43; “Curatorial Labyrinths in Macedonia”, Men in Black – Handbook of Curatorial Practice, Ed. Christoph Tannert/Ute Tischchler, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin/Revolver: Archiv für actuelle Kunst (Frankfurt am Main, 2004). “Hesitations, or About Political and Cultural Territories” in Cultural Territories, edited by Barbara Steiner, Julia Schäfer and Ilina Koralova (Köln, 2005), 31-43; “Is Balkan Art History Global” in Is Art History Global, edited by James Elkins, (New York, 2006), “Resistance that Cannot Be Recognised as Such – interview with Gayatri C. Spivak” in Conversations With Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Swapan Chakravorty; Suzana Milevska; Tani E. Barlow Palgrave Macmillan, 2007 (London, in print) and in New Feminism: worlds of feminism, queer and networking conditions, Löcker Verlag (Vienna, in print).