Tuesday, Jan 7, 2020
At 6 pm
A Repeated Question: Where Does It Come From?
This presentation began with a set of questions that could help shape the boundaries, position, mechanism, and application of curatorial practice. As the title of the presentation suggests, the focus was on the relative proposition between the artist/curators, not a contrary one, rather the one that may provide a suitable space for collective activities and mutual collaborations.
Historicizing Vs. New Reading
Then an overview of curatorial activities in Iran over the past few decades was provided. The main questions arose on how to survey the contextual activities of the present situation, how to avoid historicizing and how to maintain a critical distance from the active agents involved in the art space to account for a nonlinear or rhizomatic quality, integrity, and continuity.
Visible and Hidden Aspects of the Curatorship
Next, the questions arose whether the current situation in Iran provides the context to define the curatorial activity as a ‘career’, that means a stable profession with protected intellectual property rights.
Defy the Competitive Norms
In the end, Amirali Ghasemi suggested several alternative ways that could replace making the exhibition. Namely, curating moving images and film collections, working with non-profit expert groups, touring curatorial activities, geography-based community work, focusing on libraries and oral history methods as raw material, thinking of the magazine or website as the presentation format and transcending disciplinary borders and turning to other fields such as architecture and literature.