Curating the Living Room: A Queer Feminist Decolonial Intervention in Public and Private Spaces

Many scholars and institutional critique artists have made the role of the museum in the formation of national/state ideologies clear. However, interventions that extend this critique to the private space of the home and its domestic cultures and practices remain few and far between. This article considers the decolonial and queer feminist curatorial methodologies that framed the creation and development of the exhibition Unpacking the Living Room (MSVU University, Kjipuktuk/Halifax, Nova Scotia, 2018). This exhibition was posited as not only an intervention into the settler colonial taxonomies and display practices of Western museum systems and modernist white cube galleries, but also an invitation for guests visiting the Living Room to reflect on their own living room as sites where power and meaning and identity are constantly negotiated. This article outlines the process of curating Unpacking the Living Room and shares it methodological growth and research outcomes.

Towards a curatorial continuum or How to fire a gun and time-travel

<p>This thesis questions the ethics of curatorial agency: an issue that has plagued the profession since the influence of institutional critique of the 1960s. The proliferation of the ‘curatorial turn’ during the 1990s developed out of this legacy of institutional critique by grouping a diverse range of alternative practices that aimed to question curatorial agency. Curator Maria Lind defines this shift by making a methodological distinction between ‘curating’ and the ‘curatorial’. This is a binary division that posits curating as conventional practice that maintains hegemonic power structures and the curatorial as progressive and emancipatory. However, critics and curators such as Paul O‘Neill and Nina Möntmann argue that methodologies of the curatorial turn have become compromised by personal, institutional, political and economic motivations. Due to this, it is apparent that a shift in methodology alone is not sufficient to question the ethics of curatorial agency and that Lind's dichotomy of curating and the curatorial requires revision. This study therefore explores how curators practice by studying different methodologies and to understand why curators practice by considering to what extent motivations influence the application of a curator’s methodology. The research specifically addresses these questions in relation to contemporary art curating within the broader framework of museum and heritage studies. To do so, I have put my own curatorial practice under scrutiny, using a range of mixed qualitative methods such as autoethnography, in order to delve deep into the decision-making process. My research consists of six exhibition case studies that pertain to one of three common exhibition forms: group, solo or process-led exhibitions. Through a cross case analysis of these different exhibitions my findings suggest that there is not a distinct division between curating and the curatorial. Instead, I reveal that there is a complex interplay between spectrums of methodology and motivation. From this perspective, I argue for a new philosophy of curating that considers curatorial practice as an emergent spectrum charged with infinite possibilities, what I call the curatorial continuum.</p>

Towards a curatorial continuum or How to fire a gun and time-travel

<p>This thesis questions the ethics of curatorial agency: an issue that has plagued the profession since the influence of institutional critique of the 1960s. The proliferation of the ‘curatorial turn’ during the 1990s developed out of this legacy of institutional critique by grouping a diverse range of alternative practices that aimed to question curatorial agency. Curator Maria Lind defines this shift by making a methodological distinction between ‘curating’ and the ‘curatorial’. This is a binary division that posits curating as conventional practice that maintains hegemonic power structures and the curatorial as progressive and emancipatory. However, critics and curators such as Paul O‘Neill and Nina Möntmann argue that methodologies of the curatorial turn have become compromised by personal, institutional, political and economic motivations. Due to this, it is apparent that a shift in methodology alone is not sufficient to question the ethics of curatorial agency and that Lind's dichotomy of curating and the curatorial requires revision. This study therefore explores how curators practice by studying different methodologies and to understand why curators practice by considering to what extent motivations influence the application of a curator’s methodology. The research specifically addresses these questions in relation to contemporary art curating within the broader framework of museum and heritage studies. To do so, I have put my own curatorial practice under scrutiny, using a range of mixed qualitative methods such as autoethnography, in order to delve deep into the decision-making process. My research consists of six exhibition case studies that pertain to one of three common exhibition forms: group, solo or process-led exhibitions. Through a cross case analysis of these different exhibitions my findings suggest that there is not a distinct division between curating and the curatorial. Instead, I reveal that there is a complex interplay between spectrums of methodology and motivation. From this perspective, I argue for a new philosophy of curating that considers curatorial practice as an emergent spectrum charged with infinite possibilities, what I call the curatorial continuum.</p>

Out of Place: Artists, Pedagogy, and Purpose

Broad in scope, Out of Place: Artists, Pedagogy, and Purpose presents an overview of the different paths taken by artists and artist collectives as they navigate their way from formative experiences into pedagogy. Focusing on the realms in- and outside the academy (the places and persons involved in post-secondary education) and the multiple forms and functions of pedagogy (practices of learning and instruction), the contributions in this volume engage individual and collective artistic practices as they adapt to meet the factors and historical conditions of the people and communities they serve through solidarity, equity, and creativity. With this critically, historicist approach in mind, the contributions in Out of Place historicize, study, critique, revise, reframe, and question the academy, its operations and exclusions. The extensive range of contributions, emphasizing community-oriented projects both inside and outside the United States, is grouped into three overarching categories: artists who work in academic institutions but whose social and pedagogical engagement extends beyond the walls of the academy; artists who engage in pedagogical initiatives or forms of institutional critique that were established outside of an art school or university setting; and artist–scholars who are doing transformative and inter/transdisciplinary work within their respective institutions. Collectives and projects represented in Out of Place comprise Art Practical, Axis Lab, BFAMFAPhD, Beta-Local, Black Lunch Table Project, The Black School, The Center for Undisciplined Research, Devening Projects, ds4si, Elsewhere, Ghana ThinkTank, Gudskul, The Icebox Project Space, Las Hermanas Iglesias, The Laundromat Project, Occupy Museums, Peebls, PlantBot Genetics, Queer Conversations on Culture and the Arts, Related Tactics, Side by Side, ‘sindikit, Sustainable Native Communities Collaborative, and Tiger Strikes Asteriod.

Visual Arts: Postmodernism

Postmodernism is notoriously difficult to define in any concise manner. Its start dates (and end dates, for that matter) exist in a state of flux, often varying by decades in the historiographies of major disciplines. In an attempt to begin to understand postmodernism, many theorists, art historians, and philosophers choose to take a rather apophatic approach by describing that which it is not, namely starting by understanding modernism. After all, that is embedded into the term postmodernism itself; at its core, postmodernism is connected to modernism. Essentially, modernism as a movement was predicated upon an avant-gardism that envisioned modern art as the cure-all for the broken world, working toward a utopian ideal. In understanding art’s engagement with religion in the postmodern era, it is also necessary to consider the shifting social landscape of institutional religion and politics at this time. The culture wars of the end of the 20th century both shaped and were shaped by postmodern art, with famous clashes between artists and the emerging religious right and/or prominent political figures dominating the headlines. Largely because of these events, many critical narratives have promoted the idea that art and religion had little to do with each other in this period. While secularization theories are gradually unraveling in the field at large, these ideas still figure prominently in many discussions of modernism and postmodernism. Regardless, artists have continued to engage with religious subject matter throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. The appearance of secularization is imperative to note, particularly as a number of postmodern artists (indeed, some of the most recognizable names in the art world) have engaged with religion in their work. This is not to say that postmodern artworks with religious themes all celebrate religion uncritically, nor do they all examine religion from outside the realm of belief in a strictly anthropological manner. One of the main difficulties in interpreting postmodernism’s rather vexed relationship with institutional religion is the multivalence of many of the artworks. Multiplicity of meaning in both artistic intent (if such a thing is granted) and reception is common in postmodernism, which should caution critics from attempting to make concrete assertions about any presence of pure religiosity or pure secularism. Trends in postmodern artistic practices, such as the mixing of high and low art forms and media, the use of appropriation, pastiche, institutional critique, and more, along with the increasing diversification of artists and contexts, have resulted in the examination of religious subjects in ways that are particularly postmodern.

Outlining Conceptual Practices in Comics

This article examines how the shortcomings of institutional representation in comics, and the shifting role of existing institutions in the industry, can engender a new comics practice. ‘Conceptual Comics’ mobilise the historical legacy of conceptual art in its capacity for institutional critique, self-reflexivity, alternative forms of skilling, and the prioritisation of context over content, to renew comics making and reading. My case study, Noirs [Blacks] (2015), a facsimile détournement of Les Schtroumpfs noirs [The Black Smurfs], closely approximates the original, with the same cover, number of pages, and format, but replaces four different composite colour plates by four uniform plates of cyan, resulting in a monochromatic deviation. Noirs demonstrates how a form, when no longer conventionally operational, can foreground industrial fabrication normally intuited as a transparent and mechanic process.

Airing Grievances

Through an examination of the 2018 “grievance studies” hoax this essay considers the role hoaxing plays in the articulation of both internal and external modes of institutional critique that pertain to the production, verification, and dissemination of knowledge. By examining the grievances of three academics who wrote twenty false/fraudulent articles—seven of which were published in (and later retracted from) peer-reviewed journals—this research attends to the different kinds of boundary work and repair that are performed and enacted by academics to shed light on the conflicting ways knowledge production and academic labour are currently contextualized and understood.