Course goals
After completing this course, the student has:
- developed a critical and historical understanding of curating and mediation in the field of media, contemporary art and performance.
- gained knowledge of key theories and ideas about curation and know how to employ this knowledge analytically.
- learned how to analyse curatorial projects, approaches and methodologies in creative and critical ways.
Content
Ecologies of curation entails the trans- and interdisciplinary study of the interaction between spectators, artworks/performances and the spatial, social and media environments wherein the objects and acts are staged, produced, situated. Taking the etymological roots of curating as ‘care-taking’ into account, we will explore how curators can and should respond to transformational practices that increasingly cross and bend institutional borders. How does curating produce the type of ecologies in which media, contemporary art and performance projects can actually perform their potential, and where acts of mediation, interfacing or staging function as accelerators of the perceptual and performative strategies that are embedded in these works? Next to investigating current trends in discourse, we will jointly visit and critically analyse a curatorial project that include media, contemporary art and performance works. Based on these various strands of research, students conduct a critical evaluation of a curatorial project of their own choosing, first orally in groups and then individually in writing, and
formulate productive advice for the project.
Additional information
This course is for students in the RMA programmes Musicology, Art History, Gender Studies, NLC, CLS, MAPS and the EFMS programme. The entrance requirements for Exchange Students will be checked by International Office and the Programme coordinator. You do not have to contact the Programme coordinator by yourself.
Students from other MA programmes should check with the course coordinator before enrolling. Only this way participation can be granted.
Career orientation:
Knowledge of curation in the field of media, art and performance. Knowledge of the curatorial profession and ways of working as well as curatorial strategies, approaches and methodologies. Knowledge of curatorial networks and institutional ways of working within several ecologies of curation.