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- Volume 11, Issue 1, 2022
Journal of Curatorial Studies - Volume 11, Issue 1, 2022
Volume 11, Issue 1, 2022
- Articles
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The Museum in Quarantine: Architecture, Experience and the Virtual Museum
More LessThe effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, beginning in early 2020, were felt across all industries and public institutions, including art museums. Shuttered art museums sought to maintain public interest in their collections and exhibitions by promoting existing online tools, such as the virtual art museum tours hosted by Google Arts & Culture. This article analyses these tours from the perspective of museology and architecture and argues that, rather than a form of virtual reality, these tours are a peculiar kind of image database. As such, they are part of Google’s growing efforts towards mass digitization and data accumulation.
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Curating Online Collections: Towards an Authentically Digital, Mediation Protocol for Art Digitizations
More LessSince the mid-1990s, cultural organizations have increasingly digitized their physical collections and made them available online; however, museums are still puzzled over what to do with these growing digital collections. Meanwhile, art institutions’ reluctance to produce virtual exhibitions, linked to a prevailing skeuomorphic paradigm, has left the matter of curating art digitizations unresolved. While museum computing scholarship has aptly identified the problematic absence of authentically digital curatorial processes, it has largely overlooked the fact that online collections and in-gallery group shows similarly condition artistic reception owing to a shared database logic, subjecting both to a mediation paradox in contemporary culture. This article examines the effects of this shared logic on public engagement, along with recent digital curatorial strategies that have emerged in response around notions of the digital aura and networked objects. The article concludes by proposing three conditions for an alternative curatorial process capable of adequately mediating art digitizations online without sacrificing aesthetic experience to the limited affordances of screen-based information and communications technologies.
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- Curatorial Reflections
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Barring Freedom: Art, Abolition and the Museum in Pandemic Times
Authors: Alexandra Moore and Rachel NelsonBarring Freedom, a travelling exhibition featuring artworks engaging the histories and current conditions of prisons and policing in the United States, was to open in April 2020. While COVID-19 disrupted that plan, the realities of inequity in the United States placed into stark relief by the pandemic and the uprisings of summer 2020 brought urgency to rethinking the curatorial vision of the exhibition to reach audiences beyond the gallery walls. Buoyed by the idea that, in the words of Angela Davis, art can ‘propel people towards social emancipation’, the exhibition and related programming was reconceived as an ongoing, interdisciplinary, public scholarship initiative reaching across the borders normally perceived between museums, prisons and universities. Opportunities arose for expanded forms of community building and participation that welcomed different forms of knowledge, furthering the political and aesthetic aims of the project to shift the social attachment to prisons.
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(Un)Curating COVID: Lessons from Corona in the City
Authors: Margriet Schavemaker, Esmee Schoutens and Rowan StolShortly after the first lockdown in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the Amsterdam Museum launched the online exhibition Corona in the City. The multimedia platform, which invites inhabitants of the city of Amsterdam to contribute their own stories, aims to collect the pandemic as it is experienced. The authors look back on the trajectory of the platform during its first year and observe how, through a combination of curating and ‘uncurating’ the content, the museum demonstrates a broader change in its policy towards collecting and storytelling. We reflect on ways in which the platform has and will change according to how the pandemic unfolds, and propose that it can serve as a pilot for more democratic, co-created institutions in the future.
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- Exhibition Reviews
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- Book Reviews
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Dorothy Morland: Making ICA History, Anne Massey
By Rina AryaReview of: Dorothy Morland: Making ICA History, Anne Massey
Liverpool: Liverpool University Press (2020), 216 pp.,
ISBN: 978-1-7896-2127-3, h/bk, £80.00, ISBN: 978-1-7896-2128-0, p/bk, £24.95
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Outdoor School: Contemporary Environmental Art, Diane Borsato and Amish Morrell (Eds)
More LessReview of: Outdoor School: Contemporary Environmental Art, Diane Borsato and Amish Morrell (Eds)
Madeira Park, BC: Douglas and McIntyre (2021), 192 pp., h/bk, ISBN: 9-781-7716-2284-4, $44.95
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- Podcast Review
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