Journal of Curatorial Studies - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2016

This article considers the changing definitions of curatorial labour in the light of affective economies of care and love. It examines how recent conceptions of curating shift emphasis from caring for objects and collections to producing and managing social networks, collective energies and professional relationships. While curators prioritize their care for artworks and artists, they often overlook the low-status and infrastructural activities that sustain curatorial production. At the same time, by over-identifying with their work, and instrumentalizing their personal relationships and energies, curators risk self-exploitation and burn-out. By recognizing curating’s inter-dependent nature, this article prompts a redefinition of curatorial care and calls for a reallocation of curatorial and institutional priorities and resources.

This article will take the subject of affect as a space of critical reflection on the limits of museums when conceived primarily as communications media. Drawing from a range of interdisciplinary debates across media and cultural theory, including the field of affect studies and approaches to subjectivity, embodiment and mediation, the article will outline some core issues of relevance to curatorial practices. I will pose the question of what it might mean to enter into suggestive relations with another – human and non-human – by focusing upon the embodied experience of visiting the Foundling Museum in London. The article will attempt to ‘find the feeling of the foundling’ in order to raise critical and creative questions about the entry of affect into the arts and humanities, and ways of newly conceiving interactive publics no longer considered primarily as consumers of meaning.

Recent installation projects by Canadian artists Geoffrey Farmer (The Intellection of Lady Spider House, 2013–14) and Allyson Mitchell (Killjoy’s Kastle, 2013) have taken up the architectural, atmospheric and affective structures of the haunted house. These two projects suggest distinct environments for working curatorially with queer affect, defined here as the fraught or stigmatized feelings that often adhere to queer experience. While Farmer’s quasi-museological project draws on the archive and the uncanny in its juxtapositions of varied objects (examined here through camp and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s theories of queer shame), Mitchell’s performative and pedagogical work explicitly employs Sara Ahmed’s concept of the feminist killjoy to reckon with undead tropes from feminist herstories. The affective significance of the distorted domesticity evident in both installations lies in how they animate and explore uneasy queer feelings, which can be traced to the projects’ collaborative origins and the ways that they assemble objects and experiences to highlight difference as much as cohesion.

Focusing on the construction of Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s curatorial authorship in The Logbook published by dOCUMENTA (13) (2012), this article addresses the politics of publishing personal relationships in the context of current post-Fordist regimes where immaterial and affective labours such as communicating, networking and self-promotion have moved to the core of the capitalist production of value. I discuss how the third volume of dOCUMENTA (13)’s three-part catalogue turns into a curatorial autobiography that not only exhibits Christov-Bakargiev’s authorship by exposing her conviviality, familiarity and friendship with significant others, but also provides an updated version of the 1981 Harald Szeemann monograph Museum der Obsessionen. My aim is to scrutinize the intersection of historically shifting (bio)political implications of affective labour and the gendering of curatorial practice.

Curators use Instagram like many individuals to post selfies and images of friends, special events, travel and other notable sights. Yet this platform has taken on special relevance in the art world by how it extends curatorial relationality and modalities of affective engagement. In this article, I survey accounts of curators whose Instagram accounts blur work/life dichotomies, adopt conceptual or feminist projects, and function as avenues for ethico-aesthetic intensifications of awareness. I argue that Instagram’s affect of proximal immediacy keeps users ‘in touch’ through a range of haptic modalities that in effect bring the art world into one’s hand; kinaesthetically mobilize users through ‘following’; and reveal the manners by which curators attune themselves to context.

The Xerox Book Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, 12 September–24 October 2015

Saltwater: A Theory of Thought Forms – 14th Istanbul Biennial Curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, various locations, Istanbul, 2 September–1 November 2015

Ink Remix: Contemporary Art from Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong Curated by Sophie McIntyre, exhibited at the Canberra Museum and Gallery, 3 July–18 October 2015; Bendigo Art Gallery, 31 October 2015–7 February 2016; University of New South Wales Galleries, 26 February–21 May 2016; Museum of Brisbane, 16 September 2016–19 February 2017

Artist Textiles: Picasso to Warhol Curated by Dennis Nothdruft, Textile Museum of Canada, Toronto, 2 May–4 October 2015

Mark Rothko’s Harvard Murals Curated by Mary Schneider Enriquez, in collaboration with Narayan Khandekar, Carol Mancusi-Ungaro, Christina Rosenberger and Jens Stenger, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, 16 November 2014– 26 July 2015

Dries Van Noten: Inspirations Curated by Pamela Golbin, with Karen Van Godtsenhoven, MoMu Fashion Museum, Antwerp, 13 February–19 July 2015, originally presented at Musée des Arts Décoratifs (curated by Pamela Golbin), Paris, 1 March–2 November 2014

Revisions – Zen for Film, Hanna B. Hölling New York: Bard Graduate Center (2015), 100 pp., Paperback, ISBN: 978-1-941-79202-5, US$20.00

Family Ties: Living History in Canadian House Museums, Andrea Terry Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press (2015), 248 pp., Hardcover, ISBN: 978-0-773-54561-8, CAD & US $110.00/Paperback, ISBN: 978-0-773-54562-5, CAD & US $44.95

Introducing Suzy Lake, Georgina Uhlyarik (ed.) London: Black Dog Publishing (2014), 232 pp., Hardcover, ISBN: 978-1-90896-673-5, US$34.95