Curating and Politics: Beyond the Curator – Initial Reflections

Since the 1990s, exhibition discourse has revolved around the figure of the professional curator. Consequently, curatorial politics is usually considered the direct outcome of a curator’s acts and intentions. Now, however, new institutional models and modes of exhibition practice, together with key shifts in funding and collecting strategies, have revealed aspects of curatorial politics over which the exhibition-maker has in fact very little or no control. The present volume presents a series of essays by noted art theorists and cultural scientists such as Heidi Bale Amundsen, Ekaterina Degot, T.J. Demos, Reesa Greenberg, Gerd Elise Mørland, Andrea Phillips and Cecilia Sjöholm, that go beyond the perspective of the individual curator to reveal these previously unexplored levels of curatorial politics.