Seminar

■ CURATORIAL RESPONSIBILITY

Curatorial Responsibility – A critical view on curating and responsibility is a two-day
seminar held by the MA program in curating at Bergen National Academy of the Arts

November 26-27 - Gallery 3,14, Bergen

The issues questioned in this seminar are located around the curator and her/his role as negotiator and mediator between the art/artist and society. Included in this query is the question of responsibility: For whom is the curator responsible when political, moral- and other agents lay their heavy hand on projects in the public space, and censorship becomes the device? For whom is the curator responsible when the art/artist is squeezed between different, more or less powerful, articulations and desires?

For the practice of a curator, an essential question is related to the position of the curator as placed inside the existing division of art. The freelance curator that emerged in the late 1950s, like Harald Szeemann and Seth Siegelaub, were quite aware of the gap described by Marcel Duchamp – the creative act. Duchamp claims that the work of art is not the sole making of the artist. The artist just delivers the raw material. The audience is playing the part of the finishing creator, the maker of the end result. A work of art therefore exists only in relation with a public and in public.

The creative act serves here as a hypothesis – which has to be tested. And it’s the artists and curators who do the testing in a mutual relationship where the border between these professions disintegrates. Curators play (in an ideal function) the role of the mediator, putting the hypothesis in contact with an audience, which then function as the responder, maybe even as a testing ground for critical self-awareness. In this model the curator takes part in the production line of art – on the same side of the creative gap as artists. They – as collaborative curators – are not the judgers of art anymore; they also work in a state of doubt and insecurity, where the exhibitions as such depend upon the transformation from raw art (testing ground) to a completed work being performed by an audience.

Speakers:

Abdellah Karroum (Morocco)
James Putnam (Great Britain)
Stina Högkvist (Norway/Sweden)
Tommy Olsson (Norway/Sweden)
Rakett ― Karolin Tampere and Åse Løvgren (Germany/Norway, Norway)
Sven Åge Birkeland (Norway)

Moderators:

Jorunn Veiteberg and Arne Skaug Olsen

Program and info

For program and practical info go to the Seminar Program page.

This seminar is made with support form City of Bergen