International Curatorial STUDents’ ASSEMBLY
9th May 2026
For the 61st Biennale Arte, we will launch the groundbreaking International Curatorial Students Assembly, bringing together graduate curatorial students from numerous institutions to engage in shared learning, critical reflection, and professional exchange.
Led by members of the Workshop, this one-day conference will foster dialogue among its international participants, exploring the curatorial, political, and institutional dimensions of large-scale international exhibitions, with a specific critical focus on the current Venice Biennale’s exhibitions. The Assembly includes participants from NABA, Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti, Milan; the School of Visual Arts, New York; HDK-Valand Academy of Art and Design, University of Gothenburg; the Art Academy of Latvia, Riga; and the Universitatea Nationala de Arte “George Enescu,” Iași. The Assembly is hosted by the Università Iuav di Venezia.
This Assembly is one of a number of conferences and symposia that have been organized by its members in the UK, Latvia, Romania, Italy, Finland, Sweden, Thailand, the US, and forthcoming in South Africa. During this event there will be an informal launch event to mark recent publications by members of the EARN working group.
Most recent publications by members range across key concerns for the fields of artistic research, curatorial research, and art history, with ongoing publication series and journals engaging crucial critical thinkers.
The new series, On the Curatorial (Floating Opera Press), edited by Carolina Rito, explores the debate around “the curatorial” that arose in the mid-2000s. The first two volumes are On Discourse and the Curatorial by Mick Wilson and Beyond Caring: Para-Hosting as Curatorial Escape Paul O’Neill, with a third volume, written by Beatrice von Bismarck, forthcoming this spring.
The series, Thoughts on Curating (Sternberg Press/MIT Press), edited by Steven Henry Madoff, has published Curating the Complex & The Open Strike by Terry Smith, Unannounced Voices: Curatorial Practice and Changing Institutions by Zdenka Badovinac, and Pidginization as Curatorial Method: Messing with Languages and Praxes of Curating by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung; and the anthology, Why I Do What I Do; with a forthcoming volume by Charles Esche.
Cătălin Gheorghe and Mick Wilson co-edited the open-access volume, Curating beyond Exhibition: On the post-exhibitionary condition in a post-political, in the series Vector – Critical Research in Context. Gheorghe also co-edited with Lorena Marciuc the open-access volume, Under the Last Magnetic Sun: Practices of (Counter)Research Imagination, published by the Doctoral School of Visual Arts, UNAGE, Iași.