WG5CURATORIAL STUDIES WORKSHOP
ABOUT
This group brings together researchers, educators and practitioners to exchange and dialogue on aspects of curating and the curatorial in order to develop a collaborative international and inter-institutional research environment. This is done through shared events and joint outputs (conferences, seminars, workshops, publications, and exhibitions) providing a context for both doctoral and senior researchers to develop their work in an international milieu of “critical-friends”.
The format of a “studies workshop” is adopted to place equal emphasis on engaging with existing knowledge-practice while collaboratively seeking to build new insights and knowledge through the tangles of discussion and practice, of production, exhibition, workshop, commission, seminar, publication …
MEMBERS
- Cătălin Gheorghe, George Enescu National University of the Arts, Iași
- Joasia Krysa, (Institute of Art and Technology & School of Art and Design, Liverpool John Moores University)
- Nina Liebenberg, (Academy of Fine Arts, UniArts Helsinki)
- Hongjohn Lin, (Taipei National University of the Arts)
- Steven Henry Madoff, (SVA New York)
- Nontobeko Ntombela, (WITS Johannesburg)
- Bige Örer, (Four-Legged City: Association for Urban, Nature, and Animal Advocacy, Istanbul/ London.)
- Antra Priede, (Latvian Academy of Art, Riga)
- Vipash Purichanont, (Silpakorn University, Bangkok)
- Carolina Rito, (University of Gothenburg, CAPIm Associate)
- Andris Brinkmanis, (NABA, Milan)
- Henk Slager, (HKU Utrecht) (Contact for WG5)
- Mick Wilson, (University of Gothenburg, CAPIm)
UPCOMING
The group is hosting two major gatherings in 2026: the first in Venice on May 9th, the International Curatorial Students’ Assembly hosted by UAIV; and the second in Johannesburg, South Africa and Livingstone, Zambia (5-15 September) where EARN joins colleagues for the Annual meeting of the Curatorial Studies Network in WITS, Johannesburg and the Mosi oa Tunya Perennial: Sonic Solidarities: Legacies, Histories and Other Gossips, Livingston.
Members of the group will also be contributing to the 2026 programme of Positioning: A Symposium on Curatorial Learning in the Nordic-Baltic Region & Beyond.
Group members are also actively leading ongoing publishing projects that include:
- The Curatorial (2025-ongoing)
- the new series with Floating Opera Press (2025-ongoing)
- Thoughts on Curating book series with Sternberg Press (2021-ongoing)
- Curatography (2020-ongoing)
- VECTOR Publications (2010 – ongoing)
and have also collaborated with MetropolisM on an occasional series that includes:
- Expo-Facto: Into the Algorithm of Exhibition (2022)
- The Postresearch Condition (2021)
- To Seminar (2017)
- Experimental Aesthetics (2015)
- Offside Effect: Academy as Exhibition (2013)
PREVIOUS
Members of the group have contributed extensively to discussions and debates within the field with publications such as:
- Curating beyond exhibition: On the post-exhibitionary condition in a post-political world (2025)
- On Discourse and the Curatorial (2025)
- Why I Do What I Do: Global Curators Speak (2024)
- Learning by curating: Current trajectories in critical curatorial education (2022)
- Exhibitionary Acts of Political Imagination (2021)
- Institution as Praxis (2020)
- What about activism? (2019)
Several members of the group participated in POSITIONING A Symposium on Curatorial Thinking in the Nordic-Baltic Region & Beyond organised by PUBLICS (Helsinki) and The Centre For Curatorial Thinking.
The group contributed a one-day programme to the conference on “Eastern European Curatorial Practices: Historical Development and Challenges” hosted by the Latvian Academy of Art in Riga (25-26 September 2025) where the newly initiated Lexicon project was presented.
In advance of the conference, Steven H. Madoff hosted the online curatorial roundtable: The Curatorial Roundtable: Solvita Krese, Slavs and Tatars (Riga) on Wednesday, September 24, 2025. (See here for the full programme of the SVA Curatorial Roundtables.)
The group held an in person meeting and workshop hosted by Coventry University in 7-10 November 2023, that included a public programme in association with the Coventry Biennial.
Some members of the group published a book on the relay of exhibition-making into virtual and online spaces, following up on issues addressed “expo-facto: into the algorithm of exhibition?”. (Oct 2022)
The group hosted a symposium “In Different Places: Imagining the Biennial Form” (8 June 2022) and an online curatorial research workshop (8-10 June 2022) at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg. More information here: June 2022 Meeting
Some members of the group realised and contributed to the Special PARSE Issue: On the Question of Exhibition (2021)
Within the 2021 Postresearch Condition, this group convened a panel discussion–under the heading “expo-facto: into the algorithm of exhibition?”–on the question of the relays between exhibition protocols and the culture of digital networks, and the specific question of online exhibition mediations, extensions, alternates and substitutions. The panel was proposed as a forum through which to formulate the preliminary terms for an enquiry into the conditions, affordances and horizons of artistic operations and labour that are emergent in the transfer and relay of exhibitionary protocols online. This was conceived as a very tentative and modest first step in response to what seems to be (i.e., not necessarily to be taken at face value) a global institutional convergence. This development might be seen as similar in ways to the pervasive distribution of the white cube as a primary exhibition paradigm, though seeming to occur at a much more accelerated rate.