This course invites curators, artists, activists, educators, cultural workers, and those who are interested in critically engaging in thinking about post-representational, affective, and experiential transdisciplinary curatorial forms: a curation that allows for a shift from an on-looking audience towards activated and self-empowered protagonists; a holistic and relational – versus informational and representational – curation, for an emancipatory activation of the curatorial public.

The course will introduce and discuss some exemplary fieldwork and philosophical approaches – for example, Brazilian scholar and curator Suely Rolnik or those who have been inspired by philosopher Baruch Spinoza – advances that might encourage the development of and experimentation with embodied critical thinking for the making of alternative ethical-aesthetic-political curatorial formats. The theoretical engagements will be mobilised with some simple physical exercises to affectively activate the course protagonists. 

The materiality of our human existence – as a spatial agent itself – and as a multidimensional being with its sentient qualities, is an essential starting point for experiencing a critical practice. How might we create alternative curatorial ways to stimulate not only human inter-subjective but also inter-relational agency and critical consciousness towards our environment, and towards what might be considered as the “Other”? How might we take better account of, and create ‘response-ability’ in the ways that we learn, practise, and live together?

 

 

Berit Fischer is a curator, researcher, and writer who has worked internationally since 1999. She holds a PhD from the Winchester School of Art/Southampton University, UK. Her curatorial research interests lie in critical spatial practices, socially and holistically produced spaces, the specification of art as a producer of new knowledge, as a means to permeate the status quo, the creation of fields of action, and the development of spaces for critical engagement, affective encounter, and relational learning.

She has published articles internationally, e.g. with Afterall or Onomatopee, and has both contributed to and edited or co-edited books like New Spaces for Negotiating Art (and) Histories in Africa, Hlysnan: The Notion and Politics of Listening, and Other Possible Worlds – Proposals on This Side of Utopia.

She has presented tutorials, lectures, and workshops around the world, e.g. at Making Futures School (raumlabor, UdK Berlin), Bergen University, ZHdK, Freie Universität Berlin, Nottingham Trent University, or at Soma in Mexico City. Some of her notable curatorial projects have taken place at nGbK, Berlin; Radical Intention, Italy; tranzit.sk, Bratislava; Casino Luxembourg Forum d’Art Contemporain; Brooklyn Waterfront Outdoor Sculpture Exhibition and Dumbo Arts Festival, New York; Zendai Museum of Modern Art in Shanghai; and BankART in Yokohama.
http://www.beritfischer.org