The Emancipated Audience – Experiential Curatorial Knowledge Production

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 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 (PhD) is a curator, researcher, writer, and editor who has worked internationally since 1999. She holds a Ph.D. from the Winchester School of Art/Southampton University, UK. Her research interests include critical spatial practices, socially produced spaces, holistic and experiential knowledge production as a means to permeate the status quo. In her work she strives to activate agency, fields of action and spaces for critical engagement and critical consciousness, affective encounters and relational learning. In 2016 she founded the Radical Empathy Lab, an on-going nomadic and artistic social-and research-laboratory for alternative and holistic knowledge production.

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, including at New Alphabet School, HKW, Berlin (forthcoming), Making Futures School (raumlabor, UdK Berlin), Bergen University, ZhdK, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart), Freie Universität Berlin, Nottingham Trent University, and the Soma in Mexico City. Some of her notable curatorial projects have taken place at Floating University and nGbK, Berlin; Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart; 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.