Curating to Speak the Unknown

Lecturer: Antonio Cataldo

To catalyze change, we need to question and alter normativities produced within and outside the art field. An artistic action is a form opening up space to experimentation with social norms that can give rise to new ways of collective and individual subjectivization and transforming our and other people’s habits. Through displays, we exercise how we enter and experience space, and its overarching architecture, reclaim public and private space and make claims on spaces that belong to us and from which we have been deprived. It is a performance of activism. 

Leaning upon intersectional practices, we must talk, again and again, with the voices left in the dark. We must speak the unspoken: what and who remains unacknowledged by keeping silent. We must find agency for the powerless and give a voice to adversity. We must practice assertion, providing images for the past to write a different future. 

The course will focus on structuring community-building claims and imagining appearance structures through practical examples and exercises: gestures, actions, performances, displays, and collaborations attempting to break free from given infrastructures.  

Bio

A writer and curator, Antonio Cataldo holds a Ph.D. in Curatorial Studies. Since August 2018, Cataldo has served as the Artistic Director of Fotogalleriet Oslo, an independent and publicly-funded institution, the oldest kunsthalle for photography in the Nordic region. Through exhibitions, discourse, and research for several internationally reputed organizations, Cataldo has actively challenged institutional models, their governing structures, and the representational social role of images. Cataldo studied with philosopher Giorgio Agamben in Venice, Italy, obtaining his MA in 2006. Over the last two decades, Cataldo held curatorial and other positions at OCA – Office for Contemporary Art Norway, La Biennale di Venezia, and IUAV, University of Venice. Cataldo sits on the boards of Kunsthalles in Norway and the Sandefjord Kunstforening Art Award jury.