This book presents over 20 authors’ reflections on ‘curating care’ – and presents a call to give curatorial attention to the primacy of care for all life and for more ‘caring curating’ that responds to the social, ecological and political analysis of curatorial caregiving.
Social and ecological struggles for a different planetary culture based on care and respect for the dignity of life are reflected in contemporary curatorial practices that explore human and non-human interdependence. The prevalence of themes of care in curating is a response to a dual crisis: the crisis of social and ecological care that characterizes global politics and the professional crisis of curating under the pressures of the increasingly commercialized cultural landscape. Foregrounding that all beings depend on each other for life and survival, this book collects theoretical essays, methodological challenges and case studies from curators working in different global geographies to explore the range of ways in which curatorial labour is rendered as care.
Practising curators, activists and theorists situate curatorial labour in the context of today’s general care crisis. This volume answers to the call to more fully understand how their transformative work allows for imagining the future of bodily, social and environmental care and the ethics of interdependency differently.
Elke Krasny and Lara Perry: Introduction
Part I. Caring Curating
- Françoise Vergès: Curatorial Labour and Decolonial Feminism
- Bruxas Bruxas Arts Collective: Get Bodied: Inverting the Witch to Summon a New Commons
- Care beyond Curation: A Conversation with Lauren Craig. Interview by Racha Baraka Pauline
- De Souza: Transcultural Care and the Cultural Sector in the United Kingdom
- Helen Kaplinsky: Caring for ‘range-ful’ identities in the work of Danielle Brathwaite Shirley
- Mirella Maria: Decolonial and Heritage Practices in the Context of Current Global Challenges. Quilombola Museology and Digital Technologies in Brazilian Community Museums
- Sophie Lingg: Caring Curating and Social Media
- Berit Fischer: A Laboratory of Care. Active Micropolitics, Joyfulness and Affectivity
- Joulia Strauss: Avtonomi Akadimia. Curating becomes Curing
- Alexandra Kokoli: Care, Aftercare, and the Work of Transmission: Learning from Greenham Common
- Eliana Otta: Caring for Mourning, Working with Loss. Curating, Listening, and Attending to the Sacred in Peruvian Highlands and Forests
- Elke Krasny: Care, Thought, Being: Curating with a Wounded Planet
- Caroline Gausden, Kirsten Lloyd, Nat Raha, and Catherine Spencer: Curating Forms of Care in Art and Activism: A Roundtable on Life Support
- Helena Reckitt: From Coping to Curious: Unlearning and Reimagining Curatorial Habits of Care
- Sascia Bailer: Care for Caregivers: Curating against the Care Crisis
- Jacqueline Millner and Zsuzsanna Zsoboszlay: Cultivating Care Ethics and the Minor Gesture in Curatorial and Research Practices
- Jenny Richards: ‘Do what you do best and outsource the rest’ - Curatorial Lessons within Cultures of Outsourcing
- Katja Kobolt, Petja Grafenauer, and Brigita Miloš: The Platform of Care: Collective Curatorial Modes of the n*a*i*l*s hacks*facts*fictions platform
- Claudia Lomoschitz: Curating Queer Nursing: the performance installation PARTUS Gyno Bitch Tits
- Magdalena Kallenberger (MATERNAL FANTASIES collective): Curating a Collective Body: a Non-Idealized Concept of Care
- Johanna Braun: Spellbound. Witchcraft Activism as Caring Curatorial Practice
- Zahra Khan: Curating Aliveness. Engaging with Ecologies
- Hansel Sato: La escuela del buen vivir/ The school of good life: counteracting the imperial mode of living
Part II. Curating Care
Biography
Elke Krasny is Professor of Art and Education at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She is a feminist cultural theorist, urban researcher, curator and author. Krasny’s scholarship addresses care, ecological and social justice, memory work and emancipatory cultural practice at the present historical conjuncture marked by ecocidal and genocidal pasts. Her exhibition Hands-On Urbanism: The Right to Green on urban gardening and farming as subsistence practices was included in the 2012 Venice Biennale of Architecture. The exhibition Critical Care: Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet, curated with Angelika Fitz at the Architecture Centre Vienna in 2019, introduces a perspective of planetary care ethics through architectural practice. Krasny co-edited Curating as Feminist Organizing (Routledge, 2023).
Lara Perry works in the School of Humanities and Social Science at the University of Brighton. Trained first as a historian, Lara’s career has involved her in work with artists, curators, photographers, educators, computer scientists, philosophers, archivists, activists and art historians. Much of her research has focused on evolving feminist museology, starting with her doctoral thesis on the collection of the National Portrait Gallery (London) published as History’s Beauties: Women, History and the National Portrait Gallery 1856–1900 in 2006. Lara has published a number of essays and edited volumes concerning art history's and curating's relationship to gender and feminism, most recently, an edited volume with Elke Krasny Curating as Feminist Organizing (Routledge, 2023).
