Ronald Kolb
Post-Exhibitionary Practice

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https://www.on-curating.org/issue-53-reader/Situated-Knowledges-and-Interdependence.html

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Ronald Kolb, „Situated Knowledges and Interdependence in the Exhibitionary-Educational Complex”
In: OnCurating Issue 53: Situated Knowledges – Curating and Art on the Move
Eds. Ronald Kolb & Dorothee Richter
June 2022
ISBN 979-8-8369-8624-7
126 pp.

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Drawing on Donna Haraway’s concept of situated knowledges, the essay argues that all knowledge is positional, not neutral — steering a middle path between a false „universal“ objectivity (illustrated through MoMA’s Eurocentric 1936 art-history diagram) and a postmodern relativism that treats every viewpoint as equally valid and dissolves accountability altogether.

It then applies this to curatorial and educational practice, drawing on Lynn Margulis’s biology of symbiosis over competition and documenta fifteen’s lumbung practice as models of collaborative, trans-local knowledge — calling for exhibitions and schools to build structures that hold onto situatedness between students, teachers, publics and producers, rather than collapsing into false universalism or relativism.