Ronald Kolb
Post-Exhibitionary Practice
CURATING – explored with a camera.
2015–18
Co-producer
Various locations
An interview project with international curators, 2015–2018
Video interviews with 71 curators and artists
Organized by Ronald Kolb & Dorothee Richter
Most of the interview material has been transcribed and is available in a raw edited form, awaiting further analysis and distribution.
Some parts of the interviews were used as oral sources in my doctoral thesis (see excerpts below).
Interview partners were Peter Weibel, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Pauline J. Yao, Christina Li, Aric Chen, Qinyi Lim, Freya Chou, Cosmin Costinas, Yung Ma, Hammad Nasar, Joshua Simon, Ruti Direktor, Meir Tati, Eyal Danon, Hila Cohen-Schneidermann, Chen Tamir, Sergio Edelsztein, Lars Nittve, Stella Rollig, N’Gone Fall, Omar Kholeif, Oliver Ressler, Susa Gunzner (Grandhotel Cosmopolis), Ellen Blumenstein, Marius Babias, Rein Wolfs, Florian Ebner, Rob Hamelijnck and Nienke Terpsma, Binna Choi, Beatrix Ruf, Daniel Baumann, Bice Curiger, Hedwig Saxenhuber, Luisa Ziaja, Can Gülcü, Vanessa Joan Miller, Nicolaus Schaffhausen, Katharina Morawek, Iris Dressler / Hans Christ, Anshuman Dasgupta, Kate Fowle, Monica Narula, Nkule Mabaso, Kadiatou Diallo, Riason Naidoo, Terry, Ntone Edjabe (Chimurenga), Khwezi Gule, Nontobeko Ntombela, Jay Pather, Yuko Hasegawa, Bruno Latour, Sarah Rifky, Ashok Sukumaran & Shaina Anand (CAMP), Ute Meta Bauer, Patrick D. Flores, Shwetal Patel, Jennifer Teo + Tien Woon (Post-Museum), Maria Lind, Axel Wieder, Azar Mahmoudian, Anuradha Vikram, Hamza Walker, Jason Underhill, Mara McCarthy, Dena Beard, Apsara DiQuinzio, Lawrence Rinder, Michelle Wong, Fatima Hellberg, Heike Munder, Jeanne van Heeswijk, and Bonaventure Ndikung.
From 2015 to 2018, Dorothee Richter and I conducted video interviews with 71 curators or artists with a curatorial practice internationally in Amsterdam, Bonn, Berlin, Cape Town, Dhaka, Hong Kong, Johannesburg, Karlsruhe, Linz, Los Angeles, Rotterdam, San Francisco, Stuttgart, Singapore, Stockholm, Tel Aviv, Utrecht, Vienna, and Zurich. Far from a comprehensive mapping of a global field of curatorial practice, we reached out to established curators or cultural practitioners ranging from an interesting institutional practice to self-organised practices in off-spaces and politically motivated arts initiatives that were accessible to us through various travel itineraries.
During the interviews, we loosely followed a prepared questionnaire covering a wide range of topics on curating: from personal background to the practicalities of exhibition-making, the political, postcolonial, and gender aspects of curating, and the economic side of art practices within and outside of the art market and the digital sphere. The questionnaire was designed to help us analyse the statements on the above-mentioned topics in a comparable way, clustering statements to create a discourse on each topic. In the end, the interviews turned into long conversations, but for the most part they still followed the structure of the questionnaire.
We encountered highly skilled curators and were privileged to hear their thoughts on art, their curatorial practices, and institutional thinking, aware of their own situatedness in the art field, but also their connections to the respective societies in which they are embedded, the representative and representational power that art and exhibitions can hold, and how exhibitionary practices desire social change, too.
Questionnaire
Interviews loosely followed nine thematic clusters:
- Curatorial statements — personal concepts of curating, shaped by artistic practice, reading, theoretical input, and socio-political situations rather than by biography alone.
- Exhibition-making — the material and practical side of curating: planning, design, display, production, and collaboration with artists and other partners.
- Political aspects and dependencies — curators as mediators between institutions, artists, and publics, navigating funders, city and national politics, and questions of censorship and surveillance.
- Gender aspects, identity and community — how curatorial practice engages gender equality, and how exhibitions imagine and address diverse communities.
- Race, class and postcolonial aspects — the representation (and underrepresentation) of non-Western artists and curators, decolonising strategies, and the question of whom an exhibition is for.
- Personality cult — curators‘ relationships to the international „star system,“ visibility, and the mechanics of reputation and gossip in the art world.
- Art market — the market’s influence on curatorial practice and recent reorganisations of the art system.
- Digital space — how digital tools and platforms are used for curating and mediating projects, and how they reshape curatorial practice.
- Strategies as a curator — practical advice for emerging curators on building relationships with artists and positioning oneself in the field.
Excerpt from:
Ronald Kolb, Curating as Governmental Practices: Post-Exhibitionary Practices under Translocal Conditions in Governmental Constellations. (Zurich: OnCurating.org, 2024), 45.
In an interview with Binna Choi at Casco Utrecht in August 2015, she described her collaborative practice, which had developed at Casco over many years, as follows:
It’s not a traditional exhibition space. […] It’s what I call a micro community. [Casco] is a test site for a different kind of society, a postcapitalistic society. Together with artists and other practitioners we instigate projects based on questions, that come up, maybe related to anger as well as desire. These are often long-term processes, the different stages of development have different moments and forms of public sharing and exhibitions are one of them. […] It is really important how we develop things and how we relate among ourselves within our team, but also to our environment, our neighbours and communities besides the art professionals. One principle is that everyone should be a researcher. Everyone should develop their theory or their own material.
Besides the idea that an art space can develop a propositional dimension for a larger society (“institution as a test site”), Choi speaks, in my view, of a different relationship of art (practice) towards its “audience”, the “environment, our neighbours and communities besides the art professionals”. And this relationality is also applied in Casco’s institutional practice, which I learnt from our encounter with her. This reference alone is indicative of a profoundly different understanding of the structure art–institution–audience. This is also reflected in the title of the institution, which was changed a few years ago to Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons and its slogan “Welcome to Casco, a platform where art invites a social vision”.
The major difference is how art and its practices are oriented towards society and the public sphere.