The exhibition “Terrance Houle & Adrian Stimson: Exploring Indigenous Masculinities” showcased the performance art of Terrance Houle (Blood/Ojibway) and Adrian Stimson (Siksika) at the Union Gallery in Kingston, Ontario from March 20th to March 22nd, 2012. Both artists used the occasion to interrogate how Indigenous identities are constructed and perceived. The artists’ interaction with the audience and the space of the gallery itself acted to destabilize lingering colonial beliefs about Indigenous identity. This thesis explores how the Kingston performances investigate the historical construction of Indigenous masculine identities. Through the artists’ own embodiment of historical knowledge (both colonial and Indigenous knowledges) and their interaction with the audience and gallery space, the performances challenged and reimagined colonial perceptions of Indigenous masculine identity as a singular, static form. The performances served to translate alternative knowledges about Indigenous men and models of Indigenous masculinity, a dynamic I analyze in this thesis as a larger set of tactics and effects available to artists decolonizing Indigenous masculinities. / Thesis (Master, Cultural Studies) -- Queen's University, 2012-09-25 21:04:21.008

I conduct a series of experiments culminating in a gallery exhibition, I Never Stopped Being A Curator, which investigate and reinterpret what it means to ‘care’ and ‘profane’ in the context of an expanded notion of curatorial practice. I call what I’m doing ‘performative micro-curating,’ a playfully performative practice with precedents dating back to Marcel Duchamp and The Richard Mutt Case. More specifically, I’m interpreting and practising performative micro-curating as a relational, meta-conceptual art practice that uses mirroring and repetition as a method for posing questions, making knowledge and forging social bonds, while, at the same time, dissolving the boundaries that customarily distinguish artmaking from curating.

Increasingly, contemporary artists are invited to create artworks responding to and located in cultural heritage sites such as national parks, national monuments, historic landmarks, and historic buildings. This thesis examines the nature of contemporary art production, display, and encounter in cultural heritage sites. The research is directed by the question: What are the conditions of curating contemporary art in cultural heritage sites?   The analysis builds from the idea that the meeting ground of contemporary art and cultural heritage produces a curatorial zone, and explores the implications of the interplay between these two fields for curatorial labor in cultural heritage sites specifically. A set of conditions that are central to both curating and cultural heritage management forms the methodological starting point for a comparative analysis of ten contemporary art projects in cultural heritage sites, including one in-depth case study.   The comparative analysis reveals that this curatorial zone is characterized by conditions that arise from conceptual tensions between the fields of contemporary art and cultural heritage. Specifically, a set of conditions I have termed change, temporal, interpretive, site-specific, and instrumental conditions actively shape the act of curating contemporary art in cultural heritage sites.

I conduct a series of experiments culminating in a gallery exhibition, I Never Stopped Being A Curator, which investigate and reinterpret what it means to ‘care’ and ‘profane’ in the context of an expanded notion of curatorial practice. I call what I’m doing ‘performative micro-curating,’ a playfully performative practice with precedents dating back to Marcel Duchamp and The Richard Mutt Case. More specifically, I’m interpreting and practising performative micro-curating as a relational, meta-conceptual art practice that uses mirroring and repetition as a method for posing questions, making knowledge and forging social bonds, while, at the same time, dissolving the boundaries that customarily distinguish artmaking from curating.

Viele zeitgenössische Institutionen (Theater, Festivals, Biennalen, Kunsthallen, Museen, etc.) haben sich seit Mitte der 1990er Jahre wieder verstärkt experimentellen Formen zugewandt, sowie einen Theorie und Praxis verzahnten Diskurs gefördert. Wie aber sieht es in der Realität mit einer kontinuierlichen Programmarbeit in diesem Bereich aus? Gehören diese Formate und programmatischen Überschriften lediglich zu einer aufgeklärten Gesellschaft des Spektakels, die nach mehr Abwechslung verlangt oder existieren substantielle und kulturpolitische Langzeitperspektiven?

This thesis presents three main arguments. First, that curating in national museums is a process of meaning making and that the exhibitionary meaning is situated in and mediated by culture, thus, the products of curatorial work, i.e. the exhibitionary complexes are complex political and cultural constructions. Second, that the exhibitionary complexes final visual outcome, i.e. the exhibitionary complexes images and texts result in the presentation of mythological constructs of Byzantium as the only truth to their audiences. Third, that what is finally communicated through the presentation of mythological constructs of Byzantium is national identity and dominant cultural values. The latter is effected through the representation of the Byzantine Empire as part of the identity of the dominant cultural group of the country to which each national museum belongs. National identity is communicated through the exhibitionary complexes, either by suggesting historical continuity of the contemporary national identity of a country s dominant cultural group through Byzantium, as in the case of the Greek national museums, or by undermining the very idea that Byzantine history, European history and British history are so very different, as in the case of the British Museum. Both interpretations are culturally constructed realities . The above approaches are explained through the investigation of exhibitionary meaning around Byzantium, by identifying and analysing the nature and cultural functions of the presuppositions that are involved in each museum s curatorial practices. These presuppositions are the cultural ideas, values and beliefs of the involved dominant cultural groups on Byzantium and on their own identity. My identification and analysis of these presuppositions includes research on the historical, political and cultural context of each museum, the culturally accepted history and art history literature of each country on Byzantium, as well as research on museum archives. By explaining and using the curatorial concepts of democratisation and demystification , adopted and adapted to the practices of the museums under study, and by analysing the British and Greek interpretations of Byzantium, which make themselves apparent in the images and texts of the British and Greek exhibitionary complexes , I provide a cultural account of the making of exhibitionary meaning, explaining contemporary perceptions of Byzantium, its use in identity making and its relation to national politics. By doing this, I also explain the implications of those presuppositions to the making of exhibitionary meaning, and I provide an explanation of how and why the power system of the exhibitionary complex is still in play although we are shifting into the era of the Democratic museum (Fleming, 2008). The concluding remarks of the thesis include suggestions for the further development of the curatorial practices of democratisation and demystification.

Curating Resistances focuses upon the socially interventionist and activist agendas of two contemporary art biennials in Europe during and in response to the current economic crisis. This thesis seeks to untangle their tensions, conflicts and intimate socialities as they evolve against the backdrop of neoliberalism, austerity, crisis and the rise of Occupy cultures. Drawing upon primary ethnographic research on the 3rd Athens Biennale (2011) and the 7th Berlin Biennale (2012), as well as on the examination of curatorial, journalistic and archival documents, I argue for an approach that takes into consideration the threefold nature of these sites, as institutions, organizations and events. A central area of investigation is the post-1990s curatorial idea of strategically occupying the institution from within and mobilising it as a space of radical knowledge production. This idea gave rise to a model of exhibition-making, that I call the ‘discursive exhibition’, which shapes the vocabulary and forms of curating cultures at least since documenta X (1997). I argue that this model was challenged during the European crisis through the post-2010 art activism that brought ideas related to class, labour and the commons to the centre of debates on art and politics. Through their attempts to radicalise in response to such challenges, I argue that the two biennials I examine expose the limits of biennials as sites of activism and political resistance. In employing the research perspectives of place and translocality, terms borrowed from cultural geography, I argue that rather than imposing a global art language, biennials unfold through complex socio-spatial dynamics, manifesting a remarkable capacity to absorb, remediate and repurpose their surrounding environments. By discussing how a series of failed statements, border-crossings, internal conflicts, withdrawals, police interventions and press spectacles interconnect with the biennial’s organizational and institutional dynamics, this thesis navigates through the translocal tensions played upon the materiality, infrastructures and economies of curating resistances.

Curating practices appear in various fields as a common practice of immaterial labour today. To ‘curate’ is an active verb that suggests ‘doing’ something. Seldom if ever are the implications of curating critically discussed outside the arts, and this provides a reason for this thesis to investigate. What does ‘to curate’ mean, imply or suggest in the urban context? How are urban curatorial practices legitimized and where can they contribute to urban planning? Embedded in contemporary urban challenges and the “state of crisis” often referred to, this paper introduces curating as an emerging cultural practice into this field. A vital part of the discussion this thesis opens up, is where art can become part of urban planning. Noting that the relationship between arts and urban environments is ambivalent, since the arts’ symbolic power is recognized within international competition of cities, it is about the margin between the field of arts and urban development. By laying a groundwork of contemporary curatorial understandings in the arts, the paper gives an overview on the existing notions and practices of ‘urban curation’ and highlights that there are strong positions but no existing definition as such. A look into urban planning theory pinpoints the crucial role of economic growth and its implications for the organization of urban developments under the term neoliberalism, a condition in which festivals replace urban development policies and culture becomes a structuring element. The occurrence of projects as organizational structure dominates and challenges long term developments. This constitutes the framework in which the paper discusses three very different project examples from Hamburg, Liverpool and Vienna for closer analysis. Between preservation and management, arranging and staging curating can alternatively be understood as an epistemology producing new knowledge. By cross-referencing between the arts, where the critical discussion on curating is held, and urban planning and architecture, where curatorial practice is applied, the paper suggests strengthening the critical discourse on the relevance and use of cultural practices in urban studies.

The thesis explores a multidisciplinary approach, bridging together perspectives from art-historical, philosophical and anthropological fields of knowledge to question and outline the way materiality has been thought about, and how this in turn can be informative to developing a curatorial methodology. By looking at Moderna Museet Stockholm, the thesis will demonstrate the mileage of thinking materially in the act of exhibition making and the curatorial position. In doing so, the thesis explores various discursive arenas of the institution such as the museum, the temporary exhibition and the permanent collection. Central to developing the methodology are concepts such as agency, revisionist history and cultural modernity.

Within curatorial practice, graffiti has come to little attention. On the occasion of the street art hype during the 2000s, graffiti appeared only as a minor component. Considering, that graffiti remains an undefined and mostly illegal and uninstitutionalized practice, the fact that it is not a common exhibition topic seems self-evident. However, graffiti is a globally and publicly present form of visual output and communication which upon closer look reveals conceptual depth and complexity. Therefore, this thesis investigates illegal graffiti in urban space and the possibility of curatorial approaches. Using the theoretical framework of Henri Lefebvre’s writings on the city, graffiti in urban space is conceptualized and analyzed. Possible readings and understandings of graffiti are highlighted. On the basis of such, past curatorial practices with and research on graffiti are outlined and discussed. Finally, the thesis aims to establish an understanding of graffiti as an institution of its own. For a productive curatorial approach to graffiti, an awareness of that division is considered crucial.