I wish I was a curator

  • 2018
  • Installation of a collaborative project (text, photography, exhibition, talk)
  • Dimensions variable

A project in collaboration with the Post-Graduate Program in Curating in Zurich with the aim of initiating a dialogue on the relationships between artists and curators. To this end, I wrote a short text that addressed “framing” as a process of perception, thinking, and conception, and asked the aspiring curators to photograph specific things and situations.

The curators were given disposable analog cameras for this purpose, which made it impossible for them to control or select the photos they were shooting. They did not know what would eventually show up in, nor what would happen to these photographs. They had to submit to a curatorial concept, the formulation of which was unknown to them and which was only revealed to them when the corresponding exhibition opened.

In such a reversed relationship between curator and artist, certain questions arose in the interplay of these different perspectives: how are (power) relations between curators and artists constituted? What ethos characterizes the work of curators and / with artists? Who wants to be an artist, who a curator, and why? What is it about art that we identify with?

Labels with attributes (most of which were stemming from the self-description of the curating program) could be used for (self-)identification; blank ones offered additional space for own perceptions. Between selection and creation, heteronomy and autonomy, paternalism and participation – how will these budding curators work in the future?

Discussing and attributing the labels:

Before the opening: