Curating
Curating is the practice that produces art exhibitions in galleries, museums, and public spaces. But it also moves across diverse artistic practices, such as performance, design, and publishing. It has expanded to include any cultural activity that consists of selection, compilation, organization, and presentation.
Subject description
Curating has been associated historically with exhibitions: displaying works of art or other kinds of material artifacts in public spaces, or for a select audience. Curating shares with an audience a dynamic constellation of things, images, and concepts in spaces that bring forth relationships and connections between them. But curating is not only a product or an event for an audience but also a way of thinking, a way of perceiving, and a way of assembling the world on the part of the curator. The practices and methods that emerge from the curatorial can be useful means through which racial, economic, ecological, and political systems are investigated and critiqued in the service of expanding freedom and democracy.
Through its particular modes of operation, curating blends the material and the immaterial, tangible and intangible, the image and the word, reading and looking, thought and feeling. It can be a form of creative expression, but also a form of research. Curating thus is a cultural practice that can transcend disciplinary boundaries as well as artistic media. It is also what the philosopher of science, Isabelle Stengers, calls a “bridge-making” practice, one that finds or establishes connections through the unique ways it exhibits, displays, stages its concepts, artifacts, and images.
Curating presents a distinctive way of thinking, and thus functions as theory and as research method, which may or may not consist of an exhibition, may or may not include working with artists and works of art. Curating as an academic subject is transdisciplinary, embracing the breadth of areas that make up the Department of Culture and Aesthetics, and a way of thinking that includes both form and content, theory and practice, that characterizes the many forms of cultural production and analysis, expression and reflection.
Career opportunities
The subject provides the historical and theoretical foundation that provides the prerequisites for applying to many different research programmes in culture studies, art history, fashion and design, and theoretical studies. It also prepares the graduate to work in many different arts and cultural organisations that consist of bringing performances, exhibitions, or other events to a public.
Courses and programmes
Degree
To gain a master's degree in Curating, you complete the International Master's Programme in Curating, with a specialization in Art, Management and Law, 120 credits.
Research
Curatorial research is inherently multi-and transdisciplinary. It gathers objects, concepts, images, and texts from different disciplines and discourses and juxtaposes them in unique relationships to open up new paths for innovative thinking and research.
Stockholm University is the only university in Europe where Curating is a distinct research area, along with Art History, Musicology, Theatre Studies, Literature, and the History of Ideas in the Department of Culture & Aesthetics. Curatorial research is distinguished not by its subject but its methodological approach. (Unlike the other subjects, it is a verb and thus denotes an action, a process, and approach, rather than describing a subject.) It uses theory and method as creative tools that are often used in response to and in collaboration with the material artifacts, images, or concepts that the researcher addresses.
The concepts we often associate with exhibitions – such as space and time – as well as its display equipment – vitrines, pedestals, lighting, and didactic wall labels, etc. – are sometimes used as metaphors that generate thought and guide research that is often kinetic, mobile, and embodied. Works of art and other material artifacts can thus become a starting point – an active collaborative agent – for research and not just inert and static objects of study. Research in Curating absorbs insights from a variety of research methodologies, from the arts and other forms of creative expression, to the humanities and natural sciences. Curatorial approach thus offers an ideal site for collaborative, collective, and hybrid research that responds in new ways to the multiple and dynamic political, economic, ecological, and cultural challenges that characterize our volatile world as well as how knowledge about this world is produced.
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Contact
Programme Coordinator
- Phone hours
By appointment.
Head of Curating; Director of ProgrammeMagdalena HoldarSenior lecturer, associate professor
