Stockholm university

Curating

The role of the curator has become increasingly expansive since the turn of the 21st century. Curating, synonymous throughout the late 1900s with freelance exhibition production, today encompasses a greater number of functions connecting a wide range of creative practitioners (including artists, architects, filmmakers and writers) with an audience.

Subject description

Central to curatorial practice is the task of organizing and enabling the encounter between audiences and artworks, often involving highly diverse and differentiated forms of expression and audience orientation.

Curatorial work embraces both critical approaches (through questioning norms and power hierarchies to historical and philosophical perspectives) and practice (including the management of collections and the production of exhibitions, events and other projects), together with mediation through verbal, digital and printed communication.

The International Master's Programme in Curating Art provides you with the theoretical tools and practical knowledge to analyze, develop, organize, arrange and mediate curatorial projects. The programme is founded on close collaboration between the disciplines of art history, philosophy, business administration, and law, together with numerous institutions beyond the university, such as kunsthalles, galleries, museums and publishing companies.

Career opportunities

The programme prepares you for working as an institutional or freelance curator, exhibition producer or project manager, and also provides the perquisites for applying to research programs.

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 studies is a relatively young academic discipline, and has been an area of significant growth internationally since the first academic programmes began to emerge in the mid-1980s and early 1990s.

Research in this area broadly focusses on exploration, development, evaluation and innovation of the curatorial, in its artistic, aesthetic, social, critical and political dimensions. Therefore, by its very nature, curatorial studies research is dynamically transdisciplinary – a nexus where contributors from a range of disciplines may conjoin with curatorial practitioners and artists to investigate curation’s shifting concerns and parameters.

Concomitant with this is the development of curatorial education and pedagogy itself. For a field where career access and progression has traditionally involved apprenticeship arrangements in museums, galleries and institutions, curatorial studies today require new ways of teaching to ask the questions, address the tasks and evaluate different approaches which will lead to conceptual and practical success.