Migrations of Curatorial Work Carlos Quijon, Jr.
During the pandemic, it became necessary to reconsider the primacy of the physical exhibition as the privileged outcome of curatorial work. The exhibition was a site of encounter for art and its publics, and it required a discrete space where artworks and people gathered and interacted. This was a situation that in the context of the global health crisis became unfeasible, even life-threatening. The political and productive potential of the exhibition, ascribed in its capacity to animate and foreground the making public of art and the social contexts and relationalities that emerge from this assembly, coincided with the risks that came with the highly communicable airborne virus. This crisis required us to rethink the logic of curatorial work and the necessity of the physical exhibition as its culmination, and to imagine ways curatorial and artistic work may thrive in the time of the pandemic. How do we reimagine curatorial labour in this context? How do we cultivate art’s publics and its publicness in response to the timely and necessary problematisations of the exhibitionary form that the pandemic has forced us to recognise and respond to? How do we interrogate the unquestioned buzzwords about relationality thrown about in relation to contemporary art and exhibition-making, such as hospitality, collaboration and digitalisation, among others? Most importantly, how do we foreground their undeniably urgent ethical and pragmatic implications in the time of Covid? I attempt to think through these questions in relation to exhibitions and curatorial projects that I have been part of
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