ARCHIVO READING GROUP

Productive uncertainty or fatal vagueness?

The temporality, materiality, and parasitical

aspects of curatorial theory.

DR. SARA CALLAHAN

In the reading group we  bring together different elements of curatorial theory.

How does the curatorial relate to the materiality and immateriality of the image, and what does it contribute to present-day understandings of seriality, the network, the archive and the collection?

How does the curatorial differ from what appear to be similar notions such as “assembly”, “constellation”, and “ecology”? 

The curatorial has been criticized as a symptom of ahistorical presentism of the current moment, yet it is also embedded in processes of preserving and activating objects and ideas of the past. How do the different texts—implicitly and explicitly—describe the temporality of the curatorial?

Much curatorial theory stress the embedded criticality in the notion of “the curatorial”, yet the figure of the curator is also often seen as the ultimate neo-liberal entrepreneurial project-manager and marketer. What kind of critical potential is outlined in the texts we have read, and what is not addressed? How does this critique align (or not) with the notion of “care” also stressed by many who theorize the curatorial?

Participants will focus on discussing the usefulness and limits of curatorial theory, and they are invited to bring examples of specific ways that they “curate” objects and ideas in their own practices.

Dr Sara Callahan is an art historian whose research focuses on art and visual culture from the twentieth and twenty-first century. Her various research projects converge around the question of how artistic and other visual practices relate to theories, attitudes, and phenomena from non-art contexts, and how the present interacts and interferes with history in different ways. Callahan is interested in the way artworks identify and process the most pressing issues of the day in ways that engage knowledge and ideas from scientific, philosophical and political contexts, and she believes that by studying and understanding phenomena in the artworld, we can better understand the multifaceted aspects of the world around us. Callahan’s book Art + Archive: Understanding the Archival Turn in Contemporary Art was published by Manchester University Press in their series Rethinking Art’s Histories in 2022. She is currently finishing a monographic study that investigates how photographic motion studies have been activated in different discourses and visual culture since the late-nineteenth century. In addition, she is currently developing a project about clouds as a visual and conceptual motif in contemporary art; a study that ties nineteenth century studies of clouds to present-day artworks that engage with the cloud as technological and environmental concern.

More information:

Reading Materials are available at the Archivo Intranet.