Essays

All Items

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  Joella Q. Kiu

  ‘An Exploratory, Irregular Tendency’: Using Digital Gardens in Curatorial Research

  As we grapple with this pandemic-altered reality, institutions seek for new ways to present curatorial research online. With a focus on considered, attuned, and meaningful ways for presentation, this essay will explore the possibilities afforded by presenting curatorial research through the concept of ‘digital gardens.’ I demonstrate that digital gardens occupy an unusual space between social media feeds and fully formed publications or journal articles. With an emphasis on sampling-ideas and work-in-progress, digital gardens encourage growth whilst expressing a need to be tended. This essay examines how we might lean into the framework of a digital garden in a bid to reify the process-driven and the experimental aspects of curatorial work.

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  Ekaterina Andreeva

  Pontus Hultén and Museum Revolutions on the Territories of Moscow and St. Petersburg

  The experience of the exhibitions Moscow–Paris, 1900–1930 (the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, 1981), The Territory of Art and Atelier (the State Russian Museum, 1990), curated by Pontus Hultén, is addressed in this essay in relation to the context of the most recent developments in museology, to a large extent shaped by Claire Bishop’s book Radical Museology: Or What’s Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art? (2014). The author points out that the social engagement of the contemporary museum depends on the temporality of its audience, which is noticeable when considering examples of the Russian curatorial practice from 1990 to 2010. The function of the museum, the author argues, is not only to serve today’s interests of social groups, being the ‘meeting’ point of artists and the public, but also consciously to transform the present, working mainly with the artistic potential, that is, with the creative energy of the time accumulated in artworks, as it was done by Pontus Hultén in the exhibition Moscow–Paris.

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  Ashraf Jamal

  Blond Beast of Prey

  Against the backdrop of a global outcry and the battle against systemic racism, this essay examines the role of whiteness—as an idea, rather than as a racial category—in the maintenance of an acculturated system of power. I argue that race and racism are not the root of the problem but the symptom, and that the deeper issue resides in the inhumanity of institutions: in this case, the institution and culture of art, its values, its manifest self-regard, its exclusionary and controlling force. Through an examination of works by the artist Russell Bruns, I consider how, within the physical and ideological skin of whiteness, this malevolent project is challenged.