Paul O’Neill: Did Somebody Say Curating, Again? Recent Turns in Curatorial Practice

Lecture: The Exhibition-as-Medium, the Exhibition-as-Form: Co-productive Exhibition-making and Attentiveness
May 12, 2014, at 7 pm, SCCA Project room, Metelkova 6, Ljubljana; the lecture will be held in English.

The group exhibition-form has become the primary site for curatorial experimentation and, as such, represents a relatively new discursive space around artistic practice. Paul O'Neill will look back at some of his exhibitions, and describe how cumulative and expanding exhibition-forms can constitute an investigation into how the curatorial role is made manifest through cohesive and co-operative exhibition-making structures applied during all stages of the exhibition production. This talk will demonstrate how exhibitions create spatial relations between different planes of interaction for the viewer, and how multiple agencies and actors are necessary for an understanding of the curatorial as a constellation of activities that can be represented by the final exhibition-form.

Workshop: May 13–15, 2014, SCCA Project room, Metelkova 6, Ljubljana

This workshop will look at recent turns in contemporary curatorial practice. In doing so it will explore certain concepts of the discursive, the durational and the educational turns in contemporary curating. The workshop will address the on-going 'discursive turn' in contemporary curating to the more recent 'educational turn' in a way that seeks a critical reconstruction of 'the exhibition' and 'the school' in curating and discursive practices. Key terms to be explored will be the curatorial, collaboration, duration, participation, ritual, citizenship, sociality, relationality, publicness, attentiveness, and the discursive.

Detailed programme and schedule.

Applications for the Workshop will be accepted up until Friday, May 9, 2014.

The fee for attending the workshop is 10 EUR. The number of participants is limited. Preference will be given to those who can attend the workshop in its entirety. The participation fee must be paid before the start of the workshop and is non-refundable.  

Please send your application with CV in English to: svetumetnosti@scca-ljubljana.si

Dr. Paul O'Neill is a curator, artist, writer and educator based in New York and Bristol. He is Director of the Graduate Program at the Centre for Curatorial Studies, Bard College in New York and has co-curated more than 50 exhibition projects across the world. O'Neill is international tutor at the de Appel Curatorial Program, Amsterdam since 2005 and has held numerous research and lecturing positions at Goldsmiths, University of London; Middlesex University; The Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media, Dublin and the University of the West of England, Bristol. Paul’s writing has been published in many books, catalogues, journals and magazines and he is a regular contributor to Art Monthly. He is reviews editor for Art and the Public Sphere Journal and is an editor of Afterall’s Exhibition Histories Series. He is on the editorial board of The Exhibitionist and The Journal of Curatorial Studies. He is editor of the curatorial anthology, Curating Subjects (2007), and co-editor of Curating and the Educational Turn with Mick Wilson (2010), both published by de Appel and Open Editions (Amsterdam and London), and author of Locating the Producers: Durational Approaches to Public Art (Amsterdam, Valiz, 2011), edited with Claire Doherty. He is author of the critically acclaimed book The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s), (Cambridge, MASS., The MIT Press, 2012). His forthcoming book Curating Research (de Appel and Open Editions) co-edited with Mick Wilson will be published in 2014.

These events are part of the 2014 World of Art public programme, which is being prepared by the SCCA–Ljubljana and the Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory.

The programme is supported by: the City of Ljubljana – Department for Culture; ERSTE Foundation; the United States Embassy in Ljubljana.