90710 - LAB - Curatorial Practices

Learning outcomes

Students learn the basic theoretical and practical approaches of curating exhibitions and they explore various curatorial methodologies and strategies for different forms of exhibitions (monographic, thematic, collection presentations, performances, media-based and interactive projects, etc.). They become also familiar with social practice and urban projects in public contexts, and with alternative or artist-run spaces. Through readings and discussions, viewing assignments and journals, field trips, and guest lectures, they are able to analyse the role of curators and cultural producers today.

Course contents

This lab aims at engaging students with colonial traces in the urban landscape and heritage, and with the colonially of power in present times. The ‘translation’ of theories into artworks and installations - through an array of different aesthetic registers and languages - will be the central component of the Lab. Our ambition is to reflect on how to produce art that can bring about perceptual (and emotional) re-orientations around issues of ‘race’, self and otherness.

To that aim, the laboratory will encourage students to address the ways in which art, politics and academic literature can intertwine and on the transformative potentials of different genres.

The overarching conceptual framework of the Lab stems from Jacques Ranciere’s insights on the relation between aesthetics and politics in the production of consensus and dissensus. Notably, dissensus must cut across and destabilise consensus -that is assigned hierarchies and normative forms of belonging, genres and discourses - by introducing new subjects and objects into the field of perception.

Our laboratory will be articulated through a combination of engagement with theories, lectures and guest lectures, class discussions and presentations, and the production of art projects/installations. Through aesthetic subversion and perceptual challenges, we hope to contribute to creating spaces of debate around public discourse on issues such as identity, racial constructions and belonging. We will reflect on what resistance (or dissensus) can look like in political art such as subvertising (the removing, altering, and replacing outdoor advertisements), urban interruptions, aesthetic disruptions as ways of destabilising dominant discourses and aesthetic representations which normalise racial hierarchies and racism. By focusing on the aesthetic dimension of politics and the political dimension of art, students will be encouraged to think of ways of challenging dominant representations (consensus) and bring about dissensus. Our explorations of these issues will draw from different contexts and historical experiences across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

 

Past events in the Lab included:

4th April 2023: Decolonial walk with Resistenze in Cirenaica. Meeting at 10:00 at Casa di Quartiere Scipione del Ferro, Via Sante Vincenzi 50

11th April: Wissal Houbabi on decolonising art practices and museums

The artwork of Wissal Houbabi

https://www.einaudi.it/autori/wissal-houbabi/

18th April: Which memory which history? Statues and decolonial memory

A workshop with Victoria Klinkert and Jadeel Andreetto

Introduction: Ruba Salih

Speakers:

Victoria Klinkert: Statues, Ignorance and the Politics of Memory – Decolonial and Abolitionist Approaches.

Jadel Andreetto: Title tba

Victoria L. Klinkert is an anthropologist interested in decolonial theory, critical whiteness studies and abolitionisms. She is currently a researcher at the University of St Gallen, where she is researching notions of responsibility in the afterlives of slavery. Victoria completed her PhD at SOAS, in which she conducted an ethnography on white ignorance within an elite university in the UK as well as within British anthropology itself. She has published on her research, as well as on decolonising ethnographies and anthropology (with Prof Raminder Kaur) in HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, and Darkmatter as well as in Teaching Anthropology (with Zouhair Hammana and the River and Fire Collective). She is currently working on her monograph.

Jadeel Andreetto is an activist, known for his work as a novelist, screenwriter and musician. He holds a significant role as a founding member of the Resistenze In Cirenaica project, a permanent cultural think tank established in 2015. This initiative is renowned for pioneering the concept of "odonomastic guerrilla warfare," which involves the recontextualization or hacking of street signs, commemorative plaques, and monuments. Additionally, the project hosts public events such as narrated walks. Through these efforts, RIC collectively opposes historical amnesia by bringing buried narratives to light and challenging misconceptions.
Among his latest publications: La parola Amore Uccide (co-authored with G. Pispisa) and published by Rizzoli and the docufilm Sudtirock: Music on the Edge whcih will be released next June 2024.

Students with SLD or temporary or permanent disabilities. It is suggested that they get in touch as soon as possible with the relevant University office (https://site.unibo.it/studenti-con-disabilita-e-dsa/en) and with the lecturer in order to seek together the most effective strategies for following the lessons and/or preparing for the examination.

Readings/Bibliography

Ahmed, Sara. 2014. The cultural politics of emotions (Second edition.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, Introduction. Feel your way.

Fieni, D. 2012. What a Wall Wants, or How Graffiti Thinks: Nomad Grammatology in the French Banlieue. Diacritics 40 (2), 72-93

Haiven, M. & A. Khasnabish. 2010. What is Radical Imagination? A Special Issue. Affinities: A Journal of Radical Theory, Culture, and Action. 4 (2), i-xxxvii.

Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Blackwell, 1991.

Raminder Kaur and Victoria Louisa Klinkert, Decolonizing ethnographies [https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/713966]

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2021 11:1, 246-255

Rancière, J. & S. Corcoran 2010. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics.New York & London: Continuum

Rancière, J. 2010. Ten Theses on Politics. In Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. J. Rancière & S. Corcoran, 27-44. London & New York: Continuum

Salih, R and Richter-Devroe, S. (2014) ‘Cultures of Resistance. The case of Palestine and beyond’ Arab Studies Journal, Spring 2014 (Vol. XXII No. 1).

Schacter, R. 2008. An ethnography of iconoclash. Journal of Material Culture. 13(1), 35-61.

Stoler, Ann Laura. “Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination.” Cultural Anthropology, vol. 23, no. 2, 2008, pp. 191–219. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20484502.

Ann Laura Stoler, 2013. "Introduction “the Rot Remains”: From Ruins to Ruination", Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination, Ann Laura Stoler

Teaching methods

Frontal lectures will be delivered, but the Lab will mainly be the developed through class discussions, elaborations, projects planning and presentations.

In addition, for this Lab, we will be working in tandem with the visual arts methodology class of Prof. Annalisa Frisina at the University of Padova and their work on urban decolonisation and resignification.We will have two combined sessions together, one in Padova and one in Bologna, where students will be able to introduce and present their work in progress and final projects to each other.

We are also planning to organise decolonial walkings/visits in the city of Bologna assisted by activists/artists (to be confirmed)

Assessment methods

Students will be forming groups and will work together in producing their artwork/projects. These can take many different shapes. They can be a mini-ethnographic project, an assemblage of images, an installation of a flipchart in a student accommodation or in a public square with an image or a question that can be asked to passers-by. Similarly, artwork can take the shape of a photographic project, a musical composition or a documentary, it can be a demonstration, a subvertising project or an alteration of dominant images around self and otherness. An oral history project with a visual art component could also be presented. These are just ideas which by no means exhaust the array of possibilities. You are encouraged to use your creativity to interrogate the world around you (or far away), through a race/gender lens in a creative and personal way.

Alongside this, each group will submit and present a brief commentary reflecting on how academic literature inspired the themes raised in the projects. This commentary can be 1-3 pages long and will:

1) Identify and spell out a question (can be, but not strictly limited to, the topics addressed in the Lab).

2) Refer to and quote academic literature to elaborate on the essay question.

3) Elaborate on how the art-project visualises the question the commentary is addressing. Engage with academic debates and with academic literature on the topic.

5) If you are elaborating on your positionality, because this is relevant for the project and question you are dealing with, you are encouraged to write in the first person in the commentary

A list of references is provided but this is to be considered an open ended syllabus which will be enriched by students’ contributions and items throughout the duration of the Lab

Final project (100% of the grade) to be averaged with the course Curating the contemporary.

Please note: the Lab- Curatorial Practices is part of the Curating the contemporary course. Curatorial Practices and Contemporary Art is an integrated exam of 12 CFU (6 CFU+6 CFU) and the verification and evaluation of the preparation follow the procedures laid down for an integrated exam, i.e. they must be taken in the same session and students must then register simultaneously for both exams.

Erasmus students have the possibility of taking the Lab as a separate course for 6 credits.

Students with SLD or temporary or permanent disabilities. It is necessary to contact the relevant University office (https://site.unibo.it/studenti-con-disabilita-e-dsa/en) with ample time in advance: the office will propose some adjustments, which must in any case be submitted 15 days in advance to the lecturer, who will assess the appropriateness of these in relation to the teaching objectives.

 

Office hours

See the website of Ruba Salih