Millet Matrix: Contemporary Art, Collaboration, Curatorial Praxis

Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, 2022

This Dialogues section seeks to contribute to the scholarship on Latin American art in Canada and “Latinx Canadian art.” We aim to broaden the historical and current narratives of art and artists from Latin America north of the United States, taking into account Canada’s history of migration and its official bilingual status (French-English), multilingual and multicultural reality, and relationship with Indigenous peoples. Adding to the urgency of studying the presence of Latin American art in Canada, there is also a need to focus on the work of artists and curators with a Latin American background. They are developing languages of expression, practices, and aesthetics that no longer conform to the “Latin American art” category. It is thus essential to highlight the multiple artistic initiatives that are allowing them to gain visibility and recognition within both the local and global artistic milieus. We posit that today it is almost impossible to overlook both the historical and the ongoing presence of Latin American art and artists in Canada and the recent emergence of a vibrant, ever-expanding contemporary Latinx Canadian art scene. This section proposes six groundbreaking contributions that, from coast to coast, offer further data and analysis, case studies, and investigations into museum archives: from Vancouver to Montréal, from pre-Columbian art and material culture to contemporary art, from the Chilean diaspora of the 1970s to more recent migration waves, from curatorial strategies to the classroom.

Leonardo, 2012

Postgraduate Programme in Curating (ZHdK), 2014

During my time at the Postgraduate Programme in Curating at Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), I had the great opportunity to work extensively on two projects by the socially-engaged Dutch artist, Jeanne van Heeswijk: the seventh installment of her Public Faculty series in Zurich (May 2013) and the closing conference for her long-term project, Freehouse, titled “Radicalizing the Local”, in Rotterdam (January 2014). I must admit that I began my involvement in socially-engaged art skeptically. And yet, through my involvement, my attitude began to transform, as only the more meaningful of engagements can do. This isn’t, however, a story of Skeptic-turned-Believer; it is rather a story of shifting focus: from the existential Is-This-Art? via the epistemological How-Is-This-Art? to the aesthetic What-Does-This-Art-Look-Like? This shift, however, is not a dismissal of the first two questions as irrelevant; I think they are indeed very relevant and interesting explorations. However, part of the shift of my focus is the acknowledgement of socially engaged art as a fait accompli in the domain of contemporary art. As such, the shift addresses one of the most prevalent critiques of socially-engaged art, its so-called dismissal of the aesthetic. It could be argued that the shift in conceptual and post-conceptual art was not so much a shift from materiality to immateriality, but rather a shift of aesthetic emphasis from the material to the immaterial. Most of these artworks remained very much material, whether in the person of the artist, the audience, or whatever is in between. And as such, the material remains often the infrastructure of how we encounter these works, and therefore still a large part of them. As in any genre, the aesthetics of the material infrastructure of this specific genre of post-conceptual art, namely socially-engaged art, was set in its early years by formative examples of it. I will therefore consider two such iconic examples, namely Democracy by Group Material and If You Lived Here by Martha Rosler. Both exhibitions took place at the Dia Art Foundation in New York in the late eighties. I contend that, despite the criticism that this genre devalues the aesthetic, the aesthetic choices made in it influenced much of its works for years, till our very day. Part of the interesting transformation of our day, however, is the proliferation of digital media and the influence that the virtual realm has had on issues of publicness. Accordingly, socially-engaged practices are transforming right along, some more embracing of the new media than others. As such, one of the questions that I hope to address in this study, as well, is how the aesthetics set by the early foundational projects of the genres translate in this transition. Thesis Dissertation Excerpt Master of Advanced Studies (MAS) Postgraduate Programme in Curating Institute for Cultural Studies in the Arts (ICS) Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) Jury: • Dr. Dorothee Richter • Elke Krasny • Raphael Gygax May 31, 2014

CHAPTER ABSTRACT: I present a review of pertinent literature, scholarly research, and historical profiles that address the subject of the paradox of artistic agency in light of the institutionalization of art and art presentation. Particularly, as this subject pertains to two central movements in artist activities arising in the late 1960s and 1970s — namely the development of artist-run spaces (artist-run centres in Canada) and the emergence of the genre of artistic practice known as institutional critique — this chapter situates both attendant histories before correlating each to the conceptual and social turns in critical art discourses; debates which influence and continue to impact understandings of each movement’s productive arc. THESIS ABSTRACT: ART ADMINISTRATION AS PERFORMATIVE PRACTICE / ORGANIZING ART AS INSTITUTIONAL CRITIQUE A propositional rethinking of art administration within the artist-run institution, this thesis contributes new conceptualizations of operations of the artist-run centre in Canada. The suggestion is that art administration practiced therein is a specialized embodied expression of the institution as apparatus. Proposing that the Canadian artist-run context is a form of and forum for institutional critique, this analysis argues that the art administrator is a unique practice of mediation in art called “diagnostic organizing;” a negotiative role gesturing toward performative relationships to protocol. Recontextualizing art administration as embodying the interface between art and policy, this study also names “performing the context” as an experimental and critical approach to arts facilitation. The work of artist Andrea Fraser is investigated for her writing and practices of institutional critique, as is the arts presentation project Kunstverein Toronto where Co-Director’s Kari Cwynar and Kara Hamilton’s performative language and gestures communicate their facilitative practices.

EXHIBITIVE CARTOGRAPHIES II Critical Instrumentation, Exhibitive and Curatorial Narratives, 2024

The aim of this conference is to present, examine and contextualise curatorial practices in contemporary art, in Croatia and the region, but also specifically in regard to our lecturer Pedro Lorente’s thesis on “museums as cathedrals of urban modernity”. It is important to note that the history of curatorial practices is a relatively little studied area in Croatian art history, while it is increasingly present at the international level. Our objective with this conference is to address this important subject at the crossroads of art criticism, theory and practice. There has been increasing interest in exhibition history and contextualisation of curatorial practices in art-historical research. While we can trace back exhibition history in the modern sense of a universal right to publicness to the revolutionary turmoils of the late 18th century, it was the avant-garde tendencies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries that gave the history of exhibition practices a new dimension, paving the way for innovative methods, participation and the questioning of existing institutional policies, contextual frameworks and models of presentation. The emergence of neo-avantgarde and the institutional critique of the 1950s and 1960s destabilised the conventional meanings and institutional positions of artists, artworks, curators and audiences, which led to a more active role of curators in mediating new artistic expressions, but also to radical questioning of their own position. Curators became increasingly active in the creation of meaning, assuming more and more often, with their gestures or texts, the role of meta-artists, especially in the domain of conceptual art. Redefining the position of the curator-author has increasingly come into focus since the emergence of conceptual/neo-avantgarde tendencies in art. The starting point of the conference is the curatorial figure of Želimir Koščević, the 2018 laureate of AICA Croatia’s Annual Award and Lifetime Achievement Award. Exposed to late modernism but also to counterculture in former Yugoslavia, as a relatively young art historian, Želimir Koščević won a fellowship from Stockholm’s Moderna Museet.

Oxford Art Journal, 2013

FRESCO Collective Publications, 2019

The purpose of this thesis is to define the concept of the curatorial, the artist-curator and to explore the various notions around these concepts. It is also to explore the various modes of exhibition display, the history of these modes, how they can be experimental, how the gallery space can be considered an artistic medium and how the exhibition space can be gendered in the masculine. I will do this by selecting various case studies throughout the history of exhibition-making and comparing and contrasting these to form a well-balanced hypothesis. I will do this by referencing the artist-curator Dorothy Cross’s exhibition Trove at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the artist Janine Antoni’s project Loving Care, Lucy Lippard’s exhibition 557,087, Harald Szeeman’s landmark exhibition When Attitudes Become Form: Live In Your Head and the theorists Nicholas Bourriaud and Hans Ulrich Obrist.