152 – 171

ACTION RESEARCH:
GENERATIVE CURATORIAL
PRACTICES
Kate Fowle
Action Research: Generative Curatorial Practices 153 

In 1997, fifteen curators from around the world met at the Rockefeller
Conference Centre in Bellagio, Italy, to discuss the emerging phenomenon
of ‘international’ exhibitions. (1)  Chronicled by art critic, Michael Brenson,
who attended to write a report for participants and funders, conversa-
tions centred on whether biennials, or projects of a similar scale, could
address the pressing cultural concerns of the time as well as the practical
and conceptual issues that arise in producing such shows.
Brenson’s account began by pronouncing that the ‘era of the
curator’ was upon us, going on to outline what he described as the
‘challenges facing the curatorial profession to think deeply about multiple
audiences and to allow individual curatorial perspectives to be invig-
orated by radically, even shockingly, different experiences of space and
time, memory and history’. Recognising the expanding responsibilities of
the curator in providing a framework for art in relation to broader world
politics – namely the ‘meanings and possibilities of art in a post-Cold
War, post-colonial, fin-de-siècle moment’ – he warned that such high
stakes do not reward ‘curatorial business as usual’. (2)  The time had come
to understand, and act upon, what it meant to work in diverse cultural
and geographical contexts.
This summit occurred during a year in which five biennials ­– Cairo,
Havana, Istanbul, Johannesburg, Venice – and a documenta took place,
in a decade that witnessed an unprecedented rise in interest around
curating. According to a recent study, thirty-two biennials were instigated
during the 1990s, in comparison to the twenty-seven that were created
altogether in the period between 1895 and 1989. (3)  The 1990s was also

1. Participants in the Bellagio conference were: Margaret Archuleta, Curator of

Twentieth-Century Art, the Heard Museum, Phoenix; René Block, Director, Museum
Fridericianum, Kassel; Michael Brenson, New York; Germano Celant, Curator of
Contemporary Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Kinshasha Holman
Conwill, Director, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Vishaka N. Desai, Director of
the Galleries, Asia Society, New York; Okwui Enwezor, Artistic Director, Second
Johannesburg Biennial; N. Fulya Erdemci, Director, 13th International Istanbul
Biennial; Lillian Godoy, Director, Centro Wifredo Lam, Havana; Madeleine
Grynsztejn, curator of Twentieth-Century Art, Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh; Paolo
Herkenhoff, Chief Curator, Fundação Bienal de São Paulo; Virginia Pérez-Ratton,
Director, Museo de Arte y Disñeo Contemporáneo, San Jose, Costa Rica; Apininan
Poshyananda, Associate Director, Center of Academic Resources, Chulalongkorn
University, Bangkok; Mari Carmen Ramirez, Curator of Latin American Art, Jack S.
Blanton Museum of Art, Austin; Remi Sagna, Secrétaire Général, Daka Biennial;
Caroline Turner, Deputy Director, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane.
2. Michael Brenson, ‘The Curator’s Moment’. CAA Art Journal. Vol. 57. No. 4.
Winter 1998. pp. 16-27.
3. Sabine B. Vogel, Biennials – Art on a Global Scale. Springer-Verlag/Wien.
2010. pp. 118-119
Kate Fowle 154 

a time during which curatorial masters programmes were established. (4) 

These degrees were premised on the notion that, just as an artist could
be trained to develop a practice, so too could a burgeoning curator.
Perhaps more importantly, the programmes instituted the model of
curators taking time out to talk about and reflect upon their profession,
for the sake of future generations’ learning. Over a relatively short time,
this self-reflexivity has given us a curatorial discourse through which we
make sense of the circumstances we find ourselves working in today.
In spite of this, however, many of the uncertainties raised at the
1997 summit still seem as relevant as they were then. The questions as to
whether art can speak for itself when presented out of its cultural context
and whether we should be seeking intrinsic meaning in the form of an
artwork, as opposed to amplifying the value of what it represents, are still
up for judgment. As a curator, is it really possible to produce exhibitions
beyond your own cultural knowledge? How do you find out what you don’t
know? Are there ways to continuously process and update research in
order to generate fresh perspectives? In an art world that is increasingly
intertwined with ‘real life’ politics, how do you navigate the contradic-
tions this can create, presenting work in contexts that neither obfuscate
nor distort meaning? What does it mean to work internationally?
This text asks: which of the experimental curatorial practices of
the 1990s can be brought to bear in understanding how curators have
developed ways of working that respond to changing cultural and political
imperatives in an ever-expanding art world. It begins at the outset of the
decade – with the proliferation of the biennial format and the emergence
of a new discourse around curating and exhibitions – charting the tensions
between theory and practice in establishing curatorial precedents.
The notion of research is interrogated throughout, in a bid to
assess what constitutes a curatorial research, as opposed to any other
kind. In particular, the process is explored as a lens through which to make
sense of any instinct toward unfamiliar situations and concepts as well as
the propositions artists offer us. Finally, by recognising the decade of
the 1990s as one that witnessed radical shifts within the infrastructure of
art, this chapter starts to evaluate the relevance of informal, peer-to-peer
networks in the reappraisal of what so-called cultural ‘exchange’ can
be. By exploring the curatorial imperatives of the people that pioneered

4. For example, the École du Magasin in Grenoble, France in 1987; the Royal
College of Art in London, UK in 1992; the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard
College in Annandale-on-Hudson, US in 1994, etc.
Action Research: Generative Curatorial Practices 155 

experimental approaches to global connectivity, the reasons for building

generative practices become more evident and, indeed, pressing.

* * *

In exhibition history, the story of the 1990s begins at the end of

the previous decade. Four years in the making, Magiciens de la Terre was
conceived and promoted as the first ‘global’ exhibition of contemporary
art. Curated by Jean-Hubert Martin and installed at both the Centre
George Pompidou and the Grande Halle La Villette in 1989, the show
was initiated as an alternative to the traditional format of the Biennale
de Paris, which it temporarily replaced. Magiciens presented work by a
hundred artists – fifty from the United States and Western Europe juxta-
posed with fifty from Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, Central and South
America, Australia and Oceania – who were each, according to an early
press statement, ‘committed to the avant-garde’. (5) 
Martin produced Magiciens in response to what he regarded
as the structural and ideological problems of large-scale shows that
predominantly relied on cultural diplomacy for the selection of artists
and works. The examples he referred to included the Biennale de Paris,
which had been in operation since 1959, as well as the Triennale-India
(since 1968), the Sydney Biennale (1973), the Havana and Cairo biennials
(1984) and the Istanbul Biennial, which started in 1987, midway through
the curator’s preparations. In his first statement on Magiciens in 1986,
Martin emphasised: ‘This exhibition will bring together artists from all
over the world, not just from developed, capitalist countries. […] The
artists in the exhibition will not be picked and shown as ambassadors
of their countries to demonstrate their nation’s cultural, economic, and
political skills, but as individuals from all the world striving towards
spiritual fulfilment’. (6) 
In outlining his selection criteria, Martin described his curatorial
research process as one of looking for artists whose practice was
experimental within their own traditions; this involved a search for art that
reflected on relations between different cultures, and for practitioners
whose methods of working could be displaced from their original site to be

5. ‘Magiciens de la Terre. The Death of Art – Long Live Art’. Press Release.
Centre Georges Pompidou. 1986.
6. Ibid.
Kate Fowle 156 

adapted to the specific conditions and scale of the Parisian venues. (7)  His
emphasis was on conducting fieldwork, travelling extensively to meet with
artists in their studios or place of practice, as well as providing research
trips to a few Western artists to inform new work for the show. Martin
also enlisted the support of three curatorial colleagues as advisors on the
exhibition concept, as well as involving other specialists – ethnographers,
anthropologists, historians and critics – in helping him to decide where
to go and who to meet without relying on official diplomatic networks. (8) 
Adamantly upholding his own vision, Martin claimed: ‘This project can
only be realised wholly independently of all political machinery, national
or international. It will be the first properly international exhibition by one
organiser who can guarantee the intellectual unity of his selection.’
While this aim of avoiding bureaucratic channels created the
potential for developing a transnational network of peers, Martin’s
insistence on maintaining a singular perspective, ‘open and receptive
towards other civilizations, but […] made from a Western standpoint’ (9) 
propelled the exhibition into the heart of postcolonial debate. The process
also revealed the problematic behind the nascent form of international
curating: how does one begin to research and engage with art that exists
beyond one’s own cultural references, to create a ‘new internationalism’,
as opposed to using the premise that the more countries represented
through the selection of artists, the more ‘international’ the show? (10) 
Many critics concur that, to his credit, Martin at least demon-
strated wide-ranging research practices, particularly in his emphasis
on selecting artists from cultures in transition. Chilean-born, US-based

7. ‘Magiciens de la Terre. One Exhibition, Two Sites’. Press Release. Centre

Georges Pompidou. 1989.
8. ‘Magiciens de la Terre. The Death of Art – Long Live Art’. Press Release.
Centre Georges Pompidou. 1986. A number of sources cite different curators and
researchers as central to the project. The following list is one produced for the
credits in the exhibition materials for the opening: Jan Debbaut; Mark Francis;
Jean-Louis Maubant; Fei Da Wei; Cherif Khaznadar; Thierry De Duve; Pierre
Gaudibert; Yves Michaud; Aline Luque; Andre Magnin; Thomas McEvilley; Homi
Bhabha; Jacques Souliliou; Bernard Marcade.
9. Ibid.
10. Michael Brenson, ‘Review/Art; Juxtaposing the New From All Over’. The New
York Times. May 20 1989. http://www.nytimes.com/1989/05/20/arts/review-art-
juxtaposing-the-new-from-all-over.html
Thomas McEvilley, ‘APENDIX A The Global Issue’ in Art and Otherness. Crisis in
Cultural Identity. McPherson & Company. 1992. pp. 153-158.
Rasheed Araeen, ‘Our Bauhaus Others’ Mudhouse’ in Rasheed Araeen and Jean
Fisher (eds.), Third Text: Third World Perspectives on Contemporary Art and Culture.
Kala Press, part of the organisation Black Umbrella (Project MRB). 1989. pp. 3-14.
Third Text: Third World Perspectives on Contemporary Art and Culture comprises all
but one (Lucy Lippard’s text from Les Cahiers) of the articles from the special issue
of Les Cahiers du Musée National d’Art Moderne, No. 28, published at the occasion
of the exhibition Magiciens de la Terre at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.
Action Research: Generative Curatorial Practices 157 

Alfredo Jaar – who presented a series of photographic light boxes

portraying the impact of illegal toxic waste dumping in Koko, Nigeria –
suggested that the show was the first to present his work alongside that
of artists from countries that were the subject of his concerns: ‘Since I
began working, I’ve dealt with the issue of the widening gap between the
so-called Third World and the industrialized world. In this show, perhaps
for the first time, my work was seen in its proper context’. (11)  Jaar also
suggested that the show was pioneering because of the number of
artists that were invited, often for the first time outside their own country,
to produce work on site. The incongruity of the installation period did not
go unnoticed, however: ‘One morning, there was Esther Mahlangu from
South Africa painting her house. In front of her Cyprien Tokkoudagba
from Benin was finishing a sculpture. Next to both of them, a group of
Australian Aboriginal artists were working on their sand painting, and five
meters further in the back, Richard Long was making one of his large mud
drawings. What a sight! They were so close together and so far apart at
the same time’. (12) 
Lawrence Weiner, one of the artists Martin travelled with in
advance of the show to ‘initiate dialogues’ and ‘question the relationship
of our culture to other cultures in the world’, also reported a distancing
when he went to Papua New Guinea.  (13)  On describing this trip, he
admitted: ‘I don’t know where along the way, probably on the airplane,
I realized there was something a little bit greasy about the whole thing’.
Weiner went on to explain that, while there was plenty of shared ground
from which to engage with local artists, he was more interested in the
fact that dialogue was not actually happening between the generations
living and working there, even at the art school:

They were excluding a lot of kids who were not making things
for the European tourism; meaning copies of what had been previously
done, which they were calling their heritage. It was their heritage, but why
would a fourteen-year-old be doing that? They wanted to make other things.
So we made a coin that was exactly like the ‘Kina’ in New Guinea (which
has a hole in the middle) and inscribed ‘Now Him It Art Belong You & Me’
around it, which just means ‘The Art of Today Belongs to Us’. People could

11. Alfredo Jaar, ‘The Peripatetic Artist: 14 Statements’. Art in America. Vol. 77.
No. 7. July 1989. p. 131. Interviews conducted by Lilly Wei, Elisabeth Baker.
12. Ibid.
13. Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, ‘The Whole Earth Show: An Interview with
Jean-Hubert Martin’. Art in America, Vol. 77. No. 5. May 1989. p. 155.
Kate Fowle 158 

wear it around their neck. It’s not very profound. It was a way of saying you
could love your children without them having to resemble you. (14) 

In contradiction to the accounts from participating artists, the

exhibition title, ‘Magicians of the Earth’, suggests that the artists
possessed some kind of pre-rational or spiritual connectivity to each other
and their surroundings. In actuality, the artists’ only shared experience
appears to be that of the early contradictions of globalisation. Somewhere
between these two paradigms – the connectivity suggested by the title
and the distancing described by the artists – Martin’s curatorial strategy
revealed (as described by critic, Eleanor Heartney) ‘an awareness of
the theoretical debates currently raging within the disciplines of anthro-
pology and ethnography’, but little acknowledgement of ‘the reality of
power politics’. (15)  What’s more, the curator’s desire to circumnavigate
the national and international ‘political machinery’ for the sake of ‘intel-
lectual unity’ did not ensure that the artists involved or the art presented
was removed from the burden of national or cultural representation. In
fact, through the emphasis on anthropology, it could be argued that many
of the artists were framed more by their cultural representation than their
individual merits.
Martin’s claim – that the show was not a ‘World Art catalogue’
but a site for dialogue and exchange – further highlighted the complex
question of what constitutes being ‘open and receptive to other civiliza-
tions’. In one curatorial statement, he described exchange as ‘borrowings’
and ‘the theft of influences’, (16)  while ‘dialogue’, in the context of this

14. Lawrence Weiner in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist at Manchester City
Art Gallery, July 2013. As part of the public programme for do it. Unpublished
transcribed quotation from a response to a question from the author, ‘Can you tell
me about your participation in Magiciens de la Terre?’
15. Eleanor Heartney, ‘The Whole Earth Show. Part II’. Art in America. Vol. 77.
No. 7. July 1989. pp. 95-96. For further examples see also Benjamin H.D. Buchloh,
op cit. p. 211.
Jean-Hubert Martin: Rather than showing that Abstraction is a universal language, or
that the return to figuration is now happening everywhere in the world, I want to
show the real difference and the specificity of the different cultures.
Benjamin Buchloh: But what are the real differences between the different cultures
at this point? […] Don’t you think that by excluding these political and economical
aspects and by focusing exclusively on the cultural relationships between Western
centres and developing nations, you will inevitably generate a neo-colonialist
reading?
J.-H.M.: That implies that the visitors of the exhibition would be unable to recognize
the relationships between the centres and the Third World.
16. ‘Magiciens de la Terre. The Death of Art – Long Live Art’. Press Release.
Centre Georges Pompidou. 1989.
‘Magiciens de la Terre. The First World-wide Exhibition of Contemporary Art’. Press
Release. Centre Georges Pompidou. 1989.
Action Research: Generative Curatorial Practices 159 

show, can only really be construed as terminology for the formal juxta-
position of works within the exhibition design. The curator’s travel notes
indicate that the meetings he had with various artists and advisors during
his research could constitute conversations, (17)  but, as Weiner’s account
reveals, the exchange that occurred as the result of research travel was
not necessarily in line with the conceptual intentions of the show or the
messages it was supposed to convey.
In her article for a special issue of Les Cahiers du Musée National
d’Art Moderne, published to coincide with the opening of the exhibition,
the cultural theorist, Jean Fisher, indicated that such research was a new
guise of imperialism: ‘The West’s traditionally anthropocentric search
for lost utopias has never resulted in equal exchange with others […]
[and] the recent interest shown by our cultural institutions in creative
work outside the paradigms of modernism raises the suspicion that, as
so often in the past, the West is turning to other worlds to revitalize itself
in the face of a spiritual and sociopolitical bankruptcy’. (18) 
As radically polarised as Fisher’s and Martin’s perspectives were,
there was perhaps a tacit agreement around the so-called ‘bankruptcy’
of the West. The common quest was one of resolution, particularly in
relation to that which constitutes effective exchange. Martin emphasised
his perspective on this when writing about the meta-objective behind
Magiciens: ‘The particular needs of this project require that a constant
exchange takes place between theory and practice, and that both
constantly correct each other in the course of the preparation of this
exhibition. It is not that discourse on intercultural relationships has been
absent from French thought; what is missing are the pragmatic forms of
putting this discourse into practice’. (19) 
The attempt to merge theory and practice through exhibition-
making, and Martin’s emphasis on primary research, perhaps explains
why Magiciens still resonates today. Throughout the development of the
show, Martin can be seen testing ideas by thinking aloud through various
press statements, travel journals and media interviews. The processes of
creating the exhibition became a form of ‘action research’ and, as such,
a vehicle through which the curator continuously built knowledge and

17. Extracts from Jean-Hubert Martin’s diaries; correspondence; press releases;

exhibition materials were all given to the author by Fei Dawei as scans from his
personal archive, part of which can be found in the Asia Art Archive, Fei Dawei
Archive: Collection Description VI. Magiciens de la Terre. http://www.aaa.org.hk/
Collection/SpecialCollections/Details/22
18. Rasheed Araeen and Jean Fisher, op cit. p. 79.
19. Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, op cit. p. 157.
Kate Fowle 160 

experience; even if this was largely through contradiction and opposition,

as a curatorial strategy, this approach had few precedents at the time.
Four years after Magiciens de la Terre and a continent away, the
1993 biennial exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New
York was one of a number of exhibitions in that year’s art world calendar
which foregrounded what was becoming known as ‘issue-based’ or
‘socially-engaged’ practice. Curated by Elisabeth Sussman, the 1993
biennial addressed the theoretical issues of multiculturalism and the
Culture Wars by presenting artists whose practice engaged, to a greater
or lesser degree, with migration, diaspora, displacement, gender and
race in the United States. (20) 
Interestingly, the curators’ selection criteria addressed almost
the same interests as those Martin had focused on for Magiciens de
la Terre, but the motivation appears to be quite different. As outlined
by Sussman in her catalogue essay, the co-curators each researched
artists who were: committed as much to ideas as to aesthetics (compare
with Martin: art that was radical in its own tradition), making work that
portrayed identities and nationalisms in flux (Martin: art that reflected
relations between different cultures) and creating projects that revealed
the ‘collectivity of cultures involved in a process of exchange and
difference’ rather than as homogenising entities (Martin: work that could
be removed from its original site and respond to specific conditions). (21) 
One crucial difference was that artists were invited to participate in the
biennial specifically because of their emphasis on political and cultural
engagement rather than their ‘spiritual’ responses. Furthermore, the
exhibition directly confronted the issue of political machinery and its
influence on the development of culture, rather than attempting to remain
independent of it, as Martin had done.
Looking back at the biennial a few years later, Sussman described
it as one of the exhibitions ‘that fixed the terms of the critical debate
in the late 1980s and early 1990s’ as well as being important in intro-
ducing a new generation of artists – including Lorna Simpson, Glenn

20. As touched upon earlier in this essay, the subject of multiculturalism was
widespread at the time, with other shows including Aperto in Venice (1993);
Poliphonies in Budapest (1993); Culture in Action in Chicago (1993). The curator of
the 1993 Whitney Biennial was Elisabeth Sussman, supported by co-curators
Thelma Golden, John G. Hanhardt and Lisa Phillips. Not all selected artists for the
1993 Whitney Biennial could be considered ‘identity-based’ artists under the
post-colonial rubric, for example Robert Gober, Mike Kelley, Cindy Sherman, Chris
Burden.
21. Elisabeth Sussman et al., 1993 Biennial Exhibition. Whitney Museum of
American Art in association with Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers. 1993. pp. 14-15.
Action Research: Generative Curatorial Practices 161 

Ligon, Daniel Martinez, Renée Green and Gary Simmons – who, she
said, demanded a ‘rebalancing of the critical discourse’. (22)  At the time,
however, this attention to criticality partly explained why the show was
negatively received, especially because journalists perceived theory to
predominate over practice, to which they responded by stressing the
primacy of the object in relation to the discursive tensions of multicultur-
alism. (23)  Roberta Smith epitomised this sentiment in her review for the
New York Times in which she wrote that the 1993 biennial ‘frequently
substitutes didactic moralizing for genuine visual communication’. (24) 
Aside from the media responses toward the rise of the message
over the object, the topic was given academic weight when the biennial
became the focus of the first published October roundtable, in which
Benjamin Buchloh, Hal Foster, Silvia Kolbowski, Rosalind Krauss and
Miwon Kwon explored how political, socio-economic and institutional
change was transforming the frames through which art was being
produced and understood. This discussion was centred on the premise
that art made in the US at that time was prioritising theoretical concepts
or political positions, and the importance of conveying a message was
deflecting the artist’s interests away from the signification of material
and form. This, it was determined, was changing how meaning in
art was conveyed and affecting the potential for multiple readings of
the work. The panel went on to suggest that the politics of form was
increasingly dismissed in the production of work about identity, which
instead championed personal experience or political expressionism.
This, in turn, encouraged curators to use artworks to represent their own
personal takes on social and political issues. Far from producing a more
open artwork or exhibition, it was agreed that the demise of form was

22. Elisabeth Sussman, ‘Then and Now: Whitney Biennial 1993’. CAA Art Journal.
Vol. 64. No. 1. Spring 2005. p. 75.
23. Examples of media coverage: Christopher Knight, ‘1993 Year in Review: ART:
It’s Called Art, Not Politics’: With identity politics overriding the art world, it was a
relief to see shows by artists like Vija Celmins and Adrian Saxe’. Los Angeles Times.
26 December 1993. http://articles.latimes.com/1993-12-26/entertainment/
ca-5558_1_art-museum; Peter Plagens, ‘Fade from White’. Newsweek Magazine. 14
March 1993. http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/1993/03/14/fade-from-
white.html; John Dorsey, ‘While the Whitney Biennial Focuses on Messages, They
Don’t Always Get Through’. The Baltimore Sun. 29 March 1993. http://articles.
baltimoresun.com/1993-03-29/features/1993088159_1_whitney-biennial-work-of-
art-today-art; Roberta Smith, ‘At The Whitney, A Biennial With A Social Conscience’.
The New York Times. 5 March 1993. http://www.nytimes.com/1993/03/05/arts/
at-the-whitney-a-biennial-with-a-social-conscience.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm;
Hal Foster et al., ‘The Politics of the Signifier: A Conversation on the Whitney
Biennial’. October. Vol. 66. Autumn 1993. pp. 3-27.
24. Roberta Smith, op cit.
Kate Fowle 162 

leading to the privileging of viewers with access to certain definitions of

culture rather than expanding potential audiences. In other words, while
the intentions were different, the biennial curators created a distance
between the artists and their publics just as Martin had also done in the
process of trying to evidence connectivity between artists and spiritual
ideas. (25) 
In his essay for the catalogue, post-colonial theorist, Homi Bhabha,
offered a contrasting perspective on this notion of producing openness
(or not), with an observation about the reception of such work, which he
saw as existing on a boundary that was constantly moving. Through this,
he emphasised not what the audience will experience, but how:

Representing cultures at the borderlines, as this Biennial

attempts to do, is a demanding double act between artist and curator.
[…] Installed within the very act of display, in the contradictory structure
of spectatorship itself, there exists ambivalence about the representation
of cultural difference that creates a productive tension between the
borderline artist and the frontline curator. […] The intention of the object
consists neither in the producers’ mental image of it, nor in the fulfilment
of the curator’s pedagogy. The intentionality of display lies in opening up
an active space between object and label that propels the spectator in a
‘shuttling process,’ back and forth, hither and thither, between culturally
informative causes and visually interesting objects. (26) 

Where Martin was convinced that a cohesive exhibition could be

produced through a singular curatorial vision, Bhabha’s emphasis on the
viewers’ ‘shuttling process’ between ‘causes’ and ‘objects’ suggests
that responsibility for a sense of cohesion rests with the audience. The
evocation of borderline and frontline suggest the risks at stake in the
relationship between curator and artist. The meaning of the work (and
the exhibition) is a negotiation between the sum of its parts – the objects,

25. Hal Foster et al., op cit. pp. 3-27.

26. Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Beyond the Pale: Art in the Age of Multicultural Translation’
in Elisabeth Sussman et al., op cit. pp. 63-64. It is interesting to compare Bhabha’s
analogy of the ‘curator on the frontline’ with Mari Carmen Ramirez’ ‘curator as
cultural broker’ noting the ‘transformation of the curator of contemporary art from
the behind-the-scenes aesthetic arbiter to central player in the broader stage of
global cultural politics’ which she first described in 1994 at Bard College during a
lecture for the curatorial programme and was subsequently published as Mari
Carmen Ramirez, ‘Brokering Identities: Art Curators and the Politics of Cultural
Representation’ in Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson and Sandy Nairne (eds.),
Thinking about Exhibitions. Routledge. 1996. pp. 15-27.
Action Research: Generative Curatorial Practices 163 

concepts, labels and spaces or tensions between works – in the context

of a particular site. Furthermore, Bhabha suggests that, rather than with
individual works, openness rests with the method of display, which is also
the key mechanism through which representation can gain ambivalence,
creating space for viewers’ independent perceptions. As such, it could
be said that, rather than exhibition-making constituting the completion of
a thesis, the presentation of works creates the potential for testing ideas
that would not otherwise be possible, thereby becoming a research tool
itself. With this in mind, Sussman’s belief that an exhibition could ‘fix the
terms of critical debate’ gains credence, as does the decision by October
to use the biennial as the frame of their first roundtable discussion.
The notion that curating and exhibition-making could be vehicles
to further new socio-political readings was central to the development
of a new style of art organisation in London around the same time. The
Institute of International Visual Arts (InIVA) was set up as a production
company with an emphasis on partnerships and collaboration and no
exhibition space. Equally focused on ideas and making, its four spheres
of activity were: exhibitions (many of which were produced to travel
regionally in the UK), education and training, research and publications.
Ground-breaking at the time, not only for its organisational structure
but also for its mission – to support dialogue and practice that was not
focused on the intellectual and cultural priorities of the West – InIVA
was an outcome of the Black Arts Movement of the 1980s. It provided
crucial access to the theorists, philosophers and other academics who
were starting to influence the art world, producing public events that
gave access to the cross-disciplinary debates which were otherwise
happening behind closed doors. In this respect, InIVA was among the
first non-academic organisations anywhere in the world to champion
research-orientated programming.
InIVA’s inaugural event was a conference that took place at the
Tate Gallery in 1994. Entitled Global Visions: towards a new internatio-
nalism in the visual arts, it was the first time artists, cultural theorists
and curators – including Rasheed Aareen, Jean Fisher, Hal Foster, Geeta
Kapur, Sarat Maharaj, Olu Oguibe, Elisabeth Sussman and Fred Wilson ­–
came together to publicly discuss, and then publish, cultural perspectives
on internationalism and multiculturalism. (27)  The conference started from

27. Jean Fisher (ed.), Global Visions: Towards a New Internationalism in the
Visual Arts. Kala Press in association with the Institute of International Visual Arts.
1994.
Kate Fowle 164 

the principle that ‘Postmodernity demands a different concept of inter-

nationalism’, acknowledging both the practical and intellectual urgencies
at stake, particularly the need to embrace pluralistic views prompted by
multiculturalism. Speakers were invited to address the questions: How
does the term ‘international’ fit into definitions of contemporary practice
at the close of the millennium? Is there a desire for a new concept of the
international? Which questions are posed for curatorial work, collecting
and the construction of postmodern art history? (28) 
A comprehensive overview of the event is beyond the scope of this
essay, but it is relevant to briefly reflect on the contributions of curators
Hou Hanru and Gerardo Mosquera, each of whom focused on the discrep-
ancies between ideas of cultural marginalisation, on the one hand, and the
decentralisation of culture on the other, drawing on their experiences of
international curating from respective bases in China and Cuba.
Hou Hanru, who had just relocated from Beijing to Paris, stressed
the difference between New Internationalism and previous internation-
alisms which imposed a Western utopic model on the world, suggesting
that; ‘“New Internationalism” reflects the pluralisation of international
political, economic and cultural relationships, as well as the contradictions
and conflicts that have emerged’. (29)  From this perspective, the binaries
of Western modernism versus postmodernism, or even colonialism and
post-colonialism, did not have the same resonance in China and could
not, therefore, be the lens through which foreign curators and writers
could understand Chinese contemporary art. The real problem with the
notion of an international art world, at least from the perspective of places
like China, was a lack of knowledge about the impetus for art practice,
which was further exacerbated by the tendency to perpetuate clichés:
‘The writers of most articles on Chinese contemporary art, instead of
discussing the artists’ creative efforts and the cultural-intellectual values
of the work, concentrate their energy and interests on revealing how
the ‘unofficial’ artists suffer from political pressure in the country, as if
the significance of both artists and work can only be found in ideological
struggles’. (30) 
Hou went on to explain that this pervasive judgment from the
outside was affecting internal production on many levels, not least
because of the impact of the market on certain types of work which,

28. Gavin Jantjes, ‘Preface’ in Jean Fisher, op cit. pp. 7-8.

29. Hou Hanru, ‘Entropy; Chinese Artists, Western Art Institutions, A New
Internationalism’ in Jean Fisher, op cit. p. 79.
30. Ibid. p. 82.
Action Research: Generative Curatorial Practices 165 

in turn, undermined what he termed ‘avant-garde research’, which, he

emphasised, was also central to the development of the Chinese art
system. Furthermore, he suggested that the practices of many artists
– such as Gu Wenda, Huang Yongping and Jang Jiechang – which were
consistently concerned with the urgent problems of being International,
were frequently considered nothing other than Western-influenced: ‘The
problem is that the authors understand multiculturalism as a kind of
‘regionalism’ or ‘nationalism’ while the artist understands it as internation-
alism, never refusing international exchanges and mutual influences’. (31) 
The slippage Hou described, between what the artist is communicating
and what is perceived, raises serious questions about cultural translation,
or the lack of it. There is no guarantee that meaning is communicated
through the direct translation of language and little attempt to dig below
the surface on the part of the critics and curators researching the work.
Perhaps more importantly, Hou highlighted how so-called interest in art
practice outside of one’s own context amounts to little more than an
affirmation of one’s existing prejudices.
In his presentation, ‘Some Problems in Transcultural Curating’,
Gerardo Mosquera opened by stating that ‘There are many different
centres and peripheries and relations among them’, but that globalisation
had created a false perception that everything was interconnected. In
fact, the situation was one of ‘axial globalization’ between centres of
power, interspersed with ‘zones of silence’. His central concern was
that, with the rise of the curator as author of international exhibitions, the
chosen mode of research was increasingly that of explorer, which was
both inevitable and problematic: ‘It implies an acceptance of the curators’
capacity to make transcultural judgments and, from here, the belief in the
universality of art. To deny it would imply an anagnoresis: acknowledging
that a selection is made from local criteria (from a particular institution,
culture and aesthetic) leaving behind any globalizing discourse’. (32) 
Mosquera spoke of working outside his own immediate
knowledge during his research for the Havana Biennial, (33)  through which
he determined that ‘one has to start by accepting an ample margin of
contradiction’ and the need to curate with ‘both eyes and ears’ as well
as developing small and diverse curatorial teams as opposed to using
advisors. Mosquera’s notion of team curating was only just gaining traction

31. Ibid. p. 81.

32. Gerardo Mosquera, ‘Some Problems in Transcultural Curating’ in Jean Fisher,
op cit. p. 136.
33. Ibid. pp. 133-136.
Kate Fowle 166 

at the time of this conference, with the first large-scale collaboration

happening in Venice in 1993, when 13 curators were invited to curate
sections of the Aperto. (34)  The same was true of biennials developing
outside traditional art centres, which were also just starting to proliferate:
for example Dak’art began in Senegal in 1992; the Asia-Pacific Triennial
was instigated in Queensland in 1993; Bamako Encounters in Mali (1994);
the Gwangju Biennale and the Johannesburg Biennale were initiated in
1995; and Shanghai, Mercosul and Manifesta biennials began in 1996,
to name but a few. To conclude, he outlined that the truly international
circulation of art ultimately had to mean more than the democratisation
of current circuits, going on to anticipate the evolution of curatorial
thinking and infrastructural development that would occur in the new
millennium: ‘The transformation has to include the internal mechanisms
of circulation. This implies a change of formats, cultural extension, work
within schools and communities, the use of press and mass media, and
the development of many other ways emerging from local characteristics,
interests and inventiveness. It must become a part of the responsibility of
every curator of the Third World, as well as elsewhere, who aspires to a
true plurality of the diffusion of art’. (35) 
In a roundtable discussion, entitled ‘Global Tendencies’, published
by Artforum in 2003, Hans Ulrich Obrist looked back on this phenomenon:
‘The peripheral biennials, at least until the end of the decade, were not
just ‘another biennale again’; it was really a time when they were tools,
helping a new generation of artists from different cultural backgrounds
become internationally visible and also helping curators test ideas’. Later
in the discussion, he described the impact of the decade on his own
work: ‘When I started to curate at the beginning of the ’90s I very often
had two or three years to research exhibitions. By the end of the ’90s I
often only had six or eight months’. He went on to explain how, when he
and Hou Hanru started work on Cities on the Move in 1996, ‘We couldn’t
just say, “We want three years for our research” because then the show
would never have taken place. So there was a kind of given parameter.
The question became: How, within this parameter, do we change the
rules of the game? And we thought it might be interesting to develop a

34. Curators of Aperto include: Helena Kontova, Francesco Bonami, Jeffrey

Deitch, Nicolas Bourriaud, Matthew Slotover, Berta Sichel, Kong Changan, Robert
Nickas, Thomas Locher, Benjamin Weil, Mike Hubert, Antonio d’Avossa and Rosma
Scuteri.
35. Gerardo Mosquera in Jean Fisher, op cit. pp. 137-139.
Action Research: Generative Curatorial Practices 167 

show that wouldn’t always stay the same, but to actually have research
occur throughout the travel schedule’. (36) 
Ten years on, in an interview with the author, Obrist reiterated that
it was as a result of travelling to Bangkok to give a talk for the exhibition
do it in 1996 that he understood the potential of this generative strategy.
In particular, he responded to the artists and the energy of the art scene
in a place he might otherwise not have visited:

The penny really dropped about how important Asia was

going to be for the twenty-first century and so I called up Hou Hanru, whom
I had first met in the late-’80s through Yan Pei Ming and Huang Yong Ping,
and said let’s collaborate. I don’t think I would have done Cities on the Move
without this experience. It just became so apparent that it was really the
urgent show to do. Then this led to research in Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia,
and Singapore. All these places revealed themselves to be incredible art
centres. (37) 

Obrist’s portrayal of the importance of a collegial network

independent of institutional structures is indicative of a significant moment
in the development of the profession. Between curators living and working
in different geographies, there was burgeoning recognition that expertise
could be shared and built upon. In turn, this collaborative practice enabled
experimental research methods and the generation of more responsive
curatorial forms; Cities on the Move is one such example.
A travelling exhibition like no other before it, Cities on the Move
literally played out the contradictions between local traditions and rapidly
expanding globalised societies being experienced in Asian mega-cities.
Initially developed for Secession in Vienna, it was imagined as a complex,
self-perpetuating system, spreading through the galleries, into the offices
and out into the street. Intended to travel from the outset, the show was
established with a roster of up to 100 artists and architects at any given

36. Tim Griffin et al., ‘Global Tendencies: Globalism and the Large-Scale
Exhibition’. Artforum. November 2003. pp. 152-163. Roundtable participants
include: Tim Griffin, introduction; James Meyer, moderator; Francesco Bonami,
Catherine David, Okwui Enwezor, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Martha Rosler and Yinka
Shonibare.
37. Kate Fowle and Hans Ulrich Obrist, ‘Progress Report’ in Do It. Independent
Curators International and DAP. 2013. p. 49.
Kate Fowle 168 

time, changing and evolving over two years, across six venues in Europe,
the US and Asia. (38) 
In order to create a flexible, yet coherent, framework that would
allow the project autonomy in the different spaces where it would be
installed, the curators worked with architects, Rem Koolhaas and Ole
Scheeren. They developed a system which re-used materials at each
venue to create the future structure of the exhibition. This revealed
construction methods and transformed existing architectural elements to
shift the perceptions of the regular visitor while also enabling a low-cost
process of accumulating materials to emulate environments that inspired
the subject of the show. Spaces were carved into typologies of the
city called ‘the architecture compression centre’, ‘the pleasure district’
and ‘the political protest room’, among others, with artists producing
ad hoc interventions within this infrastructure. Providing opportunities
for unmediated relationships between works while generating its own
mutations, the exhibition embodied the chaos, claustrophobia and
cacophony of the cities that artists were working in and the subjects with
which they were dealing. Attention-seeking and headache-inducing, the
exhibition was as performative as the work it presented. (39) 
If it was Martin’s desire for Magiciens de la Terre to be a site
for dialogue and exchange, it could be said that Hou and Obrist wanted
Cities on the Move to be a space of contamination and reinterpretation,
exposing relationships rather than facilitating them. By constructing an
imaginary in which artworks could coexist, the possibility of representing
culture at borderlines, as Bhabha would have it, was redundant. In fact,
this exhibition removed the border completely, becoming a frontline upon
which the audience unwittingly stumbled. Nothing and no one was ‘repre-
sented’. Everything just was in that moment in time. To then restage the
project over and over again, responding to new sites and introducing new
works, was to remove any possibility of the exhibition proving a curatorial
thesis or producing a fixed meaning. Instead, exhibition-making was
established as an evolutionary process, which, according to Obrist, is

38. Vienna Secession, Vienna; CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux,

Bordeaux;
MoMA PS1, New York; The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen; The
Hayward Gallery, London; Bangkok (as a city-intervention project)
39. For descriptions of the project see: Andrew Gellatly, ‘Cities on the Move’.
Frieze. Issue 48. September-October 1999. http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/
cities_on_the_move/; Douglas Fogle, ‘Cities on the Move’. Flash Art, No. 199. 1998.
http://www.flashartonline.com/interno.php?pagina=articolo_det&id_
art=382&det=ok&title=CITIES-ON-THE-MOVE; Also see http://www.buro-os.
com/?s=hans+ulrich+Obrist+
Action Research: Generative Curatorial Practices 169 

‘how the show learns and grows’, reinforcing the notion that a show is
somehow a living organism through which curators develop their practice.
Viewed retrospectively, 1997 – the year Cities on the Move began
to travel – may be seen as a landmark for exhibitions, not least because
of Catherine David’s documenta X and Okwui Enwezor’s Johannesburg
Biennale. Both shows are now widely discussed for their expanded
formats, their initiation of discursive frameworks and ‘platforms’ and,
crucially, for confronting both the issue and subject of globalisation. As
Michael Brenson proclaimed, in response to the Rockefeller summit of
the same year, the age of the curator had indeed begun. As this essay
has demonstrated, this was not only because of the increased number of
shows and curatorial opportunities, or the so-called power this bestowed
on curators, but also because of the growth of a profession into a practice,
which created a field – or set of coordinates – of its own.
If the 1990s witnessed the rise of international exhibitions and
the biennial boom – which opened the potential for dialogues between
divergent practitioners around the world, as well as the establishment
of contemporary curating as we understand it today – it could be said
that the 2000s brought new institutional models to fruition, initially with
curators taking the helm of older European and US spaces and trans-
forming their functions and then with the emergence of institutions in
new geographical locations. From the Colección Jumex in Mexico City
and Inhotim near Bello Horizonte, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo and
the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing to Garage Center
for Contemporary Culture in Moscow and Tranzit in Vienna, Prague,
Bucharest, Budapest and Bratislava; from Sán Art in Ho Chi Minh City
to Salt in Istanbul, from the Centre for Contemporary Art in Lagos to
the Raw Material Company in Dakar, these institutions are introducing
new programming priorities, new audiences for contemporary art, new
funding structures and yet further expansion of the curatorial role.
What these institutions have in common is that they have
established more permanent platforms around the world from which
to generate collaborative programming and accumulate research that
goes beyond the mandates of the traditional contemporary art museum
and biennial. But, as these new infrastructures, networks and curatorial
strategies have emerged at the same time as decentralisation and insta-
bility have been accepted as operational norms, how far has the curator
come in successfully navigating both the expanded contexts and ongoing
questions of what working internationally really means?
Kate Fowle 170 

By 2011, the art world appeared totally absorbed with, and impli-
cated in, global politics. The initial flare was the march on Washington
in late December 2010, following the Smithsonian’s censorship of
artist David Wojnarowicz’s video in the National Portrait Gallery’s Hide/
Seek show. This artwork, produced in 1987 in response to the AIDS
crisis, was removed after a handful of conservative radicals objected
to a brief scene showing ants crawling on a crucifix, which ignited vivid
recollections of the Culture Wars for those opposing the clampdown.
Then, on a completely different scale, in the early months of 2011, the
beginning of the Arab Spring made a huge impact as the Internet and
social media fuelled worldwide calls for allegiance and participation in
uprisings, bringing viral solidarity in the global art community. Attentions
were momentarily diverted on 17 March, with the launch of the petition to
boycott Guggenheim Abu Dhabi over migrant workers’ rights in relation to
the building of a museum on Saadiyat Island, when artist, Ai Weiwei, was
detained in Beijing on 3 April for what officials alluded to as ‘economic
crimes.’ This happened just days before curator, Jack Persekian, was
sacked from his position as the director of the Sharjah Biennial, triggered
by the more specifically political content of a work.
These protests and the prolific ensuing media commentary on the
breakdown in international art relations were all eclipsed on 17 September
when the Occupy Movement ignited around the world. Penetrating insti-
tutions of culture and commerce alike, while creating a fresh language of
rebellion, Occupy created a feedback loop between art and activism that
has, in equal parts, been taken advantage of and contested during the
two years that have followed.
On the one hand, art and its infrastructures have become fully
embedded in contemporary culture at large and increasingly located at
the heart of global economics, while, on the other, it is evident that we
are in a stage at which the production of biennials and the international
circulation of projects and ideas has reached the limits of the official
infrastructures that support them. Meanwhile, the new institutions are
not yet fully established, and the ways in which they will create context-
specific operational methods are still open to question. Time will tell what
impact these new venues will have once they have proven sustainability,
but it is already possible to ascertain that widespread connectivity with
art – rather than a distancing from what it stands for – has started to
expand audiences as the places and forms of its presentation continue
to develop.
Action Research: Generative Curatorial Practices 171 

With the creation of a curatorial discourse and its widening

dissemination beyond academia, curatorial knowledge has grown
exponentially around the world; we don’t find ourselves facing exactly
the same practical and ideological dilemmas as Jean-Hubert Martin in
1986, but the question of ‘how’ to practice remains as urgent, if for no
other reason than that our options are so much broader. In a very short
time, we have arrived at a point at which there are tensions between
curatorial theory and practice, as well as cultural or political theory and
curatorial practice. This is beginning to divide the field between those
who think of curating as a means to an end and those who want to refine
the practice for the sake of its form. As with any discipline, there is room
for both. What is more important is the ways in which this plays out as the
places in which contemporary curating occurs expand geographically,
bringing new cultural and political imperatives into the equation.
Providing the tools with which an audience can ask questions and
draw independent conclusions has become as important as providing
curatorial frameworks for artistic practices. In an art world that is
increasingly intertwined with real life politics, to curate is to navigate
political machinery while revealing it, and the responsibility of the curator
is to present work in ways that neither obfuscate nor distort meaning.
Rather than just concerning ourselves with the balance between the
representation and form of the artwork, we are now also responsible for
thinking about the representation of emerging contexts as they continue
to diversify.
We are fast arriving at a time when a new generation of curators
will come of age. Starting to practice in the new millennium, this is
a generation that has worked outside the traditional Western centres
and museum structures as much as within them. These curators take
for granted that wherever they work is also a centre. They have gained
their experience through the new institutions and curatorial models that
have emerged in the past two decades. They base their practices on
responding to local situations, adapting what they learn from elsewhere
to what matters where they are.
When this new generation take the reins, perhaps we can start
to fathom what a truly international art world looks like and what new
forms it can take. To paraphrase what Gerardo Mosquera said more than
twenty years ago, it seems certain that one who aspires to a true plurality
of the dissemination of art has to start by accepting an ample margin of
contradiction.