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Curating (in) the City. New Challenges for Public Art

Subject Area Art History
Theatre and Media Studies
Term from 2018 to 2023
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 398109857
 
Final Report Year 2024

Final Report Abstract

The transformation of curatorial practice is one of the fundamental themes being discussed within art and cultural studies as part of the 'curatorial turn'. On the one hand, contemporary curatorial practice does not only take place in traditional art spaces such as galleries, museums or theaters, but also intervenes in public urban spaces. On the other, contemporary curatorial practice, in the course of advancing digitalization, deals with new forms of materiality and their respective modes of representation, accompanied by their relational networks of human and non-human actors. In addition to the observable blurring of boundaries within this diversified field of activity in art, one can also observe an expansion of the curatorial into other social fields. The research project focused on how curatorial practices face new challenges in a changing field of cultural production, which lead to specific curatorial working methods in the field of urban development. Particular attention was paid to curatorial practices dealing with projects in public spaces and their increasing entwinement with the collection and processing of urban data at the interface with science. (1) First, the research project, using selected case studies, examined specific constellations of actors and modes of organization that lead to specific (institutional) forms of cooperation and organization of the curatorial and which, in particular, are based on different forms of collaboration. (2) Second, it investigated the specific working methods of the actors who not only 'put together' urban planning projects, but also 'initiate' them. This included examining to what extent the complexity that contemporary curators confront in relation to the described paradoxes of the urban is not only linked to work in cooperative, often temporary contexts, but also associated with the development of new ways of working whose degree of openness, uncertainty and unpredictability have to be abided. (3) Third, the connection between curatorial practices and the handling of the paradoxes of the urban and the digital in relation to the so-called production of the public sphere was critically examined and, among other things, interfaces to the (applied) sciences were extensively described and analyzed. The hypothesis guiding the research was that the contextual changes of the curatorial in the course of the ubiquitous collection, evaluation and provision of public data give rise to new urban collaborations that lead to a curating in and of the city.

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