Co-presented by the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory and
to elaborate: discentre for curatorial projects
Monday, December 4, 2017
5:30 pm
Room 102, Frederic Lasserre Building
6333 Memorial Road, University of British Columbia
Through this performative lecture, Paul O’Neill reflects upon his curatorial practice, collective exhibition-making, and the public as a constructed readymade. Taking his recent multi-year exhibition project We are the Center for Curatorial Studies, Hessel Museum (2016–18) as its starting point, this lecture reflects upon curatorial studies and extends a conception of the curatorial to account for multiple sites of contact, assemblages and gathering of diverse bodies and subjects as well as their discursive connections. In doing so, it opens up a concept of the formation of the “exhibition” itself as a potential mode of research action in its own process of becoming.
O’Neill explores how different points of contact are made possible when exhibiting becomes a form of escape for the artwork as much as for the viewer. Here, O’Neill identifies escape as a key concept for the curatorial, which defines itself as an act of release—from something, somewhere, someone—accompanied by the wish to be transformed. Escape implicates language itself as being complicit with our need to be able to, at least, imagine ourselves elsewhere. How can a language of exhibitions, therefore, enable us to think attentively about escape as a curatorial form?
Dr. Paul O’Neill is an Irish curator, artist, writer, and educator. He is Artistic Director of Checkpoint Helsinki. From 2013 until July 2017 he was Director of the Graduate Program at the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS), Bard College. O’Neill is widely regarded as one of the foremost research-oriented curators and a leading scholar of curatorial practice, public art, and exhibition histories. O’Neill has held numerous curatorial and research positions over the past twenty years and he has taught on many curatorial and visual arts programs in Europe and the UK. O’Neill is one of the most widely published authors in the field, most notably with The Culture of Curating, the Curating of Culture(s), published by MIT Press in 2012. He received his doctorate in visual culture from Middlesex University, London, in 2007.
