qui.enter atlas
international symposium of emerging curators
26, 27,28 october 2013
GAMeC galleria d’arte moderna e contemporane, bergamo, italy
premio lorenzo bonaldi per l’arte - enterprize
Since 2003, with the establishment of the Lorenzo Bonaldi Award for Art -EnterPrize, and later with the birth of Qui. Enter Atlas – International Symposium of Emerging Curators, the GAMeC -Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo pursues its cultural policy focused on youth, with a special attention to the curatorial world.
The Museum wants to highlight the centrality and significance of the curator, not only on the international art scene, but also in the broader context of contemporary cultural practices. For this reason, from the 26th to 28th October GAMeC will act as a meeting place for young curators from around the world with the fifth edition of Qui. Enter Atlas -International Symposium of Emerging Curators.
The gathering will come to a close on Monday 28th October with the Award Ceremony of the winner project of the seventh edition of Lorenzo Bonaldi Award for Art EnterPrize.
QUI. ENTER ATLAS – INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM OF EMERGING CURATORS, 5th Edition
Led by Pierre Bal-Blanc and Mirjam Varadinis
Curated by Giacinto Di Pietrantonio and Stefano Raimondi
The fifth edition of Qui. Enter Atlas -International Symposium of Emerging Curators involves emerging curators and two leading professionals on the contemporary art scene: Pierre Bal-Blanc – Director, CAC -Centre d’art contemporain de Brétigny, Brétigny and Mirjam Varadinis – Curator, Kunsthaus Zürich, Zurich.
The Symposium is an event offering a moment for discussion and comparison designed to accompany the competition resulting in the Lorenzo Bonaldi Award for Art – EnterPrize and, for the 2013 edition, 4 curators under 35 and the 5 candidates for the Bonaldi Award -from Europe, Middle East, Africa and United States -will compare their personal experiences and theoretical and methodological positions during a three-days debate, with the precise goal to offer this emerging generation of professionals an opportunity for exchange and meeting.
9 young curators -who work at public institutions, non-profit spaces or as independent curators -will be led by Pierre Bal-Blanc and Mirjam Varadinis, supported by Giacinto Di Pietrantonio and Stefano Raimondi, curators of the symposium.
Panelists:
Antonia Alampi – Curator and Writer, Beirut, Cairo
Andrew Berardini – Writer and Curator, Los Angeles
Alessandro Castiglioni – Cultural researcher; Museo MAGA, Gallarate; Little Constellation, San Marino
Michele D’Aurizio – Founder, Gasconade, Milan
Lara Khaldi – Curator, Ramallah / Amsterdam
Sam Korman – Assistant Director, White Flag Projects, St. Louis
Isla Leaver-Yap – Independent organizer of projects and publications, Glasgow
Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk – Curator, The Office for Curating, Rotterdam
Theodor Ringborg – Curator, Stockholm / Istanbul
LORENZO BONALDI AWARD FOR ART – ENTERPRIZE, 7th Edition
Award Ceremony
Monday 28 October 2013, at 6.30 p.m.
GAMeC, Spazio ParolaImmagine
This will be the seventh edition of the Lorenzo Bonaldi Award for Art – EnterPrize which has become a biannual event since 2005. The goal of this award, unique in its genre, is to support the research of a young curator who is under thirty years old and his or her exhibition project.
Created in the memory of Lorenzo Bonaldi, collector and art lover, this recognition is intended to highlight the centrality and significance of the curator on the international art scene, in addition to encouraging and supporting the talent of a young person at a particularly vital moment in his or her career.
The rules for the award include participation by invitation only: competitors must be presented by an advisor/mentor -artists, critics, curators, museum directors, collectors, representatives of courses and schools for curatorial training and editors in the sector from around the world -who for a single edition select one candidate. Each candidate presents a project for an all-new exhibition, conceived around an assigned exhibition space and budget.
The curators under 30 in the competition and the advisors who have selected them:
Andrew Berardini – Writer and Curator, Los Angeles
Nominated by: Philipp Kaiser, Director, Museum Ludwig, Cologne
Lara Khaldi – Curator, Ramallah / Amsterdam
Nominated by: Christine Tohme, Director, The Lebanese Association for Plastic Arts, Ashkal Alwan, Beirut
Sam Korman – Assistant Director, White Flag Projects, St. Louis
Nominated by: Dominic Molon, Chief Curator, Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis
Isla Leaver-Yap – Independent organizer of projects and publications, Glasgow
Nominated by: Edoardo Bonaspetti, Editor in Chief, Mousse Magazine, Milan
Theodor Ringborg – Curator, Stockholm / Istanbul
Nominated by: Mats Stjernstedt, Director, Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo
At the end of the symposium, on Monday, 28th October, Pierre Bal-Blanc, Mirjam Varadinis and Giacinto Di Pietrantonio will award the Prize to the project recognized as the most innovative. The evaluation takes into consideration the many different points of view: critical, theoretical, contents as well as practical and economic.
The winning project will be hosted at GAMeC in 2014.
The detailed program of the symposium and the biographies of curators and jury members are
available on the website www.gamec.it.
GAMeC – Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo
Via San Tomaso, 53 -24121 Bergamo
Tel +39 035 270272 / Fax +39 035 236962
www.gamec.it
3 Questions to know the curators
Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk
ATP: Starting from the beginning: who are you? How have you become a curator? Which are your role models?
Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk: I would like to start by saying that I am Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk, and I work as a curator and writer. My foundation is in Art History, which I studied at the Utrecht University from 2007–2010, and was followed by a Curating course in London (2010–2012). This course is taught jointly by the London Metropolitan University and The Whitechapel Gallery. During the latter period I also worked for the David Roberts Art Foundation. In September 2012 I founded The Office for Curating, which is currently being located in Rotterdam. The Office has allowed me to engage in and contribute to various constellation, among exhibitions, publications and lectures, but rather than to summarise, I would suggest to have a look at the following: www.theofficeforcurating.com. My all time favourite role models are: Enrique Vila Matas, Jean–Luc Godard, Hergé, Felix Gonzalez–Torres, in that specific order.
ATP: What image bests represents being a curator? Why?
N.J.L.: Either: Bruce McLean, Pose Work for Plinths 3. 1971, or Bruno Munari, Seeking Comfort in an Uncomfortable Chair, around 1950, or: … And so on, and so forth…
BRUCE MCLEAN, POSE WORK FOR PLINTHS 3. 1971
ATP: Tell me about the last exhibition that you have seen. Which is your personal opinion?
N.J.L.: I would recommend to have a look into this exhibition project: Dora García, The Joycean Society. http://www.spaziopunch.com
***
Isla Leaver-Yap
ATP: Starting from the beginning: who are you? How have you become a curator? Which are your role models?
I am Isla Leaver-Yap. I am a project organizer who recently moved from Brooklyn, NY to Glasgow, UK. I don’t know entirely if I am a curator, though I have certainly held that job title in my working life (I used to work as one at Baltic, Gateshead, and ICA, London). I haven’t had any formal curatorial training, for example, but I do work with artists and institutions. All my projects involve an artist and the production of public-facing work – whether performance, text, printed matter or exhibition. This is sometimes simply a conversation, other times I work from a more embedded position within an institution to stage durational projects, like the exhibition series Short Stories at Sculpture Center, New York, or the recent Artists Moving Image Festival at Tramway in Glasgow. The format may change but my intention of interfacing with an artist remains the same. My approach is perhaps more editorial than curatorial. I hope not to value or idolize people, and I hope never to “follow” a role, though I have great respect for the work of my peers who are my most direct and frequent point of reference and influence. Richard Birkett, who I worked with at the ICA, has an ethos that I think is rare within our field of work — his commitment to talking to artists on their own terms and with a depth of intelligence was something that affected the way I felt shows could and should be done; James Richards is an artist who has an intuitive and deft way of piecing together feeling and material, his sensual relationship to work is very inspiring; Angie Keefer is a thinker, writer, artist who has many ‘roles’ but, nonetheless, a highly particular voice and approach to the production of work that has always been key to thinking what is possible; and the curator and writer Fionn Meade makes the kind of leaps between seemingly discrete areas of writing, philosophy and objects that always intensifies my experience of work, leaving things permanently transformed. What is key in this question of roles and models, however, is that my role, whatever that might be, is only afforded as part of someone else’s work that has often come before my own; it’s important to acknowledge my parasitic relationship to the producer, and in that acknowledgement I also seek to transform that relationship into more symbiotic and mutually supportive situation, so we can go further together and discard models.
ATP: What image bests represents being a curator? Why?
I.L-Y: The gloved hand looks like Mickey Mouse. There’s an air of the Pink Panther about this image too.
ATP: Tell me about the last exhibition that you have seen. Which is your personal opinion?
I.L-Y: I just saw the Art Under Attack show at Tate Britain, that traces iconoclasm in British art from the reformation onwards. The grouping of the early material – broken statues, repainted altarpieces, and reconfigured stained glass windows – was staggering. I found the collection of defaced coins particularly exciting.
***
Andrew Berardini
ATP: Starting from the beginning: who are you? How have you become a curator? Which are your role models?
A.B.: Big questions. I started out as a writer and still am one. More or less everything I do emanates from this. I started curating as expression of writing, arranging objects in a space where people move through it is a story, a narrative, more like a play than an exhibition. My role models are Charles Baudelaire, Patti Smith, and Samuel Beckett.
ATP: What image bests represents being a curator? Why?
A.B.: I’m perhaps a little old-fashioned in this. I prefer the curator and their role to be amorphous, undefined, complicated, kaleidoscopic. I’m against the professionalization of the job. So in a way there’s no image that could capture all the weird characters and diverse backgrounds. I’d prefer curators to be. I prefer weird diversity over austere modernist monoliths.
ATP: Tell me about the last exhibition that you have seen. Which is your personal opinion?
A.B.: I probably see two dozen exhibitions a week. It’s a love affair, an obsession, a modest way to make a living. Though excellence in human endeavor tends to be rare, every expression has validity.
***
Sam Korman
ATP: Starting from the beginning: who are you? How have you become a curator? Which are your role models?
Sam Korma: a. My name is Sam Korman and I’m the assistant director of White Flag Projects in St Louis, Missouri.
b. How did I become a curator? I started as an artist. Only after I became frustrated, and sought to establish a context for my work and the work of my friends by founding Car Hole Gallery in Portland, Oregon did curating become what I do. So, really, I just called myself a curator. Car Hole was only open for a year, but it was a lesson in how art, writing, institutions, and ideas are developed by a community, and, in turn, how they help to develop a community, as well. It taught me how to really think about art and the necessity of an institution to have a real, and, at times, iconoclastic voice. Whether or not I achieved any of this is still up for debate, but by the end of Car Hole, these things I was actively doing inscribed me as a curator, and I finally started to think of myself as one. I also stopped making art in any strict sense of the word. Now, I am fortunate enough to work for an organization that I respected long before it became my employer. White Flag definitely creates a context where self-definition is still free, which is what brought me to this field in the first place.
c. My role models are d.boon and Mike Watt.
ATP: What image bests represents being a curator? Why?
S.C.: Recently, at 11 PM on a Monday night, I was standing in an aisle at a grocery store in St Louis opening a bottle of fresh deer urine, because an artist asked me to research its scent. I took a massive whiff of the buck lure. It was so strong that it sent me reeling across the aisle sneezing and holding my nose. I had to smell it several more times in order to give an accurate description! My report to the artist read: “It is reallllllly strong. Like vitamin pee, but after 200 vitamins and more ammonia smelling with notes of tall grass and old bark.” At the check-out, I bought several apples, some bread, and the small eye-dropper bottle of urine. “Art is what makes life more interesting that art.”
ATP: Tell me about the last exhibition that you have seen. Which is your personal opinion?
S.C.: I don’t want to get myself in too much trouble with this one. Maybe I’ll plead the fifth? You probably won’t get too many people saying something sucked, and I’m not going to name any names. I will say two things: I wind up seeing a lot of museum shows in my neck of the (back)woods and those have been pretty uncreative and boring in their selection and presentation of artists. They just aren’t taking any risks and I am not sure why – I think this is what makes it so frustrating to me. Quit pussyfooting! Good artists are worth the risk to your institution and to your career. The second thing: the last show I saw that got me really excited about art was Jef Geys at Wiels – that artist and that institution are doing some of the most interesting projects, so it was a perfect combination: smart, challenging, problematic, very open, funny. It was an awesome show that was expertly curated. This answer is me kind of wimping out. And, admittedly, I live out in the provinces, so I look at a lot of art online. There’s no context other than my computer screen and so much art looks really good on the Internet – perhaps even looks made for it… I’ll say that israellund.tumblr.com is a really well curated exhibition I love looking at over and over again.
***
Alessandro Castiglioni
ATP: Starting from the beginning: who are you? How have you become a curator? Which are your role models?
Alessandro Castiglioni: I studied as art historian and since 2004 I have been working at the museum of modern and contemporary art in Gallarate, known as MAGA. Then, in 2009 I started to contribute to Little Constellation, a network based in San Marino that focuses on contemporary art in Small States and geo-cultural micro-areas of Europe. Thanks to this experience, my activity started to grow inside of many cultural institutions, and I think this addressed my approach to focusing on cultural anthropology and educational practices. For what concerns my role models, I would think of two “mentors”, who were incredibly influential, though they passed away too soon: Antonio Caronia and Roberto Daolio.
ATP: What image bests represents being a curator? Why?
A.C.: Actually I have to say I think of curatorship more like a practice, rather than a profession. But it’s something personal: I see myself more as a cultural researcher who uses, as instrument of research, the curatorial activity in order to investigate, discuss, display and show some images, actions or stories related with some actual issues of our contemporary culture.
ATP: Tell me about the last exhibition that you have seen. Which is your personal opinion?
A.C.: Some days ago I was in Valletta and I saw an exhibition dedicated to young Maltese artists. These kind of projects are very interesting: I have the opportunity to compare some areas or territories known as peripheral to what I usually see in cities like Milano or London, and try to understand dynamics such as the standardization of international artistic languages, or the issues related with some sort of cultural isolation (for example nations, like Malta, that don’t have art schools), and maybe the opportunity to discover some unexpected projects, that, by the way, I think you will see next January in Viafarini…
October 26th, 2013
international symposium of emerging curators
26, 27,28 october 2013
GAMeC galleria d’arte moderna e contemporane, bergamo, italy
premio lorenzo bonaldi per l’arte - enterprize
Since 2003, with the establishment of the Lorenzo Bonaldi Award for Art -EnterPrize, and later with the birth of Qui. Enter Atlas – International Symposium of Emerging Curators, the GAMeC -Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo pursues its cultural policy focused on youth, with a special attention to the curatorial world.
The Museum wants to highlight the centrality and significance of the curator, not only on the international art scene, but also in the broader context of contemporary cultural practices. For this reason, from the 26th to 28th October GAMeC will act as a meeting place for young curators from around the world with the fifth edition of Qui. Enter Atlas -International Symposium of Emerging Curators.
The gathering will come to a close on Monday 28th October with the Award Ceremony of the winner project of the seventh edition of Lorenzo Bonaldi Award for Art EnterPrize.
QUI. ENTER ATLAS – INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM OF EMERGING CURATORS, 5th Edition
Led by Pierre Bal-Blanc and Mirjam Varadinis
Curated by Giacinto Di Pietrantonio and Stefano Raimondi
The fifth edition of Qui. Enter Atlas -International Symposium of Emerging Curators involves emerging curators and two leading professionals on the contemporary art scene: Pierre Bal-Blanc – Director, CAC -Centre d’art contemporain de Brétigny, Brétigny and Mirjam Varadinis – Curator, Kunsthaus Zürich, Zurich.
The Symposium is an event offering a moment for discussion and comparison designed to accompany the competition resulting in the Lorenzo Bonaldi Award for Art – EnterPrize and, for the 2013 edition, 4 curators under 35 and the 5 candidates for the Bonaldi Award -from Europe, Middle East, Africa and United States -will compare their personal experiences and theoretical and methodological positions during a three-days debate, with the precise goal to offer this emerging generation of professionals an opportunity for exchange and meeting.
9 young curators -who work at public institutions, non-profit spaces or as independent curators -will be led by Pierre Bal-Blanc and Mirjam Varadinis, supported by Giacinto Di Pietrantonio and Stefano Raimondi, curators of the symposium.
Panelists:
Antonia Alampi – Curator and Writer, Beirut, Cairo
Andrew Berardini – Writer and Curator, Los Angeles
Alessandro Castiglioni – Cultural researcher; Museo MAGA, Gallarate; Little Constellation, San Marino
Michele D’Aurizio – Founder, Gasconade, Milan
Lara Khaldi – Curator, Ramallah / Amsterdam
Sam Korman – Assistant Director, White Flag Projects, St. Louis
Isla Leaver-Yap – Independent organizer of projects and publications, Glasgow
Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk – Curator, The Office for Curating, Rotterdam
Theodor Ringborg – Curator, Stockholm / Istanbul
LORENZO BONALDI AWARD FOR ART – ENTERPRIZE, 7th Edition
Award Ceremony
Monday 28 October 2013, at 6.30 p.m.
GAMeC, Spazio ParolaImmagine
This will be the seventh edition of the Lorenzo Bonaldi Award for Art – EnterPrize which has become a biannual event since 2005. The goal of this award, unique in its genre, is to support the research of a young curator who is under thirty years old and his or her exhibition project.
Created in the memory of Lorenzo Bonaldi, collector and art lover, this recognition is intended to highlight the centrality and significance of the curator on the international art scene, in addition to encouraging and supporting the talent of a young person at a particularly vital moment in his or her career.
The rules for the award include participation by invitation only: competitors must be presented by an advisor/mentor -artists, critics, curators, museum directors, collectors, representatives of courses and schools for curatorial training and editors in the sector from around the world -who for a single edition select one candidate. Each candidate presents a project for an all-new exhibition, conceived around an assigned exhibition space and budget.
The curators under 30 in the competition and the advisors who have selected them:
Andrew Berardini – Writer and Curator, Los Angeles
Nominated by: Philipp Kaiser, Director, Museum Ludwig, Cologne
Lara Khaldi – Curator, Ramallah / Amsterdam
Nominated by: Christine Tohme, Director, The Lebanese Association for Plastic Arts, Ashkal Alwan, Beirut
Sam Korman – Assistant Director, White Flag Projects, St. Louis
Nominated by: Dominic Molon, Chief Curator, Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis
Isla Leaver-Yap – Independent organizer of projects and publications, Glasgow
Nominated by: Edoardo Bonaspetti, Editor in Chief, Mousse Magazine, Milan
Theodor Ringborg – Curator, Stockholm / Istanbul
Nominated by: Mats Stjernstedt, Director, Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo
At the end of the symposium, on Monday, 28th October, Pierre Bal-Blanc, Mirjam Varadinis and Giacinto Di Pietrantonio will award the Prize to the project recognized as the most innovative. The evaluation takes into consideration the many different points of view: critical, theoretical, contents as well as practical and economic.
The winning project will be hosted at GAMeC in 2014.
The detailed program of the symposium and the biographies of curators and jury members are
available on the website www.gamec.it.
GAMeC – Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo
Via San Tomaso, 53 -24121 Bergamo
Tel +39 035 270272 / Fax +39 035 236962
www.gamec.it
3 Questions to know the curators
Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk
ATP: Starting from the beginning: who are you? How have you become a curator? Which are your role models?
Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk: I would like to start by saying that I am Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk, and I work as a curator and writer. My foundation is in Art History, which I studied at the Utrecht University from 2007–2010, and was followed by a Curating course in London (2010–2012). This course is taught jointly by the London Metropolitan University and The Whitechapel Gallery. During the latter period I also worked for the David Roberts Art Foundation. In September 2012 I founded The Office for Curating, which is currently being located in Rotterdam. The Office has allowed me to engage in and contribute to various constellation, among exhibitions, publications and lectures, but rather than to summarise, I would suggest to have a look at the following: www.theofficeforcurating.com. My all time favourite role models are: Enrique Vila Matas, Jean–Luc Godard, Hergé, Felix Gonzalez–Torres, in that specific order.
ATP: What image bests represents being a curator? Why?
N.J.L.: Either: Bruce McLean, Pose Work for Plinths 3. 1971, or Bruno Munari, Seeking Comfort in an Uncomfortable Chair, around 1950, or: … And so on, and so forth…
BRUCE MCLEAN, POSE WORK FOR PLINTHS 3. 1971
ATP: Tell me about the last exhibition that you have seen. Which is your personal opinion?
N.J.L.: I would recommend to have a look into this exhibition project: Dora García, The Joycean Society. http://www.spaziopunch.com
***
Isla Leaver-Yap
ATP: Starting from the beginning: who are you? How have you become a curator? Which are your role models?
I am Isla Leaver-Yap. I am a project organizer who recently moved from Brooklyn, NY to Glasgow, UK. I don’t know entirely if I am a curator, though I have certainly held that job title in my working life (I used to work as one at Baltic, Gateshead, and ICA, London). I haven’t had any formal curatorial training, for example, but I do work with artists and institutions. All my projects involve an artist and the production of public-facing work – whether performance, text, printed matter or exhibition. This is sometimes simply a conversation, other times I work from a more embedded position within an institution to stage durational projects, like the exhibition series Short Stories at Sculpture Center, New York, or the recent Artists Moving Image Festival at Tramway in Glasgow. The format may change but my intention of interfacing with an artist remains the same. My approach is perhaps more editorial than curatorial. I hope not to value or idolize people, and I hope never to “follow” a role, though I have great respect for the work of my peers who are my most direct and frequent point of reference and influence. Richard Birkett, who I worked with at the ICA, has an ethos that I think is rare within our field of work — his commitment to talking to artists on their own terms and with a depth of intelligence was something that affected the way I felt shows could and should be done; James Richards is an artist who has an intuitive and deft way of piecing together feeling and material, his sensual relationship to work is very inspiring; Angie Keefer is a thinker, writer, artist who has many ‘roles’ but, nonetheless, a highly particular voice and approach to the production of work that has always been key to thinking what is possible; and the curator and writer Fionn Meade makes the kind of leaps between seemingly discrete areas of writing, philosophy and objects that always intensifies my experience of work, leaving things permanently transformed. What is key in this question of roles and models, however, is that my role, whatever that might be, is only afforded as part of someone else’s work that has often come before my own; it’s important to acknowledge my parasitic relationship to the producer, and in that acknowledgement I also seek to transform that relationship into more symbiotic and mutually supportive situation, so we can go further together and discard models.
ATP: What image bests represents being a curator? Why?
I.L-Y: The gloved hand looks like Mickey Mouse. There’s an air of the Pink Panther about this image too.
ATP: Tell me about the last exhibition that you have seen. Which is your personal opinion?
I.L-Y: I just saw the Art Under Attack show at Tate Britain, that traces iconoclasm in British art from the reformation onwards. The grouping of the early material – broken statues, repainted altarpieces, and reconfigured stained glass windows – was staggering. I found the collection of defaced coins particularly exciting.
***
Andrew Berardini
ATP: Starting from the beginning: who are you? How have you become a curator? Which are your role models?
A.B.: Big questions. I started out as a writer and still am one. More or less everything I do emanates from this. I started curating as expression of writing, arranging objects in a space where people move through it is a story, a narrative, more like a play than an exhibition. My role models are Charles Baudelaire, Patti Smith, and Samuel Beckett.
ATP: What image bests represents being a curator? Why?
A.B.: I’m perhaps a little old-fashioned in this. I prefer the curator and their role to be amorphous, undefined, complicated, kaleidoscopic. I’m against the professionalization of the job. So in a way there’s no image that could capture all the weird characters and diverse backgrounds. I’d prefer curators to be. I prefer weird diversity over austere modernist monoliths.
ATP: Tell me about the last exhibition that you have seen. Which is your personal opinion?
A.B.: I probably see two dozen exhibitions a week. It’s a love affair, an obsession, a modest way to make a living. Though excellence in human endeavor tends to be rare, every expression has validity.
***
Sam Korman
ATP: Starting from the beginning: who are you? How have you become a curator? Which are your role models?
Sam Korma: a. My name is Sam Korman and I’m the assistant director of White Flag Projects in St Louis, Missouri.
b. How did I become a curator? I started as an artist. Only after I became frustrated, and sought to establish a context for my work and the work of my friends by founding Car Hole Gallery in Portland, Oregon did curating become what I do. So, really, I just called myself a curator. Car Hole was only open for a year, but it was a lesson in how art, writing, institutions, and ideas are developed by a community, and, in turn, how they help to develop a community, as well. It taught me how to really think about art and the necessity of an institution to have a real, and, at times, iconoclastic voice. Whether or not I achieved any of this is still up for debate, but by the end of Car Hole, these things I was actively doing inscribed me as a curator, and I finally started to think of myself as one. I also stopped making art in any strict sense of the word. Now, I am fortunate enough to work for an organization that I respected long before it became my employer. White Flag definitely creates a context where self-definition is still free, which is what brought me to this field in the first place.
c. My role models are d.boon and Mike Watt.
ATP: What image bests represents being a curator? Why?
S.C.: Recently, at 11 PM on a Monday night, I was standing in an aisle at a grocery store in St Louis opening a bottle of fresh deer urine, because an artist asked me to research its scent. I took a massive whiff of the buck lure. It was so strong that it sent me reeling across the aisle sneezing and holding my nose. I had to smell it several more times in order to give an accurate description! My report to the artist read: “It is reallllllly strong. Like vitamin pee, but after 200 vitamins and more ammonia smelling with notes of tall grass and old bark.” At the check-out, I bought several apples, some bread, and the small eye-dropper bottle of urine. “Art is what makes life more interesting that art.”
ATP: Tell me about the last exhibition that you have seen. Which is your personal opinion?
S.C.: I don’t want to get myself in too much trouble with this one. Maybe I’ll plead the fifth? You probably won’t get too many people saying something sucked, and I’m not going to name any names. I will say two things: I wind up seeing a lot of museum shows in my neck of the (back)woods and those have been pretty uncreative and boring in their selection and presentation of artists. They just aren’t taking any risks and I am not sure why – I think this is what makes it so frustrating to me. Quit pussyfooting! Good artists are worth the risk to your institution and to your career. The second thing: the last show I saw that got me really excited about art was Jef Geys at Wiels – that artist and that institution are doing some of the most interesting projects, so it was a perfect combination: smart, challenging, problematic, very open, funny. It was an awesome show that was expertly curated. This answer is me kind of wimping out. And, admittedly, I live out in the provinces, so I look at a lot of art online. There’s no context other than my computer screen and so much art looks really good on the Internet – perhaps even looks made for it… I’ll say that israellund.tumblr.com is a really well curated exhibition I love looking at over and over again.
***
Alessandro Castiglioni
ATP: Starting from the beginning: who are you? How have you become a curator? Which are your role models?
Alessandro Castiglioni: I studied as art historian and since 2004 I have been working at the museum of modern and contemporary art in Gallarate, known as MAGA. Then, in 2009 I started to contribute to Little Constellation, a network based in San Marino that focuses on contemporary art in Small States and geo-cultural micro-areas of Europe. Thanks to this experience, my activity started to grow inside of many cultural institutions, and I think this addressed my approach to focusing on cultural anthropology and educational practices. For what concerns my role models, I would think of two “mentors”, who were incredibly influential, though they passed away too soon: Antonio Caronia and Roberto Daolio.
ATP: What image bests represents being a curator? Why?
A.C.: Actually I have to say I think of curatorship more like a practice, rather than a profession. But it’s something personal: I see myself more as a cultural researcher who uses, as instrument of research, the curatorial activity in order to investigate, discuss, display and show some images, actions or stories related with some actual issues of our contemporary culture.
ATP: Tell me about the last exhibition that you have seen. Which is your personal opinion?
A.C.: Some days ago I was in Valletta and I saw an exhibition dedicated to young Maltese artists. These kind of projects are very interesting: I have the opportunity to compare some areas or territories known as peripheral to what I usually see in cities like Milano or London, and try to understand dynamics such as the standardization of international artistic languages, or the issues related with some sort of cultural isolation (for example nations, like Malta, that don’t have art schools), and maybe the opportunity to discover some unexpected projects, that, by the way, I think you will see next January in Viafarini…
October 26th, 2013