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Hanyun Xue / Curating (2024-2025)[SEM2]

Tag: emotional curation

W12-A Curatorial Experiment at Summerhall–Fear as a Method

By

On 21 April 2025

In Curatorial Experiment at Summerhall, 💬 Peer Exchange & Curatorial Dialogue

Part 1:

Introduction

Before anything else, let me show you what we made.
This is the title slide from our final curatorial presentation:

Please click the link to view

Fear as a Method

link:https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/s2500923_curating-2024-2025sem2/wp-content/uploads/sites/11192/2025/04/Fear-as-a-Method.pdf

(Fear as a Method A sensory workshop. March 29, 2025 · Summerhall · In Vitro Gallery)

Our PPT laid out the structure, intent, and emotional architecture of the workshop.
We framed fear not as pathology but as a method—
a curatorial tool to explore perception, misjudgment, and emotional co-creation.

We offered no art objects. No polished installations.
What we gave participants was a guided pathway—
through touch, sound, spatial disorientation, and quiet reflection.

They left not with answers, but with a method.
And we, as curators, left with better questions.

This blog is a reflection on how that happened.
Not just how we built the workshop,
but how the workshop built us.

Part 2:

Curatorial review and reflection

I. Where It All Began: Feeling Our Way Into a Method

We didn’t begin with a perfect concept. We began with a shared feeling—something more like a hunch than a plan.

It was early March, and the four of us—Yiran, Yufan, Lingqiu, and I—were tucked into a quiet café corner, half-lost in conversation, half-sketching thoughts onto napkins. What kept coming up was this strange, slippery word: fear. Not as an idea to explain, but as a sensation we couldn’t quite pin down. I remember looking up and asking:
“What if fear isn’t something we display, but something we practice—something we can stay with, even gently rehearse?”
And that was it. That question became the doorway to everything that followed.

Right from the beginning, I didn’t want to make an exhibition people only looked at. I wanted to make something people felt through. We proposed the central theme—Fear as a Method—as a way to move away from visuals, and into something more internal: a participatory, sensory, body-centered experience. Not therapy. Not theatre. Just a quiet space where people could encounter their fear—not to fix it, but to understand it differently.

II. Building from the Course: Three Weeks that Shaped Everything

W4: Curatorial Ethics

This week changed our entire approach to curating. It taught our to think not only about what we show, but how people feel when moving through a space. Inspired by course readings on care, vulnerability, and bodily safety (O’Neill, Wilson), We began designing the workshop route not as a gallery but as an emotional threshold.

I made key decisions here:

  • Using soft materials like feathers and ribbon to create sensory ambiguity.
  • Incorporating ambient sound layers that blend comfort and tension.
  • Emphasizing psychological safety while gently pushing discomfort.

Our route was not designed for clarity, but for internal resonance.

(The photographer of the event photos: Yiran Gu)

W6: Artist-led Curation

This week’s examples reminded me that a curator can also be a facilitator, a host, or a listener. I saw the power of allowing others to co-create the emotional temperature of a project.

We structured the workshop so that each participant could move at their own pace, in silence, blindfolded, uninterrupted. I personally designed the route flow and sound transitions to support this rhythm, ensuring people could drift inward.

During testing, I adjusted the transitions between sensory stations based on what participants felt—not what we expected. My role became not just designer, but emotional cartographer.

(“Fear as a Method” sensory route – exhibition layout sketch, April 2025. Includes Blindfold Zone, Crunch Floor, Ribbon Installations, Producer of the effect drawing: Yiran Gu.)

W9: Publishing as Curation

This week was perhaps the most transformative for me. We studied “The Phone is the Keyhole; The Penpot, the Heart” and I was completely moved. Their refusal of polish, their embrace of emotional honesty, and their prioritizing of friendship as method helped me see publishing not as post-event documentation, but as an integral part of the curatorial experience.

So I proposed:

“Let’s make the back side of our zine a toolkit.”
“Not just to reflect, but to use. Something they can take away.”

I designed the emotional kit section with fill-in prompts, soft design choices, and handwritten elements—so participants could continue the workshop privately, on their own terms.

(Zine mock-up: Designed and written by the team, All images are co-created by the event participants. )

III. Making and Unmaking: Group Process and Living Diagrams

Our group worked in Miro constantly. Looking back, our board doesn’t just show logistics—it shows our thinking style: layered, nonlinear, highly emotional. We mapped quotes, fears, diagrams, workshop flows, and even doubt. The board became a record of not just what we did, but how we made decisions. This was also the first time I felt fully comfortable disagreeing in a group—I knew my ideas (and feelings) had space.

Together we refined:

  • The misjudgment stations (I curated the sound textures).
  • The route structure (I directed how the body flows).
  • The language tone (I crafted the closing reflection speech).
  • The publication design (I created the concept for the emotional takeaway page). (Miro process map – team discussion and emotional mapping Screenshot from team Miro board, March 2025. Author: Team archive.)

IV. The Workshop: A Rehearsal for Courage

On the day of the workshop, I was nervous. Not about logistics, but about whether people would actually feel something. We weren’t showing art. We were inviting people to surrender their sight, to misjudge, to be vulnerable.

At the end of the route, I delivered the final speech:

Thank you for walking this path.
Maybe you didn’t guess anything right.
Maybe you startled yourself.
Maybe—you weren’t afraid at all.

Sometimes, fear isn’t a mistake. It’s a reminder.
It says: “There’s something here that frightens you.”
Maybe it’s a memory.
Maybe it’s something from childhood.

In the dark, fear becomes clearer.
But often, fear comes not from what’s real—
but from what we imagine.
Reality is rarely as terrifying as our minds make it out to be.

When you realise that what you’re afraid of
is actually a past wound speaking,
and when you gather the courage to face it—
that fear may already be halfway gone.

Now, write one sentence—
a message for a future version of yourself who might be afraid.
When fear returns, how will you remind yourself?

Remind yourself that we always have courage.
Enough to face one unknown after another.

This is the little method you take with you today.
A quiet piece of courage that belongs only to you.

They took the zines. They wrote themselves notes for the future.
And I watched them place those sticky notes on the wall—
each one a small sentence of survival.

V.Team Roles and Contributions

1. Hanyun Xue — Experience Curator (Emotional Facilitator)
As the group’s emotional anchor, Hanyun served as the guide and psychological support throughout the experience. With her background in art and counseling, she shaped the language of comfort and trust. Her voice—calm, attentive, and clear—helped participants navigate their fear safely, especially in moments of sensory disorientation.

2. Lingqiu Xiao — Spatial Choreographer (The Lobby Manager)
As the “lobby manager” of our emotional space, Lingqiu took charge of real-time movement and crowd coordination. Like a stage choreographer, she arranged the physical flow of participants with a sharp eye for timing and calm control. From managing transitions to maintaining safety during blindfolded routes, she held the space with both precision and empathy.

3. Yiran Gu — Sensory Orchestrator (Media & Technical Lead)
Acting as our behind-the-scenes technician, Yiran handled both sound design and video documentation. She composed the atmospheric sound layers and recorded the workshop with sensitivity—capturing fleeting gestures, silences, and reactions. Her work preserved the ephemeral feeling of the event and helped us build a self-archive rooted in emotion.

4. Yufan Wang — Service Narrator (Flow & Discipline Coordinator)
Taking on the role of “discipline coordinator,” Yufan made sure everything ran smoothly. She oversaw timing, participant rhythm, and station transitions. Quiet but ever-present, she was the backstage voice who ensured that nothing felt rushed or chaotic. Her sense of order gave structure to the experience—and her steady presence made it feel secure.

My Role, My Reflection

Task Description
Theme Initiation Proposed the core concept “Fear as a Method” during the first brainstorming session.
Sound Design Selected and edited sound textures for sensory misjudgment zones (e.g. insects, feathers).
Route Planning Designed the blindfolded walking route; guided spatial pacing and emotional rhythm.
Emotional Toolkit Design (Zine) Created the reflective back page of the zine with writing prompts and coping actions.
Closing Speech Wrote and delivered the final speech during the workshop to reflect on emotional insights.
Exhibition Recap (PPT) Co-developed the final presentation slides on team roles, outcomes, and reflections.

1: Research

We applied emotional ethics (W4), sensory curation (W6), and affective publishing (W9) directly into the design of this project. We referenced not only course texts but practices by artists like Marina Abramović (who uses presence as method), and Tramway’s Jarman exhibition (W7), which made private pain public without aestheticizing it.

2: Practice

I coordinated theme direction, sensory station design, wrote and delivered the workshop’s closing, and authored the emotional reflection page in the zine. I also curated sound elements, choreographed the route, and contributed to visual consistency in our publishing and video documentation.

3: Reflection

I realised that curating isn’t about “creating something to be looked at.” It’s about creating a space where something can happen—for real people, in real time. The workshop was about trust. And we earned it.

VI. Outcomes Are Not Just Outputs

Our project ultimately consisted of four interwoven outcomes:

  • Our curatorial presentation (PPT), which archived our judgment, not just our actions.

Fear as a Method

Looking Back, and Forward

Fear as a Method was not perfect—but it was personal, alive, and full of care. We didn’t aim to heal people. We offered them a method to rehearse feeling, misjudgment, and return.

It taught me what kind of curator I want to be:
Not a guide. Not a gatekeeper.
But a quiet facilitator of difficult feeling.

That, to me, is where curating begins.

Week 11 | 11:11 Collective Recap: Where Collaboration Meets Curation

By

On 21 April 2025

In 🤝 Collective Practice: 11:11 Collective

If I had to describe these three group events in one word, it would be: alive. Not just because we were surrounded by real flowers and blooming ideas, but because the experience of making something together—as a team—felt truly vibrant.

🎬 Collective Event 1: Film Sharing Afternoon at Summerhall

On March 20, our curatorial collective gathered in the Collective Space at Summerhall for a film-sharing session. We didn’t set out to impress or instruct—our only goal was to feel together. And that’s exactly what happened.

Each of us brought a short experimental video—mostly from UbuWeb, some from YouTube—and we watched them one by one. No lectures, no long analysis. Just a few soft words on why we chose what we chose, and then a moment of stillness to sit with what we saw.

I shared Joan Jonas – Left Side Right Side (1972)
🔗 Link to film

It’s a raw, direct piece that uses the body and the camera to challenge how we see. Jonas’s gestures—moving from left to right, shifting her gaze—felt like she was handing over control of the frame to us. I chose this work because it captures something I want to explore in “Fluid Curating”: what happens when we surrender authority and invite others to take part? What does curatorial space feel like when it becomes shared, intimate, and unstable?

 Film Selections

Here are some of the works we watched together:

  • Staff at Moderna Museet by Annika Eriksson
  • Cycles by Zeinabu irene Davis
  • Why Modern Art is so Expensive? by Business Insider
  • Singing in the Rain by Gene Kelly & Stanley Donen
  • Interior Scroll – The Cave by Carolee Schneemann
  • Love Sequences – Qanun by Gobelins
  • Inspirator by Abigail Lane
  • Lanvin, Alka-Seltzer, Veterano ads by Salvador Dalí
  • The Neighbor’s Window by Marshall Curry

Each one offered a different way of sensing—through rhythm, silence, contradiction, or vulnerability. Together, they formed a constellation of emotional and visual textures.

（The poster designed by Sarah）

Collaborative Setup

What I appreciated most was the way we worked as a group. Someone brought popcorn, another taped up the windows to dim the light, someone else set up the projector. We didn’t assign roles like a production team—we just moved together, intuitively, like a collective with shared purpose.

This event reminded me that curating is not just about objects or spaces—it’s about shared energy. In that room, every gesture felt like part of the exhibition already.

Sometimes, curating doesn’t need walls or text panels. Sometimes, it begins with a projector on a wobbly table, a dim room, and a handful of people ready to sit quietly with each other. This was more than a screening. It was a rehearsal for the kind of curating I want to practice: slow, shared, and emotionally intelligent.

 

💻 Summerhall Event 2 – Entering the World of Artsteps

This session was like stepping into a new dimension. Our teammate Beichen (a.k.a. our unofficial tech guide!) introduced us to Artsteps, an online tool for building virtual exhibitions. At first, it felt a bit like a game—dragging walls, resizing images—but then I realised: this is curation in action.

Together, we explored how to build a digital space that reflects a shared vision. Not just uploading images, but thinking about:

  • How does someone move through this exhibition?
  • Where should a pause happen?
  • Can digital silence feel like breathing space?

I loved seeing how everyone brought something to the table—some coded quietly, some discussed lighting effects, others helped title walls or test the walkthroughs. It wasn’t just about digital skills. It was about shared authorship.

This is curatorial practice in its expanded field: merging tech, aesthetics, collaboration, and playful experimentation.

🌸 Summerhall Event 3 – Flower Arranging with Feeling

From screen to stem, the next session took us in the opposite direction—back to the material world.

We gathered for a flower arranging session. It wasn’t a workshop in the formal sense. No one was “teaching” us. Instead, it was something more beautiful: a space to create side by side. Each of us brought different flowers, and as we sat together on the wooden floor, trimming stems and passing colors to each other, something shifted.

This wasn’t just about arranging flowers. It was about arranging time, presence, and attention.
There were no rules, just silent understandings. A shared sense of “you add that, I’ll hold this.”
The bouquets we made were different, but they all reflected the gentleness of co-creation.

I realised—curatingdoesn’t always begin with a concept. Sometimes it starts with care.

💬 Reflections on Practice

Looking back, these sessions taught me something vital. Curating isn’t just about selecting and displaying artworks. It’s also about learning how to be together—online and offline, formally and emotionally.

Whether building a virtual gallery or weaving petals into shape, we were always practicing:

  • Shared decision-making
  • Respecting differences in aesthetics and pace
  • Making space for everyone to contribute

These moments, simple as they were, grounded my belief that “fluid curating” begins with real people, working together, experimenting, laughing, failing, adjusting, and making something new.

And honestly? That’s the kind of exhibition I want to make. One that’s not perfect, but deeply human.

W8-Tracing Emotion Through Space: Three Galleries, One Heart-My Field Notes from Glasgow

By

On 11 March 2025

In 📚 Curatorial Theory & Literature Reflection, 🧭 Field Notes & Exhibition Visits

🌙 Tracing Emotion Through Space: Three Galleries, One Heart
— My Field Notes from Glasgow

When I first set out for Glasgow, I didn’t think too much. I just felt it was always worth going to see some exhibitions. But I didn’t expect that this one-day journey would leave behind so many subtle ripples inside me.

🏛 First Stop: Hunterian

It looked like the kind of museum I had always imagined—rows of neatly aligned display cases, carefully controlled lighting, and spaces so clean they resembled laboratories.
The exhibition itself was powerful, dealing with colonial medicine, bodily control, and scientific violence. I stood in front of a wax anatomical model, and suddenly I realized: this wasn’t just about “presenting knowledge” it was also a kind of violence of being observed.

I began to ask myself: as curators, when we reconstruct these histories, is there a risk that we unknowingly repeat this gaze?

Thoughts of my own curatorial project floated into my mind. If I want to tell a story about the body and memory, how should I wrap that pain? With cold light? With silence? The rationality of Hunterian made me want to rebel.

That evening, I looked up several books and tried to process the confusion I felt. In Labour and Monopoly Capital, Harry Braverman’s analysis of Fordist labor made me wonder—does exhibition design also contain a form of knowledge division and a discipline of vision? Burton Benedict’s The Anthropology of World’s Fairs opened my eyes to how spatial atmospheres shape collective psychology, affecting how we read an object.

And then there was Propaganda and Empire by John M. MacKenzie. He reminds us that exhibitions don’t just present history, they actively construct it. That struck me deeply: if I want to explore bodies and power in my project, then form itself can never be neutral.

✨ Second Stop: Tramway

The moment I entered Tramway, I knew I’d remember it for a long time.

There was no prominent signage at the entrance, but inside, the gallery unfolded like a giant dream. Maud Sulter’s You are my kindred spirit quietly lived in this space. Semi-transparent curtains drifted softly, and images emerged from behind fabric—making me slow down, as if walking through someone’s family memories.
Photos, videos, and sound fragments wove together overlapping identities of mother, daughter, and Black female poet.

What stayed with me the most was the lighting—so beautifully handled. Some artworks were rimmed with a warm glow, like the sun casting slanted rays onto old curtains at dusk. It didn’t just illuminate, it narrated. Sometimes it felt like a secret being gently lit, sometimes like longing softly crying in the corner.

There was also a “circular reading room” in the space—books, headphones, stools, a projection—arranged like a soft corner of a home. I sat there reading Sulter’s family photo albums and poetry, and suddenly I understood: an exhibition doesn’t always have to display—it can accompany.

That night I opened Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics, where he describes exhibitions as spaces of encounter. I felt so much resonance. And in Hawkins’ writing on the AIDS Memorial Quilt, I saw curating not only as a practice of structure, but as an act of social empathy.

I began to reimagine my own project Fluid Curating—could I also create a “non-exhibition corner”? A place where visitors stop reading labels, and instead pause to listen, to smell, to look at an old photo—and find their own relationship to the work?

🎬 Third Stop: GoMA

Our last stop was GoMA, where we saw John Akomfrah’s Mimesis: African Soldier. Three giant screens surrounded us, black and white war footage, slow-motion water washing over old photographs, and single-word subtitles like disenchantment and mourning, no narration, just music and fragments of visual poetry.

For a moment, I felt a bit lost. But I was completely drawn in. I remember one scene: soldiers dancing in uniform on muddy ground, music sorrowful and beautiful. I thought, maybe they were trying to reclaim their dignity as human beings in the midst of war.

I recalled Okwui Enwezor’s curatorial concept in Documenta 11, where he emphasized decentering the Western gaze and using exhibitions to address global trauma. Akomfrah’s work felt like a silent cry, a voice for lives swallowed by history. Other curatorial examples, like Red Shift or Treno, reminded me how art can be a stage for the silenced.

One line from the AIDS Memorial Quilt struck me: its center is wherever you find it. That made me realize—not every exhibition needs a clear narrative. Sometimes, scattered memories, flowing gazes, and overlapping emotions feel more true to how we actually experience life.

I started thinking seriously about non-linear structures in curating. Maybe what I need is not a “linear exhibition path,” but a kind of curatorial weaving. Not a script, but a net.

Mimesis: African Soldier — V21 Artspace | Interactive 3D Exhibition ...

🎒 What I’ve Learned Isn’t Just Curating

As the day ended, I sat on the train back to Edinburgh with a phone full of photos and audio clips. I realized I wasn’t just viewing the exhibitions, they were seeing through me. They pierced through my obsession with “explaining everything,” and slowly opened up a new awareness: exhibitions can also be felt.

I don’t want to be a curator who only explains. I want to be someone who speaks through emotion: who creates a space where viewers can find their own moments of resonance between light and shadow, between sound and silence.

📚 Further Reading

Benedict, Burton. “The Anthropology of World’s Fairs: San Francisco’s Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915.” Visual Anthropology, vol. 3, no. 1–2, 1990, pp. 17–34.

Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2002.

Braverman, Harry. Labour and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974.

Enwezor, Okwui. “The Black Box.” In Documenta 11_Platform 5: Exhibition Catalogue, edited by Ute Meta Bauer, 43–55. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002.

Greenberg, Reesa, Bruce W. Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne, eds. Thinking about Exhibitions. London: Routledge, 1996.

Hawkins, Peter S. “Naming Names: The Art of Memory and the NAMES Project AIDS Quilt.” Critical Inquiry 19, no. 4 (1993): 752–779.

MacKenzie, John M. Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984.

Wilson, Fred. “Mining the Museum.” In Fred Wilson: A Critical Reader, edited by Doro Globus, 38–49. London: Ridinghouse, 2011.

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