What I learned in the lecture

In the shifting landscape of contemporary curating, the act of publishing has emerged not as a secondary tool of documentation or promotional ephemera, but as a critical, autonomous space of curatorial inquiry. Rather than simply accompanying exhibitions, publications now often assume a curatorial role in their own right—framing artistic practices, mediating public, and sustaining dialogues across time. As Adam Benmakhlouf (2025) succinctly notes, “The publication is increasingly considered as a curatorial space within contemporary art.”

From Object to Practice: Theoretical Shifts in the Understanding of Publishing

Annette Gilbert’s anthology Publishing as Artistic Practice (2016) provides a foundational pivot in how we conceive of publishing—not as a fixed object (the book), but as an unfolding, processual, and socially embedded activity. Gilbert (2016, p. 7) observes a shift “from medium, i.e. artefact, to practice; and from book to publishing,” highlighting the increasing relevance of publishing as a form of artistic and curatorial production. In line with the broader “practice turn” in the humanities and social sciences, Reckwitz (in Gilbert, 2016, p. 9) defines the practice as a patterned, habitual mode of engaging with the world, involving bodies, materials, and structures of meaning. What this framing enables is a view of publishing not as passive dissemination, but as a proposition that both enacts and critiques the very systems in which it circulates. Bhaskar’s model (cited in Gilbert, 2016, pp. 10–11) identifies publishing’s agency through four interrelated functions: filtering, amplification, framing, and modelling. These are not merely logistical processes—they actively shape the reception, legibility, and politics of cultural production.

Curating as Authorship: Queering the Field

As curators increasingly assume the role of publishers, and vice versa, questions of authorship, legitimacy, and institutional power surface. Kuusela (2016, p. 121) links this shift to the broader collapse of modernist ideals of originality, where curatorial selection and framing now constitute meaning-making activities in themselves. In this context, publishing becomes a powerful site of authorship—especially for those seeking to unsettle inherited norms of visibility and value. Sara Ahmed’s (2006) theory of “queer phenomenology” offers a compelling lens through which to understand this orientation. She writes: “The hope that reproduction fails is the hope for new impressions, for new lines to emerge” (p. 18). Through publishing, curators can redirect attention, propose new trajectories of thought, and mark deviations from the dominant narratives of art history. This aligns with Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ conception of “cognitive justice”—a framework that Carol Azumah Dennis (2018, p. 201) describes as “a struggle for co-presence, premised on epistemological resistance.”
Case Study 1: Give Birth to Me Tomorrow
Co-curated by Adam Benmakhlouf and Tako Taal, Give Birth to Me Tomorrow (2021) was conceived as part of the Artists’ Moving Image Festival by LUX Scotland. But rather than a static catalogue, the publication operates as a continuation—and in many ways, a complication—of the festival itself. “This publication is an extension of GIVE BIRTH TO ME TOMORROW… a reflection on the process of co-programming a film festival during a global pandemic” (Benmakhlouf and Taal, 2021, p. 4). Its structure, unfolding across seven lunar phases throughout the year, mirrors the disruptions and pauses imposed by the pandemic. This temporal choreography, described by Taal as a “slowed + reverb” methodology (Taal, 2021, p. 10), allows the publication to act as a site for mourning, intimacy, and sustained attention—a refusal of the binge-watch economy that dominates the visual culture.
Case Study 2: The Phone is the Keyhole; The Penpot, the Heart
Produced by the first all-QTIBIPOC committee at Transmission Gallery (2018), this publication exemplifies how publishing can foreground affect, embodiment, and refusal. Alberta Whittle (2019) reflects on the committee’s internal dynamics, noting the unequal burdens placed on racialised members and the exhaustion that ensued. The publication doesn’t aestheticise these tensions; instead, it discloses them, in a voice that is intentionally “chatty,” relational, and raw.
Described in lecture materials as practising “friendship as a methodology” (Benmakhlouf, 2025), this work embraces messiness as a form of curatorial critique. The refusal to conform to institutional expectations becomes a strategy of resistance—what Benmakhlouf and Taal (2021, p. 12) call an “insistent and obstinate” presence in a field often driven by professional legibility.
Case Study 3: How We Hold
Created by the Serpentine Gallery’s Civic and Education team, How We Hold presents a collection of socially engaged, pedagogical, and activist projects. Rather than fix ephemeral encounters into a stable archive, the editors frame the book as “rehearsals for art and social change” (Khalaf et al., 2021, p. 13). Its fragmented, collaborative structure—featuring timelines, personal essays, and documentation—embodies a non-linear, pluralistic ethics of care.
As a curatorial form, How We Hold insists that the political is not a postscript to art but its embedded condition. The publication embodies Gilbert’s (2016) notion of publishing as “praxeological”—a practice entangled in its context, shaped by the communities it addresses and the infrastructures it resists.
Conclusion
Across these examples, publishing emerges not as a supporting act to curatorial work, but as a fully-fledged curatorial medium in itself—one that reorients attention, reshapes temporalities, and remakes the boundaries of exhibition. Whether mobilised through grief, intimacy, refusal, or pedagogy, publishing extends the reach of curatorial practice beyond the gallery and into the social, material, and discursive fields that frame contemporary art. In doing so, it not only makes meaning public but makes the act of making public a site of political and aesthetic possibility.

Bibliography

Ahmed, S., 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press.

Benmakhlouf, A., 2025. Week 9: Publishing as Curating. Lecture Slides, University of Edinburgh, 19 March.

Benmakhlouf, A. and Taal, T., 2021. Give Birth to Me Tomorrow. Glasgow: LUX Scotland.

Dennis, C.A., 2018. ‘Decolonising Education’, in Bhambra, G.K., Gebrial, D. and Nişancıoğlu, K. eds. Decolonising the University. London: Pluto Press, pp.190–204.

Gilbert, A., ed., 2016. Publishing as Artistic Practice. Berlin: Sternberg Press.

Khalaf, A., Thorp, A., Graham, E., Gatens, L. and Egan, J., 2021. How We Hold: Rehearsals for Art and Social Change. London: Serpentine Galleries.

Kuusela, H., 2016. ‘Publisher, Promoter, and Genius: The Rise of Curatorial Ethos in Contemporary Literature’, in Gilbert, A. ed., Publishing as Artistic Practice. Berlin: Sternberg Press, pp.118–133.

Reckwitz, A., 2002. ‘Toward a Theory of Social Practices: A Development in Culturalist Theorizing’, European Journal of Social Theory, 5(2), pp.243–263. [Cited in Gilbert, 2016].

Taal, T., 2021. ‘Postponements’, in Benmakhlouf, A. and Taal, T., Give Birth to Me Tomorrow. Glasgow: LUX Scotland, pp.6–11.

Whittle, A., 2019. ‘Biting the Hand That Feeds You: A Strategy of Wayward Curating’, Critical Arts, 33(6), pp.110–123. DOI: 10.1080/02560046.2019.1688848.

Inspiration for my curation

Although my exhibition did not involve a published project, I can still draw inspiration from it.

1. Publications： extension of the exhibition space

Treat publications (whether paper or digital) as part of the curation, not as an add-on. They are not instructions, but another exhibition site. Practical methods: For example, let the publication not try to ‘explain’ the exhibition, but propose parallel thinking, feelings, and voices related to the exhibition; like Give Birth to Me Tomorrow, which turned the publication into a space of ‘slowed + reverb’—allowing the work and theme to ‘resonate for a long time’ in the audience’s mind.

2. The tone and form of the publication can be ‘informal’ and ‘intimate’

using letter-writing, notes, chat, and aside-style language to give the text a sense of physicality and warmth, rather than technical terms and dispassionate analysis. For example, he Phone is the Keyhole uses ‘chatty print’ to reveal the ‘back of the kitchen’ behind the curation, expressing fatigue, friendship, and perception rather than just recording the results.

3. Time as a curatorial material: delay, repetition, and non-linearity

Breaking the linear view of time from ‘opening-closing’. Like Give Birth to Me Tomorrow, the curatorial process is broken down into ‘chapters’ or ‘echo’ modes. For example, design an exhibition text that is ‘released in phases’ (for example, a new interview or image every 3 days); the publication is not published before or after the exhibition, but continuously generated during the exhibition (such as a zine gradually bound on the wall); the use of time metaphors such as ‘moon phases’, ‘housekeeping cycles’ and ‘plant growth’ is particularly suitable for the female and family rhythms I am concerned with. So if there is to be a continuation of feminist exhibitions in the future, this is a good approach.

4. Publishing as a strategy for care and resistance

Let publication become an action of care, collaboration and memory reconstruction in the exhibition, rather than a final summary. For example, the practice in How We Hold is well worth learning from – treating publication as a kind of ‘social rehearsal space’ where different voices can coexist.

Week–9 Publishing as curatorial practice / Yilin Cong / Curating (2024-2025)[SEM2] by is licensed under a