01 What do we know about curating？

In the afternoon workshop, the temporary team members shared their experiences or hobbies in curation-related fields. Among them, I was very interested in the curatorial work that one of the team members participated in. When planning an exhibition that changes with The Times, do curators arrange visits according to a timeline? I think there are many examples to answer this question.

As a cultural practice, the essence of curation is obviously not simply the selection and display of exhibits. Brian O’Doherty pointed out in Inside the White Cube that curators build not only a physical space, but also an ideological container. The concept of “White Cube” separates art from social reality and forms the illusion of neutrality through the display strategy of de-contextualization. This critical perspective explains the mechanism of curatorial power: the curator shapes the audience’s cognitive framework through taxonomy and narrative arrangement.

On the mind map produced by the workshop, it is obvious that many words extend around “Communication”. With the development of economy, the core orientation of contemporary curatorial practice has gradually changed from exhibit orientation to audience orientation. More and more curators seek to construct a dialogue between exhibits and audiences through display methods and technical means in exhibitions. In fact, as early as 2012, Claire Bishop demonstrated the case of “participatory art” in her book Artificial Hells, and this form of digital curation, which transforms the role of the audience into a co-producer of the exhibition, has been pushed to a new dimension with the development of modern technology.

Reference：

Bal, Mieke. 1996. Double Exposures: The Subject of Cultural Analysis. New York: Routledge.

Bishop, Claire. 2012. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso.