06 “Space” is not just a venue for curation

This week’s lecture focused on ATLAS Arts. Frances introduced this contemporary art organization to us and explained to us how curators should realize exhibition content as the carrier of stories, artworks and local culture through practice based on three representative projects of ATLAS Arts. The art projects of ATLAS Arts do not directly display certain objects to the audience, and they do not regard these contents as available resources in an overbearing manner when telling local cultural memories. Through their examples, I gradually began to understand the concept of “place-responsive curating”.

I am deeply inspired by ATLAS Arts’ curatorial thinking. They start not from “what I want to say,” but from “what the land is willing to say.” Lauren Gault’s work “CUINNEAG/BUCKET” in the lecture was very special. Using only an empty basin and a fossil to represent time and landscape, it does not attempt to interpret local cultural symbols, but communicates through the regional memory attached to the object. And the curatorial method of place-responsive curating gives me new ideas about my personal curatorial projects. Non-mainstream urban space is not a kind of “complementary culture”, these Spaces themselves have their own unique regional cultural memory. This reminds me that curating is not a simple application of curating methods in a certain space, perhaps it should be a reflection of the dialogue between regions and curators.