Week 3 Thinking Through Curatorial Power and Ethics
🫧Thinking Through Lecture and Workshop
This week’s lecture and workshop helped me understand curatorial structure and ethics more clearly. When curating, we often begin with basic questions: what, why, when and how. However, beneath these practical concerns are deeper issues of influence and responsibility. Curating is not only about planning and control; it shapes how the public receives artworks, what messages they take away, and what power the curator holds in structuring that experience.
I now understand how strong curatorial influence on the public can be. As Maura Reilly argues, curatorial decisions are never neutral: “the decision to participate in such initiatives is, in essence, a political act” (Reilly 2018, 215). Martinon further expands this idea by defining curating as an act of selecting and critically evaluating culture itself (Martinon 2020, ix). Through deciding what content audiences encounter, how it is presented, and which artists are made visible, curators shape public understanding in ways far greater than I had previously realised.
This raised an important question for me: what kind of content is appropriate for public display? It becomes essential for curators to establish their own ethical standards through critical reading, dialogue with peers and mentors, and ongoing self-reflection. Curatorial practice should not simply add diversity to existing white male-dominated frameworks, but actively question the structures of exclusion behind them. Because curators influence what others see and what messages they receive, ethics becomes central to curatorial responsibility.
If an exhibition fails to fully engage diverse artists, or continues to reproduce racism and sexism, it risks reinforcing global injustice. From this perspective, curators cannot claim neutrality. This also changed how I began to think about my own curatorial project: selecting works and designing routes are not neutral choices, but decisions that shape what audiences notice, how they move, and whose meanings become visible.
Reference
Reilly, Maura. Curatorial Activism: Towards an Ethics of Curating. London: Thames & Hudson, 2018.
Martinon, Jean-Paul. “Introduction.” In Curating as Ethics, ix–xii. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020.
