While the exhibition has come to define the profile of curating and its museums as the primary site of social or political engagement with the public, a number of contemporary visual arts organizations and their workers endeavor to shed this inheritance. Instead, they pursue their missions through close, revisionary engagement with the administrative, logistical, and programmatic armatures that prop up cultural institutions – that domain of activities that has elsewhere been called the “paracuratorial.” We take the “paracuratorial” to imply the culture worker’s obligations outside of exhibition-making (programming, education, education, stewardship, archiving, administration, and the like), along with the infrastructures of extra-exhibitionary activity. Unlike the temporary exhibition, this working group proposes, these function as primary sites of the institution’s politics, knowledge production, and sociality. The group will investigate genealogies that trace how contemporary curating became a saturated medium, and will focus on the sites and structures within which museums reflexively grapple with their ethical obligations. 

Study is divided into two parts over the course of the semester: the first will investigate the various prosthetics of institutions (including collections, archives, finance, and programming) through case studies that attempt to redefine them, and the second will engage with new institutional formats that interrogate the frames of exhibition making (through, for example, forms of community, collectivity, dispersal, and opacity).

Co-organized with Lauren Rosenblum