Curating and/as Care

This keynote talk addressed the faultlines inherent to discussions about curating and care, in a contemporary art field in which conditions of precarity and exhaustion effectively undermine principals of self and collective care.

While the politics of care, vulnerability and co-dependency have become increasingly visible as thematic strands in arts programmes, curators and cultural workers often struggle to incorporate the radical implications of such artistic practices beyond the level of presentation, as they grapple with rigid institutional dynamics and protocols and neoliberal labour conditions. In identifying new tools for collective and self-care, communities that have historically suffered a deficit of institutional care are those that have the most to teach – an argument underlying a new book, HEALTH (Whitechapel & MIT Press), edited by Barbara Rodríguez Muñoz, drawn from the worlds of art and activism, and foregrounds insights from the Social Theory of Disability.

Highlighting recent curatorial projects that take a durational, interdisciplinary approach to processes of research, development, and consultation, Reckitt showed how they aim to establish frameworks for collective learning and exchange. Rejecting the domineering model of curator as author, the initiators of such projects locate themselves as mediators working within a relational network. This more collaborative approach to curatorial practice foregrounds vulnerability, co-dependence, resisting the performance of professionalism that works to the detriment of arts workers’ and their collaborators’ wellbeing. Practitioners in such projects recognise what they do as feminised forms of affective labour and social reproduction, and value them as such. They aim to replace old habits of knowledge and attention with new ones, grounded in long-term commitments, that are attuned to the values of caring with identified by feminist political scientists, Berenice Fisher and Joan Tronto.