Spring 2016 Lecture Series | Curation: Agencies + Urgencies

Curation: Agencies + Urgencies

ACT’s Spring 2016 lecture series Curation: Agencies + Urgencies addresses the contexts and forces shaping the practice of curation today. Bringing together a cast of influential curators, critics, and educators operating across institutional boundaries and political scales—from the book to the biennial—these lectures consider the curator—as diplomat, as researcher, as (para-)artist, as speculator, as provocateur, as censor—and the varying roles and forms curation itself: What defines spaces of curation today? What are the politics pressurizing the practice? What role does the emerging discipline of curatorial studies play in the institutionalization of art? What are the limits and possibilities of curation as a mode of publicity?

In many ways, these are timely questions for an evolving artistic research program such as ACT. Indeed, ACT is in the midst of its own curatorial moment: The program is currently reconceiving the accessibility and presentation of its archive, experimenting with new forms of publication, and developing lines of pedagogy and research that naturally overlap with the basic associative impulse of curatorial praxis—that is, the drive to find new forms and spaces of relief, to form new associations and ecologies of works, people, venues, and sites.

Lecture series participants include: Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Alejandro de la Fuente, Magdalena Campos-Pons, Corinne Diserens, Timothy Hyde, Lars Bang Larsen, Anna-Sophie Springer, and Doris Sommer.

ACT’s Monday Sprung 2016 series is conceived by Gediminas Urbonas, ACT director, and developed and coordinated by Elan Rochbert, and Lucas Freeman, ACT writer in residence, in conversation with ACT graduate students.

This series is made possible with the generous support of our partners and collaborators: The Council for the Arts at MIT (CAMIT), MIT School of Architecture and Planning, Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT, and MIT Department of Architecture.

The Monday night lecture series was launched in 2005. The series draws together artists, cultural practitioners, and scientists from different disciplines to discuss artistic methodologies and forms of inquiry at the intersection of art, architecture, science and technology.

Videos of many of the past lectures can be seen here.

Funded in part by the Council for the Arts at MIT