Launch of the What Could/Should Curating Do? book together with Sasa Tkacenko, Katarina Kostandinovic, Neva Lukic and Sinisa Ilic, followed with a lecture by Patrick D. Flores
When: May 13, 2019, 18:00
Where: Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade
What Could/Should Curating Do? is proud to announce the inaugural lecture for the 2019 program by Patrick D. Flores, titled Singapore Biennial 2019: Some Political Inspirations.
The presentation will speak to the methods undertaken and conceptual impulse to convene a biennial in Singapore, noting the lively cultural and social milieu of contemporary art in Southeast Asia and the ethical demands involved in evoking this liveliness.
Patrick Flores, Artistic Director of SB2019 explains: “It may be said that the world is troubled. To sense such a state of flux is to acknowledge the situation and begin to face it. For Singapore Biennale 2019, we ask: What are the possibilities for art, the artist, and the audience in light of this trouble? What are the responsibilities of the artwork, its making, and its experience in the prospects of future action? As we believe, every effort to change the world for the better does in fact matter. SB2019 puts its faith squarely in the potential of art and its capacity to rework the world, as expressed in the Biennial’s title: Every Step in the Right Direction.”
About the speaker:
Patrick D. Flores is Professor of Art Studies in the Department of Art Studies at the University of the Philippines, which he chaired from 1997 to 2003, and Curator of the Vargas Museum in Manila. One of his many publications, The Exhibition Problematic and the Asian Dislocal revisits the conceptual conditions that prompt students of the history of exhibitions and the future of their making to ask questions about notions of history and futurity through the proposition of the exhibition. Previously, Flores curated the Philippine pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2015, the exhibition Position
Papers at the Gwangju Biennale in 2008, and served as one of the curators of Under Construction: New Dimensions in Asian Art at the Japan Foundation in 2000. He also co-curated South by Southeast, an exhibition of contemporary art from Southeast Asia and Southeast Europe, organized by the Osage Art Foundation in 2015. A respected art historian, Flores was a guest scholar of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles in 2014. Some of his other publications include Past Peripheral: Curation in Southeast Asia (2008).
Joining this inaugural lecture for the 2019 program, the first volume in the What Could/Should Curating Do? publication series will also launch, which is co-published with Orion Art and conceptualized by Sasa Tkacenko and Biljana Ciric.
The interest for What Could/Should Curating Do? to publish this series came out of the necessity to develop a scholarship for the curatorial course that was first established in 2018. The series also simultaneously serves as an archive of the discourses produced around the course on an annual basis, thereby engaging with questions of how to archive something that is still in development. These volumes are one possible solution to be further shared and explored.
With this mind, the WCSCD publication series developed into a kind of annual reader related to the curatorial discourses that grow out of the program’s different workshops, initiated by the invited guest mentors to the program. At the same time, this effort also encourages the attending, emerging curators to produce and contribute their own writing.
The first volume includes contributions : Neva Lukic, Katarina Kostandinovic, Dorothea von Hantelmann, Elena Filipović, Tara McDowell ,Maria Lind, Matt Packer, Mia David, Hou Hanru, What, How & for Whom, Jasna Jasna Zmak, Kirila Cvetkovska, Ruri Kawanami, Vera Zalutskaya Niels van Tomme, Sinisa Ilic, Milena Joksimovic, Agustina Andreoletti, Tjasa Pogacar, Boba Mirjana Stojadinovic, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Branislav Dimitrijevic and Biljana Ciric.
During this special evening, WCSCD will also announce the curators who have been accepted into the WCSCD 2019 course, and highlight the partners for the WCSCD 2019 program as well as new artist commission.
The curatorial course is a long term project made possible with the support and collaboration of the following partner institutions:
Project patron: Wiener Städtische;
Partners: The Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade; EVA International—Ireland’s Biennial of Contemporary Art; Center for Promotion of Science and Zepter Museum, among others. The project is supported by the Istituto Italiano di Cultura Belgrado; the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Belgrade; the Austrian Cultural Forum; Heinrich Boell Stiftung; Hestia Art Residency & Exhibitions Bureau; and EUNIC Serbia, Media partners Before After and Designed.