World Questions—For Contemporary Curatorial Education
Terry Smith • 2/1/25
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Roulette is our section for essays, portfolios, videos, conversations, and more that range across a broader purview of culture and politics, not within our current thematic sections. It is, in a sense, a chance encounter with a subject of interest within the extended realm of visual culture.
In this essay, Terry Smith examines curatorial studies during a period of global "intermission," exploring how curatorial practices can respond to contemporary challenges such as climate change, economic inequality, geopolitical shifts, and technological disruption within what he calls the visual arts exhibitionary complex (VAEC). He argues that while curatorial studies traditionally make modest contributions to culture, reimagining them as a "curatorial form of life education" could bring about new thinking. Recognizing that a unified global mission is unlikely due to ongoing crises and divisiveness, Smith suggests that curators focus on promoting coeval communality in its liberatory potential in addressing the urgent issues the world faces today and in the years to come. Seven key curatorial models are presented with examples, including curating large-scale world pictures, asserting sovereignty, exploring diasporas, localizing dominant narratives, creating exhibitions as thinking machines, engaging with new technologies, and navigating censorship. The core argument is that curators must actively pursue strategies of coeval communality, resisting passive historical narratives and working toward collaborative, context-specific artistic interventions.
What forms should curatorial studies take at a time of “intermission” for contemporary art and for “broader cultural and political realities” today—indeed, for “human history at this moment”?1
I presume the existence of strong relationships between the specifics of making works of art and practices of curating, on the one hand, and, on the other, the large-scale historical sweep, through the present, of the major forces shaping life on this planet. Among the myriad institutions and networks that mediate these relationships is curatorial studies. The discipline of curatorial studies usually makes modest contributions to changing the status quo while also striving to advance the practice of curating art, of exhibition-making, and of caring for artworks and artists as best it can. Curatorial studies, like everything else involved in art and education today, is subject to the stagnation of “intermission.” Nevertheless, there is the hope that art, curating, and curatorial studies, if radically reconceived as “a curatorial form of life education,” can liberate both “humanity and art.”
If this is a utopian quest, I feel obliged to point out that realism requires a closer look at the concept of intermission, especially the presumption (or perhaps the hope) that we are suspended—not just between two times, past and future (that will always be true)—but between two world orders: that of a no longer viable past, which nonetheless fills our present, and “a big new play,” a freshly imagined, shareable mission.
What would this big new play need to do? It would need to guide us toward solving the main challenges facing life on Earth at this time. Let me list these challenges as questions:
Will we wean ourselves from our dependence on fossil fuels in time to hold down the global boiling that is already making the planet uninhabitable for many living beings—and might soon do so for most of us and eventually all?
Will we arrest accelerating economic inequality before it precipitates unstoppable authoritarianism, fascism, and/or random insurrection within nations and more conflict between them?
Will the shift in geopolitics from the international “rules-based order”—led since 1989 by the US—to a “world disorder,” consisting of contention between alliances led by major regional powers such as China, Russia, and India, along with coalitions such as BRICS, ASEAN, etc., be accomplished without continuing attrition, regional wars (as in the Middle East at this time), or total war? The resumption of Donald Trump to the US presidency signals the emergence of a new axis of authoritarianism, making such negative outcomes more likely.
Will the alliance of market economies with representative governance (Western democracy) survive as a framework for national politics in those countries where it prevails at present? Can states with central economies and single-party rule manage the planetary, global, regional, and internal challenges of state capitalism?
Do the current international agencies and non-governmental organizations with international remits offer an adequate basis for the worldly cooperation necessary to meet these challenges?
Will other modes of cooperation and governance emerge in time to address these challenges in ways that work locally and add up planetarily?
Will the affordances of new technologies, notably AI, outweigh their negative impacts?
These questions do not afford a simple, all-inclusive answer. But their accumulating force suggests that a big new play, a new, shareable mission, is highly unlikely. Rather, we are likely to remain in a state of permanent transition from the postwar order, and from the decolonizing disorder—those remainders of the modern world order—into the contemporaneity of difference that characterizes our continuous present.
Our current situation is haunted by the paradox that divisiveness seems to have reached unprecedented levels at a time when unity among our differences has never been more essential and urgent. A further persistent paradox is that while knowledge of the world’s processes, of human history, and of technological capacity is vast and deep, conversely the task of imagining futures often cedes to presumptions of continuity or to chance; to an emergent victor or a messianic figure; or to algorithmic possibilities, peripheral glimpses, and generalizing categories. Too often—not least in advanced critical thinking—futurity is avoided altogether.
Curating Our Contemporaneity
What kinds of cultural work, artmaking, and curating become necessary, then possible, in contemporary circumstances?
In my books on curating, especially Curating the Complex and The Open Strike, I map the frameworks within which art curators work and suggest strategies for practice within current situations.2 In well-resourced art centers today, these are the places where art is exhibited:
Curatorial education must include learning about these clusters: their distinctiveness and their interactions, their historical development, their imbrication in other social formations, and their connections with visual arts exhibitionary complexes (VAECs) elsewhere. To mangle Roland Barthes’s already overused distinction in Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography: study the studium, absorb it until the puncta that haunt it surprise the curatorial within you and your world.
I will highlight some examples of curators who have pursued art’s liberatory potential in the face of the kinds of challenges I listed above. If a new, shareable mission is unlikely, nevertheless, a workable unity among and between our differences is imaginable—and necessary. A step toward that would be to ask: What can we learn from the constructive, world-building projects that are being urgently embraced by artists, curators, and educators in various places around the world today? How might we build on their achievements, learn from their shortcomings?
I will highlight seven kinds of curatorial projects that I believe are vital today.
1. Curating Large-Scale World Pictures
Very few curators have conceived their work as operating on a worldly scale—that is, as addressing the kinds of world-historical questions I have listed. Okwui Enwezor was one. In 2013, over ten years ago, he conceived an ambitious plan to map the ways in which large-scale sociopolitical and cultural changes were manifest in critical thinking and in art practice since the end of World War II. This was a major enterprise in art-historical revisionism to be conducted through research, publishing, and, above all, exhibition-making. He thought that this would be best done in three big exhibitions: Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945-1965; an exhibition provisionally titled The Postcolonial Constellation: Art, Culture, Sovereignty, 1965-1985; and a third to be called Postcommunist, 1985 – now.
The first was shown in 2016 at the Haus der Kunst, where he was the director from 2011 to 2018. He began from the question: “How did artists contend with the evidence all around them of the enormous destructive power of the human imagination?” His co-curator, Katy Seigel, noted that “the image of the Atomic Bomb becomes the most recognized image in the world. For the first time, the world is a single place,” in which, she implies, all of us could die together—much like the even larger scale, and more multiple, existential crises facing us today. The exhibition argued that “To address deeper questions of morality, meaning, spirit, many artists rejected the ideological demand to choose either tradition and modernity by fusing realism and abstraction.” Can a similar observation be made today? How would you exhibit it?
The second phase, The Postcolonial Constellation: Art, Culture, Sovereignty, 1965-1985, remained unrealized at Enwezor’s death in 2019, but his entire career can be seen as an effort to attack the forces of imperialism and colonization by showing how artists do so: from the 1994 launch of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art through the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale: Trade Routes—History and Geography (1997); The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945-1994 (2001); and Documenta11 (2002), as well as in such exhibitions as In/Sight: African Photographers 1940 to the Present (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1996) and Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography (International Center for Photography, New York, 2006). At Sharjah in 2022, Hoor Al Qasimi took up the challenge of the unrealized postcolonial show in her iteration of the Sharjah Biennial, pursuing his injunction to “think historically in the present.”
In his remarks that opened the 56th Venice Biennale that he titled All the World's Futures (2015), Enwezor was explicit about his conception of exhibitions as “machines for thinking” in this critical way about these great issues. He did this by centering that exhibition, literally, around a continuous reading of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital in the main space in the main pavilion; by inviting works such as Isaac Julien’s video Kapital (2015), a discussion with venerable Marxist geographer David Harvey; and by culminating the parcours with John Akomfrah’s The Vertigo Sea (2015). This was the closest he got to showing the Postcommunist phase in his trilogy.
If driving forward Africanist perspectives was always his priority, Enwezor was highly conscious that this was not simply a partisan or regional commitment. Rather, it was an iconogeographical turning, as I call it—that is, a worldwide, world-historical shift; a constellating of several currents into an unstable but powerful configuration. He spelled this out in his 2003 essay, “The Postcolonial Constellation: Contemporary Art in a State of Permanent Transition,”3 and articulated its effects—not least, the definitive experience of “intense proximity of differences” and the overall state of “permanent transition”—in such exhibitions as 2nd International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville, The Unhomely: Phantom Scenes in Global Society (2006) and the 3rd Paris Triennale, Intense Proximity (2012).
Enwezor’s legacy is the richest of this kind that we have; a judgment that will be reinforced when the two volumes of his Selected Writings, which I am editing, are published next year by Duke University Press.
And the other six models, briefly:
2. Curating Sovereignty
For artists outside the West, mega-exhibitions such as Documenta and the biennials in Europe, were (and often still are) platforms to negotiate the systemic inequities of imperialism and colonization, to assert a people’s sovereignty, usually through four phases: achieve recognition as existent; secure acknowledgment as equals; arrive at self-acceptance; and create and assert intrinsic value.
Since the postcolonial heyday of the 1990s, biennials have increasingly retreated from the global surveys that were so urgent then and now take incredibly diverse forms. Today we expect a biennial to include as many different kinds of exhibitions as a museum, while museums have become more focused on temporary exhibitions and events.
There has also been a steady stream of exhibitions outside the biennial circuit that shows these changes as aspirations and achieved actualities, including the multiple nuances involved for particular peoples during specific periods. For example, the anti-colonial, sovereignty-asserting project pursued by Indigenous artists and curators since the 1970s in Australia. Aims: to develop a support and distribution system that would sustain artists working in remote communities; circulate their work nationally and internationally; and encourage Indigenous curators and art writers. Landmark exhibitions include Dreamings (Asia Society, New York, 1988), Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius (AGNSW, 2000), and Madayin (traveling the US, 2023-24). Self-acceptance and the assertion of the intrinsic value of the work were made by Indigenous artists throughout the world and motivated exhibitions such as Nirrin, Brook Andrew’s Sydney Biennale in 2022. The curatorial voice becomes more and more Indigenous.
A parallel history in Canada moves from exhibitions such as INDENGENA: Perspectives of Indigenous Peoples on Five Hundred Years (Canadian Museum of Civilization, Gatineau, 1992; now the Canadian Museum of History) through to somewhat generalizing surveys such as Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art (National Gallery of Canada, Ottowa, 2013) and becomes focused in the work of, for example, Cree Plains curator Gerald McMaster and the Wapatah Center for Indigenous Art, e.g. Artic/Amazon: Networks of Global Indigeneity (Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, 2022).
For some time now in the VAEC, Indigeneity is going global.
3. Curating Diasporas, Transculturality
Within the US, Black aesthetics is flourishing across most of its VAEC, from public art fairs to Gagosian galleries and the leading museums. Definitive exhibitions include shows dedicated to the work of artist, filmmaker, and cinematographer Arthur Jafa, along with Enwezor’s posthumous Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America that took place in 2020 at the New Museum in New York.
In Africa, there is a long history of local and circulating exhibitions pertinent to the recognition of Black artistic production, a recent example being Kayo Kouoh’s When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration (Zeitz MOCA, Cape Town, 2023), which traveled to the Kunstmuseum Basel this year. Then there are the curatorial projects of Gabi Ngcobo, who co-founded the Centre for Historical Reenactments in Johannesburg in 2010, and which describes itself as responding “to the demands of the current moment through an exploration into the historical legacies and their resonance and impact on contemporary art.” Ngcobo has continued her work concerning social justice in various venues, including her curatorial oversight of the 10th Berlin Biennale in 2018, titled We don’t need another hero, and her more recent work as the director of Kunstinstitut Melly, Rotterdam.
4. Provincializing Europe
Models of cooperative coevality, or coeval communality, are essential to the solution of the challenges outlined earlier. They are constantly being envisaged and enacted by artists to the benefit of millions, especially on local levels, throughout the world. Some of them involve curating the VAEC ecology itself: for example, Maria Lind, currently the director of the Kin Museum of Contemporary Art in Kiruna, Sweden, who is a major organizer of lateral connections between alternative spaces in many parts of the world, and who appointed 100 curators from these spaces as Biennale Fellows when she was artistic director of the Gwangju Biennale in 2016, bringing them together in Gwangju. Appointing ruangrupa as artistic directors of documenta fifteen was an even bolder reverse move. Unfortunately, their lumbung model—an effort to display to the Western world what collective creativity looks like throughout the rest of the world—was met with a Berlin wall of bad faith, aesthetic snobbery, and hypocritcal political reaction.4 The good news: polls showed that younger visitors loved the effort that was being made, however imperfect, and that curating by collectives has burgeoned throughout the international VAEC since then.
5. Exhibitions as machines for thinking about curating and for thinking about thinking
There are many examples by artists, such as Joseph Kosuth, and by curators, such as Harold Szeemann and Hans Ulrich Obrist. In recent decades, the Prada Foundation series at the Ca’ Corner in Venice has been remarkable, including When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969, Venice 2013 (2013); Serial Classic (2015); The Boat is Leaking, The Captain Lied (2017); Human Brains (2022); and Everybody Talks About the Weather (2023).
These exhibitions spring from an instinct for curating against the grain: against the grain of conventional understandings of the idea they explore only to explode it, and against received ideas about the exhibitionary form (group shows, one-person shows, theme shows, etc.) that they productively misuse. The exhibition as punctum?
6. Curating the new technologies
A necessary task for some contemporary curating is to display the affordances of the new technologies while also showing their massive consumption of real-world resources and their dystopic social impacts. Striking examples include exhibitions by Trevor Phomepageaglen and Kate Crawford, suchhomepage as From Apple to Anomaly (Barbican, London, 2020) and Training Humans (Fondazione Prada, Milan, 2019-20), and Paglen and Crawford with Vladan Joler, Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power, 1500–2025 (Fondazione Prada, Milan, 2023). Or you can go to the homepage of Ben Grosser to watch him curate communicative platforms in ways that counter how social media platforms such as Facebook, X, and TikTok manipulate our modes of perceiving the world to their economic and political advantage.
7. Conclusion: Curating the secrets, the Open Strike
As censorship, surveillance, and outright repression grow in many parts of the world, how do we bend curating toward liberation, equality, and coevality? In Slovenia in 1993, Zdenka Badovinac and Igor Zabel began the process of turning the Moderna galerija, the national museum of a new nation, into a “museum of parallel narratives” about its modern prehistory from the late nineteenth century up to the 1990s. Then, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Badovinac curated a program dedicated to the multiplicitous conceptions of time, history, place, citizenship and selfhood that have animated art in the region since then. In both institutions, this was exemplary curating of contemporaneity.5 In 2020, the new right-wing government sacked her. The situation has not improved: in 2024, the government summarily dismissed Alexandra Kusá, director of the Slovak National Gallery, and the director of the national theater. Slovenia is moving towards the situation that obtains in several countries, where official approval of all exhibitions, public and private, is required. When Zoe Butt was the director and curator of Sán Art and afterward of the Factory between 2009 and 202, both in Ho Chi Minh City, she found it necessary to prepare four distinct descriptions of every exhibition—one each for censors, an uninformed public, an informed audience, and artists—and to be careful about which version circulated where. She learned a great deal about the enduring power of circles of friendship and communality as the support structure for artmaking in conditions of constraint. Based in Chiang Mai, Thailand, since then, she founded in-tangible institute, dedicated to mentoring art communities whose viability is inhibited by state or other actors.6 These are just two examples of ethical responses to the increasingly pervasive problems facing contemporary curating.
I have been arguing that today “intermission” is not a pause between two world orders. The sweep of history is not moving one way only, or even predominantly so, from our several pasts toward “a new, big play.” It is more like an unfolding Hydra-headed disaster as the wrecking ball of imperialist, colonizing, Western modernity clashes headlong with the storm, blowing not from a paradisical future and its angel of history (as Walter Benjamin famously suggested in “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” written in 1940 when he was on the run for his life from the Nazis) but from all the world’s several futures—many of which are already here, while others to come remain unimaginable figments. We are caught between these tides and currents. And few of us are angels.
Commenting in his recent book, The Benjamin Files, on the question posed by Benjamin in his dissertation, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, Fredric Jameson asks: “Do we once again confront the hostile gods (the remorseless laws of planetary geology, the inevitability of Homeric warfare and the finitude and doom of myth), or something closer to the allegorical landscape of rubble and mangled bodies in the midst of which tyrants and usurpers rave, schemers scheme, and saints joyously accept their martyrdom?”7 My ontology of the present says that, in fact, we are being confronted by both in their contemporary costumes, knowing them to be past their times but not their prime time.
Although we might secretly, or even openly, desire the frisson of being swept along as ciphers of history subject to much larger forces, we must resist this comfort. If we wish to curate our contemporaneity, we must learn from the examples I have given and from others like them. We must always pursue political struggles toward coeval communality, aiming at answers to the world’s questions through strategies tailored to our direct circumstances. At the same time, we must focus our artmaking, curating, and criticism on these same values, through artistic, curatorial, and critical strategies. The Open Strike should be at the core of curatorial education.
NOTES
1. This essay is adapted from a talk given at the Institute of Contemporary Art and Social Thought, China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, for its symposium Intermission: Curatorial Studies/Education?, November 3 and 4, 2024. The text in quotation marks in the first three paragraphs is from the prospectus for the symposium, organized by Lu Jie, Feiran Jiang and other members of ICAST, see https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/634363/intermission-curatorial-studies-education/.
2. Terry Smith, Thinking Contemporary Curating (New York: Independent Curators International, 2012), Talking Contemporary Curating (New York: Independent Curators International, 2015), and Curating the Complex and The Open Strike, ed. Steven Henry Madoff (London: Sternberg Press, 2022).
3. Okwui Enwezor, “The Postcolonial Constellation: Contemporary Art in a State of Permanent Transition,” Research in African Literatures 34, no. 4 (2003): 57–82.
4. See Charles Esche, “The First Exhibition of the Twenty-First Century—Lumbung 1 (Documenta Fifteen), What Happened, and What It Might Mean Two Years On,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, August 28, 2024, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14434318.2024.2380770?src=recsys. For my views, see “Unintended Consequences: Withdrawal from Documenta,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, June 13, 2024, https://doi.org/10.1080/14434318.2024.2358199.
5. See “Zdenka Badovinac: Continuities and Ruptures in Museums of Contemporary Art,” in Terry Smith, Talking Contemporary Curating,162-189; and Zdenka Badovinac, Unannounced Voices: Curatorial Practice and Changing Institutions (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2022).
6. See https://in-tangible.org/about-us/.
7. Fredric Jameson, The Benjamin Files (London: Verso, 2022), 66.
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Terry Smith is Andrew W. Mellon Emeritus Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh; Professor in the Division of Philosophy, Art, and Critical Thought at the European Graduate School; and on the faculty at large in the MA Curatorial Practice program of the School of Visual Arts, New York. An internationally renowned author and lecturer, his most recent book is Six Paintings from Papunya: A Conversation, with Fred R. Meyers (Duke University Press, 2024). Forthcoming from Duke University Press is his edited edition in two volumes of Okwui Enwezor’s selected writings.
