"Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance" proposes that the concept of curating is a complex field of enquiry. By drawing together artists, curators, architects and cultural theorists, it proposes new approaches to curating and ways of developing critical enquiry about this increasingly expanding field.

By News Editor 12 Jul 2013

This is not a brand-new publication, but we think it might interest our readers:

Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance

Edited by Judith Rugg and Michèle Sedgwick

Intellect Books
ISBN 9781841501628
Hardback 184 pages
230 x 174mm
Published December 2007
Price £34.95, $70

Focusing on pertinent issues in curating contemporary art and performance, the book’s four parts examine forms of thinking in contemporary curating: curating and the interdisciplinary; as intervention and contestation; as a form of reconsideration of conventional museum spaces and as a problematic in ‘emerging’ practices. Beginning with a contextual ‘map’ of recent thinking on curating which examines some of the issues that have emerged in curatorial discourse over the last ten years, the volume then investigates curating as a research process and a form of collaboration in considering contemporary photography and video. The relationships between writing and curating, reception and encounter are proposed as part of a way of thinking as a critical spatial practice, and cross-disciplinary issues are considered in curating science/art exhibitions.

Historical and contemporary perspectives examine issues of gender and marginalization and diversity; and the particular issues relating to curating and practices such as animation, site-specific dance and computer-based work are discussed.

Chapter titles:

Chapter 1: ‘The Curatorial Turn: From Practice to Discourse’ – Paul O’Neill
Chapter 2: ‘Curatorial Strategy as Critical Intervention: The Genesis of Facing East’ – Liz Wells
Chapter 3: ‘No Place like Home: Europa’ – Sophia Phoca
Chapter 4: ‘Critical Spatial Practice: Curating, Editing, Writing’ – Jane Rendell
Chapter 5: ‘Exhibitions and Their Prerequisites’ – Chris Dorsett
Chapter 6: ‘Curating Doubt’ – J.J. Charlesworth
Chapter 7: ‘A Parallel Universe: The “Women’s” Exhibitions at the ICA, 1980, and the UK/Canadian Film and Video Exchange, 1998-2004’ – Catherine Elwes
Chapter 8: ‘Thoughts on Curating’ – Richard Hylton
Chapter 9: ‘Oscillating the “high/low” Art Divide: Animation in Museums and Galleries’ – Suzanne Buchan
Chapter 10: ‘Generator: The Value of Software Art’ – Geoff Cox
Chapter 11: ‘Who Makes Site-specific Dance? The Year of the Artist and the Matrix of Curating’ – Kate Lawrence
Chapter 12: ‘The Movement Began with a Scandal’ – Alun Rowlands