Wen-Ying Tsai, Cybernetic Sculpture System, at Center for Advanced Visual Studies exhibition "Explorations," Hayden Gallery, MIT, 1970. Photo credit: Nishan Bichajian. courtesy of MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology.

Curation: Agencies + Urgencies

ACT’s Spring 2016 lecture series Curation: Agencies + Urgenciesaddresses 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.

Kepes, (left to right) Otto Piene, Gyorgy Kepes, and Harold Tovish at the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies, Cambridge, 1968. Photo credit: Ivan Massar. courtesy of MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology.

February 29
Empathy and Artistic Relations (A collaboration with AKPIA at MIT)
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Director Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art and Galleria Civica D’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin

March 7 
Future Island: Cuba
Alejandro de la Fuente (Harvard), with Magdalena Campos-Pons (SMFA), Doris Sommer (Harvard), and Timothy Hyde (MIT)

March 28
Infrastructure
Irit Rogoff, Professor of Visual Culture, Goldsmiths, London University; and curator of Bergen Assembly 2016

April 11
Open Museum, Open City
Hou Hanru Artistic Director of the MAXXI in Rome; and Consulting Curator at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (NYC)

April 25
Historical Resonances, Archives of the Present, Genealogies of the Future
Corinne Diserens, Director of ERG in Brussels; and curator of the 10th Taipei Biennial

May 2 
Mediated Entities. In and Out of Curating.
Lars Bang Larsen, Co-curator of the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, Visiting professor at the Haute Ècole d’Art et de Design in Geneva

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

ACT’s Monday night lecture series is conceived by Gediminas Urbonas, ACT director, and developed and coordinated by Amanda Moore, ACT alumna ‘11, 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 atMIT, 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.

> via act.mit.edu