Notebook 37 2024

The 37th Notebook for Art, Theory and Related Zones opens with an editorial by Jan Zálešák and Zuzana Jakalová, in which they describe the overall design of this special thematic issue that focuses on curatorial research. In an expository overview “O čom hovoríme, keď hovoríme o kurátorskom výskume? Parciálna správa o stave jednej debaty” [What We Talk About When We Talk About Curatorial Research: A Partial Report on the State of One Debate], Zuzana Jakalová outlines the terrain within which the other texts will operate. Her essay can be viewed, inter alia, as a critically annotated bibliography of curatorial research. Jana Písaříková’s essay “Umění nepečuje, pečuj o umění” [Art Doesn’t Care: Take Care of Art] is a methodologically bold contribution to the discussion on how to write theory from essentially personal positions. The text reflects on her decision in 2018 to look after the artist and curator Valoch, whose health had deteriorated considerably, the aspect of care, which tends to become something of a cliché in etymological introductions to the problem of curating, moves to centre stage. Care also occupies an important place in the study by the collective comprising Martina Johnová, Anna Remešová and Karolína Žižková titled “Kurátorský výzkum jako nedisciplinovaná a znepokojivá forma poznání” [Curatorial Research as an Undisciplined and Unsettling Form of Knowledge]. This involves caring for a specific region and its human and non-human inhabitants, as well as caring for the planet, in stark contrast to the abstract logic of capital. The text describes specific methods of curatorial work on the exhibition Symptoms of the Future (that they curated in 2024) and places them within the discursive framework of thinking about the exhibition as a form of research. These three studies are followed by a translation of the essay “Compensatory Postures: Natural History, Necroaesthetics, and Humiliation” by Anna-Sophie Springer and Etienne Turpin. The text was written in 2019 in connection with the trio of exhibitions titled Verschwindende Vermächtnisse: Die Welt als Wald [Disappearing Legacies: The World as Forest], which Springer and Turpin conceived in collaboration with natural history museums in Berlin, Hamburg and Halle as part of the project “Reassembling the Natural.” The issue ends with a review essay by Jan Zálešák, which focuses on a trio of publications by Terry Smith, Zdenka Badovinać and Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung from the Sternberg Press series titled “Thoughts on Curating.”

Content

Zuzana Jakalová

What We Talk About When We Talk About Curatorial Research: A Partial Report on the State of One Debate

In recent years, a growing interest in curatorial research and curatorial epistemologies has become tangible in both the art world and academia. This text analyzes curatorial research from the perspective of curatorial theory. It looks at sites of curatorial research and the changing language that frames the debate associated with it, as well as situates the above mentioned questions within the broader framework of the transformations of curatorial practices and their academic reflection over the past two decades.

Jana Písaříková

Art Doesn´t Care: Take Care of Art

The study explores the ways in which the archive is processed and presented through curatorial activities, while also examining the possibilities of integrating those who created or are part of the archive and collection with their works and documents. In this sense, curating (not only in the original meaning of the word) is very open to intergenerational dialogue and questions of care. It is clear that curatorial care can apply not only to works of art and archives, but also to cultural actors. How can we, as curators, care for those who, due to old age or illness, lose the possibility of being in contact with art? The author of the study works with the method of auto-ethnographic research, which allows her to look at the topic from personal experience and relate it to the art scene of which she is a part. Using the form of a first-person narrative and direct dialogue, she describes the processing of the archive of the Czech artist, curator, and collector Jiří Valoch (b. 1946), which gradually turned into an agenda for the care of the artist himself. The thematization of the concept of the art archive and curatorial work with it thus moves on to observations from the life of the caring subject. The more personal level of the text is largely set in the period of the covid pandemic in 2019–2022 and also deals with the method of re-enactment as a tool of curatorial care.

Anna Remešová, Karolína Žižková, Martina Johnová

Curatorial Research as an Undisciplined and Unsettling Form of Knowledge

The aim of the text is to show that curatorial research is a legitimate way to find answers to complex socio-economic and environmental questions, using the example of a two-year process of creating an exhibition project referring to the issue of planned lithium mining in the Ore Mountains. The text argues that a research exhibition is as relevant a contribution to scholarly debate as an academic article or publication. However, it differs in the sense that its format is not simply a presentation of results, but rather a spatial framing in which the research hypothesis is tested or verified. This hypothesis then does not necessarily stand at the beginning of the research, it emerges gradually in a material that has its own agency. The joint text of the curatorial collective presents what kinds of agency lithium plays out and how this particular mineral determines the form of the research that led to the exhibition Symptoms of the Future (Ústí nad Labem: Galerie Hraničář, 2024).

Anna-Sophie Springer, Etienne Turpin

Compensatory Posture: Natural History, Necroaesthetics, and Humiliation

Translation of Text:

Anna-Sophie Springer – Etienne Turpin, „Compensatory Postures: On Natural History, Necroaesthetics, and Humiliation“, in: Tristan GARCIA – Vincent NORMAND (eds.), Theater, Garden, Bestiary, Berlin: Sternberg Press 2019, s. 161–72.

Jan Zálešák

A Murky Report on a Fragmented (Art) World

This review essay focuses on a trio of publications by Terry Smith, Zdenka Badovinać and Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung from the Sternberg Press series titled “Thoughts on Curating.”

Language

czech, slovak, english

Number of pages

208

ISSN

1802-8918