Curating: politics of display, politics of site and politics of transfer and translation
Editorial by Dorothee Richter and Nkule Mabaso
This issue of OnCurating consists of a variety of texts and interviews, which were developed out of interviews from participants connected to the Postgraduate programme in Curating (www.curating.org). Many of the authors and interviewees gave lectures and participated in the programme over the last four years, adding to the dialogue in the postgraduate programme, as well as other curators in the field.
In the spirit of slowing down, in sometimes rather a hastily discourse, we would like to present them to a broad public, which engages with our main topics: politics of display, politics of site and politics of transfer and translation, topics which refer clearly to the research institution where the Postgraduate Programme in Curating is situated: the Institute Cultural Studies in the Arts at the Zurich University of the Arts. We see the curatorial discourse not primarily as a philosophical discourse with some practical outcomes. We are always interested in the power relations and politics, which structure the field. As curators and as researchers we have chosen the attitude that practice and theory are intertwined profoundly, and both materialisations have the ability “to do things” with art and with words, to intervene, to highlight.
