Positioning: A Symposium on Curatorial Learning in the Nordic-Baltic Region and Beyond

Positioning is a globally networked inquiry into current and future curatorial thinking in the Nordic-Baltic region during a time of urgencies, and of radical uncertainty. We come together to explore how we can think, learn, and work together, how to position ourselves with others, and how to bridge the local-regional-global curatorial nexus within and beyond the region.

In association with PUBLIC and The Centre for Curatorial Thinking, CAPIm will be one of multiple partners co-hosting the second in a series of four annual, interrelated, and cooperative symposia—spanning Curatorial Thinking, Learning, Instituting, and Collaborating—and explores the importance of public discourse across Finland, the Nordic-Baltic region, and beyond. In this second symposium, titled Positioning A Symposium on Curatorial Learning in the Nordic-Baltic Region & Beyond, we collectively reflect on the relationship between learning, curatorial thinking, exhibitionary practices, and discourses of the curatorial.

The symposium is organised by PUBLICS: in Helsinki & Espoo with Architecture & Design Museum Helsinki, EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art and Uniarts Helsinki’s Academy of Fine Arts; in Malmö and Copenhagen with Malmö Konstmuseum, Simian and PASS – Center for Practice-based Art Studies, University of Copenhagen; in Gothenburg & Stockholm with HDK-Valand and the Centre for Art and the Political Imaginary (CAPIm), with CuratorLab, Konstfack, University of Arts, Crafts and Design, Stockholm and with IASPIS.

Wednesday 11 November

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13.30 – 14.00 Arrival / Coffee (Glasshouse)
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14.00 – 14.30 Welcome notes: PUBLICS & HDK-Valand (Glasshouse)
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14.30 – 15.00 Position Paper by Céline Condorelli
15.00 – 15.30 Position Paper by Raimundas Malašauskas
15.30 – 16.00 Moderator & Respondent with Final Word Mick Wilson
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16.30 – 17.30 Panel Discussions / For the Record presentations Nick Aikens, Andris Brinkmanis, Marianna Feher, Adriana Munõz

17.30 – 18.00 Moderator Nkule Mabaso, Respondent with Final Word Marti Manen
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18.15 – 19.00 Listening session (Black box room, Valand) : Onkar Singh Kular
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19.00 – 20.00 Dinner & Reception
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Thursday 12 November

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09.00 – 09.15 Welcome notes PUBLICS & HDK-Valand (Bio Valand)
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09.15 – 10.45 Film screening (Bio Valand) Dora García, (Revolución, cumple tu promesa) Amor Rojo, 2024.
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11.00 – 11.30 Position Paper by Dora García
11.30 – 12.00 Position Paper by Urgent Pedagogies – Magnus Ericson & Pelin Tan
12.00 – 12.30 Moderator Ram Krishna Ranjan, Respondent & Final Word Emiliano Battista
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Lunch (Glasshouse)
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13.30- 14.30 Panel Discussions / For the Record presentations (Glasshouse) Jason E. Bowman, Irfan Hošić, Rana Issa, Seda Yıldız

14.30 – 15.00 Moderator Maddie Leach, Respondent with Final Word Paul O’Neill

The Positioning series is a collaboration across a dispersed network of 100+ cultural agencies from the Nordic-Baltic regions that actively take part in The Centre for Curatorial Thinking program since 2023.

Since the establishment and expansion of curatorial courses in the early 1990s, we have seen many deliberations on different approaches to curatorial education, knowledge production, and on what forms of learning may have enduring impact for the practice of curating and its discourses and histories.

Positioning explicitly considers what specific modes of curatorial thinking-as-learning are taking place across the ever-expanding contemporary curatorial field and are enabled by its diverse educational provisions.

Positioning gathers past and present approaches, knowledges, and critiques within practices of the curatorial. In doing so, the symposium creates a space for dialogue between local and international contemporary art scenes and their practitioners to generate new opportunities for artists, curators and cultural workers in the Nordic-Baltic region.

Positioning A Symposium on Curatorial Learning in the Nordic-Baltic Region & Beyond is organised by PUBLICS: in Helsinki & Espoo with Architecture & Design Museum Helsinki, EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art and Uniarts Helsinki’s Academy of Fine Arts; in Malmö and Copenhagen with Malmö Konstmuseum, Simian and PASS – Center for Practice-based Art Studies, University of Copenhagen; in Gothenburg & Stockholm with HDK-Valand and the Centre for Art and the Political Imaginary (CAPIm), withCuratorLab, Konstfack, University of Arts, Crafts and Design, Stockholm and with IASPIS.

Positioning asks:

• How might curatorial learning be understood?

• What do curators learn from artists, from exhibitions, from curating and from other curators?

• How does learning reveal itself in curatorial practices, histories, discourses?

• How to account for curatorial learning actually taking place?

• How might the curatorial be understood as its own mode of learning?

• How can all these forms of learning transform Curatorial Thinking?

• How can curators position this learning locally, regionally, internationally?

• How might curatorial learning enable curative action?

Positioning addresses how expansion of curatorial learning has accounted for greater global awareness around a range of issues, including the need for decolonising exhibition histories alongside increasingly critical approaches to curator-centred discourse. Such debates have situated curating and the curatorial as unique forms of knowledge production and educational learning. At the same time, the understanding of the exhibition as a political space of inquiry and medium of representation has been maintained by the various turns to the “discursive,” the “educational,” the “social,” and the “relational” in the exhibitionary, curatorial, and artistic practices.

Positioning aims to reflect on some of these dynamics, and to consider learning as a process of gaining understanding, and of values, attitudes, and models of thinking brought into practice as it is transformed into new curatorial knowledge.

Positioning is a globally networked inquiry into current and future curatorial thinking in the Nordic-Baltic region during a time of urgencies, and of radical uncertainty. We come together to explore how we can think, learn, and work together, how to position ourselves with others, and how to bridge the local-regional-global curatorial nexus within and beyond the region.

For more information about event in Gothenburg, November 11-12, please contact nick.aikens(at)internationaleonline.org or seda.yildiz(at)gu.se

Admission is free and open to the public, booking required.

For more information about the larger series, please visit www.positioningsymposium.com and write to contact@positioningsymposium.com, or call +358451080585.