Curating Contemporary Art

This course explores what a contemporary art exhibition can be and offers students the opportunity to work towards presenting an exhibition at SAS. The course provides an overview of the history of art exhibitions, surveying a range of different projects including biennials, artist and curator-run spaces, performance, public art projects and those that take place outside the institution. Throughout the 8-week course students are presented with actual artworks as learning tools. 

Taking the stance that a hands-on approach is the best way to explore curating, working with these artworks will form a crucial component of the course. These artworks will be lent by artists who have agreed to contribute them as learning resources to the course. Students will be lead through exercises in which the artworks are analysed and discussed and then ‘played’ with in a workshop in regards to spatial arrangement, contextualisation, juxtaposition, etc. 

The course also explores the curatorial turn and urge in wider contemporary culture, unpacking some current theories and thinking around taste, selection, and display. Students will become familiar with approaches from visual and material culture studies along with art history and museum studies. The course includes visits to local museums and galleries and a voluntary weekend trip to Yekaterinburg to visit art institutions including The Ural Branch of the National Center for Contemporary Art.

The course includes a section overviewing practical components of exhibition making including self-organising, seeking funding, promotion, installation, and exhibition text writing. In the second half of the course students will individually propose a theoretical exhibition and then co-curate an actual exhibition, working with the artworks provided. The course hopes to encourage the students to develop an ongoing student-led exhibition programme at SAS that could be shared across multiple disciplines for different curatorial purposes.