Mastering Curatorial Statements: 2-day Writing Workshop

Duration

May. 03 - May. 10, 2024

Enroll before

May. 02, 2024

One-time Payment

189.00 € (incl. VAT)

Live sessions

4 hrs/week

A curatorial statement is key in conveying the essence of your work as a curator, making it one of the most important yet challenging texts to craft. How to present yourself in a variety of contexts? How to accurately reflect your practice?

In this workshop, you will learn how to write compelling curatorial statements that distinctively set your work apart. Over two days, you will discover how to:

Define the fundamental values and interests of your practice as a curator
Improve your core writing skills
Reflect on different styles of writing
Work in building blocks to produce engaging texts
Identify where your text is unclear
Strengthen your ability to edit
Develop your collaborative working and critical engagement skills

Crucially, you will learn by doing. Working in pairs and larger groups, you will develop curatorial statements directly through talking and writing. This dynamic approach, coupled with constructive feedback, will help you understand how others perceive your texts and refine your writing.

Following the workshop, you will have the confidence and clarity to write strong curatorial statements to carry into your professional life. The writing skills and techniques learned will be transferable to other art texts that you need to produce, such as exhibition statements and grant applications.

This workshop is for curators, though many of the skills could be useful for artists and other cultural workers also. Good English language skills in written and verbal form will be useful.

Image by Anna Pou from Pexels

Day 1 - Articulating your values and finding your voice

In this session, we will delve into discovering your core interests and values as a curator and learn how to effectively communicate them.

What is a curatorial statement?
Defining your core interests
Writing styles: Writing to inform - Writing to describe - Writing to explain
How to work with the building blocks principle
Elaborating on your values and finding your writing style
Writing a first draft curatorial statement

Day 2 - Refining and editing for different audiences

This session focuses on editorial processes based on critique and discussion, as well as how to refine and modulate your statement for different briefs, such as exhibition texts.

Introduction to editorial processes

Setting the terms of engagement.
Editing content vs Editing correctness.
Techniques for finding issues - Devil’s Advocate, Layperson’s/Audience’s shoes.

Editing for different audiences: Paddlers Swimmers Divers
Editing for length: how to write in short form
Collaborative editing

We will use Zoom for the live video conferences, please check Zoom's technical requirements here.

Live captioning will be available during the video conference.

Mastering Curatorial Statements: 2-day Writing Workshop

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