Our new website is live! Please reset your password.

*This course offers University credits. To opt for credits read this page


Since the heyday of the white cube, curating has transformed and developed to become much more than staging an exhibition. This course explores the expanded field of curating, looking beyond traditional exhibitions to examine how curators respond to changing cultural, social, and spatial contexts. Over five weeks, we will delve into recent groundbreaking curatorial projects and identify practical ways of realizing innovative concepts.

Through in-class exercises and group reflections, we aim to find new and experimental models and methods that can be carried forward into your curatorial practice. Together, we will develop ways of producing projects and exhibitions that expand beyond the expected, incubate new ideas and inspire the audiences to imagine a (better) future.


By the end of the course, you will be able to:

  • Identify key shifts in curatorial practice from traditional exhibitions to expanded formats.
  • Analyze the ethical and societal role of curators in contemporary practice.
  • Design strategies to activate non-art spaces as platforms for artistic and curatorial experimentation.
  • Develop curatorial proposals that are context-sensitive and aim to engage potential new audiences.


This course is ideal for emerging and practicing curators, artists with an interest in curatorial work, and anyone looking to push the boundaries of what curating can be.


Image by ArtistAmyKarle1, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

*Prices include VAT

Video conferences every Tuesday from 3pm to 5pm Berlin time CEST. Recordings will be available in case you miss a live session!

Week 1: Presentation

  • The lecturer will introduce the program and participants will introduce themselves. No prior preparation is necessary, however, you could think of a project that has made an impression: either in a bad or good way


Week 2: Curator as an organic intellectual

  • Curator as an initiator
  • Curatorial ethics and societal responsibility
  • Artist-curator relationship: collaborative and dialogical ways of working
  • From concept to realisation - how to prevent the dilution of ideas when negotiating practicalities


Week 3: Meaning-making through exhibition contexts – in the white cube

  • Considerations on how different gallery and exhibition contexts change the work
  • The longue durée of an artwork/project: each new presentation of an artwork is also its new incarnation
  • Challenging the idea of an exhibition as a monolith, fulfilled, finished “thing”
  • Durational projects


Week 4: How to prevent the artwork from being thrown into the river?

  • Site-specific projects and the creation of context
  • Expanding audiences – potential new audiences
  • Practical challenges of working outside gallery and museum environments


Week 5: Beyond exhibitions – non-representational curating

  • Non-exhibition focused curating
  • Publications
  • Programming as a way of curating spaces and institutions
  • Interdisciplinary breeding grounds and collaboration with other stakeholders

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.

Mirjami Schuppert

Read Bio Next

Recommended Courses

ups

We're sorry, but we currently have no available courses.

Please check out our course offerings.