Prateek Raja, co-director of Experimenter, Kolkata, in his opening remarks posited — “How can we be equivocal about issues that confront us, underscore the differences that are inherent in it and yet build a constructive sustainable dialogue?” Held online for the second year in light of the pandemic and ongoing global restrictions, the 11th edition of the Experimenter Curators’ Hub, conducted between November 9 and 14, experimented with its form. Introduced by Priyanka Raja, the format invited five curators, who in turn invited collaborators including individuals and institutions to exchange propositional ideas, discuss possible projects and understand each other’s practices.
Moderated by Natasha Ginwala, on day one, the conversation between Stephanie Rosenthal, director of Gropius Bau in Berlin and British-Kenyan artist Grace Ndiritu consistently returned to the structural framework of the museum and its limitations. Ndiritu asked what is so wrong with our institutions that it needs external pressures to enact modes of repair, inclusivity, accountable representation and change. Rosenthal cited the conservative structures perpetrated by decades-old rigid modes of ‘caring for art objects’, and the bureaucratic and administrative challenges with respect to funding and policies. She suggested and I quote, “It is a constant transformation that needs a constant rolling over. We are in a time where change is very likely”. Conversations around hospitality and care continued to re-emerge in the following days along with the hope for unusual communities, casual networks, radical and hopeful actions.
Mikala Tai, head of Visual Arts at the Australia Council for the Arts, asked how we can take control of the future — the future we want as our legacy — on day two of the hub. How do you respect what’s come before while also building new futures? I add to this Ginwala’s “How to attend to emergent realities?” The answer in many ways was in the promise of alternate structures like ArtsPay, co-founded by Marc Goldenfein, Lara Thoms and Alistair Webster. Every purchase through this FinTech app contributes a processing fee towards artists. Simply put, the ‘general public’ supports the arts ecosystem by turning into consequential patrons. The money is led into a foundation that will provide funds to artists and arts organisations.
On the third day, Osei Bonsu, curator of international art at Tate Modern in London, expanded the discussion from day one between Rosenthal and Ndiritu, and flagged how working at the museum has led him to thinking about layers — of collection, exhibitions, display, and how you can bring a curatorial practice within that infrastructure. In his position he has been thinking about, “How African artists can play a role in re-narrating the stories that we tell (through museums, perhaps). Okwui Enwezor believed in the necessity of the institution as a space to act and to think historically in the present,” he noted.
“How can we treat the museum as a space for historical intervention and activation? How do we make sure that institutions do not become passive observers to history and preservers of history (belonging to) a set group of society, but become engaged through a pluralistic logic of history making?” Through British-Nigerian artist Ndidi Dike’s work, the conversation attempted to stage the contemporary as a portal for people to enter regional, local histories.
Through the conceptual, philosophical and structural modes of home and family, on the fourth day of the Experimenter Curators’ Hub, we returned to hospitality and hope under hostility. One that is colonised and under constant distress from various actions, including forceful occupation, ethnic cleansing, extraction and historic-cultural erasure. Independent curator and historian Rattanamol Singh Johal was in conversation with celebrated Palestinian artist Emily Jacir and arts organiser Aline Khoury who collectively run the Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research Center, a grass-roots independent artist-run initiative in Bethlehem. Dar Jacir was raided and damaged by Israeli forces some months ago; their urban farm was destroyed and equipment stolen. Even with the kind of heaviness this persistent condition brings to the space and its work — “How to find openings and the strength to re-group… and to find the joy of working with artists, collaborators and the community?” asked Johal. Jacir responded by reminding us of the spirit of the space, one that is informed by a sense of hospitality, and possibilities of family-building and co-sharing.
Speaking about a workshop ‘On the question of making art in cities under siege: exploring the intersection of hospitality and hostility’, led by Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz at a time when they couldn’t access their building due to renovations, Jacir narrated how they congregated in other and open spaces — the houses of neighbours, the street, refugee camps, bars, supermarkets — a kind of temporary hospitality and the neighbourhood as an extended family. The street where the Dar Jacir house lies is the historic Bethlehem-Hebron Road and has always been a conduit for movement and connection. Jacir noted: “It is important to situate not only where we are temporally and spatially, (but that) we are not in a postcolonial situation. We are living under a colonial apartheid. (This) needs to be clear because it frames our site and how we operate.”
The fifth day of Experimenter Curators’ Hub hosted a conversation between Elvira Dyangani Ose, now director of MACBA, Barcelona and former director of The Showroom in London and Lily Hall, her former colleague and currently curator at The Showroom. Thinking about small, agile institutions and their life in a post-pandemic world, they attempted to give us a sense of where The Showroom conceptually and structurally stands at this point. “For me and our team, we come with the inclination and a real necessity to return to the material realities and conditions on the ground, the here and the now from within which we imagine. This relay of productive tension between the imaginary and the material conditions from which and with which we enact those imagined possibilities in practice and everyday life is something that we consider and work through in all of our collaborations,” noted Hall.
The final day of the hub opened with an address by journalist Rana Ayyub. “I wish to have given you an optimistic picture” but “it is an extremely frustrating time not (only) as a journalist but as a citizen of this country where we have long cherished our democracy and (ideals of) secularism,” Ayyub noted.
In the course of her address Ayyub left us with two thoughts. The first is that “bigotry is all pervasive and this belief that oh it’s not going to come to us… hate cannot be confined. When you unleash the demon called hate, it will not just come to my door but come to yours too”. The second was that she is not going to speak for any of us — “you have to fight this battle yourself… this is my personal battle and I am fighting for the idea of India that I believe in, I am not fighting it on your behalf”.
As is customary, the hub concluded with a discussion with all the presenting curators and collaborators of this edition. Bonsu, reflecting on “how we could be together post pandemic” asked Ginwala what it would mean to conceptualise and organise a forum such as the hub. Ginwala reminded us of the “shrinking public sphere” and “what does it mean to gather in this way” in a space that not only asks you to discuss propositions, but failures.
She followed by addressing the ideas and aspects of representation that are being widely used at this moment, particularly in institutional politics and positioning. In this “rhetoric of diversity” and the “co-option of critical practice by institutions at the centre of the internationalised art world, how can we in our work represent an ethics of diversity (after Kwame Anthony Appiah) to allow for forms of difference to continually be generated? Bonsu replied by foregrounding how calls for diversification of arts on face value can be detrimental to its possibility. There is a need to shift methodology in a critical way. Inviting diversity into structures and modes of knowledge that were essentially imperial and colonial — is “violent and inhospitable” in many ways.
He suggested that this repair needs to happen in silence at and internally because of the lives entangled within them and from lived experiences. Johal reminded us that despite all of the machinery of the institution — the encounter of the visitor with the artwork is something we can and should hold on to, “it has charge and power and meaning”.
Bonsu continued to extend from Ose and Hall’s conversation from the previous day to further note the “transfer of knowledge” as a generative model. “Ethics of diversity has got to do with listening as we’ve heard from Rana” but also listening “deeply enough so that we can build a sense of commonality.”
Finally, I leave you with two things to think of and think from. The first is a question that Ginwala asked during the discussion: “How can we cede power to the communities we serve while maintaining the work central to our mission?”
And the second is this piece of poetry from Etel Adnan, who left us last week. She also left us the inheritance of her immense hope:
I am not at the mercy of men
since trees live in my fantasies
men and trees long for fire
and call for the rain
I love rains which carry desires
To oceans.
Mario D’Souza is a curator and writer based in Goa, and he is currently associate curator for the 5th edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale
