These tensions are demanding renewed institutional and curatorial approaches that deliberately depart from their foundational colonial legacies to generate new dynamics and symbioses between people, ideas, objects, and places.  Traditional single authored models of programming are out of sync, requiring actions that open-up from within themselves in terms of inquiry and poetics, to propel ideas of relationality and potentiality.

Departing from this, my research will draw on current curatorial theories and practices to problematise the models adopted by institutions, galleries, and curators for engaging with the public - and question whether artistic research can be proposed as ‘a dynamic site’ for the generation of imaginative modalities, methods and formats that have the potential to link the original ideas embedded in artistic enquiry processes, with the publics.

Arts Cabinet my practice, will be intermittently activated as laboratory/observatory, highlighting a kinship between experimentation and documentation intrinsic to the notion of “research as practice” resting on long-durational work and privileging the process of the coming together of ideas. I will investigate modalities for exhibiting research-based work that fosters participation and engagement directly with processes of artistic enquiry and meaning-making. My research will further test the potential of this approach to deepen connections between viewers and the work presented, and generate an inter-relationality between the activities, the context, the participants, and the publics.

Combining theory and practice, I will address the curatorial through translation and mediation – and critically situate the implications of my findings alongside current contemporary art and theory debates. I will develop exhibition propositions, events, publications, and produce an itinerary that moves my practice from an “experimental research platform” towards a critical research-based praxis, situated within the wider ecologies of knowledge.

Supervisors

Primary supervisor: Marquard Smith
Secondary supervisors: Kieren Reed