Curating (in) the City. New Challenges for Public Art

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Gesa Ziemer
• Subject Area: Art History ; Theatre and Media Studies
• Term: from 2018 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 398109857

Changing curatorial practices are one of the key issues that are negotiated in the context of the "curatorial turn" in art history and cultural studies. Not only can the expansion of this differentiated and diversified job profile be observed between professionalism and deprofessionalisation, between curatorial and artistic work as well as in the changing relevance of authorship (Bude 2012); furthermore the importance of singularity-the curator as individual-is shifting towards an understanding of curatorial practice as collective activity. Contemporary curatorial practice no longer takes place only in classical art spaces such as galleries, museums or theatres, but instead intervenes into public urban spaces. Curating ''public art' particularly requires dealing with the ephemeral and the incomplete as well as with the openness of public spaces. What becomes particularly evident in the light of these expansions of the curatorial is a shift in the conditions and mechanisms that determine how contemporary public art is produced and how it impacts society today. Accordingly, the research project will analyse the fundamental transformations that lead to an expansion of the curatorial with regard to the production of contemporary public art. On the basis of three international case studies, the research project investigates the specific actors' constellations and modes of organization that lead to specific (institutional) forms of cooperation and organization (1). Secondly, it examines the working methods of contemporary curators. It is to be examined to what extent the requirements and working activities of the curators converge with the changes in the field of art (2). Thirdly, the relation between curatorial practices and attempts to establish new public spheres are critically analysed. The aim is to deliver a detailed analysis on the one hand of the observable intersections of art production and urban culture, on the other hand of the shift from education to the assembly of new publics. The new challenges of urban art production lead to a practice of 'curating (in) the city', which has to be analysed in its function for the production of art specifically in the city as well as for the creation of urban culture.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants