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OnCurating Issue 1 / What are the specific topics

Concept Dorothee Richter in cooperation with Maren Brauner, Johanna Franco Bernet, Barnaby Drabble, Irene Grillo, Petra Haider, Damian Jurt, Christoph Kern, Wolf Schmelter, Thomas Zacharias

9 May–14 November 2008

What are the specific topics on curating you would like to see more openly discussed?

Welcome to the first issue of the international web-journal www.on-curating.org, a new web-based publication focusing on curatorial practice and theory! The interest of all those involved in the journal, whether curators, lecturers, researchers or participants of curating programs is to create a platform for presentation, discussion and research about this growing area of knowledge.

To expand the pool of those involved we aim to cooperate with different institutions and people for every new issue. This platform is intended for both an art-interested public and cultural professionals from various areas of exhibition production and curating.

The chief aim will be to inquire into the issues of display and curating that condition exhibition making today. Thus the exhibition is to be understood here not merely in terms of its “surface” or design but as part of a complex of media in which all elements contribute consciously or unconsciously to the production of meaning. Today exhibition is considered a cultural practice which conveys values and norms and thus, implicitly, ideological concepts. To encourage a debate around curating is therefore a way to engage with the ideological sphere, and that is motivated through desire not to curate but to engage with the world.

Issue 01: Thirty-one positions on curating
In preparation for the web journal on-curating.org we asked a selection of curators, artists and thinkers for their suggestions on how such a future journal might look and what it might contain. We have written to professionals, whose position in curating, in the arts and in theory we think most interesting and challenging in contemporary discussion. We invited a broad selection of art-world figures, curators we find critical, artist-curators and other interesting people from our direct networks. To illustrate the first issue we have chosen photographs and videostills from a dvd on Curatorial Vaudeville that was produced with Szuper Gallery and the Postgraduate Programme in Curating of the Institute for Cultural Studies in the Arts (ICS), Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK).

Publisher: Dorothee Richter

Concept: Dorothee Richter in cooperation with Maren Brauner, Johanna Franco Bernet, Barnaby Drabble, Irene Grillo, Petra Haider, Damian Jurt, Christoph Kern, Wolf Schmelter, Thomas Zacharias.

Design: Michel Fernández

Assistance: Siri Peyer