Talks
L. Schleiffenbaum, K. Chisholm, E. Butler
Curatorial Research Panel at HKW in Berlin
17 Septemeber 2026
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Three curators — Lea Schleiffenbaum, Kerri-Anne Chisholm & Emily Butler — share new work at the intersection of public art, Caribbean identity, and translation.
Lea Schleiffenbaum presents “Sites in Motion: Actor Constellations in Contemporary Public Art” — exploring how artworks made outside cultural institutions depend on temporary alliances between artists, residents, municipal administrations, and funders. The talk traces these questions through Assembly: Der Pavillon, a project by Lithuanian artist Lina Lapelytė taking shape with citizens of Eisenhüttenstadt, on the German-Polish border.
Kerri-Anne Chisholm presents “Let us return to the yard — a return to play, a call to dream, a rising to reclamation.” It’s in the yard that we unearth our shared histories: the forgotten, the unspoken, the taboo, and those holding the paths to futures drenched in healing.
Rooted in Black Caribbean feminist thought, Kerri-Anne Chisholm’s research reads the Caribbean yard space as a site of leisure, identity, and resistance — a critical tool for decolonial thinking and infrapolitical resistance, grounded in care, situated knowledge, and reclamation. Sited at Gram Bella’s in the Cayman Islands, a current British colony.
Emily Butler presents the “Curating in the Age of (Mis)Translation.” Translation can help us connect, transmit, negotiate, and reimagine — it transforms what is translated and those who translate. As globalisation continues to unravel, translation has become an urgent social practice for negotiating difference and (mis)understanding each other better. This talk explores translation within the visual arts through the proposition that artists and curators act as translators across languages, sign systems, cultures, and worldviews.
Yet translation is never neutral or complete: meaning can be lost, gained, or transformed in the process — what Derrida and Spivak describe as a “necessary but impossible” act, bound by who translates and how. Drawing on Okwui Enwezor’s Documenta 11 (2002) and The New Alphabet at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2019–2022), Emily Butler traces a shift from the curator as mediator to the curator as (mis)translator — proposing the curatorial space as a translation zone, where meanings, epistemologies, and relations can be renegotiated.