Talks

Curating in Feminist Thought: Michaela Melián

Talk by Michaela Melián

Symposium Curating in Feminist Thought
Friday 6th of May 2016 at Migros Museum
Saturday 7th of May 2016 at Zurich University of the Arts

https://vimeo.com/204760400

See all contributions here: https://vimeo.com/album/4426824

Michaela Melián is a visual artist and a musician, since 2010 Professor for time based media, the University of Fine Arts, Hamburg, founding member of the Band F.S.K. Recent exhibition Electric Ladyland at Kunstbau, Lenbachhaus Munich.

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Concept by Elke Krasny, Lara Perry, Dorothee Richter
With contributions by Amelia Jones, Maura Reilly, Helena Reckitt,
Sigrid Schade, Dorothee Richter, Lara Perry, Elke Krasny,
Hilary Robinson, Stella Rollig, Lina Džuverović  and Irene Revell,
Laura Castagnini, Susanne Clausen, Michaela Melian, Nkule Mabaso

Videoprogramme with works by Martina Mullaney, Szuper Gallery,
Plan C, Liv Wynter, Louise Fitzgerald, PUNK IS DADA

Curators and their partners are working in a contested field, in which
the meanings of institutions, their power structures and modes of
participation can be debated and reshaped. “To think of institutions in terms of production (of work and discourse and political practice and solidarity) instead of representation would be, to my mind, a first feminist step”. With this provocation the curator Ruth Noack invited us in 2013 to rethink the nature of feminist critique of the museum, the gallery, the exhibition space. Is access to the representational space of the museum a meaningful or adequate tool for feminism? Can such occupations mobilize sufficient means to reform the social function of exhibition? In recent years the role of the curator has increasingly become identified with “the new economic conditions that require new contexts of collaboration and interaction” (Olga Fernandez), conditions which are identified with celebrity and authority as well as precarity and casualization. What is the gendered nature of the power relations, effects, inconsistencies and contradictions of curating in the present? And how can feminism help us to rethink the role of the curator?