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Curator, TBA21 Academy

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Public Programs as Medium: on the Practices and Poetics of the Imagination 
Sofia Lemos

The history of exhibitions has become a specialised field of inquiry within curatorial studies. From speculative to revisionist accounts of art history, interest in this field has grown steadily in the last decades. Yet, these practices have often neglected the important role public programs have in shaping how curatorial ideas get introduced and circulated. What can public programs tell us about art and its histories as well as the trajectories of curatorial knowledge, its urgencies, and propositions?

In this talk, Lemos discusses “live research,” a curatorial approach that brings together scholarly, sensorial, and spiritual approaches to explore the role of public programs in fostering critical reflection and deep insight about our present. This methodology mobilizes experience and curiosity with engaged and contemplative propositions, performative vocabularies, and experimental pedagogies to rethink sites of curatorial knowledge. As a means of wayfinding and sense-making, she will introduce Meandering, a TBA21–Academy program expanding from the Ocean into rivers, to explore what can be sites of curatorial knowledge, where are they found, and how to approach them in relation to their conceptual emergence, unresolved histories, and potential narratives.

Sofia Lemos is a curator and writer. She is curator at TBA21– Academy where she mobilizes Meandering, a new live research program fostering the practices and poetics of the imagination for social and environmental justice. From 2018–2021, she was curator of public programmes and research at Nottingham Contemporary and was associate editor at The Contemporary Journal. Recently, Lemos was Associate Curator Public Programmes to the 2nd Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art – RIBOCA (2020) with previous curatorial and research roles at HKW, Berlin, PRAXES, Berlin, DRAF, London, and MACBA, Barcelona. Her writing has been featured in publications such as art-agenda, Document Journal, Spike, frieze, and Mousse, as well as in several catalogues and monographs. She is editor of Sonic Continuum: On the Sound and Poetics of Time (forthcoming, 2022), METABOLIC RIFTS (Atlas Books, 2019) with Alexandra Balona, and Musa Paradisiaca: Views on Misunderstanding (Bom Dia Books, 2018) with Claudia Pestana.

Caption: Eduardo Navarro, Riverbed Mediation (2022). Courtesy the artist and TBA21–Academy. Photo by Lourdes Cabrera.