Keeping the Edges Open: Towards a Curatorial Horizon in the Negev Desert
Curators working in cultural institutions in regions that are distant from cultural centres hold the power to participate in shaping the artistic and creative narrative of their communities. They can reproduce and reinforce a western curatorial agenda, or they can become powerful agents in introducing other forms of knowledges, ideas, and creations from their region that have not yet been globalized.
Keeping the Edges Open is rooted in re-visitations of regional, subjugated, creative expressions and knowledges of the Negev desert. Hadas Kedar explored the desert to consider forms of expressions from ancient times and from recent ones that have resisted the subjugating forces of Western art. Examining a series of curatorial interventions in the Negev, where she lived in her teenage years and returned to as a professional in the arts, Keeping the Edges Open offers an original and extensive study of curatorial interventions and methods that shape artistic and creative narratives in remote regions, exploring how they may stimulate a democratization of the curatorial.
Hadas Kedar is an artist and curator and the founder of Arad Contemporary Art Centre and Arad Art and Architecture Residency Program.
Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Dorothee Richter, Prof. Alun Rowland