Curating Subject: Practicing Contemporary Exhibitions

Description

The thesis examines the curating subject since the practice became first popular since 1960's, seeking after its parallel exhibition history such as biennials and Documenta and in underpinning its politico-cultural logic for the necessary evil in the contemporary esthetics. To curate, originally used a term for religion and institution purpose, was then reinvented by artistic, critical, and performative exhibition practice, anchoring on the grey zone in between the roles of the artist and the curator for the aesthetics of differences. To install in exhibition spaces always already meant to reflect the axiomatic spatial logics and new historism as well. The discursive space of curating can be regarded as a line of flight from art criticism, becoming a alternative statement for artworks and their writing, much as the analysts in the psychoanalytical sense where the subject was supposed to know in linking the triangular relation among artwork, exhibition, and curation. The second part deals with the genealogy of the biennials and finds its patterns in discovering its symptoms and discontents. From here, a self-reflexive stance of curating practice as a symbolic act for subjectification from within can be realized. It is an cultural action lurking in the politio-aesthetic agenda of contemporary art, through displacing art from its usual settings in denaturalizing what we supposed to perceived as art and thus to transgress the subjectivity of the gallery.