Curating: Histories and theories

This unit will offer you an introduction to the most important and influential theories of curating and provide an overview of the history of curating from the mid-18th century on. Although the unit will focus on curating that involves art objects and art practices through a history of exhibitions, it will also consider historical and contemporary instances of curating that do not involve art objects (from the Wunderkammer to curating performance) or approach curating as an expanded field of practice that may be activist, temporal, decolonising, and so on. The overall aim of the unit is to provide you with a working vocabulary so that you can ask critical questions of the contemporary practice of curation.

Lectures will largely provide a chronological history of curating, starting with early museums and collections, but with an emphasis on the rise of curating as a practice and the figure of the curator from the mid-1970s on. A number of key instances of curating (particular exhibitions and international biennales and triennials) will be selected for analysis. In this way, you will be given both an overall history of art curating and a way of thinking critically about the term's almost infinite expansion in the present. The unit aims to provide you with an appropriate working method for curating you might undertake in the future and a way of thinking about issues of curating if you choose to work in a museum or gallery context or write about art. In some ways, the unit is intended as complementary to the more practice-based unit Curating: Making exhibitions (previously titled Curating: Practices), although this is not its only possible outcome.