On Queer
Curating
During the 2020-21 academic year, I will be serving as the inaugural Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies Artist-in-Residence at the University of Toronto. Over the course of this residency, I will be researching queer and feminist curatorial strategies as I publicly work towards realizing an upcoming exhibition of contemporary Canadian LGBTQ2S+ photography at Gallery TPW.
Documents, articles, notes, questions and reflections will be shared here over the next nine months.
September
2020
〉September 1, 2020
First on the reading list: “How have queer issues, queer curators, and queer exhibitions at one and the same time both shaken the foundations of traditional curatorial practice, and found their potential for intervention papered over or silenced? How can queer desires continue to force the museum to evolve? What does queer change in the museum look like? This issue is an attempt to foster a dialogue about queer curating in a transnational frame.”
〉September 7, 2020
Full before I could register. A course from the Node Center for Curatorial Studies, taught by Sylvia Sadzinski: “This course gives an introduction to queer theories, queer art practices and to ongoing conversations about forms and methods of queer exhibition-making. Queer curating not only relates to a better representation of the diversity of gender and sexuality in collections and exhibitions, it also addresses how this can be achieved. Queer curating challenges the museum and exhibition as normalizing entities, where meanings are created and binary and heteronormative structures are reinforced.”
〉September 22, 2020
“Is it possible to identify a mode of curatorial practice that possesses a specifically queer orientation?”
〉September 29, 2020
Aperture Magazine, Spring 2015 – The Queer Issue
October
2020
〉October 5, 2020
Not specifically queer, nor specifically feminist, but undoubtedly both also. Zoom link here.
〉October 13, 2020
Performing Diverse Sexualities: Queer Curating or Curatorial Strategies of the Schwules Museum*, a thesis by Liang-Kai Yu which proposes a theoretical framework of queer curating based on Judith Butler’s performativity theory and aims to rethink ways of exhibition display.
〉October 21, 2020
Queer Exhibitions/Queer Curating, A Cross-Cultural Symposium held May 19 and 20, 2017 at Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany. This jumped out at me – “Even today, queer exhibitions are quite rare—there have been a total of under 50 across the world—and in many nations they are still contentious.”
〉October 29, 2020
Tyler School of Art and Architecture’s Queer Materials Lab – I love this model of a physical queer space for queer research (lucky me, I got to visit last year). They “provide a space, an archive, a workshop, a research site and an-ever evolving collection of materials through which queer, transgender, gender non-conforming and non-binary identifying people may examine and engage with the idea that materials can be ‘queer’ either through their location, their history, their tactile qualities or their maker.”
November
2020
〉November 10, 2020
The curatorial strategy of CUNTemporary, a UK-based non-profit organisation that works with individuals and groups that explore feminist, queer and decolonial art practices and theories. Find out more about their work here.
〉November 16, 2020
Curating Queerness as an Activist Practice, a short essay by Claire Mead, posted on Curating the Contemporary (CtC).
〉November 27, 2020
