It has become commonplace to talk of a globalized art world, in

CURATING AFTER

Roadmaps for the Present

CURATING AFTER THE GLOBAL:
which specific discourses, commodities, and individuals seemingly
circulate endlessly, and even to speak of contemporary art and
curatorial projects as drivers of globalization. This
universalization of what art is, or can be, and where and how it
manifests itself, is often presumed to be an unstoppable process
THE GLOBAL:
at the cost of local traditions and any sense of locality and
embeddedness. But what exactly does it mean to be global, or to Roadmaps for the
Present
be local in the context of artistic, curatorial and theoretical
knowledge and practice?
Following How Institutions Think (2017) and The Curatorial
Conundrum: What to Study? What to Research? What to Practice?
(2016), this third anthology in the series extends our questioning
of the dynamic relations among curatorial education, research and
practice and their institutions. The contributions to Curating after
the Global: Roadmaps for the Present consider approaches to artistic
and curatorial practice in relation to questions of locality,
geopolitical change, the reassertion of nation-states, and the
violent diminishing of citizen and denizen rights across the globe.

Published by Contributions by

Luma Foundation Lotte Arndt

Marwa Arsanios
Center for Curatorial Studies, Athena Athanasiou & Simon Sheikh
Bard College María Berríos & Jakob Jakobsen
Ntone Edjabe & David Morris
The MIT Press Liam Gillick
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Alison Green
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142 Yaiza María Hernández Velázquez
http://mitpress.mit.edu Prem Krishnamurthy & Emily Smith
Emmanuelle Lainé
Nkule Mabaso
Qalandar Bux Memon
Morad Montazami
Paul-Emmanuel Odin
Paul O’Neill
Vijay Prashad
Kristin Ross
Grace Samboh
Sumesh Sharma
Joshua Simon
Hajnalka Somogyi
Lucy Steeds
ISBN Gerrie van Noord
978-0-262-53790-2 90000 Françoise Vergès
Mick Wilson

Paul O’Neill, Simon Sheikh,

Lucy Steeds, Mick Wilson, editors
19 Preface
Maja Hoffmann, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Tom Eccles

25 Morbid Symptoms: Curating in Times of Uncertainty and

De-Globalization. An Introduction
Simon Sheikh

SECTION I
AFTER THE GLOBAL:
DIAGNOSES OF THE CURRENT CONJUNCTURE

37 Introduction: Political Imaginaries after the Global

Mick Wilson

47 In the Ruins of the Present

Vijay Prashad

71 Formations of Political-Aesthetic Criticality:

Decolonizing the Global in Times of Humanitarian
Viewership
Athena Athanasiou and Simon Sheikh

99 Globaphobia
Nkule Mabaso

117 The Seventh Wonder of the Zad

Kristin Ross

137 Zone of Being and Non-Being

Qalandar Bux Memon

159 The Way Things Are Organized: The Mesoscopic,

the Metastable, ‘the Curatorial’
Joshua Simon

177 A ‘World’ for Art and the Material Turn

Sumesh Sharma

203 Beyond the Colonial Discourse of Lack:

A Humble and Difficult Art
Françoise Vergès
 SECTION II 397 Mutualizing Knowledge, Bridging Differences, Sharing
AFTER THE GLOBAL: Resources: On Collaborative Production Conducted by
EXHIBITION HISTORIES Réseau Cinema
Lotte Arndt
223 Introduction: Activating What Might Have Happened
to Shape What Could Be 413 Toward a Feminist Organization: Between the Rubble,
Lucy Steeds the Garbage and the Institution
Marwa Arsanios
231 Archives, Struggles and Exhibitions
María Berríos and Jakob Jakobsen 427 Can We Work like This? OFF-Biennale Budapest
Hajnalka Somogyi
255 Imagining Curatorial Practice after 1972
Yaiza Hernández Velázquez 445 Time Counter to Time: la compagnie, lieu de création
Paul-Emmanuel Odin
275 Performing Pan-Africanism
Ntone Edjabe and David Morris 469 “A Three-Hour Tour”: Toward a Methodology for
Responsive Curating
295 L’Atelier Gallery: The Museum without Walls of Prem Krishnamurthy & Emily Smith
Trans-Mediterranean Modernism
Morad Montazami 491 Should Be: Organizational Pathways Restated
Liam Gillick
317 Projeto Terra
Lucy Steeds POSTSCRIPTS

345 What Does the Elephant Remember? 499 Epilogue: Exhibitions as Curatorial Readymade
How Did the Ant Win? Forms of Escape
Grace Samboh Paul O’Neill

517 Words of Care

SECTION III Gerrie van Noord
AFTER THE GLOBAL:
INSTITUTIONAL RE-POSITIONING 527 Contributors’ Biographies

369 Introduction: Instituent Solidarities toward the End 537 Acknowledgments and Credits
of Western-Centric Globalism
Paul O’Neill

377 Why Practice?

Alison Green
 Ⅱ AFTER
THE GLOBAL:
EXHIBITION
HISTORIES
 Introduction:
Activating What Might
Have Happened to Shape
What Could Be

Lucy Steeds
INTRODUCTION: ACTIVATING WHAT MIGHT HAVE HAPPENED TO SHAPE WHAT COULD BE

It was 2010 and I was part of a small group of researchers, curators,

and editors seeking a book title to describe succinctly the
complex issues that united two major shows of art from around
the world as staged in 1989: Magiciens de la Terre in Paris,
and the third Havana biennial. Looking to publish paired volumes
in Afterall’s Exhibition Histories series, we were interested
in the inclusive ambitions (and concomitant exclusions) of these
two curatorial initiatives, and in how this augured curatorial
trends for perennial art events on all continents in later years.1
Having struggled for a long time for something better, we
finally settled on Making Art Global.2 One point to emphasize
now is that the present participle of the verb at issue—that
is, making—gently highlights the curatorial aims to articulate
worldwide artistic practice, without necessarily conceding
any categorical achievement of ‘global contemporary art’ as such.
In other words, we wanted to underscore how particular rather
than general values are always revealed in any given declaration
that—this or that—contemporary art is unifiable as ‘global.’
The impossibilities of fair, true, real or consensual globalism
in artistic practice were palpable in 2010—and the contrasts
presented by the two 1989 exhibition initiatives made this
amply clear.
What was less obvious to me at the time—being based in
London and confident, back then, that any jingoism attaching
itself to England, Britain, or the UK could be collectively
disavowed—was the failure of art biennials since those two 1989

1 Rachel Weiss et al., Making Art Global
(Part 1): The Third Havana Biennial 1989
(London: Afterall, 2011); Lucy Steeds
et al., Making Art Global (Part 2):
‘Magiciens de la Terre’ 1989 (London:
Afterall, 2013).
2 The editorial team responsible at the time
comprised Sabeth Buchmann, Charles
Esche, Teresa Gleadowe, Pablo Lafuente,
Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen and myself,
with institutional support from the Van
Abbemusuem, Eindhoven, and the Academy of
Fine Arts, Vienna. Afterall’s present
partners on the Exhibition Histories
series are the Center for Curatorial
Studies at Bard College, Annandale-on-
Hudson, and Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong.

SECTION II 223
LUCY STEEDS
exhibition projects to seriously usurp, transform, or evade
nationalism and statehood. Of course the privileges associated
with the capital cities of Havana and Paris—and the backing
of Fidel Castro and François Mitterand respectively—were evident
in the historical exhibition initiatives we were studying, but their
curatorial (and the associated artistic) ambitions to transcend
a framing by the nation-state seemed overriding. Indeed,
the ‘global’ vision from Paris (in the eyes of Jean-Hubert Martin
and curatorial team) and simultaneously from Havana (according
to Llilian Llanes, Gerardo Mosquera, Nelson Herrera Ysla
and colleagues) might better be described as a desire to override
national artistic representation. And this chimed strongly
with my personal investment, two decades later, in a rejection
of art history as written from the perspective of competing
national canons. However, it is now painfully clear—as xenophobia
and the borders between countries are re-entrenched—that
national anchorage is not as easily discounted as it felt possible
to celebrate a decade ago. Moreover, the cultural ills (to
say nothing of the humanitarian and ecological perils) of the
neoliberal take on globalism are also now clearer—resounding
with (and financializing) the imperial advances of modernist
universalism. Both resurgent nationalism and pernicious
globalization demand a rethinking of ‘the global’ in more ethical
and responsible terms. Prioritizing a popular critical openness
to ideas and practice from around the world, solidarities
that exceed market imperatives are now crucial. And here history
offers some valuable models, as this section of the present book
sets out to demonstrate.
3 See https://www.afterall.org/events/ 4 See https://www.afterall.org/exhibition-
exhibitions.and.the.world.at.large histories/the-other-story
(accessed November 29, 2018). I took the (accessed November 29, 2018).
title “exhibitions and the world at
large” from a conversation between Charles
Harrison and Seth Siegelaub published
in Studio International in 1969, although
the world at large is not much or
precisely addressed there.
CURATING AFTER THE GLOBAL
INTRODUCTION: ACTIVATING WHAT MIGHT HAVE HAPPENED TO SHAPE WHAT COULD BE
Afterall announced its commitment to historical
discussion of “exhibitions and the world at large” in a public
symposium convened under this name in 2009.3 In this context
we invited debate of Magiciens de la Terre and the third Bienal
de La Habana, while contrasting these with a third exhibition from
the same year, The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War
Britain, curated by artist Rasheed Araeen for the Hayward Gallery
in London (ahead of a UK tour in 1990). The designated era
for the work gathered by this latter project (dating back to the
1930s) and the national (British) focus set the show apart
from the two earlier the same year—and therefore we did not
move toward a third part in the Making Art Global sequence
at the time. However, the anti-imperial and anti-racist thrust of
The Other Story, and its embrace of the transnational within
the national, now arguably make it more relevant than ever. And,
on this basis, my own recent work to do justice to the show’s
significance comes decidedly after ‘the global,’ such as I understood
it from London a decade ago.4
*
I don’t believe any of the contributors whom I have had the
pleasure of working with in shaping this section of the book would
comfortably own the label ‘historian.’ Nevertheless, they all
draw deeply on certain historical experiences of worldwide activity
and they invigorate these in the present in a way that I find
inspiring. Together, they productively open up the methodologies
or populate the indiscipline of Exhibition Histories as a field of
endeavor. Moreover, they all enact the denaturalization of
history in terms of content as well as form: challenging the neglect
of particular exhibitions, curatorial initiatives, cultural congresses
and festivals in the past, as a basis from which to learn now.
In the opening dialogue, María Berríos and Jakob
Jakobsen reflect on their collaborative project investigating the
Cultural Congress of Havana 1968, and the astonishing
224 SECTION II 225
LUCY STEEDS
Del Tercer Mundo exhibition produced alongside in particular.
Having animated this project as an artistic contribution
to the 31st Bienal de São Paulo of 2014, they made use and continue
to make use of remarkable primary research, while quietly
offering politicized historiography a newly effective notion and
practice—that of “dramatizing echoes.”
In “Imagining Curatorial Practice after 1972,” Yaiza
Hernández Velázquez analyzes the parallel afterlives of
documenta 5 in Kassel and the roundtable of the International
Council of Museums in Santiago de Chile. Examining how
the establishment of Curatorial Studies as an academic discipline
has neglected the latter trajectory, she indicates how any
attempt to curate ‘after the global’ might do well to revisit it.
Distilled from a forthcoming book that places the contemporary
art museum in light of the philosophical and political search
for autonomy, this essay problematizes the curatorial desire to
escape, rather than transform, the museum institution.
Ntone Edjabe then debates the manifold living legacies
of FESTAC ’77, the second World Black and African Festival
of Arts and Culture in Lagos, in conversation with David Morris.
Born of the collaboration between Chimurenga and Afterall to
produce a book adequate to the FESTAC phenomenon, this
rich dialogue explores the potential of blurring history with
memory—or the political felicity of overshadowing official history
through collectivizing and collaging personal narratives.
Morad Montazami’s account of L’Atelier Gallery in Rabat
1971-1991, maps Pauline de Mazières’s curatorial initiative
within the slipstream of various festivals in the region with
differing geopolitical and cultural agendas. Through the lens
of Mohamed Melehi’s work in particular, he traces the
postcolonial generation of modern artists in Morocco and their
international, or rather transnational, support network
prior to the advent of dedicated museums in the country.
My own essay in the present book takes a certain work
of art—Projeto Terra by Juraci Dórea—as a starting point
CURATING AFTER THE GLOBAL 226
INTRODUCTION: ACTIVATING WHAT MIGHT HAVE HAPPENED TO SHAPE WHAT COULD BE
for triangulating three exhibitionary contexts to which it
contributed in the late 1980s. This allows comparison
between biennials in São Paulo, Venice, and Havana. However,
the focus lies on the potential of this particular artwork
to enunciate different concerns in the different settings, with
consistently revealing—and sometimes surprising—
implications for claims upon ‘the global.’
To conclude this section of the book, Grace Samboh
filters the significance of two Indonesian exhibitions in the
1990s through her experience of a more recent show.5 On the one
hand, she celebrates a landmark project from the changing
times ahead of the 1998 Reformasi: the exhibition Slot in the Box
(1997) at Cemeti Art Gallery in Yogyakarta. On the other,
she reminds us of the Exhibition of the Non-Aligned Movement
Countries (1995) at what is now the National Gallery of Indonesia
in Jakarta. This significant but fraught earlier undertaking
marked the 40th anniversary of the Asia-Africa Conference
(also known as the Bandung Conference, 1955), pre-empting
the more recent excitement in many quarters over this
historical event.
The contributors to this section of the book are—
between them—artists, curators, theorists, editors and DJs, among
doing other things. All their work—whether here in words
or elsewhere (also in art, exhibitions, audio mixes and more)—
mobilizes history to flag the cultural interconnectedness
and interdependence of disparate places in the world, while
refusing to engage with the global as driven by capitalist
marketing, finance and data management. My colleagues here
offer us hope.
5 I am grateful to David Teh for
commissioning the paper from Grace Samboh,
which she has developed here into an
extended essay. Also for trusting me to
chair the event to which he invited
Samboh, “The Goldfish Remembers: On the
Historical Function of Biennials,” 12th
Gwangju Biennale, September 6, 2018.
SECTION II 227