Opening: 07.08.2018 
Exhibition on view until 10.08.2018
Location: Sàn Art Library

Uncommon Pursuits, established in the summer of 2018, is a school dedicated to emerging Southeast Asian curators who aspire to gain theoretical and practical skills as they research, write and curate contemporary art in their translocal contexts. Please find more information on our program here.

The practice of a curating contemporary art covers a diverse set of expectations and requirements: engagement with artist[s] and audiences; and managing tangible and intangible processes such as the writing of interpretative text and organizing space and display.

Playing with the linguistic root of ‘curate,’ contemporary curators regularly ask “How do we care?” Most are typically required to work across both familiar and unfamiliar contexts and sites, as if the practice of a curator is already understood as mobile and uncertain.

This session explores curatorial practice—its inherent possibilities—outside established institutional contexts, or beyond the extant structure of a museum or a gallery. Raising practical and theoretical questions about responsibilities behind purposes and objectives, ethical issues are inevitably provoked because traditional forms of exchange and consumption are rendered anew.

Beyond stereotypical institutional contexts, what histories do contemporary curatorial praxis evolve? In fragile social contexts, what roles does or can the curator assume?