Lina Džuverović & Irene Revell's text 'Lots of Shiny Junk at the Art Dump: The Sick and Unwilling Curator' is published in the new Spring Issue 9 of PARSE.
Abstract
This text draws on the authors’ shared experiences of growing alientation from the figure of the “contemporary curator”, stemming from a wider concern with the rigour, ethics and radicality that become impossible with the pace of work they term “hyper-production” that has become almost completely normalised. This alienation is articulated through an enmeshment of desire and capacity—“won’t” and “can’t”—where “can’t” is a matter of capacity, time and energy relating to competing responsibilities such as child care and the self-care of chronic illness. This question of capacity to work is explored through recent art and curating thinking—by Carolyn Lazard, Taranah Fazeli, Alyson Mitchell and Deirdre Logue—that underscores the challenge posed to capitalist modes of labour by such a refusal, as well as a problematisation of “stamina”, which draws on disability activism and advocacy via Catherine Hale and Susan Wendell. The text concludes with the articulation of a series of questions that attempt to glimpse other more “resilient”, via Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez—forms of curating that might exist in opposition to the marathon-working “stamina” required of the normative “contemporary curator”.
