Curating in Context (NEW)

Traditionally understood as the practice of selecting and caring for objects to be shown in a museum, or to form part of a collection of art or an exhibition, curating has now gained broader definition and currency within the cultural and creative industries. Beyond the popular understanding of curating as exhibition-making, this course will focus on what it means to curate as a critical and creative practice, and how curators conceive of stories and concepts within specific contexts. By reading texts, surveying key exhibitions, meeting guest speakers, visiting art spaces, and doing hands-on assignments and practical training, students will explore the traditional, artistic, and multidisciplinary possibilities of curating. We will learn about the influences, controversies, and thresholds of curatorship within different contexts, both historical and geographical, aesthetic and political. Saigon will serve as a local context of curating practice, as demonstrated through notable exhibitions from the modern postcolonial nation-building period of the late 1950s, and the post-Doi Moi period of the early 2000s to present. Through such case studies, we will analyze how exhibitions intersect with political representation and aesthetic developments, and investigate in more depth how one can curate between different contexts, such as from the urban to the rural; from the national to the regional to the international; and from a historical perspective to that of the future.