Where Do We Find Each Other?: Artistic and Curatorial Strategies in Transitional Times

This essay posits artistic and curatorial strategies as modes of social improvisation that operate in relation to social and political imaginaries. It considers compositional mechanisms of artistic work as models of intervention that bear the potential to produce critical instances of an ephemeral de-instituting. I seek to develop further the term “destituent spaces” as a model for current curatorial and artistic practices in order to theorize on critical practices that produce new publics for discussion, contemplation, and reflection. Embracing challenges that emerge from contemporary practice as it engages with political and social realities, this text rethinks issues of framing, artistic process, and dissensus. Revisiting forms of exhibition, debate, and situatedness, this text problematizes the relation between form and content, composition and de-instituting, space and intervention in order to rethink models of situating, composing, and intervening as they relate to current conditions.