Future UnMapping

Curatorial Day School – Open Curatorial Dayschool at Winchester School of Art

At The Rotunda, Winchester School of Art, SO23 8DL.

Attendance is free and a vegan lunch will be provided.

Registration open until 8 May.

This is the first of a new series of Day Schools at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton.

Organised and led by staff in the MA Contemporary Curating, the Dayschools aim to provide an informal setting in which to share common hopes, anxieties and expectations about curatorial practice.

They are primarily aimed at those thinking of moving into curatorial work, but open to anyone who would like to speculate about how the arts can help us detour from a roadmap that seems intent to deliver us into an unliveable future.

Taking stock of environmental, financial, social, technological and artistic challenges, we get together to plot what kind of future art relations, actors and infrastructures we need to build collectively.

Each Day School concentrates on a particular topic, guided by conversation and group work.

You can attend as many or as few Day Schools as you like, but places are very limited, so please register early.

Dayschool 1. Content Overload

Curating has acquired a different meaning over the last two decades. No longer the sole domain of museum and gallery workers, it has become the go-to term to signal that something has been thought through, that it is distinctive, unique and considered.

In a growing sea of social media slop, disinformation and AI generated content, curating appears to offer the (false) promise to restore some meaningful relation between consumers, and between users and platforms.

For the most part, it is our free labour that is called upon to restore this relation, making the imperative to curate and display our lives an essential part of our reputational arsenal. In this Dayschool, we will ask what the longer history of curating can offer in this landscape, whether the skills and tools that curating has long held can help us negotiate our way out of logarithmic attention-traps and propose new forms of mediating relations and meaning-making.

If you use them, please bring along the phone or laptop with which you normally engage with social media to work with during the session, you will not be expected to share your content.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

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Host or Publisher Faculty of Arts and Humanities