Shapeshifters: New Forms of Curatorial Research

Shapeshifters is a two-day public symposium for curatorial research at Monash University in Narrm Melbourne, Australia. Doctoral candidates in the university’s Curatorial Practice PhD Program will present research at the cutting edge of curatorial practice today, including work on indigenous land rights, the threat and potential of eavesdropping, beholding through blindness, queering the curator, and a biography of the nymph Daphne. Presenters include Frances Barrett, Fayen d’Evie, Camila Marambio, Mihnea Mircan, Melanie Oliver, and Joel Stern.

The event marks the program’s fifth anniversary, and is an occasion to reconsider the nature of curatorial research and the genre of the symposium, a familiar but often unsatisfying format. As such, the symposium incorporates artists commissioned to invigorate and challenge the event by examining its values and peculiar sociability, and introducing elements like nurture, myth, embodiment, nature, and self-reflection. Commissioned artists include Caitlin Franzmann (Brisbane); Brian Fuata (Sydney); Lucreccia Quintanilla (Melbourne); Snack Syndicate (Andrew Brooks and Astrid Lorange, Sydney); and Charlie Sofo (Melbourne).

Los Angeles–based art historian and editor J. Myers-Szupinska will give a keynote address on Wednesday, March 13. Titled “Forms of Being Together,” the lecture will sketch out a new crisis of the group-form in art, arguing that the Romantic forms of group association that have governed art’s worlds for the last two centuries—cults, clubs, avant-gardes, and subcultures—ceased to function in the early 2000s, under the pressure of new economies of space, time, and socialisation.

Shapeshifters is free and open to the public; registration is required. The event is organised by Tara McDowell, Director of Curatorial Practice, with the support of Dr Helen Hughes and a design program by Beaziyt Worcou. It is supported by Monash University’s Critical Practices Research Lab, Curatorial Practice, and Fine Art. The reception is hosted by the Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA), whose exhibition Shapes of Knowledge will be on view.

Launched in 2014, the PhD in Curatorial Practice at Monash University Art Design & Architecture (MADA) is practice-based, and supports a spectrum of doctoral projects that reflect critically on how we engage with our cultures, our cities, and our world. It fosters curatorial projects that test the limits of art institutions. It supports advanced scholarly work on exhibitions and their histories, the conditions of art’s public appearance, and the politics of display.

MADA’s Curatorial Practice Advisory Board includes Johanna Burton, Director, Wexner Center for the Arts; Charlotte Day, Director, MUMA; Juan A. Gaitán, Director, Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo; Alexie Glass-Kantor, Executive Director, Artspace, Sydney; Kathy Temin, Interim Head of Fine Art, MADA; J. Myers-Szupinska, Associate Professor, Curatorial Practice, California College of the Arts; Tom Nicholson, artist; Anne M. Wagner, Class of 1936 Professor Emerita of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of California, Berkeley; and Tirdad Zolghadr, writer and curator.

Expressions of interest from prospective international applicants seeking scholarships close July 15, 2019. Application details here.

CRICOS provider: 00008C
CRICOS course code: 037830A