Hosted by the PhD in Arts, Università Iuav di Venezia
May 9, 2026, 11am
Venice 30125
Italy
Organized by EARN Curatorial Studies Workshop and hosted by the PhD in Arts, Università Iuav di Venezia.
For the 61st Venice Biennale, the EARN Curatorial Studies Workshop is pleased to announce that it will launch the groundbreaking International Curatorial Students Assembly, bringing together graduate curatorial students from numerous institutions to engage in shared learning, critical reflection, and professional exchange in a closed session. Led by members of the Workshop, this one-day conference will foster dialogue among its international participants, exploring the curatorial, political, and institutional dimensions of large-scale international exhibitions, with a specific critical focus on the current Venice Biennale’s exhibitions.
The Assembly includes invited participants from NABA, Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti, Milan; the School of Visual Arts, New York; HDK-Valand Academy of Art and Design, University of Gothenburg; the Art Academy of Latvia, Riga; and the Doctoral School of Visual Arts, Universitatea Nationala de Arte “George Enescu,” Iași.
The Assembly is hosted by the PhD in Arts, Università Iuav di Venezia and is one of a number of conferences and symposia that have been organized by Workshop members in the UK, Latvia, Romania, Italy, Finland, Sweden, Thailand, and the US, in recent years, with events forthcoming in South Africa and Zambia. For the full program please go here.
Recent publications
During the Assembly there will also be an informal launch event to mark recent publications by members of the EARN working group. Most recent publications by members range across key concerns for the fields of artistic research, curatorial research, and art history, with ongoing publication series and journals engaging crucial critical thinkers.
The new series, On the Curatorial (Floating Opera Press), edited by Carolina Rito, explores the debate around “the curatorial” that arose in the mid-2000s. The first two volumes are On Discourse and the Curatorial by Mick Wilson and Beyond Caring: Para-Hosting as Curatorial Escape Paul O’Neill, with a third volume, written by Beatrice von Bismarck, forthcoming this spring.
The series, Thoughts on Curating (Sternberg Press/MIT Press), edited by Steven Henry Madoff, has published Curating the Complex & The Open Strike by Terry Smith, Unannounced Voices: Curatorial Practice and Changing Institutions by Zdenka Badovinac, and Pidginization as Curatorial Method: Messing with Languages and Praxes of Curating by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung; and the anthology, Why I Do What I Do; with a forthcoming volume by Charles Esche.
Cătălin Gheorghe and Mick Wilson co-edited the open-access volume, Curating beyond Exhibition: On the post-exhibitionary condition in a post-political, in the series Vector – Critical Research in Context. Gheorghe also co-edited with Lorena Marciuc the open-access volume, Under the Last Magnetic Sun: Practices of (Counter)Research Imagination, published by the Doctoral School of Visual Arts, UNAGE, Iași.
Andris Brinkmanis published Asja Lācis. L’agitatrice rossa. Teatro, femminismo, arte e rivoluzione (Meltemi Press).
Joasia Krysa co-edited with Magdalena Tyżlik-Carver the open-access volume, Curating Superintelligences: A Reader on AI and Future Curating in the DATA browser book series.
Steven Henry Madoff brought out Unseparate: Modernism, Interdisciplinary Art, and Network Aesthetics (Stanford University Press). He is also the editor of the new open-access online journal, The Curatorial.
Henk Slager’s Collateral Concepts: A Provisional Vocabulary for Artistic Research is forthcoming in The Contemporary Condition series (Sternberg Press/MIT Press).
Ongoing EARN activities
Forthcoming events include the EARN Curatorial meeting in South Africa and Zambia in September 5–15, 2026: and the EARN Gathering “Harvesting Otherwise” where all EARN working groups gather at the Akademie of Fine Art Vienna, November 4–6, 2026. The Call for Contributions open until May 20, 2026.
The ongoing activities of the EARN Curatorial Studies Workshop place equal emphasis on engaging with existing knowledge practices while collaboratively seeking to build new insights and knowledge through the tangle of discourse and production in our assemblies, seminars, workshops, exhibitions, and publications, bringing together working professionals, scholars, and students. We are always interested in new collaborations. More about the Expanded Artistic Research Network, EARN.
