http://www.kmd.uib.no/
A small, quiet, idyllic lake in a forest on top of a hill overlooking Bergen was my first stop on a four-day intellectual trip through the state of curating and education in Norway, Europe, and the world. Organized by the curator and writer Anne Szefer Karlsen, who has long served as course director of the master’s program in Curatorial Practice at the University of Bergen, the conference “Circuits of Experiences, Research and Knowledges” marked, sadly, the termination of that very program by the university’s Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design (kunst, musikk og design; KMD for short). Or, rather, one could say that the conference not only marked that moment, but also celebrated it. By taking stock of current curatorial stances, the event converted the sorry fact of the program’s closure into a productive, pointed question: why had it closed to begin with?
Given the locale, the idea of a Norwegian Gravøl, or “grave beer” wake, inevitably came to mind; the funereal tradition implies grief as much as celebration and the sharing of stories. Up on the hill, the emphasis was more on the latter, as a crowd of alumni, associates, and friends of the program, local as well as far-flung, gathered to hear the conference's first informal talk, out in the open air. Szefer Karlsen was joined by Budapest-based Flóra Gadó and Oslo-based Anne Beate Hovind (unless otherwise noted, the conference’s contributors are curators). Gadó gave a rather sobering update on what’s known as the “Hungarian playbook”—the model case of a patrimonialist, gradually accelerating erosion of democracy à la Viktor Orbán, which authoritarians around the globe, including Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, have eagerly adopted. Gadó underscored that a long-standing Hungarian underground music festival, which was also a place for left-progressive activist issues, would take place for the last time this summer.
Hovind, however, gave a more hopeful report about an art project she produced which transforms the maladies of the present into a literary message addressed to the distant future. Future Library (2014–2114) by Scottish artist Katie Paterson is a century-long public artwork, for which paper made exclusively from one thousand trees planted just outside Oslo will be used to print texts by high-profile writers. One writer will be commissioned each year to write something substantial. Their texts are to be kept under lock and key at Oslo’s public library until the manuscripts are released to be read in 2114. So far, the list boasts top-tier literary names such as Margaret Atwood (2014), Elif Shafak (2017), Han Kang (2018), Karl Ove Knausgård (2019), and Ocean Vuong (2020). I had to think of the limbo it must create for such star novelists, accustomed to producing under the pressures and pleasures of an eager public, to suddenly write for readers who will most likely live after them, or, in the worst case, might not exist at all. While it must feel liberating at first, I imagine it becomes more like a séance with no answer, an experience that must at least be frustrating and stifling at times—unless you’re Franz Kafka.
Placing the discussion of this project—a testament as much as time capsule—at the beginning of this conference created an overtone of thinking collectively about the posterity of the terminated master program, as if metaphorically planting little trees and producing paper for future programs to be written on. But the bold scenario of a one-hundred-year-long, come-what-may contract of constant and sustained creation also flies brazenly in the face of current trends in academia. It’s important to digress and discuss these “current trends” before returning to “Circuits of Experiences, Research and Knowledges” to fully illuminate the Bergen conference’s background.
Exhibit A, of course, is the termination of the Bergen Curatorial Practice MA itself. In September last year, an article in Kunstkritikk reported that the board of KMD had voted in favor of the program being closed. On the university’s website, one can find the documentation of that proposal in Norwegian. Its logic is highly contradictory—the document keeps meandering, in cluttered and repetitive administrative jargon, between three points: that the program didn’t meet the quality standards of KMD (without ever giving a proper hint at how these standards are made or met); that the money for it supposedly wasn’t in the budget (“the program must also be seen in relation to the academy’s budget process, which is now very critical”); and that they will come up with a new program anyway (“after this, work on a new redesign will be initiated”).
The last point is especially revealing. Its argument is the rhetorical equivalent of tearing down a fully-functioning building, claiming to build something greater in its place, and, when asked what that something will be, saying, “Let us first tear it down—we’ll come up with a concept afterwards.” In this case, tearing down means destroying a program whose alumni commonly attain professional positions in art institutions in Norway and abroad, and getting rid of the only curatorial education available in the whole country. Of course, any university and any faculty or department has, within the remit of academic freedom, the right to terminate or “redesign” a program. But within that same remit, they should also make a real effort to do so according to verifiably argued standards and due process, which would include providing staff, teachers, and students the opportunity to voice any dissent.
The most obvious example of destructive trends within education are the Trump administration’s recent research cuts and tax threats against US universities and colleges in toto—and at Harvard in particular. The same Orban-inspired playbook has unfolded in Argentina under its president Javier Milei. Cuts and threats in arts and science are especially popular with the right wing in Europe as well, whether in the Netherlands or Slovakia. What we see is an ideologically turbocharged rollback that claims to be rooting out uber-wokeism despite actually being geared against scientific factuality, critical research, artistic freedom, and internationalism.
Parties in the center of the political spectrum tend to imitate this trend in a more quiet, “civilized” way, disguising any possible ideological motivations simply by justifying cuts with budgetary constraints. In Germany, the states of Berlin and Hesse—both led by the conservative members of their coalition governments—have implemented severe cuts for universities while still pumping money toward car owners and real estate buyers.
Faced with these prospects, inside the institutions, the battle for slices of the ever-shrinking pie begins. Maybe “curatorial practice” is too young and too international an academic discipline to weather such battles easily. There are several programs that have been severely cut or paused: the MFA Curating program at Goldsmith’s seems to have been scaled down to a mainly looking at/writing about course; the “Curating Contemporary Art” course at Royal College was shortened from two years to one; the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program has been put on pause in the wake of much-reported turmoil; CCA Wattis’s Curatorial Practice MA has also been paused. Reasons surely differ, but the general drift augers a return to olden days when curators were simply, and always, recruited from the ranks of traditional art history courses (and influential family networks). In that kind of climate, even when financial resources are still adequate, the prospect of future cuts and terminations arguably suffices as an invitation for anticipatory obedience and opportunism.
A further aspect also plays into the increasing embattlement of international curatorial programs: a trend towards reprovincialization, or a sense of “natives first,” that has spread in the Scandinavian region and beyond. The most explicit expression of that sentiment came with the Norwegian government’s 2023 decision to impose substantial tuition fees on non-EU/EEA international students. In the wake of this verdict, enrollment numbers dropped by 80%. (However, the decision process about the closure of the Cultural Practice MA in Bergen apparently wasn’t affected by this development.) Just a few days before the Circuits of Experiences, Research and Knowledges conference, a surprise political U-turn occurred. The current Labor coalition government—from which the protectionist, ultranationalist Centre Party had exited in January—suspended the requirement for high tuitions entirely. This essentially handed sovereignty over enrollment-related issues back to the universities. What the universities make of that sovereignty remains to be seen.
The details of Norwegian education policies, however, felt like background noise to the more pressing state of affairs overall. The opening keynote by longtime museum director Zdenka Badovinac, which took place in the upstairs function room of a restaurant not far from the small lake in the forest, seemed to confirm this impression. On the surface, one could think hers was the typical “here’s my curatorial portfolio” presentation, as she reminisced about major projects during her twenty-eight years, from 1993 to 2021, heading Moderna Galerija in Ljubljana. Instead of simply recapping her career, however, Badovinac highlighted aspects related to the historic crises that happened during its duration. The most obvious one was the break-up of Tito’s Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, the ensuing wars, and their effects on the art milieu and society in general. Her emphasis accordingly was on the activities of artist collectives, from OHO Group in the late 1960s to IRWIN in the late 1980s and ’90s.
Counter to lazy presuppositions, these groups were not interested in injecting bohemian-bourgeois values into state socialist art. Instead, they wanted "more, not less socialism,” as Badovinac quipped. Or, one could say, another kind of socialism: they were against top-down rigidity, advocating instead for peer-to-peer imaginative cooperation, or what Badovinac’s talk named “comradeship as a parallel infrastructure.” Badovinac also made connections to Donna Haraway’s notion of “making kin,” i.e. forging new and unforeseen relationships. The Haraway reference would recur throughout the ensuing days, but for Badovinac, the emphasis seemed to be on informal network-building in service of circumventing the repression imposed on institutions and the individuals representing and working in them. The point seemed self-evident—no major disagreement was voiced—and the crowd made its way down the hill and across town in small groups, each engrossed in conversation, toward dinner at Bergen Kjøtt, the cultural center that served as the venue for the second day. On the way, what was also still present were the baby-bib-like tops members of the organizational team wore. Designed by the artist Kiyoshi Yamamoto, they featured the Norwegian sentence “Når skulen forsvinn, forsvinn felleskapet,” (“When the school disappears, the community disappears”) on their backs.
The next morning, I still wondered about the notions of “comrade” and “kin,” since both have at least two sides. “Comrade” is suggestive of a nice, slightly nostalgic (if not embellished) notion of antihierarchical solidarity, but also implies militarized fraternity, an idea of party soldier against renegade traitor. “Kin” in the Harawayian sense is the forging of unforeseen entanglements with human and nonhuman entities alike, but it also bears the history of clannish bloodlines and family ties. But before I could get stuck pondering these words, the artist and writer Neo Sinoxolo Musangi—commissioned to respond, as a kind of daily intervention, to the conference’s title—delivered a short, poetic, and hilarious dismantling of another word: “research.” Musangi told a story about a drunken cousin insulting their grandmother, and the list of conclusions they drew from this little anecdote cut sharply to the chase regarding the pitfalls of “research”: every bit of it implies a narrative, and with each narrative come biases, intentions, and questions of alignment. In Musangi’s case, with research came the necessity of defending their grandmother against the insult.
What a great primer for the following panel about processes of fermentation, which, like research, is not a new subject, whether straightforwardly or metaphorically, in the art world. Then again, fermentation is precisely about slow transformation and the conservation of nourishment. Silja Leifsdottir—curator at Bergen Kunsthall and alumna of the program—gave an introduction to wild fermentation, with raw milk being transformed live via low heat and slow stirring into proto-yogurt (of course, the full fermentation process takes longer than twenty minutes). The artist, writer, and educator Juan Pablo Pacheco Bejarano followed suit with a presentation about fermentation workshops he organized on all kinds of processes involving bacteria and yeast, from kombucha-like fruit beverages to natural wine.
If people discovering that their love for sourdough making, vegetable pickling, and wild fermentation is one of the few good things that came out of the pandemic, Michelle Yeonho Hyun, director of the ICA at NYU Shanghai, had to sober us by bringing up the dystopian enforcement politics during the that period in China, when entire residential districts were turned into de facto prisons for months on end. She made reference to "Sour Things," an exhibition at the ICA by Jerusalem-born artist Mirna Bamieh, in which fermentation served as a metaphor for memory and history writing. Hyun also showed a short clip that went viral in China; the clip shows a resident being threatened at their door by officials, who warn that that if the resident do not comply, even the third generation of his offspring will feel the consequences. This kind of threat was common under Mao. The resident answers that he doesn’t care, as he’s not planning to have offspring—simultaneously the bravest and the bleakest retort one could imagine.
Carol Yinghua Lu, of Inside Out Art Museum in Beijing, and Frances Morris, longtime director of Tate Modern, both more or less ignored fermentation-as-metaphor and instead talked about different approaches to tackling ideological constraints within and beyond the art world. Lu found inspiration in poet Lu Xun’s use of “wild grass” as a metaphor for individual resilience. The “wild grass” idea also fed into her and Liu Ding’s 2024 Yokohama Triennale, leading them to the concept of “individual internationalism,” which asserts that curating should function as a holding structure for individual agency and cross-cultural connection while rejecting top-down hierarchical thinking.
Morris, who is also chair of the Gallery Climate Coalition, examined climate concerns in relation to museum and collection structures’ increasingly unsustainable logic of amassment and static conservation. Her suggestions for new alternatives to permanent purchase included a discussion of a work involving fruits on stones by Mayan artist Edgar Calel, for which the Tate acquired temporary “custodianship.” It is ironic, however, that the Latin root “custos” is also present in the old-fashioned German word “Kustos,” meaning someone who takes care of a museum collection. Sometimes we seem to come full circle.
Federica Baeza, former director of the Palais de Glace museum in Buenos Aires, made a moving presentation about the fight of trans and queer people for respect and representation within the institutional art world, precisely when a reactionary rollback is in full swing, as it currently is in Argentina. A trans woman herself, Baeza didn’t spare the audience from the realization that this fight is one of life and death, with the chilling example of the marvelous artist and queer activist Rodolfo Bulacio, who was murdered in a hate crime in 1995 and honored with a retrospective at the Palais de Glace in 2022.
Rachel Anderson offered a semi-utopian way out of the post-Covid depression of right-wing backlashes and state repression by introducing the participatory project “Idle Women.” For the project, a group of women artist-activisits, including Anderson, refurbished a wrecked ship into a functional, motorless narrowboat. They renamed the boat Selina Cooper, after a local working-class suffragist who passed away in 1946. The artists also converted a derelict piece of land in Lancashire, England into a beautiful garden. Anderson avoided romanticizing the immense amount of unpaid labor that the artists devoted the projects, and instead focused her presentation on how the boat and garden alike address issues of domestic violence sideways by offering sanctuary.
Discussion bubbled up when Bejarano asked the panel and the audience a half-straight, half-rhetorical question about the relationship between art and social practice, along the lines of, “What if our art as a social practice relieves the state of its duty of care instead of reminding it more strongly of it? And what if we neglect aesthetic practice in the process?” The second part ruffled feathers, as if implying that art-as-social-practice had to justify its status as art for the thousandth time. To me, the question's first part was more pressing, because it introduced the unsettling possibility of art being misused as substitute for something that should be state welfare. But the mood in the room was perhaps a little vulnerable in the wake of the MA program being closed down amidst a possibly regressive return to conservative notions of art, art history, artmaking, and curating.
As the participants and attendants gathered for the third day of the conference at Cornerteateret, one might have thought that there would be signs of fatigue. But there were none to be seen. The morning’s highlights were Jaleesa Johnston and Mack McFarland's observations about curators within collecting institutions, and how many reverse-engineer more diverse acquisition and exhibition policies by working backward from a plan first laid out by the development department. McFarland introduced the concept of “The Kaleidoscope,” a collaborative storytelling technique that was first conceived by Imagine Black (formerly PAALF, the Portland African American Leadership Forum). “The Kaleidoscope” prompts participants to ask hypothetical questions. In this case, the prompt was: “If a curator or artist was coming to work with your community… what questions would you want to ask and be asked?” Strangely, no one in the audience really seemed to have suggestions for what they wanted to be asked. Instead, they came up with increasingly dark versions of what they would ask such a visiting artist or curator, from “when do you leave?” to “what does it feel like to be confronted with such a barrage of cynical aggression?” The implication was, obviously, that the visiting artist or curator was exactly the kind of fly-in, fly-out, blasé professional who would behave ignorantly and with an eye toward extraction from the community in question. This inevitably unveiled a pervasive mood of self-criticism, verging on guilt, among all the professionals in the room. Suddenly, a shadow seemed to have fallen over the concepts of comradeship and kinship.
The afternoon offered (black) comic relief, though, in the form of witty theory fabulation by Clara Balaguer, who offered another metaphor for curating and art practice: strangling the institution, very slowly, to death. Her case study, with YouTube nature film footage looping behind her, was the balete tree of the Philippines, which wraps other trees in its many shoots and hanging roots until it entirely encloses and suffocates them, eventually leaving an empty void in the middle. But this was just the start, as Balaguer unleashed a firework of cheeky associations: isn’t the balete tree therefore also a sexual metaphor for circlusion, Bini Adamczak’s neologism for active enclosure (rather than passive reception, as in penetration)? And isn’t the tree’s network of entangled branches and aerial rhizomes also akin to what artist and psychoanalyst Bracha L. Ettinger calls the “matrixial borderspace,” which counters essentially phallic conceptions of selfhood with ideas of inside-out transversals of the subject-object division? Balaguer kept firing off comparisons, answering questions by looking at her hands, on which she had made notes like a cheat sheet for an exam. Her hands inadvertently became a kind of living metaphor for what it means to intertwine mental work and manual work.
On the final, fourth day, as rain poured against the windows of Bergen Kunsthall, participants gathered one last time for a workshop exercise in reading, writing, and translating, conceived by Daniela Ramos Arias and Carol Stampone. I shared a sheet of paper with a Zurich-based curator, and we wrote each other musings about Celine Dion (“My Heart Will Go On”) and Tina Turner (“I Can’t Stand the Rain”). Another exercise was to read a text to a blindfolded colleague. My partner and I digested a text about using dancing in museum education. The other participant and I agreed that we felt for those who went to the museum precisely to be left alone and to avoid any group physical activity. But our reticence points exactly to the strange task of work in art institutions: having to make space, and hold space, for many contradictory or even mutually exclusive needs and expectations.
Needless to say, the now-terminated MA in Curatorial Practice has been a beacon of such difficult work. What are the reasons it has been shuttered, then? Other than the banal, trendy, often reactionary reasons given above, no serious justification is discernible. Since its first cohort graduated in 2017, many of its alumni have continuously risen in the ranks in museums and art institutions around the world. Consequently, the conference that commemorated the program’s ending was not built around controversy or self-flagellating introspection. Instead, it was clearly an attempt to counter, against all odds, that pessimistic baby-bib slogan: “when the school disappears, the community disappears.”
