PUBLICS launches The Centre For Curatorial Thinking.
The Centre For Curatorial Thinking is a new centre in the Nordic and Baltic region focusing on the significance of past and present thinking, knowledge, and critique within practices of the curatorial.
With The Centre For Curatorial Thinking, PUBLICS provides a critical framework to engage different levels of expertise and local groups in the region and internationally, making visible, developing, and disseminating critical knowledge of curatorial practices with a wide range of institutions and actors.
The Centre For Curatorial Thinking will take on many forms, including a dedicated Curatorial Reading Group, using PUBLICS Library as one of its main settings for a series of reading and listening sessions, and annual symposia. PUBLICS Library is the largest dedicated contemporary art curatorial library in Finland. This unique Library of 8000+ publications is one of the most important research libraries dedicated to curatorial research in the world, housing the most important books and catalogues related to contemporary art curating since the 1960s. The Curatorial Reading Group will comprise cross-generational events with pioneering curators and agenda-setting curatorial thinkers, to read with PUBLICS Youth and established art professionals from across the world, including leading curators, artist-curators, art-writers, collectives, and emergent curating practitioners. Curatorial Reading Group events will also tour across the region.
Curatorial Reading Group First guests and dates 2024
15 May Maaretta Jaukkuri & Dr Tominga O’Donnell
22 August Maria Lind & Marti Manen and PUBLICS Youth
26 September Brian Dillon – On Art Writing
9 October Maria Fusco – On Art Writing
29 November AA Bronson & Gareth Long – General Idea and Art Metropole
PUBLICS hosts The Centre For Curatorial Thinking to instigate dialogue between local, regional, and international thinkers, with the following steering group; Pilvi Kalhama, Executive Director, EMMA, Espoo Museum of Modern Art; Prof Mick Wilson, HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg; Prof Bassam El Baroni, Department of Art and Media, School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Aalto University; Manen Marti, Director, Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm; Antra Priede, Vice-rector for Academic Affairs, Art Academy of Latvia; and Kati Laakso, Executive Director, Finnish Culture Institute in New York. PUBLICS Partners with Saastamoinen Foundation for 2023-2025; Anne Szefer Karlsen, Professor Curatorial Practice, University of Bergen, Norway.