Call for Papers
Curatorial Matters: on research methodologies
Deadline CfP: 6 July 2025
Symposium Date: 21 November 2025
Venue: PUBLICS, Helsinki 

Organisers: 

Patrizia Costantin (Lecturer in Curating and MA Art and Media Programme Director, Aalto University) and Marianna Tsionki (Associate Professor & University Curator, Leeds Arts University). 

Curatorial Matters: on research methodologies invites curators, artists, and theorists to explore the evolving role of the curatorial as a site of critical practice and knowledge production. As curatorial practice increasingly expands beyond exhibition-making into domains of research, pedagogy, and institutional critique, there is a growing need to articulate and examine the methodologies that underpin curatorial inquiry. 

Building on foundational propositions within curatorial discourse (Rogoff, 2006; Lind, 2012; O’Neill and Wilson, 2010, 2015; O’Neill, Wilson and Steeds, 2016, Martinon, 2013, von Bismarck and Frank, 2019, von Bismarck and Meyer-Krahmer, 2019, Sheikh, 2019) that conceptualise the curatorial as a mode of knowledge production—situated, relational, performative, and embedded within discursive, institutional, and pedagogical contexts—the symposium explores what forms of research and engagement emerge when the curatorial is understood not merely as a mode of presentation, but as a method of inquiry—interdisciplinary, speculative, embodied, affective, and often unfinished. How do curators navigate and negotiate the systems of knowledge they inhabit, inherit, or co-produce? How can curatorial strategies shape, contest, or reimagine the spaces and the conditions under which knowledge is produced, shared, and valued?

This gathering opens space for methodological pluralism and reflection, bringing together diverse approaches to curatorial research practice that call into question dominant narratives and institutional logic, and propose new forms of solidarity, co-authorship and world-building. With a focus on ecological, technological, and socio-political questions that shape contemporary conditions, the symposium invites a dialogue on how curatorial research navigates —and intervenes in—these entangled epistemic, political, and ecological terrains.

The event will feature keynote presentations from Chiara Cartuccia and Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu. Chiara Cartuccia is a curator, writer, and researcher based in London. She is currently engaged in long-term research around the Mediterranean as invented/inventive geography, focusing on the ramifications of practical Mediterraneanism(s) in Euro-Mediterranean contexts. Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu is a curator, writer, and educator working on constructive critiques of civilization, sustainability of intersectional futures, and practices of togetherness. She specializes in transgenerational feminist queer monographies, context responsive large scale exhibitions and project development for young generation artists. She co-leads the Art in Discourse programme at Braunschweig University of Art.

We invite 20-minute presentations (papers, visual essays, performative contributions, etc.) on curatorial practice as a site of research, critical inquiry and knowledge production. We encourage early and mid-career curators/researchers to submit.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, curatorial approaches that engage with:

– Curatorial methodology as research practice

– Situated, embodied, and relational approaches to curating

– Institutional critique and reimagining organisational structures

– Temporalities of the curatorial: duration, slowness, incompletion

– Interdisciplinary collaborations and curating across fields

– Epistemic resistance and alternative modes of knowledge production

– Ecological entanglements, climate imaginaries, and curating in response to environmental crises

– Collaborative, dialogic, and co-authored curatorial processes

– Failures, frictions, and the politics of unfinished projects

– Narratives for worldbuilding 

– Methodologies for curatorial research as a site for technological critique

Please send your proposal to curatorialmatters2025@gmail.com by 6 July 2025. 

The pdf/word document should include:

– the title of your proposed presentation

– a 250-word abstract 

– 5 keywords

– a 150-word biography 

Notification of acceptance will be sent by 31 July. 

Please do not hesitate to send any queries to curatorialmatters2025@gmail.com

This event is is part of PUBLICS Parahosting programme and is supported by the Department of Art and Media, School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Aalto University. 

Unfortunately, we cannot support contributors’ travel costs, but we will be happy to provide an invitation letter to support one’s funding application.

Publication

Following the symposium, we plan to develop an edited volume and/or special issue featuring extended versions of selected presentations. Participants will be invited to submit full-length articles, which will undergo a double-blind peer-review process. We are currently exploring publishing opportunities, and more details will be shared with participants after the symposium.

References

Bismarck, B. von, & Frank, R. (2019). Of(f) our times : curatorial anachronics. Sternberg Press.

Bismarck, B. von, & Meyer-Krahmer, B. (2019) Curatorial Things. Sternberg Press.

Lind, M. (2012). Performing the curatorial: within and beyond art. Berlin: Sternberg Press.

Martinon, J.P. (2013). The Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating. Bloomsbury Publishing.

O’Neill, P., & Wilson, M. (2010). Curating and the educational turn. Open Editions/De Appel.

O’Neill, P., & Wilson, M. (2015). Curating research. Open Editions.

O’Neill, P., Wilson, M., & Steeds, L. (2016). The curatorial conundrum : what to study? what to research? what to practice? LUMA Foundation.

Rogoff, I. (2006). Smuggling: An Embodied Criticality. eipcp.net

Sheikh, S. (2019). ‘Curating and research: An uneasy alliance’ in Ed. Malene Vest Hansen, Anne Folke Henningsen, Anne Gregersen, Curatorial Challenges: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Contemporary Curating. Routledge.

Patrizia Costantin

Patrizia Costantin, PhD, is a lecturer and researcher whose work explores the curatorial as a critical mode of knowledge production. Positioned at the intersection of curatorial research, art and pedagogy, her practice investigates how the curatorial — as a relational methodology — can engage with contemporary socio-political, technological and ecological narratives. Her teaching philosophy draws on the curatorial’s potential to foster collective learning, experimentation, and critical thinking. 

She completed her PhD in Curatorial Practice at Manchester Metropolitan University in 2019. The research explored the contemporaneity of digital decay through a post-medium approach to the curatorial. Centred on the research exhibition machines will watch us die, it experimented with curatorial methodologies that engage with the temporal and material dimensions of digital culture, recontextualising concepts from media archaeology and media theory within the exhibition-as-research framework.

Costantin was part of the curatorial team for the Helsinki Biennial 2023, New Directions May Emerge, where she co-developed The Curatorial School of May as part of the public programme. She has presented her research at numerous international conferences, including ISEA and Media Art History, and has contributed to various publications on curatorial theory and practice. After teaching in various roles at Manchester School of Art (2017–2020), Costantin began her position as University Lecturer at Aalto University, Finland, in 2020. In 2022-2023, she served as Head of the Visual Cultures, Curating and Contemporary Art (ViCCA) major. Appointed in 2023, she is the Programme Director of the MA in Art and Media at Aalto University’s School of Arts, Design and Architecture.

Marianna Tsionki

Marianna Tsionki, PhD, is a curator and art theorist whose research explores the intersections of contemporary art, ecology, and the curatorial as a site of critical inquiry. She is Associate Professor and University Curator at Leeds Arts University, where she leads the curatorial programme at Blenheim Walk Gallery, with a focus on environmental discourse, material ecologies, and post-industrial histories. Her work is grounded in curatorial pedagogies, exploring how exhibition-making and research-based practice can foster critical and collaborative learning in response to urgent questions of environmental justice and planetary futures.

Her writing has appeared in publications by Sternberg Press, dpr-barcelona, Palgrave Macmillan, Wetlands, and Vernon Press. Her forthcoming co-edited volume with K. Verlag, We live like trees inside the footsteps of our ancestors (2025), expands on curatorial approaches to ecological thought and decolonial aesthetics rooted in Latin American contexts. 

Tsionki’s curatorial research engages with the evolving social and ecological transformations of the Anthropocene, with particular focus on global ecologies of resource exploitation, toxic legacies, extraction sites, and the concept of sacrifice zones—developed further through the long-term project Digital Matters (2015–2021). She curated Meteorological Mobilities at apexart, New York (2020), exploring climate-induced migration, and co-curated We live like trees inside the footsteps of our ancestors (2023), a group exhibition challenging colonial frameworks and Western-centred epistemologies. Most recently, she co-curated Liminal Ecologies at tranzit.sk, Bratislava (2025), investigating human and more-than-human entanglements in the context of border ecologies, climate crisis, and geopolitical instability.

She has curated solo exhibitions and new commissions with artists including Oliver Ressler, Marwa Arsanios, Kyriaki Goni, School of Mutants and Sheila Gaffney amongst others.