Curatorial Matters: on research methodologies
Symposium Date: 21 November 2025
Venue: PUBLICS, Sturenkatu 37-41 4b, Helsinki
Registration is closed and the event is fully booked.

More information on the symposium and link to abstracts and biographies HERE

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

Curatorial Matters: on research methodologies brings together curators and researchers to explore the curatorial not only as a mode of presentation but as a site of inquiry and experimentation. The symposium opens space to think and work collectively across ecological, socio-political, and infrastructural terrains, asking what forms of knowledge, solidarities, and futures may emerge when curating is understood as research—situated, relational, and speculative. Contributions engage methodologies that are embodied, affective, and collaborative, inviting participants to think through critical curatorial imaginaries.

Programme and Schedule

9.30-10:00 Coffee and registration

10:00-10:15 Welcome words and introduction of the day

10:15-11:00 Keynote: Chiara Cartuccia – The Space We Make: Curating Counter Geographies of the Mediterranean

11:05-12:30 Panel 1: Water, Extractivism, and Environmental Infrastructures

Sara Alberani – Undercurrents. Poetics and Politics of the Flood

Yosuke Nakamoto – Curating Estrangement: Salt, Memory, and the Afterlives of Infrastructure

Cristina Ramos González – Tending the Tides: Oceanic Curating as a Practice of Hope

Yvonne Billimore – Field_Notes: Living methodologies

Lunch break

13:45-14:30 Keynote: Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu – Against Monocultural Curating: Are Practical Realignments of Curatorial Possible?

14:35-16:00 Panel – Translocal and Decolonial Curatorial Practices

Micol Curatolo – Curating Artistic Research as Translocal Laboratory

Jully Acuña Suarez & Marcelo M. Miranda – Botamán Juabnán as Curatorial Ethics: Cultural Continuity, Care, and Epistemic Justice

Danai Giannoglou – Revisiting the Margins: Independent Spaces as Sites of Curatorial Resistance and Knowledge Production

Abdullah Qureshi – Cruising Methodologies: Coalition-Building and Queer Curatorial Research in The Darkroom

Coffee break

16:20-17:45 Panel – Systems, Resistance, and Alternative Archives

Ali T. As’ad – Administrative Antimatter: Curating Palestine and (Re)producing Infrastructures of Possibility

Marina Christodoulidou – Rehearsals towards Place-making

Klara Petrović & Luja Šimunović – The Parasite, the Stranger, and the Trickster: Curatorial Experiments with KUĆĆA

Barbara Mahlknecht – Constellations of Care: Reviving 1970s Feminist Archives

17:50 -18:00 Closing words

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Please note: PUBLICS maximum capacity is 80 people.

Coffee/tea/light snacks will be available for all.

There are cafes and restaurants that offer lunch nearby Publics. 

If you registered but are eventually unable to attend, please delete your registration on Eventbrite or contact us at curatorialmatters2025@gmail.com

You can access the full list of abstracts and biographies HERE

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.