PUBLICS expands the activities of The Centre for Curatorial Thinking by co-hosting the second in a series of four annual, interrelated, and cooperative symposia—spanning Curatorial Thinking, Learning, Instituting, and Collaborating—and explores the importance of public discourse across Finland, the Nordic-Baltic region, and beyond. In this second symposium, titled  Positioning A Symposium on Curatorial Learning in the Nordic-Baltic Region & Beyond, we collectively reflect on the relationship between learning, curatorial thinking, exhibitionary practices, and discourses of the curatorial.

Since the establishment and expansion of curatorial courses in the early 1990s, we have seen many deliberations on different approaches to curatorial education, knowledge production, and on what forms of learning may have enduring impact for the practice of curating and its discourses and histories.

Positioning explicitly considers what specific modes of curatorial thinking-as-learning are taking place across the ever-expanding contemporary curatorial field and are enabled by its diverse educational provisions.

Positioning gathers past and present approaches, knowledges, and critiques within practices of the curatorial. In doing so, the symposium creates a space for dialogue between local and international contemporary art scenes and their practitioners to generate new opportunities for artists, curators and cultural workers in the Nordic-Baltic region.

Positioning A Symposium on Curatorial Learning in the Nordic-Baltic Region & Beyond is organised by PUBLICS: in Helsinki & Espoo with Architecture & Design Museum Helsinki, EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art and Uniarts Helsinki’s Academy of Fine Arts; in Malmö and Copenhagen with Malmö Konstmuseum, Simian and PASS – Center for Practice-based Art Studies, University of Copenhagen; in Gothenburg & Stockholm with HDK-Valand and the Centre for Art and the Political Imaginary (CAPIm), withCuratorLab, Konstfack, University of Arts, Crafts and Design, Stockholm and with IASPIS.

Positioning asks:

How might curatorial learning be understood?

What do curators learn from artists, from exhibitions, from curating and from other curators?

How does learning reveal itself in curatorial practices, histories, discourses?

How to account for curatorial learning actually taking place?

How might the curatorial be understood as its own mode of learning?

How can all these forms of learning transform Curatorial Thinking?

How can curators position this learning locally, regionally, internationally?

How might curatorial learning enable curative action?

Positioning addresses how expansion of curatorial learning has accounted for greater global awareness around a range of issues, including the need for decolonising exhibition histories alongside increasingly critical approaches to curator-centred discourse. Such debates have situated curating and the curatorial as unique forms of knowledge production and educational learning. At the same time, the understanding of the exhibition as a political space of inquiry and medium of representation has been maintained by the various turns to the “discursive,” the “educational,” the “social,” and the “relational” in the exhibitionary, curatorial, and artistic practices.

Positioning aims to reflect on some of these dynamics, and to consider learning as a process of gaining understanding, and of values, attitudes, and models of thinking brought into practice as it is transformed into new curatorial knowledge.

Positioning is a globally networked inquiry into current and future curatorial thinking in the Nordic-Baltic region during a time of urgencies, and of radical uncertainty. We come together to explore how we can think, learn, and work together, how to position ourselves with others, and how to bridge the local-regional-global curatorial nexus within and beyond the region.

Position Papers, Dialogues, Responses
Miriam Andersson Blecher, Sepake Angiama, Gigi Argyropoulou, Anne Julie Arnfred, María Berríos, Ida Bencke, Mikkel Bogh, Kathrine Bolt Rasmussen, Nicolas Bourriaud, Mélanie Bouteloup, Carson Chan, Binna Choi, Céline Condorelli, Ana Dević / WHW, Charles Esche, Jacob Fabricius, Dora García,  Krist Gruijthuijsen, Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy, Stina Högkvist, Kirse Junge-Stevnsborg, Inga Lace, Renan Laru-an, Beatrice Leanza, Carol Yinghua LU,  Raimundas Malašauskas, Monica Narula, Paul O’Neill, Agnieszka Pindera, Evelyn Raudsepp, Sarah Rifky, Shelter Press (Félicia Atkinson & Bartolomé Sanson), Þórhildur Tinna Sigurðardóttir, Shimmer (Eloise Sweetman & Jason Hendrik Hansma), Urgent Pedagogies (Magnus Ericson & Pelin Tan), Mick Wilson, Jan Verwoert, Markus Von Platen.

For the Record: Brief Curatorial Positionings and Moderation
Marika Agu, Nick Aikens, Åbäke, Alba Baeza, Diana Baldon, Daniele Belleri-Jaforte, Michael Birchall, Abir Boukhari, Jason E. Bowman, Andris Brinkmanis, Irene Campolmi, Patrizia Costantin, Micol Curatolo, Sebastian Dahlqvist, Bassam El Baroni, Taru Elfving, Jonatan Habib Engqvist, Farbod Fakharzadeh, Marianna Feher, Maria Elena Guerra Aredal, Heirloom (Stine Hebert & Johanne Løgstrup), Rana Issa, Gustav Johannes Hoder, Irfan Hošić, Alexander Kateb, Anne Kølbæk Iversen, Konsthall 323 (Frida Krohn & Ylva Trapp), Ilari Laamanen, Lars Bang Larsen, All all all (Sif Lindblad & Klara Li), Marti Manen, Khanyisile Mbongwa, Adriana Munõz, Sidsel Nelund, Uni Nissinen, Tone Olaf Nielsen, Klaudia Ofwona Draber, Orlan Ohtonen, Işın Önol, Auguste Petre, Antra Priede, Theodor Ringborg, Karina Sarkissova, Judith Schwarzbart, Tuomas Toivonen, Isabella Tjäder, Remi Vesala, Seda Yıldız, stanza (Grace Roy Hess, Marie Højlund, Line-Gry Hørup, Freja Kir, Laura Silke), Vaida Stepanovaitė, Liāna Ivete Žilde.

Artist Commissions/ Interventions
Félicia Atkinson, Natalia Beylis, Ieva Epnere, Dora García, Onkar Singh Kular, Sarah Pierce, Carla Zaccagnini and others.

The Positioning series is a collaboration across a dispersed network of 100+ cultural agencies from the Nordic-Baltic regions that actively take part in The Centre for Curatorial Thinking program since 2023.

Admission is free and open to the public.

PUBLICS partners with Saastamoinen Foundation 2025–2028.

Nordic Culture Fond generally support Positioning 2026 and 2027.

This is a networked project with co-funding and support from:-

Architecture & Design Museum Helsinki, EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Uniarts Helsinki’s Academy of Fine Arts, Malmö Konstmuseum, Simian, PASS – Center for Practice-based Art Studies, University of Copenhagen, HDK-Valand with the Centre for Art and the Political Imaginary (CAPIm), CuratorLab at Konstfack, University of Arts, Crafts and Design, Stockholm, IASPIS, FINYC, Museum Why, Helsinki City, Taike, Nordic Culture Fund, and S. C. Van Fonden.

For more information, please write to contact@positioningsymposium.com, visit www.positioningsymposium.com or call +358451080585.