PUBLICS launches The Centre For Curatorial Thinking, 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.

Through The Centre For Curatorial Thinking, PUBLICS co-curates a program of archival exhibitions, listening sessions, and the Curatorial Reading Group. The aim of the centre is to provide a platform for local curators and art professionals to interact with international colleagues who have contributed to the evolution of innovative curatorial practices of the last sixty years or so. Selected participants from established museums, institutions and small-scale organisations will meet at PUBLICS to think, discuss, read, engage and listen with each other and with invited international guests who have contributed significantly to curatorial discourse and innovation in curatorial practices, art writing, and exhibition-making of the last decades. Each session of the Curatorial Reading Group will be accompanied by an exhibition at PUBLICS of reading and archival material related to our pioneering guests beginning in Spring 2024. This is a space for thinking through ideas together, listening, and learning in dialogue with arts professionals and to develop their own programs, drawing on more ambitious, collaborative, and experimental examples.

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 Aug              Maria Lind & Marti Manen and PUBLICS Youth
26 Sept             Brian Dillon – On Art Writing
9 Oct                 Maria Fusco – On Art Writing
28 Nov             AA Bronson & Gareth Long – General Idea & 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; Marti Manen, Director, Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm; Antra Priede, Vice-rector for Academic Affairs, Art Academy of Latvia; Kati Laakso, Executive Director, Finnish Culture Institute in New York ; Anne Szefer Karlsen, Professor Curatorial Practice, University of Bergen, Norway; Maria Arusoo, Director of Estonian Centre for Contemporary Art  (Kaasaegse Kunsti East Keskus) and Solvita Krese, Director of The Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art (LCCA).