Hans Ulrich Obrist
Curator, Serpentine Gallery, London
Lately, the term “to curate” seems to be used in a greater variety of contexts than ever before, in reference to everything from an exhibition of prints by old masters to the contents of a concept store. The risk, of course, is that the definition may expand beyond functional usability. But I believe “to curate” finds ever wider application because of a feature of modern life impossible to ignore: the incredible proliferation of ideas, information, images, disciplinary knowledge, and material products we all witness today. Such proliferation makes the activities of filtering, enabling, synthesizing, framing, and remembering more and more important as basic navigational tools for twenty-first-century life. These are the tasks of the curator, who is no longer understood simply as the person who fills a space with objects but also as the person who brings different cultural spheres into contact, invents new display features, and makes junctions that allow unexpected encounters and results.
Michel Foucault once wrote that he hoped his writings would be used by others as a theoretical toolbox, a source of concepts and models for understanding the world. For me, the author, poet, and theoretician Édouard Glissant has become this kind of toolbox. Very early, he noted that in our phase of globalization (which is not the first one), there is a danger of homogenization but at the same time a countermovement, the retreat into one’s own culture. And against both dangers he proposes the idea of mondialité—a global dialog that augments difference.
This inspired me to handle exhibitions in a new way. There is a lot of pressure on curators not only to do shows in one place but also to send them around the world, by simply packing them into boxes in one city and unpacking them in the next. This is a homogenizing sort of globalization. Using Glissant’s idea as a tool means to develop exhibitions that build a relation to their place, that change with their different local conditions, that create a changing dynamic complex system with feedback loops.
To curate in this sense is to refuse static arrangements and permanent alignments and instead to enable conversations and relations. Generating these kinds of links is an essential part of what it means to curate, as is disseminating new knowledge, new thinking, and new artworks in a way that can seed future cross-disciplinary inspirations.
But there is another case for curating as a vanguard activity for the twenty-first century. As the artist Tino Sehgal has pointed out, modern societies find themselves today in an unprecedented situation: The problem of lack, or scarcity, which has been the primary factor motivating scientific and technological innovation, is now joined and even superseded by the problem of the global effects of overproduction and resource use. Thus, moving beyond the object as the locus of meaning has a further relevance. Selection, presentation, and conversation are ways for human beings to create and exchange real value, without dependence on older, unsustainable processes. Curating can take the lead in pointing us toward this crucial importance of choosing.