Curating and repair

Abstract

Curating & Repair is a publication exploring contemporary curatorial practices and exhibition-making as contexts for dialogue, exchange and the remaking of social and cultural relations through repair. It seeks actionable insights into how artistic work, its mediation and the institutions that support it might be mobilised toward more sustainable and interdependent worlds. Taking flight from perspectives on translation, solidarity and power, Curating & Repair approaches mediation both as contested terrain and generative possibility. It discusses the importance of challenging normative power relations in artistic collaboration, alongside the difficulties of sustaining creative work against the undertow of multiplying global crises. By aligning the curatorial with the dialogical, it calls attention to the serious, collective work that we as artists, mediators and publics have at our hands. The publication is a result of a three-year, collaborative project, Out of the Metropolis - Art Exchange Across Borders. Co-founded by Creative Europe, the project supports innovation and knowledge exchange in the co-creation and circulation of contemporary visual art, with a particular focus on photography. It explores transnational mobility, new models of international collaboration and the role of micro art institutions in Europe's peripheries. The project includes seminars, exhibitions, international exchanges, and an open-source digital platform. Emerging as a central outcome of the project, this publication articulates curating as a practice of care, repair and institutional responsibility, foregrounding solidarity across borders as fundamental to Europe's shared cultural future while also speaking far beyond Europe itself. The project is initiated by NŌUA (Bodø, Norway), Double Dummy (Arles, France) and The Finnish Museum of Photography (Helsinki, Finland).

Contents

Archiving otherwise -- Black-led community archives in the UK and the possibility of curatorial reparation / Lisa Anderson.