Curatorial Performances

The conceptualisation and development of these curatorial performances are motivated by an unease with fitting sound into curatorial conventions that represent a particular form of knowledge, history and validity of expression. Instead I employ the demands of sound’s invisible temporality to revisit and challenge the ideological and political implications of curatorial traditions: to curate, to cultivate, to archive, to hold, to have, the collection, knowledge, value and validity, class and taste. And so I disrupt and re-present: I unperform and uncurate curatorial norms and expectations. Creating a doubtful and plural experience of work, on my body and on the body of the audience, who is brought in explicitly through participatory text scores, questions, and the need to shout and sing; and implicitly through the demand of my vis-à-vis: my presence live with the work as its curator.

Curating becomes an uncurating: a peformative event, in which objects become timebased gestures, and the body becomes part of the mis en scène of the curatorial frame: framed by it, simultaneously and equally with the curatorial object, its theorisation, artistic materiality and architectural site; performing a curatorial being of work and text as a being-with every other thing. This uncurating, unperforming of work and texts, is not a critique but an affirmative restaging to reach another knowledge and another sense of things and of self with the work.

This uncurating is not an impetus against curating, nor is it a deliberate non curating, the pretence of ‘anything goes’, but an effort of de-curating and re-curating via a sonic sensibility: curating not works, spaces and objects, but their indivisible connection, and the reciprocal simultaneity between works and their theorisation. To make accessible the volume of the work, its invisible expanse and its indivisible correlation with site and text, memory and a current experience; to invite an inhabiting of this indivisible sphere as a sonic cosmos in which we inter-are with things in our individual capacities together.