in collaboration with Raqs Media Collective

The students of MPhil (Batch - 2015-17), Visual Studies, JNU along with Raqs Media Collective (Monica Narula, Jeebesh Bagchi & Shuddhabrata Sengupta) feel honored to invite you to our  closing event 'When does the curatorial work end?' on the 8th of April, at School of Arts and Aesthetics Gallery, Jawaharlal Nehru University.

             This event is a culmination of a series of class discussions between Raqs Media Collective and the students, between students and the artist community in Delhi and between the student community within JNU and outside of it.

             What started as a workshop conducted by Maya Kovskaya in October 2015, on 'curating' has brought us to engage with questions of the 'curatorial' with Raqs Media Collective.

At the onset, it is necessary to distinguish between the curatorial and curating. Curating, as a mode of practice and curatorial, as a mode of thinking. To quote Irit Rogoff, “If ‘curating’ is a gamut of professional practices that had to do with setting up exhibitions and other modes of display, then ‘the curatorial’ operates at a very different level: it explores all that takes place on the stage set-up, both intentionally an unintentionally, by the curator and views it as an event of knowledge. So to drive home a distinction between ‘curating’ and ‘the curatorial’ means to emphasize a shift from the staging of the event to the actual event itself: its enactment, dramatization and performance. ‘Curating’ takes place in a promise; it produces a moment of promise, of redemption to come. By contrast, ‘the curatorial’ is what disturbs this process; it breaks up this stage, yet produces a narrative which comes into being in the very moment in which an utterance takes place, in that moment in which the event communicates and says, as Mieke Bal once observed, ‘look, that is how this is’."

We have come to realize a question that is central to this disposition, when does the curatorial begin/end? As a thought in progress, this has taken us in many directions, to broaden the ambit of arts itself, to create necessary tension and stretch our zones of comfort,both intellectual and experiential, as well as within the modalities of practice.

We invite you to become a part of this event which will only enrich our engagement with arts - politically, socially, inherent both in the extra ordinary and the quotidian.

We'd like to take this opportunity to thank Raqs Media Collective, Maya Kovskaya, Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation,our faculty members, the student and artist community and all those who have been a part of this engagement. 

Text written by Parul Singh