Slo Curating
2022
Author: Sadia Shirazi
Sadia Shirazi’s "Slo Curating: Restitution, Archives, Access and Care” was first published in the Journal of Curatorial Studies, 11: 2, 2022, pp. 208-233, DOI. Presented below are extracts selected by Natasha Marie Llorens that make a persuasive argument for curators (and others) to take the time and care that projects and processes need.
I make my best work in bed one way or another.
– Constantina Zavitsanos (2022)
Slo curating is an entreaty to slow down. It is also an appeal to allow curators the time it takes to support their work, which also gives artists the time they need to do theirs. Slo curating embraces alternate temporalities, including ‘Colored People’s Time’, belatedness, non-linear time and ‘crip time’. In the quote above, Constantina Zavitsanos quips that they make their best work in bed, and then continues with a critique of labour and reproduction in both Marxist feminist thought and capitalism:
One problem is the construction of need as lack, when need is better understood as wealth, and simultaneously the construction of care as labor which has to find its recognition in exchange of some kind. I’m interested less in reciprocal give and take, than in something like a give-and-give, or take-and-take. What I mean is conveyed by the sexual senses of those terms, the way that to take it or to give it share meanings. The moment you enter a process of exchange, you’re inevitably surrounded by its excess or remainder, which always clouds or enriches it. This is especially true of ‘care work’. Until we start to see life as labor we will never really see work. (cited in Mills and Sanchez 2018/19, original emphasis)
Diagram of the designated route of travel and file size of Exhibition Without Objects (EwO). Image courtesy of author
If curatorial work is understood as care work, and life as labour, what kind of practices lend themselves to slo curating? Inspired by Zavitsanos’s theorization, which combines humour and trenchant social critique, one of the primary methods of slo curating is to steal back time. In order to do so, slo curating’s methods include having long-standing relationships with artists, close listening, and being ‘in study’, to use a term by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten. Slo curating tends to build relationships between curators, communities and artists, and understands that exhibitions emerge primarily from the social and a ‘common intellectual practice’ (Harney and Moten 2013: 67, 74). Harney and Moten argue that activities such as working in a factory, cooking in a kitchen, and sitting together on a porch all contain an ‘incessant and irreversible intellectuality’. They offer an ‘alternative history of thought’ understood as integral to slo curating, which does not valorize the exhibition as a primary site of knowledge production but extends curatorial practice beyond the gallery or museum to include not only public programs but all the time spent in study with others that precedes it – conversations, complaints, cooking, cleaning, dancing, napping, texting, phone calls, babysitting, caretaking – ‘life as labor’ as the very material that enables a curator to build an exhibition in the first place.
El Paquete Semanal (2016), content of 'The Weekly Package' released in March 2021. Screenshot courtesy of author
Online/Offline
An archival project that demonstrates slo curating as an investment in an online/offline social relationship is the collectively curated project El Paquete Semanal (‘The Weekly Packet’) (2008–ongoing), a one-terabyte digital collection that includes websites, music, videos, news, films, TV shows, computer programs and classifieds. In Cuba, a country in which broadband Internet is widely inaccessible, this underground weekly package of collectively curated digitized material gives residents a way of accessing the otherwise prohibitively expensive and inaccessible high-speed Internet for a small fee. Content is loaded onto multiple hard drives by its curators and made available for purchase through the underground market to people whose selections are downloaded onto their own USB sticks or hard drives. The fee is based on the content copied and its price goes down over time; the price of a new weekly package is more than the previous week’s (Cobo 2018). What is expensive is getting material onto the weekly package for musicians. El Paquete is an important promotional device in the absence of online platforms where artists might otherwise share their music.
Visitors to Exhibition Without Objects participate in Rabbya Naseer and Hurmat Ul Ain's event, Cross Connection (2013). The event allows visitors to eavesdrop and/or participate in an ongoing Skype discussion between the two artists, for whom the software is a primary tool of communication in their collaborations. 10 February 2013. Photography by Tenzing Sonam
In turn, my own project Exhibition Without Objects (EwO) (2012–ongoing) operates within this complex neo-liberal digital matrix of photographic reproduction and uneven access to technology that is comprised of slideshows, curator’s talks, and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that at times supplant actual art objects. EwO travels the world on a hard drive, transforming to include artists from each city it visits. It exists solely as a compilation of data that, at each site, materializes as people, events and hardware that manifest the data. Tracing a line that is poignant for people across the subcontinent, the exhibition’s route connects cities with mirrored experiences of mass migration during its multiple partitions. Within the contemporary context, this route is now indicative of the flow of networks of capital and labour that extend beyond South Asia. The show has had two iterations, 126 MB/EwO and 230 MB/EwO, and its third, 8 GB/EwO, is slated to travel to the UAE, reflecting upon contemporary migration patterns as Dubai and Sharjah have become important hubs and prevalent nodes in the art market and centres for the production of artistic discourse. The exhibition also plays with the role of the curator, which lies somewhere between researcher, writer, archivist and administrator.
[…]
Iqbal Geoffrey, The Written Versus the Art Writ (2012). This slide, along with other legal writs by the artist were part of his contribution to 230 MB / Exhibition Without Objects. Image courtesy of artist
EwO initiated slo curating to challenge the predominant format of national survey shows of contemporary art from South Asia. The stream of survey exhibitions of young, contemporary artists organized around national identity is seemingly endless (Shirazi 2013). One exhibition might originate, for example, in a museum in London and then travel to Paris and New York, organized by curators who would fly in and out of cities across the global south for a few days to conduct ‘research’ and ‘studio visits’. At times, curators might even review artists’ work on laptops and iPad screens instead of spending time travelling to the artists’ homes or studios, a strange digression from how studio visits are conducted with artists living and working in Europe or the United States. In contrast, Exhibition Without Objects is the result of a much more protracted process involving multiple studio visits to homes and studios across the subcontinent, being ‘in study’ in Moten and Harney’s sense with artists for a long time, over the course of several years. It also recognizes the failure inherent to dematerialized work and connections – hard drives fail, but so does Internet access during load shedding – the Internet is also a barrier when considered alongside the question of borders and border crossing. The third iteration of EwO was meant to travel further across South Asia before the UAE but escalating political tensions in the subcontinent in November 2019 compromised the safety of participating artists travelling to neighbouring counties, and so the show was put on hold.1 Even prior to the pandemic, EwO evolved out of an interest in the (increasingly digital) movement of the art object whose relative ease contrasts with the difficulty of moving people across borders.
[…]
Conversation between Professor Kavita Singh from Jawaharlal Nehru University and Sadia Shirazi at Khoj Artists' Association. The discussion and question and answer touched upon the curatorial premise of the exhibition, digital culture, and the entanglement of artistic and economic networks. 13 February 2013. Photography by Tenzing Sonam
Ultimately, slo curating operates as a critique of the pace at which schools churn out curators who then mount endless exhibitions in museums and galleries. Slo curating unsettles the tenets of teaching curating merely as a set of skills at the service of institutions or as an activity with only one goal (an exhibition); instead, slo curating reorients itself as a multivalent practice at the service of many.
1 The postponement of the show was affected by the rise of Hindutva in India.
Exhibition view of 230 MB / Exhibition Without Objects. Works include Saira Sheikh and Neha Mirza's event Deinstall (2013) and reading material of texts shared between participants of the exhibition and invitation letters to artists as well as some responses hung across the wall for visitors to peruse. Sheikh presents Deinstall with museum guide Mirza during the opening of the show. The two lead visitors through the exhibition while discussing aspects of artists’ oeuvres that touch upon prevalent concerns in the discourse around contemporary art from Pakistan. Due to issues with their visas the duo were unable to come and provided a pre-recorded video that was projected during the opening.
10 February 2013. Photograph by Sadia Shirazi
