Through this lens, the symposium will examine and share experiences and analyses of contemporary art, its conditions and presuppositions.
Transparency is fundamental to institutionality and democratic reason and promises accountability and fairness. It is considered to facilitate audience access and create consensus and participation. In the field of visual art, the emerging profession of curating embraced transparency as a central value in the late 1980s and ‘90s, reflecting its broader ascent in the language of business and public administration. In hindsight, it already played a role to ‘demystify’ exhibition-making in the late 1960s, when a shift away from traditional museological approaches disclosed the curator and (other) relations of production behind art exhibitions.
If transparency is seen as self-explanatory, a given, it is at the same time coloured by context. It is entangled with social processes and dialectical tensions that might contradict it; for instance is the oppressed subject’s right to opacity a staple of decolonial theory. And seen from the point of view of the ethics and poetics of deferral and embodiment, enactments of transparency often gravitate towards totality and that which is expedient, already said and done.
In this way, the symposium does not propose transparency as a conclusive or singular theme, but as a focal point that comes and goes in order to address some of the cases and histories, practices and situations that are relevant to the current state of contemporary art.
Kilde:
Art Hub Copenhagen
Art Hub Copenhagen