Click anywhere for your first question

Where are you practising from? Whose pasts and presents occupy the places from which you practise?

[Grounding Practice]

Why are you here? What brings you to this space? 

[Grounding Practice]

What questions have you been grappling with and asking of your practice?

[Grounding Practice]

What do you want and need from this time of shared reflexivity?

[Grounding Practice]

Who is your community? What are your roles and responsibilities within this community? How are you connected to your community?

[Grounding Practice]

Whose voices (human and more-than-human) have you been listening to? Whose voices are becoming louder and more urgent?

[Grounding Practice]

What motivations currently inform your practice?

[Grounding Practice]

What does your practice look like? 

[Doing Practice]

What forms of relation are involved?

[Doing Practice]

What is the rhythm of your practice?

[Doing Practice]

Where did you learn your practice? Where else might you find your practice?

[Doing Practice]

How do your methods help you to get to know the places and communities you are working with?

[Doing Practice]

How do your methods enable communities to explore and respond to complex crises? What methods help you to understand the situated nuances of such crises?

[Doing Practice]

As a means for bringing people together, how does your practice navigate and negotiate different world views?

[Doing Practice]

What does care feel like in your practice? 

[Troubling Practice]

How are you practising care at this moment, and for whom?

[Troubling Practice]

How do you choose what and who to care for? In your practice, what motivates the decisions that you make to care for one thing over another?

[Troubling Practice]

Care can be romanticised, commodified, and co-opted. How do you keep the problems of care in check?

[Troubling Practice]

Care can feel asphyxiating. Too much care can feel paralysing. How do you keep care from becoming too much in your practice, for yourself and others?

[Troubling Practice]

Who cares for your needs?

[Troubling Practice]

What kinds of care do you need and want to cultivate, in and through your practice?

[Troubling Practice]

What questions are you continuing to grapple with about your practice?

[Extending Practice]

What elements of your practice still need to be transformed?

[Extending Practice]

What do you want from your practice? What do you need from your practice?

[Extending Practice]

What do your needs and wants ask of the future of your practice? 

[Extending Practice]

What do you need to arrive? 

[Extending Practice]

What are you willing to accept and not accept along the way?

[Extending Practice]

What can be done differently now and under these conditions? 

[Extending Practice]

caring in and through our practices

For post-representational curatorial practice, to explore and respond to the many globally implicated and radically situated crises occurring at this moment is a weighted undertaking.

To care within relational and differently affected worlds also activates a range of tensions about our practices, which we as curatorial practitioners increasingly find ourselves grappling with. These are tensions that prompt us to reconsider how neoliberal capitalism, systems and structures inextricably linked to colonialism, shape the (temporal, hierarchical, extractive, inequitable) organising logics of the organisations in which our practices occur. In turn, they rub against the choices we make in deciding for who do we care, what for, why and how, in and through our practices. In a pandemic-impacted world, in which a crisis of care has highlighted the very real need for redressing caring imbalances, including within the arts sector, where do we as curators—whose discipline shares an etymological link with the Latin word curare, meaning to take care of—begin?

caring in and through our practices argues that it is precisely at the intersection of these tensions of practice that we, as practitioners, begin.

This creative work arrives at this understanding informed by a series of interviews and workshops with practitioners whose practices traverse post-representational curatorial practice. A qualitative analysis of these relational, affective and generative research components identified the need and want for prefiguring a community of care, and the conditions and tools for engaging with shared reflexivity, between and among practitioners, within and across institutional affiliations.

caring in and through our practices then is a tool developed for this purpose: for practitioners to engage with through a series of questions organised around four interrelated themes: Grounding Practice, Doing Practice, Troubling Practice, and Extending Practice.

Each question is an invocation to make space and time to navigate, together, the potentialities and possibilities, limitations and accountabilities of post-representational curatorial practice; become attuned conceptually, methodologically and practically to what needs to be transformed, what is transforming, and how we might be able to do so at different scales; collectively manifest the kinds of curatorial practices, and responsive and equitable organisations, our complex futures demand; and take turns, as practitioners, in caring with, for, and about each other’s practices.

Click here for a downloadable PDF of the questions.

If you have any questions about this creative work, feedback or would like to share how you have made use of it, please get in contact here.

This website forms the creative component of the research project submitted by Jacina Leong in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, School of Media and Communications, Design and Social Context, RMIT University. Find out more about Jacina and her practice here.

Website design and development by thoughtful.website

caring in and through our practices acknowledges the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nations, their Ancestors and Elders, past and present, as the Traditional Custodians of the land on which this work was conceived.