Talk | Chotin’: Curatorial Practices at the Edge

About the Event

Chotin’: Curatorial Practices at the Edge positions Chicago as a transcultural crossroads and a site of diasporic convergence for the Americas in the Midwest, reorienting and decentralizing conversations about migration, exchange, memory, and global history that are too often constrained by geographical and linear approaches, with their debates restricted either to the coastal metropolitan centers of the United States or select academic networks in Latin America.

Through presentations and conversations, a group of curators from Latin America and the Caribbean address how their various curatorial projects challenge western canonical structures of art and act not only as counter-hegemonical interruptions of the canon, but as methodological interventions. These “new museologies” imagine the museum and the gallery as porous spaces whose aesthetic exercise cannot be detached from the social mobilities and (im)possibilities of their context. Beyond national or international geographic frameworks, curatorial practice is conceived as an intimate and affective space for the generation of knowledge and the production of meaning.

In addition, Chicago-based curators consider the relationship between diaspora and new curatorial practices from the premise that most cultural and historical processes can no longer respond to a single physical place. At a time of global mobilities and migrations in which the subject-land-identity relationship is undeniably uprooted, what does it mean to think from Latin America or the Caribbean in Chicago? And to think archipelagically? These panelists reflect on their locus of enunciation not as the continental, geographical site in which they work, but as the reticular, diasporic space of historical consciousness and affective memory from which they think.

Chotin’: Curatorial Practices at the Edge is organized by Carla Acevedo-Yates, Marilyn and Larry Fields Curator, and Cecilia González Godino, Marjorie Susman Curatorial Fellow, in collaboration with Juan Canela, Chief Curator, MAC Panamá, and Elena Ketelsen González, Curator, MoMA PS1.

Learn more about this collaboration with MAC Panamá, and MoMA PS1.

Schedule

1–1:15 pm | Opening Remarks by René Morales, Chief Curator, MCA Chicago

1:15–2:30 pm | Curating from Latin America and the Caribbean in Chicago

Chicago-based curators consider the relationship between diaspora and new curatorial practices from the premise that most cultural and historical processes can no longer respond to a single physical place. At a time of global mobilities and migrations in which the subject-land-identity relationship is undeniably uprooted, what does it mean to think from Latin America or the Caribbean in Chicago?

• Carla Acevedo Yates (Marilyn & Larry Fields Curator, MCA Chicago)
• Ionit Behar (Curator, DePaul Art Museum)
• Abigail Winograd (Co-Director and Chief Curator, Pueblo Unido Gallery, and Commissioner, U.S. Pavilion, 60th Venice Biennale)
• Krista Thompson (Mary Jane Crowe Professor of Art History, Northwestern University, and Independent Curator)

2:45–4 pm | Pensar y actuar desde los afectos: Affective Networks in Curatorial Practices

Although Latin American and Caribbean contexts have recently experienced a rise of curatorial attention, their “inclusion” in the Western art circuit is almost always mediated by colonial narratives that often trap Latin America within its geographic and racial identity. This panel moves away from “inclusive” initiatives to propose collaborations and conversations that replace physical borders with affective, transnational networks.

• Juan Canela (Chief Curator, MAC Panamá)
• Sara Hermann (Chief Curator, Centro León en Santiago)
• Diane Lima (Curator, Bienal de São Paulo)

4:15–5:45 pm | From Communities to Publics: Shifting the Terms

How is the relationship between museums and communities articulated? What is a “community”? This panel calls attention to the racial, social, and marginalizing aspects that pervade the notion of community while offering other ways of bringing the museum into dialogue with its context without perpetuating dynamics of inequality and dependence.

• Elena Ketelsen González (Assistant Curator, MoMA PS1)
• Emiliano Valdés (Chief Curator, MAM Medellín)
• Keyna Eleison (Curator, Bienal das Amazônias)

5:45–6 pm | Closing Remarks