Toward a Curatorial Praxis of Planetarity

This PhD by Published Work analyzes the author’s curatorial practice through the lens of literary, postcolonial, and feminist theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s critical concept of planetarity and, in doing so, drafts planetarity as a curatorial praxis. The thesis is set against and within the background of the Anthropocene and its intersected crises that are environmental, social, political, and aesthetic, and affect both ontologies and epistemologies. It argues that these disturbances make necessary new tools for analysis, practice, and the imagination, including for the curatorial field and art at large. Discussed as context for the curatorial work are international exhibitions and projects from the last fifteen years since 2010 that are experimental, cross disciplinary boundaries, build transnational networks, focus on process, expand through time and across various locales, emphasize embodied knowledge, and highlight collaboration.

The curatorial as a praxis of planetarity is drafted alongside Spivak’s concept; contemporary artists (BUSH Gallery, Jes Fan, Anne Duk Hee Jordan, Armin Linke, Eduardo Navarro, Susanne M. Winterling, T’uy’t’tanat-Cease Wyss, and others); various curators’ definitions and practices of the “curatorial” (among them Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Maria Lind, Irit Rogoff, and Terry Smith); and writings by transdisciplinary scholars (such as Kamau Brathwaite, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Édouard Glissant, Sylvia Wynter, and Anna Tsing).

The analysis is structured around five curatorial modes (collaboration, confluent processes, situated crossings, embodied events of knowledge, and transdisciplinary research), and through a discussion of four case studies of the author’s curatorial projects in the form of research, exhibitions, symposia, and publications: Prospecting Ocean (2016–19) emphasizes transdisciplinary artistic and curatorial research in the context of ocean extractivism. Tidalectics (2017–18) looks at poet Kamau Brathwaite’s eponymous connective neologism inspired by the movement of the waves, evoking the Middle Passage as well as climate change. Sensing Nature (2021–22), the Momenta Biennale, centers embodiment and nonhuman sensibilities. Sex Ecologies (2021–22) focuses on long-term commissions and collaborative processes.

The PhD contributes to the field of art and its cross-disciplinary junctions by drafting a practice which, through Spivak’s rhetorical insistence on alterity, simultaneously allows for open-endedness and directionality to address the intersected Anthropocenic crises. It expands the curatorial beyond art, toward nature-cultures as well as other disciplines, in response to ongoing onto-epistemological transformations affecting also the field of art. It offers reflections on practice through five curatorial modes that can serve for further development of methodologies and research. It contributes to curatorial knowledge and to the curatorial as events of knowledge creation, while offering critical reflections on the colonial dimensions of knowledge and knowability. Planetarity emerges as a guiding principle for ways of relating through praxis, with wider implications and relevance beyond the field of the curatorial, and art.