The word “curator” has taken on sinister overtones ever since it was reported that the 14-year-old boy, who killed himself recently by jumping off the roof of a building in Mumbai, was allegedly participating in a game called the Blue Whale Challenge, which is overseen by “administrators” or “curators” who dare kids to commit self-destructive acts.
It is true that in the 21st century the word curator has acquired a much broader meaning, which is not confined to the visual arts. A curated experience can hard-sell anything far beyond the reach of the art gallery and that is completely unrelated to aesthetics, as David Balzer pointed out in his 2014 book, Curationism, How Curating Took Over the Art World and Everything Else .
The seventh edition of the Experimenter Curators’ Hub, which the young Kolkata-based gallerists, Priyanka and Prateek Raja, organised between July 27 and 29, and which over the years has attracted some of the leading names in the international art world as participants and viewers, underlined the importance and power of curators.
They can raise the value of an artist or a work simply by choosing to work with him or her, or by selecting a particular work for either an exhibition or a museum. Balzer wrote that curators are “imparters of value”, and that they undeniably are.
Gauri Gills, work at Aspinwall House, one of the venues of the Kochi Muziris Biennale
In 2014, the Hub had both Adam Szymczyk, artistic director of Documenta 14, and artist Riyas Komu, the ideator of the hugely successful Kochi Muziris Biennale, speaking from the same platform. On that occasion, Szymczyk had defined the role of curators with a dash of humour that came as a huge relief after being drowned in words for hours. Most curators have a gift for verbiage, which along with a tone of high seriousness is a deadly combination guaranteed to put laypersons to sleep. Szymczyk reverted to the Latin roots of words like “display” — bringing to light — and “curator” — from the Latin curare — to care for.
A social responsibility
The curator enables articulation. In the 1950s, with the rise of conceptual art, as the world of art joined hands with high finance, the career graphs of curators began to rise because they facilitated understanding of works of art that would otherwise have been incomprehensible to many.
So curators were offering their assistance to unravel the mysteries of contemporary art. But in the process, they could overshadow the works of art themselves. Komu, however, modestly declared that the biennale was a ‘confluence of ideas’ where he worked as an administrator, “I wouldn’t call myself a curator. Curation came as a social responsibility,” he said.
Ganesh Haloi, whose works are being exhibited at Documenta 14, had in 1998-99 organised an amazing exhibition in Kolkata titled Art of Bengal where he displayed the gamut of Bengal art from folk and prints to early oil painting, academic and Bengal School, original works that many had not seen before. He said: “Knowledge is of utmost importance. Curators have the advantage of being used to putting up exhibitions, but anybody with knowledge can do it.”
One of the speakers at the Hub this year was Roobina Karode, director and chief curator of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi. Karode was forthright about the role of curators. In response to a question about the indispensability of curators, she wrote in an email: “Curators are not indispensable. Today, anybody and everybody calls themselves a curator. I think somebody who has a vision to present art in an aesthetic and meaningful way, be it an artist, a poet, or simply someone driven to do so, will do a good job. Of course, curators have to deal with many other mundane responsibilities such as sourcing and collecting the works they wish to show or commission, the insurance of artworks, (and so on)...”
The responsibilities of a curator increase when a museum is started from scratch. As Karode said, “Curators play a role in sourcing, and help acquire artworks with discernment as much as with intuition. They discover new talent, under-represented artists and their oeuvre which needs to be seen and whose stories need to be told. Building collections and presenting it meaningfully to the audience through various kinds of conceptual frameworks and new juxtapositions open up fresh possibilities of seeing and writing about the work.”
Gary Hill's work at Durbar Hall in Ernakulam, at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale.
Five of the nine participants of the 2017 Hub being from either West or South Asia, the discussions were charged by their personal and regional politics and predilections. The range of media they covered was fascinating. Lauren Cornell, curator and associate director, Technology Initiatives, New Museum, New York, has played a key role in hitching art to technology.
Barbara Piwowarska, curator and art historian from Poland, related how she had to become a child when she was working with children on a project conceived by American artist Sharon Lockhart. Ruba Katrib, curator, SculptureCenter, New York, has amplified the scope of sculpture to cover performance art and include the work of marginalised people. The Congolese Plantation Workers Art League, for instance, made sculptures using chocolate made from cacao grown by the workers themselves. The proceeds helped the artists’ collective buy plantations of their own.
Relentless lobbying
Reem Fadda, former associate curator, Middle Eastern Art, for the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Project from 2010 to 2016, who will curate the inaugural exhibition of the Palestinian Museum in Ramallah in September, calls herself a “relentless lobbyist”. Taking a stand against Western values, she wants to “take away the aura of the object”. She reminded one of Jamini Roy and his engagement with folk art, which was earlier looked down upon by sophisticates. Fadda’s credo is “Think people, not object. I don’t want symbolism. I want tangible.”
Orijit Sen's work (including a model of the Charminar) at the Kochi Muziris Biennale.
Art historian and curator Olivier Kaeser, the co-director of the multidisciplinary Swiss Cultural Centre in Paris, spoke of his belief in a deep and long-standing engagement with an artist or theme before embarking on curating a show.
Like art writers, curators, particularly in India, tend to pepper their prose with jargon, which often makes them impenetrable. But, as Karode said, “I think audience is hugely important. A museum is for people and jargon can only confound the artwork further. Art needs to be demystified and when people start relating and finding that art is about life and what the world is going through, they don’t feel alienated from art.” Curators may have become the stars of the art world today, but stellar roles cannot overshadow their job of putting together exhibitions of worth.
The writer is particularly fond of Old Buildings. His latest book, Calcutta: 1940-1970 In the Photographs of Jayant Patel, will be out soon.
