Page 143 - The Black Box Book

T H E Y E AR 20 20

The act of curating exhibitions online was unfamiliar to the most until
mid-2020, when the world was in the midst of the first wave of lockdowns
in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Till then, there were a handful of
people discussing it — though many were the curators that had operated
on the web since the 1990s. And till then, the web was often considered
an unusual site for curatorial practice, and web exhibitions a corollary
to curatorial work. But after March 2020 this scenario seemed to have
undergone a change.
I began my research into curatorial work on the web when I found-
ed the curatorial platform or-bits.com in 2009. Since then, I had been
exploring it as a field of practice that, for its site-specificity, moves away
from the ‘common protocols’ of exhibition-making in the gallery space,
demandinga revision of the concepts of authorship, selection & display,
collection & archive, as well as audience participation in artistic and cu-
ratorial processes. In 2011, I started to systematically collect information
about web-based exhibitions that recently culminated in a collaborative
effort with researchers and curators Annet Dekker and Gaia Tedone:
The Broken Timeline (Dekker, Ghidini, Tedone, 2021), which presents a li-
neage of web-based curatorial projects from the 1990s till now. Gradually
my interest turned to the ways curatorial work interferes with the workings
Figure 1: Ghidini, M. (2020–). curating.online
and assumptions of networked platforms and interfaces — a research — Interviews section (2021). Screenshot of web page from
I am carrying out with the project curating.online (Ghidini, 2020). How- 2022. Retrieved from https://www.curating.online/

ever, the curatorial responses to the pandemic in 2020 made me ponder
about the significance of curating in the online environment at large. It we cannot inhabit, or we are forced to inhabit, physically and virtually. Over
was a time in which the relationship between being online and offline was the span of a year, I witnessed a mass migration of the artistic programmes
completely overturned, to the point that one of the questions I recently of art institutions and galleries online, whether on existing platforms and
started to pose to several curators pointed at the end of curatorial work social media channels (mostly), or on custom-made websites (infrequently).
on the web. I asked them: This was a movement, I thought, that asked for further questions about
curatorial approaches to exhibiting art online.
“I think the pandemic marked the death of curating on the web as For the symposium’s talk, I therefore decided to start to observe
I understood it, or at least it marked the end of its role as a space the present in relation to its past — although at the time I was struggling
for exploring the production, display and distribution of art on to grapple with a present that was overcrowded with online social, cultural
the web. What’s today’s web?” (Ghidini, 2020) and work-related activities. I dived back and re-read an essay by curator
Christiane Paul, in which she states:
To my surprise, the responses I have received are more hopeful than
the question I asked. But before discussing this, I will take a step back. “The changes in the curatorial role tend to become most obvious in
online curation, which by nature unfolds in a hyperlinked contextual
WHAT HAPPENED, ROUGHLY network. While some aspects of the curatorial role — such as se-
lection of works, organization of exhibits and their art-historical fra-
Writing this chapter in 2021, soon after the invitation to take part to ming — still apply to the process of online curating, transformations
the symposium Curating Online, which came in the midst of my third occur in the process of filtering, “describing” and classifying within
lockdown during the second wave of the pandemic in Bangalore (In- the online environment. The Internet is a contextual network where
dia), I was forced to think about the transformations of curatorial work a different context is always only one click away, and everyone is
as a consequence of the physical, social and economic restrictions of engaged in a continuous process of creating context and re-con-
the Covid-19 pandemic, especially in connection to the spaces we inhabit, textualizing.” (Paul, 2009)
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