Curating with Care

This book presents over 20 authors’ reflections on ’curating care’ - and presents a call to give curatorial attention to the primacy of care for all life and for more ’caring curating’ that responds to the social, ecological and political analysis of curatorial caregiving.

Social and ecological struggles for a different planetary culture based on care and respect for the dignity of life are reflected in contemporary curatorial practices that explore human and non-human interdependence. The prevalence of themes of care in curating is a response to a dual crisis: the crisis of social and ecological care that characterizes global politics and the professional crisis of curating under the pressures of the increasingly commercialized cultural landscape. Foregrounding that all beings depend on each other for life and survival, this book collects theoretical essays, methodological challenges and case studies from curators working in different global geographies to explore the range of ways in which curatorial labour is rendered as care.

Practising curators, activists and theorists situate curatorial labour in the context of today’s general care crisis. This volume answers to the call to more fully understand how their transformative work allows for imagining the future of bodily, social and environmental care and the ethics of interdependency differently.

Elke Krasny is Professor of Art and Education at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She is a feminist cultural theorist, urban researcher, curator and author. Krasny’s scholarship addresses care, ecological and social justice, memory work and emancipatory cultural practice at the present historical conjuncture marked by ecocidal and genocidal pasts. Her exhibition Hands-On Urbanism: The Right to Green on urban gardening and farming as subsistence practices was included in the 2012 Venice Biennale of Architecture. The exhibition Critical Care: Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet, curated with Angelika Fitz at the Architecture Centre Vienna in 2019, introduces a perspective of planetary care ethics through architectural practice. Krasny co-edited Curating as Feminist Organizing (Routledge, 2023).

Lara Perry works in the School of Humanities and Social Science at the University of Brighton. Trained first as a historian, Lara’s career has involved her in work with artists, curators, photographers, educators, computer scientists, philosophers, archivists, activists and art historians. Much of her research has focused on evolving feminist museology, starting with her doctoral thesis on the collection of the National Portrait Gallery (London) published as History’s Beauties: Women, History and the National Portrait Gallery 1856-1900 in 2006. Lara has published a number of essays and edited volumes concerning art history’s and curating’s relationship to gender and feminism, most recently, an edited volume with Elke Krasny Curating as Feminist Organizing (Routledge, 2023).