The one-day symposium ‘Artist as Curator: Collaborative Practices’  is dedicated to the discussion of recent and contemporary developments in artists’ collective engagement with exhibition-making, bringing together artists, curators and authors who have been engaged in the organisation and research of collective exhibition practice in different contexts internationally.

MRes Art: Exhibition Studies at Central Saint Martins is organising the symposium at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, with speakers Zdenka Badovinac, Clémentine Deliss, Liu Ding, Ines Doujak and Oliver Ressler. The Speakers will address different approaches to the production and presentation of curatorial practice that have been catalysts for cultural and artistic activities in their locality. These will include the Laboratoire Agit’Art in Dakar, IRWIN in the former Yugoslavia and contemporary collaborative projects elsewhere.

More details about the talk by Clémentine Deliss, « Artists as Model Engineers: Laboratoire Agit’Art, Tenq and Huit Facettes in Dakar in the 1990s »:

“Between 1992-2002, curator and publisher Clémentine Deliss worked closely with artists Issa Samb (Joe Ouakam) and El Sy (El Hadji Sy), as well as various members of the Dakar-based art collectives Laboratoire Agit’Art, Tenq, and Huit Facettes. Together they co-curated exhibitions, organised international workshops, and performed at conferences in Dakar, St. Louis du Sénégal, London, Kassel, Malmö, and San Sebastian. Characterised by a methodology of social engagement and an acute understanding of « communicational abstinence » (Deliss, 1999), their collective actions involved social and infrastructural interventions such as inhabiting a Chinese migrant workers’ settlement in Dakar, initiating an international artist-led workshop in the earliest French colonial grammar school in West Africa, and working between urban and rural contexts. Deliss published the pilot issue of the artists’ and writers’ organ ‘Metronome’ in Dakar in 1997, presented at the 100 Days of Documenta X and which included manifestos by the Laboratoire Agit’Art and Factual Nonsense (London) as well as translations of Edouard Glissant and interviews with Mark Sealy (Autograph, London), Penny Siopis (Johannesburg) and Paul Virilio (Paris). Further publications of Issa Samb’s writings appear in Metronome No.1 (London, 1997), No. 3 (1998, Kunsthalle Basel) and No.7 (2001, Scandinavia). A dialogue between Kan-Si (Huit Facettes) and Scandinavian artists Gardar Eide Einarsson and Superflex is published in Metronome No. 4-5-6 (Frankfurt). In her presentation, Deliss will show visual documents from this period and discuss some of the lead concepts that characterised this collaborative practice.”

www.whitechapelgallery.org

‘Artist as Curator: Collaborative Practices’ follows and responds to Afterall’s ‘Artist as Curator’ symposium, which took place at Central Saint Martins last November, with contributions from Ekaterina Degot, Elena Filipovic, Ruth Noack, Willem de Rooij, Valerie Smith and David Teh among others.