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Queer(ing) Art, Curation and Collaboration
  • ISSN: 2042-793X
  • E-ISSN: 2042-7948

Abstract

This article examines some of the challenges, possibilities and rewards of transnational collaborative curation through a queer lens by reflecting critically on my work within the UKRI-funded GlobalGRACE project. There, six teams comprising academics, artists, NGO staff and local participant communities used creative methods to explore how ‘cultures of equality’ can be created and sustained, locally and globally. Our contexts were varied, from trans and queer sex workers battling criminalization in Cape Town, to LGBTQ+ poets exploring identity in Manila, to women construction workers queering men’s work and worlds in Sylhet, Bangladesh. In addition to the themes addressed, we sought to queer the project by challenging the white supremacist, capitalist, colonial, cis-heteropatriarchal structures that dominate conventional academic and artistic spheres in (and beyond) the Global North – including those we were ourselves situated within. My role was to lead the curation of exhibitions that captured our collective ethos and goals. Tracing the project over four years, I explore the challenges of working together across differences, and explain how our approach developed through disagreement, debate, negotiation and experimentation – processes that revealed layered power dynamics and political pluralities and oppositionalities. Reflecting on conflicting views about what ‘worked’ in our initial experimentations, I draw on Halberstam’s conceptualization of failure as queer art (2011) to suggest that apparent missteps in creative work can lead to productive encounters, necessary (re)evaluations and new platforms for subjugated knowledge. The conjoined crises of a global pandemic and severe funding cuts forced us to more fully confront the oppressive structures in which we worked, and to critically reconfigure the meaning and implications of ‘care’ within GlobalGRACE. I close by explaining how these experiences guided our collaborative curation of a final exhibition designed to indict oppressive structures while putting a multiplicity of queer perspectives into productive conversation.

Funding
This study was supported by the:
  • The UKRI GCRF AHRC (Award AH/P014232/1)
© 2023 Intellect Ltd
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/content/journals/10.1386/aps_00093_1
2024-11-19
2025-03-16
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/content/journals/10.1386/aps_00093_1
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The uses of failure: Transnational collaborative curation through a queer lens
Art & the Public Sphere 12, 141 (2023); https://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2102/10.1386/aps_00093_1
/content/journals/10.1386/aps_00093_1
/content/journals/10.1386/aps_00093_1
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  • Article Type: Article
Keyword(s): art; creative methods; decolonial; development; feminism; funding; gender; participation

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