Curatorial Culture
In the times of post-nationalism where different degrees of globalization and de-globalization have taken place, exhibition-making in biennials, museums, and art fairs reflects a curatorial consciousness that has always dealt with a nation’s historical past and cultural pride, or rather the unconscious as something repressed. Curating practices in the sense of a “cure” fabricate the politics of memory, i.e., what to remember, to forget and to resurrect, for the public to retrieve from the collective amnesia as a result of national traumas or bio-power control. Therefore the curatorial consciousness is to recognize what is excluded from the conventional national identity to include the otherness that has been ignored along its nation-building process, or even what is repressed under national traumas. Curatorial consciousness, being aware of the short-sighted vision of national cultures, can become a public therapy through making exhibitions in the post-nationality in which borders are constantly rendered unstable and reorganized in various geopolitical, ethnic-economical, or pandemic situations.
Jau-Lan Guo’s “Pathways and Challenges: Art History in the Context of Global Contemporary Art” investigated the knowledge production of today’s art history in relation to the current transnational exhibitions, where biennials, traveling museum shows, and art fairs are the popular norms. In Guo’s view, today’s art history has to reinvent itself from a story of the time in keeping art’s stylistic changes into a synchronic narrative of the here-and-now. The geographically expanded version of art histories, due to the long-term effect of colonialism and imperialism, cannot be overlooked without the cultural-political factors including the age-old issues with nationalism or the problematic definition of “Asia”. Today’s art history has to perform self-criticism from its own old enterprise within the parameter of statehood in becoming the knowledge of self-reflexivity.