The Study of
Curatorial Culture
Curatorial Culture
SPECIAL ISSUE
It’s Us, Not You: Curatorial Notes on the 6th Asia Triennial Manchester
It’s Us, Not You: Curatorial Notes on the 6th Asia Triennial Manchester
Transvaluation and Curating in the Expanded Field
Exhibitions establish specific contexts, framings, which distinguish them from viewing the world face-to-face. One striking aspect of the participatory turn in curating, and the transvaluational dimension of ATM6 as a discursive curatorial event, is that it echoes and transforms the limits of its own frame as a curatorial practice in meeting with its audiences in public space. New technologies and shifts within geopolitical social environments have given individuals new ways by which to access the world and project their pieces of it in an age of seemingly unbounded communication. While the need to direct oneself outwards to anchor the self in engaging with the arts is as strong as ever, there still exists for many a paradoxical sense of dislocation, a frictionless spinning in the void: a shady fear that the world does not answer; that transcending the parochial in dialogue with art is itself a fiction. I argue that the discursive nature of ATM6 instantiates a particular model of comparison in understanding value in curating, which can act as a site for reinforcement and re-examination of the stances of its viewers.
ATM6 as Curatorial Expansion of Value: Maria Lind and The Silent University
At the heart of the participatory turn in aesthetics and the philosophy of art in the wake of Hilde Hein’s1 work in museums studies, notably “the curatorial turn” championed by Maria Lind2 in curating, lie dynamic connections and shared decision-making – between artworks and curated objects, the exhibition space, the specific historical context of the aesthetic event and the cultural institutions with which artists and audiences engage. In what follows, I will assume as uncontroversial that exhibitions can have a narrative communicative function as an intentional artefact,3 manifested in what Ivan Gaskell calls the invariably selective process of display, the discursive means of their physical arrangement (even if unaccompanied by text of any kind) and their status as authored (even when the agent of the intention is not explicitly acknowledged or even clearly conceived).4 Moreover, the ascription of intention employs background knowledge and experience on the part of the audience or, in other words, implicates the perceiver’s conceptual framework to account for particular curatorial events.
1 See, for instance, Hilde Hein, The Museum in Transition: A Philosophical Perspective (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000). Hilde Hein, Public Art: Thinking Museums Differently (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006). Anna Bergqvist, “Framing Effects in Museum Narratives: Objectivity in Interpretation Revisited,” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 79 (2026): 295–318.
2 See, for example, Maria Lind, Seven Years: The Rematerialization of Art from 2011 to 2017 (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2019). Maria Lind, Selected Maria Lind Writing (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2020).
3 My philosophical view of exhibitions as discursive artefacts draws on Gregory Currie, Narrative and Narrators: A Philosophy of Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). See also Michael Baxandall, “Exhibiting Intention: Some Preconditions of the Visual Display of Culturally Purposeful Objects,” in Ivan Karp and Steven Lavine, eds., Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991).
4 Ivan Gaskell, “Museums and Philosophy – Of Art, and Many Other Things, Part II,” Philosophy Compass 7, no. 2 (2012): 90. See also David Carrier, Museum Skepticism: A History of the Display of Art in Public Galleries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
This narrative discursive aspect of exhibition making, the significance of the reader’s background knowledge and conceptual framework in meaning-making, may seem incompatible with another truism, namely that curating, notably exhibition in art galleries, can serve to criticize prevailing values and conventional norms, including conceptual schemes, and thereby be a source of novel insight. Drawing this conclusion would, however, be too hasty, and here I show how transvaluation in the context of ATM6 transcends and opposes the familiar polarized subject/object dichotomies in integrating art and life, that, among other consequences, lie behind the ethos of curating of this kind.
The new curatorial methodology for exhibition making represents a turn towards visitor participation and audience engagement. But the extent and nature of the turn in question, and how this is interpreted and understood in curatorial practice, varies widely. Consider Ahmet Ögüt’s The Silent University, which describes itself as a ‘knowledge exchange platform’5 that is led by and for refugees and asylum seekers working in partnership with museums and art galleries to activate the ‘silenced knowledge’ of migrant populations in different locations.6 Under the Directorship of Maria Lind,7 who has written widely of participatory models in curating, it was part of the 2013 Tensta Museum “Reports from New Sweden” exhibition that took the form of an arts café in a segregated area of the city where people without legal papers could practice their Swedish language skills. Working together with Lind, the participants developed course topics connected to their qualifications as part of building the curatorial platform for dialogue and knowledge-exchange.8 In this way, the artwork takes dialogue and untapped potential as its point of departure for education and critical reflection on what it means to be a migrant in the participatory curatorial space.
Curating in the Expanded Field
Like ‘co-creation’ and other terms of art in curating, the idea of a ‘curatorial turn’ has been subject to varying interpretations. My choice of The Silent University as an example might seem to be ill placed for my argument about the transvaluation of the untapped discursive potential for ATM6 in curatorial practice. True, it might be argued, we can learn a great deal about outreach and community engagement from projects like The Silent University, but the further inference from community engagement in curatorial practice to the nature of artistic value is a non-sequitur. There is, however, a different way of understanding the argument that points to a contrary conclusion, namely, that although indeed an example of community engagement, The Silent University shows the extent to which the participatory turn itself involves an expansion of the scope of artistic value, and indeed, the very concept of transvaluation in curating.
Fulford and Bergqvist have elsewhere argued that expanding curating to incorporate knowledge-exchange, ‘is the process of making art of public to establish settings where different kinds of expertise come together to explore new directions in dialogue with different stakeholders in a co-creative way.’9 To defend this expanded-scope interpretation of the curatorial turn, I have drawn on the work of Maria Lind as Director of the Tensta Museum when it hosted The Silent University in 2013.10 Under her leadership, Tensta Museum became one of a group of museums that actively pursue programmes of community engagement. These programmes were, she said, ‘curating in the expanded field.’ As Lind put it:
… it is a craft that can be involved in much more than making exhibitions – beyond the walls of the institution as well as what are traditionally called programming an education. This is “curating in the expended field.” The curatorial is understood as a multidimensional role that includes critique, education, fundraising, etc. But even more importantly, the curatorial goes beyond “roles” and takes the shape of a function and a method, even a methodology.11
Interpreted in this way, then, as ‘curating in the expanded field,’ The Silent University, just in being a community engagement project, is an appropriate model of comparison for ATM6 in at least three ways. First, ATM6 emphases partnership working and dialogue between visitor and curator in navigating values of pluralism and difference. Second, Lind’s multidimensional interpretation of the role of the curator draws attention to strengths and empowerment of participants as collaborating partners, illuminated further by Lind’s concept of ‘curating in the expanded field.’ Third, as I read her, Lind’s curatorial model also points to the socio-economic capital of curatorial practice, be it at the Tensta Museum or ATM6, in re-navigating the parameters for understanding artistic value in a collaborative way. All these aspects are clearly relevant to the ATM6 concept of transvaluation in curatorial practice.
ATM6 and Transvaluation in the Expanded Field
The core claim of my philosophical account of value as applied to Lind’s concept of curating in the expanded field, again using the example of The Silent University engagement with migrant populations in curatorial practice, is the idea that we can come to ‘see’ our own values through open ended dialogue with someone whose lifeworld gives them a different perspective from our own. Metaphorically, we see our own values in the ‘mirror’ provided by other stakeholders’ points of view in curatorial practice.12 The ‘no priority view’13 of meaning and neo-objectivity in value philosophy and curating, is, I maintain, also central to the discursive nature of transvaluation underpinning ATM6. First and foremost, it is inclusive. While acknowledging the shift to the user (visitor) perspective and redefinition of the professional’s (curator’s) role, the shift in both instances is not simply a shift from one dominant value perspective to another but a shift to partnership in which neither voice has priority over the other.14 The second claim is about the meaning of individual concepts as a function of the wider interpersonal systems and geopolitical socio-economic historical contexts in which they operate.
It is this second claim that, combined with Maria Lind’s multidimensional concept of ‘curating in the open field’s in navigating curatorial social conventions and hierarchies,’ illuminates the idea of values blindness—and its relevance to what we may think of as the ethos of transvaluation inherent to the ATM6 curatorial practice. For engaging this view, communicating across differences in the entrenched ‘social whole’ life worlds found in interpersonal encounters in an open-ended way, can serve as a crucial corrective to being overly committed to ‘the voice’ of the prevailing norms and ways of seeing the world—in curatorial contexts and beyond.
Concluding Remarks
In conclusion, the transvaluational framing of ATM6 takes over part of the function of the title. It preserves an internal anonymity of the work where awareness of its possibilities is suspended, allowing activity at its edges that imply something that can be filled. This raises a new question of what makes it right to say that the use of a given concept in public discourse is the appropriate one on a given occasion in curatorial practice. What I have suggested here is that we may think of transvaluation in exhibition and its objects (as already framed in the curatorial practice) as a particular model of comparison that, echoing Wittgenstein, ‘earmarks the form of account we give, the way we look at things’ to achieve a ‘clear view’ of that which is troubling us in curatorial practice.15 Perhaps this is all you ever really need in the usually murky traffic between art and truth: a ground for openness, a willingness to be impressed.
1 See, for instance, Hilde Hein, The Museum in Transition: A Philosophical Perspective (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000). Hilde Hein, Public Art: Thinking Museums Differently (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006). Anna Bergqvist, “Framing Effects in Museum Narratives: Objectivity in Interpretation Revisited,” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 79 (2026): 295–318.
2 See, for example, Maria Lind, Seven Years: The Rematerialization of Art from 2011 to 2017 (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2019). Maria Lind, Selected Maria Lind Writing (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2020).
3 My philosophical view of exhibitions as discursive artefacts draws on Gregory Currie, Narrative and Narrators: A Philosophy of Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). See also Michael Baxandall, “Exhibiting Intention: Some Preconditions of the Visual Display of Culturally Purposeful Objects,” in Ivan Karp and Steven Lavine, eds., Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991).
4 Ivan Gaskell, “Museums and Philosophy – Of Art, and Many Other Things, Part II,” Philosophy Compass 7, no. 2 (2012): 90. See also David Carrier, Museum Skepticism: A History of the Display of Art in Public Galleries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
5 See: https://thesilentuniversity.org
6 The Silent University was launched originally in London with support from the arts-oriented NGO, the Delfina Foundation, and in collaboration with The Showroom and London South Bank’s Tate Modern art gallery.
7 Maria Lind, Seven Years: The Rematerialization of Art from 2011 to 2017 (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2019). Maria Lind, Selected Maria Lind Writing (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2020).
8 Maria Lind, Tensta Museum: Reports from New Sweden (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2021).
9 K. W. M. Fulford and Anna Bergqvist, “The Participatory Turn in Museum Curation as a Model for Person-Centred Clinical Care,” in M. Poltrum et al., eds., The Oxford Handbook of Mental Health and Contemporary Western Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780192866929.013.60.
10 The Tensta Konsthall museum was founded by the artist and social worker, Gregor Wroblewski, in 1998, when Stockholm was the European Cultural Capital; and it is now one of a group of venues that focuses on engaging their local communities. In contrast, the installation of The Silent University at London’s Tate Modern, although curatorially highly inventive, had a more traditional/art gallery “educational platform” focus through a year-long residency led by Ahmet Ögüt, comprising a series of weekly workshops in collaboration with lectures with a variety of asylum, migrant, and refugee experiences, to give voice to the lived realities of those who are unable to use their professional life and academic training gained in their home countries in the UK due to factors relating to their migration status. See: https://www.tate.org.uk/about-us/projects/silent-university.
11 See: https://cimam.org/news-archive/situating-the-curatorial/. [Last accessed 20 February 2025.]
12 See, for example, Anna Bergqvist, “Moral Perception, Thick Concepts and Perspectivalism,” in Anna Bergqvist and R. Cowan, eds., Evaluative Perception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018): 258–281.
13 Anna Bergqvist, “Framing Effects in Museum Narratives: Objectivity in Interpretation Revisited,” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 79 (2026): 295–318. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1358246123000243.
14 The implied claim, which I do not have space to fully defend here, is that it is the co-creative nature of shared decision-making that brings with it the challenge of contested values; for more on this, see Anna Bergqvist, “Shared Decision-Making and Relational Moral Agency: On Seeing the Person Behind the ‘Expert by Experience’ in Mental Health Research,” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 94 (2023): 170–200.
15 The idea of discourse nature of ATM as revelatory of meaning can be brought into sharper focus by comparison with Wittgenstein’s idea of a “perspicuous representation” as being a key aspect of the task of philosophy as he sees it. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, rev. 4th ed., edited by P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, translated by G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), §122 and §133.
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Author
Anna Bergqvist is Reader in Philosophy and the Arts & Humanities Doctoral College Faculty Head at Manchester Metropolitan University and Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. Her principal research interests are metaethics and aesthetics, moral perception and the philosophy of psychiatry and mental health. She is editor of Philosophy and Museums (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Evaluative Perception (Oxford University Press, 2018) and Lived Experience in Philosophy and Mental Health (Cambridge University Press, 2023). She has also published extensively on narrative particularism, Iris Murdoch’s moral philosophy, objectivity and value, shared decision-making, and person-centered health care. She has recently completed a major National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) research project on improving patient experience under the Mental Health Act (Improving the Experiences of African Caribbean Men detained under the Mental Health Act: A Co-Produced Intervention Using the Silences Framework) and is currently preparing a monograph on implementing particularism in medicine and public health alongside two academic handbooks, The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Public Mental Health contracted for publication with Oxford University Press and A Handbook of Phenomenology, Values-based Practice and Shared Decision-Making in Personalised Mental Health Care with Springer Nature.
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5 See: https://thesilentuniversity.org
6 The Silent University was launched originally in London with support from the arts-oriented NGO, the Delfina Foundation, and in collaboration with The Showroom and London South Bank’s Tate Modern art gallery.
7 Maria Lind, Seven Years: The Rematerialization of Art from 2011 to 2017 (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2019). Maria Lind, Selected Maria Lind Writing (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2020).
8 Maria Lind, Tensta Museum: Reports from New Sweden (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2021).
9 K. W. M. Fulford and Anna Bergqvist, “The Participatory Turn in Museum Curation as a Model for Person-Centred Clinical Care,” in M. Poltrum et al., eds., The Oxford Handbook of Mental Health and Contemporary Western Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780192866929.013.60.
10 The Tensta Konsthall museum was founded by the artist and social worker, Gregor Wroblewski, in 1998, when Stockholm was the European Cultural Capital; and it is now one of a group of venues that focuses on engaging their local communities. In contrast, the installation of The Silent University at London’s Tate Modern, although curatorially highly inventive, had a more traditional/art gallery “educational platform” focus through a year-long residency led by Ahmet Ögüt, comprising a series of weekly workshops in collaboration with lectures with a variety of asylum, migrant, and refugee experiences, to give voice to the lived realities of those who are unable to use their professional life and academic training gained in their home countries in the UK due to factors relating to their migration status. See: https://www.tate.org.uk/about-us/projects/silent-university.
11 See: https://cimam.org/news-archive/situating-the-curatorial/. [Last accessed 20 February 2025.]
12 See, for example, Anna Bergqvist, “Moral Perception, Thick Concepts and Perspectivalism,” in Anna Bergqvist and R. Cowan, eds., Evaluative Perception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018): 258–281.
13 Anna Bergqvist, “Framing Effects in Museum Narratives: Objectivity in Interpretation Revisited,” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 79 (2026): 295–318. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1358246123000243.
14 The implied claim, which I do not have space to fully defend here, is that it is the co-creative nature of shared decision-making that brings with it the challenge of contested values; for more on this, see Anna Bergqvist, “Shared Decision-Making and Relational Moral Agency: On Seeing the Person Behind the ‘Expert by Experience’ in Mental Health Research,” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 94 (2023): 170–200.
15 The idea of discourse nature of ATM as revelatory of meaning can be brought into sharper focus by comparison with Wittgenstein’s idea of a “perspicuous representation” as being a key aspect of the task of philosophy as he sees it. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, rev. 4th ed., edited by P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, translated by G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), §122 and §133.
