Workshop 10: Transforming Situated Experience into Situated Knowledges

With Katalin Erdődi (PhD researcher, Curating, ZHdK)

Date

Saturday, 26 June 2021

Time

1:00 – 4:00pm CEST / 7:00 –10:00 PM HKT

Location

Zoom

Maximum number of Participants

10

Registration

This workshop is fully booked, therefore we no longer accept registrations.

Description

This workshop looks at how we translate our situated experience as curators working with process-driven, site-specific and collaborative - in different ways ‘situated’ - approaches into situated knowledges. How do we reflect on our own position and role as curators, what are our strategies of knowledge production? Such collaborative and context-responsive working processes usually have an artistic outcome, which is made public, however little is visible and mediated of the curatorial processes, raising the question of how to reflect on and discuss these, while also making our experiences - including eventual difficulties, challenges and crises - transparent and public. Opening up this ‘black box’ of situated curatorial experience can enrich our discussions of both curatorial practice and methodology.

After a short lecture that reflects on my experience of collaborating with the self-organised Civic Guard in the village of Hegyeshalom on the border of Austria and Hungary, we will discuss strategies of (self-)documentation and knowledge production across different media, ranging from experimental fieldwork tools in anthropology and ethnography to methodologies of arts-based research, looking for interesting approaches that can be applied to mediating and making public curatorial processes. Then, based on the individual curatorial case studies brought by each workshop participant, which draw on their own practice and experience, we will work on hands-on experiments with diverse media and methods, to discuss and make public these experiences, sharing the results at the end of the workshop.

About the Speaker

Katalin Erdődi (Vienna/Budapest) works as a curator, dramaturg and researcher in the fields of visual and performing arts, with a focus on politically and socially engaged art, experimental performative practices and interventions in public space. Her curatorial practice ranges from performance- and exhibition-making to site-specific and process-oriented approaches that explore the possibilities of art as social practice and as a tool for knowledge production. She has worked as a curator for art institutions and festivals, such as steirischer herbst (Graz), Impulse Theater Festival (NRW), brut/imagetanz festival (Vienna), GfZK / Museum of Contemporary Art (Leipzig) and Trafó House of Contemporary Arts (Budapest) a.o. In 2020 she received the Igor Zabel Award Grant for her locally embedded and inclusive curatorial practice.

Her recent projects explore processes of change in post-socialist rural contexts through collaborative artistic and curatorial practice: News Medley with Alicja Rogalska and the Women’s Choir of Kartal (OFF Biennale Budapest, 2021); I like being a farmer and I would like to stay one with Antje Schiffers/Myvillages and three farmers in Hungary (Ludwig Museum Budapest, 2017-2018). This research also forms part of her PhD-in-Practice in Curating at the ZHdK Zurich and the University of Reading, dissertation title: Working Towards a Rural Agonistics - Curating Critical Rural Art Practices as Counterpublics.