A manifesto of an (un)ethical Curator: from a curator as a person - to a curator as a process

The thesis suggests a profound move in the paradigm of curating. From understanding 'a curator’ as a fixed professional identity of a person — to recognising ‘a curator’ as an implicated, entangled, pluralistic and non- hierarchical process, which lasts for the duration of a singular curatorial project and redefines the terms of authorship, acknowledgement and power of its participants from within and each time anew. With regard to the researcher’s first-hand experience of curating professionally for over 10 years, ‘a curator’ is depicted as an emergence cohered through encounter, while curating is moved away from Neo-Liberal ethos, administrative, managerial and branding exercises, performed by a self-isolated subject.

Within this new paradigm, by focusing on ‘curatorial ethics', the researcher explores how the personal drives and meanings, brought by an individual to the curatorial process intervene with the collective standards, expectations and definitions of authorship and power, imposed on a curator by institutions and other parties they choose to collaborate with. Accordingly, the aim is to identify and map a hybrid professional-curatorial ethic that emerges due to this intervention — using the researcher’s own practice as a case study.

The key outcome of this research is a method for formulating an ethic (in a suggested form of a manifesto) which is applicable to a wide range of curatorial practitioners who work beyond exhibition-making. It was developed by adapting the framework of “The Reflective Practitioner” (by Donald Schon, 1983) to the condition of a contemporary art curator via practice-based autoethnographic methodology and curation of three original art projects.

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