A five-day project with workshops, night walks, on-site visits and theoretical talks. Curated by Ronald Kolb, Elena Levi, Dorothee Richter, Rotem Ruff, Maayan Sheleff and Hillit Zwick, hosted by Kunst-Werke Berlin, 2–6 November, 2021

In retrospect, one can suspect that in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, conspiracy theories already circled redundantly and a certain strange new crowd emerged – a mixture of people who were formerly known as left-wingers (autonomous, ecologically thinking, relying on nature as a form of justice) and right-wingers, who were against any ‘interference’ from the state, against a ‘natural’ survival of the fittest world order. We did not foresee that this uncanny collaboration could be repeated on other occasions.

In November 2021, our concept read as follows: “What if we consider the recent pandemic, and the crisis mode that it engenders, as a disruption in an aesthetic-political constellation – one that severely curtails movement and momentum, unleashes paranoia, and morphs the ways in which we can act, perform, and perceive the world around us? Through such a reading, can we explore current curatorial practices as a method to voice urgencies in new ways? As curators working with contemporary artists internationally, how can we stimulate a renewed understanding of the world during this moment of crisis and as the ground beneath us is shaking?

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly amplified the challenges facing societies worldwide: inequalities have increased in a severe way, accelerating acute gaps in class, race, and labor, and creating immense needs in healthcare and social services; the media, big tech, and other algorithm-based modes of communication have stirred up significant social fragmentation, creating divided communities that can no longer find a common language; human activities have provoked disastrous climate change that is wreaking havoc on our lived environment; alienation and singularization have become magnified. The need for serious and systemic change in the order of things seems both palpable and out of reach.

Where do contemporary artists and art institutions find themselves at this very moment? What other contemporary dilemmas and conflicts might be identified and understood through curatorial practice, which would otherwise be hidden in plain sight? How can curatorial platforms re-organize social space or re-articulate knowledge during times of crises?

Curating on Shaky Grounds is a symposium and curatorial workshop that investigates ways in which new forms of curating can evoke ideas on subjectivity and situated knowledge. Exploring the social and political dimensions of curatorial practice, the workshop will address ways in which the presentation of art can contribute to the reorganization of a public in times of crises. Questioning traditional hierarchies of knowledge and power structures, Curating on Shaky Grounds will look at the possibility of transferring conflictual aesthetics to a curatorial realm, and examine the problematics of curating in taming political criticality and its potential to unleash radical positions. Through research and case studies, participants will be invited to think through the role and responsibility of curators as critical mediators, with an emphasis on curating that addresses the pace and tone of contemporary experience.

Curating on Shaky Grounds will reflect on new practices that have developed out of and/or as a response to the current crisis mode, and examine ways in which curating can provide possibilities for regaining differentiated and nuanced viewpoints.”[1]

What became an extreme interesting moment in the project was the mixture of straightforward theoretical talks, workshops, exhibition visits and a night walk. The workshops in particular made people perceive each other on different scales: if you are composing with others or doing something resembling yoga together, you are more prepared to be open and perceive inputs, such as the personal archive of Dor Guez, with a sensitive and open mind.

Even as we had to change to an online format during the symposium part, due to a diagnosed Covid case, we had the experience of a shared space as an embodied space. I must confess, we did not achieve a conflicting, antagonistic zone, more a friendly contact zone. We used some scores from ‘Small Projects for Coming Communities’ to make people behave differently – not in a hierarchical form but as a big group, having fun and also discussing burning issues. On the first day, we found out about the topics and challenges the participants were interested in.

What we did change, compared to a formal symposium, was the way in which the public was addressed. In many different instances, the usually passive and instructed public was now co-producing, so they became co-authors. The idea of temporary communities evolved and in general the atmosphere was unusually welcoming. Aspects of daily life sneaked into the practices and a space of negotiation and experience was opened up. I imagine that the interpellation for people changed; it opened up the space to negotiate societal issues. After some exercises which helped people to connect and established a relaxed atmosphere, we jointly identified issues that the participants wanted to discuss: One of the pressing topics was alienation/loneliness. As John Berger stated: “The Marquise de Sorcy de Thélusson, painted in 1790 by David, looks at me. Who could have foreseen in her time the solitude in which people today live? A solitude confirmed daily by networks of bodiless and false images concerning the world. Yet their falseness is not an error. If the pursuit of profit is considered as the only means of salvation for mankind, turnover becomes the absolute priority, and consequently, the existent has to be disregarded or ignored or supressed.”[2] The symptom of solitude is accelerated by Covid, the impression of being cut from gaining agency. Another topic was the care crisis, as discussed by Nancy Fraser: “My argument is that capitalism’s economic subsystem depends on social reproductive activities external to it, which form one of its background conditions of possibility. Other background conditions include the governance functions performed by public powers and the availability of nature as a source of ‘productive inputs’ and a ‘sink’ for production’s waste. Here, however, I will focus on the way that the capitalist economy relies on – one might say, free rides on – activities of provisioning, care-giving and interaction that produce and maintain social bonds, although it accords them no monetized value and treats them as if they were free.”[3] And she continues: “Non-waged social-reproductive activity is necessary to the existence of waged work, the accumulation of surplus value and the functioning of capitalism as such. None of those things could exist in the absence of housework, child-rearing, schooling, affective care and a host of other activities which serve to produce new generations of workers and replenish existing ones, as well as to maintain social bonds and shared understandings. Social reproduction is an indispensable background condition for the possibility of economic production in a capitalist society.”[4] This also became more pressing during Covid and the problem did not vanish after the pandemic. Another topic was the economic crisis, which is often even worse for cultural producers, because they already live in precarious circumstances. But of course any crisis in the dimension of the pandemic just made it clearer who had means to live safely and who did not. But also generally, local and global inequality produces a permanent state of crisis. Joseph Vogl described this as accelerated capitalism: “A first precondition for our economic present surely lies at the beginning of the 1970s. I refer to the end of the Bretton Woods arrangement, that postwar order which responded to the Great Depression by equipping the world economic system with a security mechanism: when all important currencies are bound in a fixed relation to the dollar, while the dollar is in turn bound in a fixed exchange relation to gold, the international trade of commodities and capital should remain crisis-free. For whatever reasons this system failed (an essential reason being the United States’ gigantic foreign debts), in 1971 President Nixon brought the so-called gold window to a close, and, in 1973, the Bretton Woods agreement was formally laid to rest.”[5] He goes on: “A second precondition, which takes us back to the 1980s, has received the title of ‘neoliberalism’ and been tied to the names of Reagan and Thatcher. Their politics consisted not only of the power to break up trade unions, to privatize state-owned enterprises, and to perform radical redistributions with tax reforms. Far beyond these markers, they also began the great politics of deregulation and of the liberalization of financial markets – through repealing the antitrust laws, removing the separation between commercial banks and investment banks, and reducing controls on financial markets. Subsequently, the trade of financial products broke loose from the controlled stock exchange centers.”[6] And he concludes: “The dynamics of today’s financial markets would not be possible without new electronic and digital technologies. Such technologies range from the first ideas about the institution of electronic financial markets in the 1960s, through the opening of computerized stock exchanges and the provision of electronic stock exchange platforms up until the release of the World Wide Web for financial operations in 1993, and finally up to today’s high-frequency trading. With these technologies the financial economy has become a worldwide information machine.”[7] The next crisis we identified was the ecological crisis, as Anna Tsing drastically emphasises: “Too-rapid climate change; massive extinctions; ocean acidification; slow-decaying pollutants; fresh-water contamination; critical ecosystem transitions: industrialization has proved far more deadly to life on earth than its designers might ever have dreamed. Addressing this disaster offers one of the great challenges for all thoughtful people today.”[8]

Infrastructural failures and the commons came up as a topic: “Politics is also about redistributing insecurity, after all. So whatever else it is, the commons concept has become a way of positivizing the ambivalence that saturates social life about the irregular conditions of fairness.”[9] and later: “The better power of the commons is to point to a way to view what’s broken in sociality, the difficulty of convening a world conjointly, although it is inconvenient and hard, and to offer incitements to imagining a liveable provisional life. The close readings that follow aim to extend the commons concept’s pedagogy of learning to live with messed up yet shared and ongoing infrastructures of experience.”[10]

These short descriptions of different moments of crisis gave just an outlook on what was mentioned as an insecurity in the group in 2021, and this was before the violent outbreaks of war and terror acts came to a convulsive outburst. We did not provide an antagonistic conflict zone; what we could provide was an atmosphere in which insecurities could be addressed and viewed – through shared circles, through different workshops, and through radical artistic and curatorial work that was presented. We were building up a contact zone in which difference and diversity could also unfold and be present. Of course these topics could only be touched upon in the workshops and talks, but all of them showed unexpected ways to deal with crisis, and they involved participants in such a way that they would experience personal agency. The following descriptions are based on the announcements and booklet for the workshops and symposium; I did not include the more detailed biographies.

 

Introduction and executing scores from ‘Small Projects for Coming Communities’

Rotem Ruff, Dorothee Richter, Ronald Kolb. This part did convey a certain joyful togetherness and also provided the atmosphere to share individual impressions of crisis; the next step entailed a maping current crisis from the participants’ perspectives, as I addressed above.

 

Workshop with curator Gilly Karjevsky

This workshop explored the concepts and practices of responsive and responsible curatorial processes. Drawing on previous site-specific programmes that emerged from their immediate contexts, such as the Jardin Essentiel – a public garden in Brussels of over thirty varieties of medicinal and aromatic herbs, where a series of experimental design and artistic interventions were held (2016) – and Climate Care – an arts festival taking place at Floating University (2019, 2021 and 2023) – the workshop will explore questions such as: how do we situate and create on shaky or fluid, grounds? How do conceptual shifts, such as emergence and interconnectedness, inform curatorial making? What kinds of learnings can be emphasised at this moment?

 

Meeting with artist Yael Bartana at the Jewish Museum Berlin to view Redemption Now.

Walk-through of a solo exhibition of work by Yael Bartana with artist and exhibition curator Shelley Harten. Yael Bartana is an artist who was born in Israel. She is an observer of the contemporary and a pre-enactor who employs art as a scalpel inside the mechanisms of power structures and navigates the fine and crackled line between the sociological and the imagination. Over the past twenty years, she has dealt with some of the dark dreams of the collective unconscious and reactivated the collective imagination, dissected group identities and (an-)aesthetic means of persuasion. In her films, installations, photographs, staged performances and public monuments Bartana investigates subjects like national identity, trauma and displacement, often through ceremonies, memorials, public rituals and collective gatherings.

 

Site visit to ZK/U with Philip Horst, co-founder and co-director of the artist collective KUNSTrePUBLIK (2006) and ZK/U Berlin (2012).

focuses on the processes that come from, and feed into, the particular contexts of the fellows’ practice, whether they be locally defined situations or international discourses.

 

Night Walk in Humboldthain Park with artist Alona Rodeh

Alona Rodeh’s current work focuses on the omnipresence of artificial illumination in the city and its influence on humans and non-humans alike. In light of the current post-pandemic city, and with an emphasis on the pressing need for more private-in-public places to inhabit, night walking suggests an expansion of possibilities for living in the shadows. In this guided nocturnal tour, Rodeh leads the way into the semi-darkness of Humboldthain Park: mapping, observing and assimilating into its various mental and optical states of exposure.

 

I AM (NOT) SAFE
Workshop with artist Ariel Reichman and his collaborative partners – dancer and performer Stephanie Amurao and musician and sound artist Maya Shenfeld.

A participatory workshop on the notion of safety, explored through discussions, body exercises and sounds. Developed in collaboration with musicians, performers and professionals from diverse fields, this workshop considers questions such as: what does safety feel like? What does safety sound like? Ariel Reichman is a Berlin-based visual artist. He uses poetic and conceptual forms in his practice, touching on issues of identity and politics through intimacy and the public space, thereby subtly drawing attention to complex subjective, cultural and political realms. Reichman’s current work I AM (NOT) SAFE is on view at Kunsthalle Mannheim and can be activated online. www.arielreichman.com

Stephanie Amurao is originally from Vancouver, BC, and graduated from the Juilliard School in 2010. Maya Shenfeld is a Jerusalem-born, Berlin-based composer and sound artist.

Workshop by Ariel Reichman, Stephanie Amurao, Maya Shenfeld

 

Workshop with artist Dani Gal

“The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realise that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism.” (On the Concept of History by Walter Benjamin, 1940). With Walter Benjamin’s famous dictum as a backdrop, Gal will present his recent films as a starting point for a discussion about unsettling empathy, multidirectional memory, witness testimony and the politics of silence.

 

Book Launch: (Un)Commoning Voices and (Non)Communal Bodies, edited by curators Maayan Sheleff and Sarah Spies, with a lecture by André Lepecki performance studies scholar and curator.

(Un)Commoning Voices and (Non)Communal Bodies is a new publication in the OnCurating academic book series, edited by Maayan Sheleff and Sarah Spies. Connecting studies of the voice and theories of the body via the politics of performativity, the publication complicates the collateral understanding of power and agency inherent in collective or communal address and participation. The book launch will include an online lecture by performance studies scholar and curator Professor André Lepecki, live from NYC. Lepecki will discuss the politics of movement and its pause during the pandemic, followed by a conversation with Lepecki and editors Sheleff and Spies.

(Un)Commoning Voices and (Non)Communal Bodies takes as its starting point the project of the same name curated by Sheleff and Spies for Reading International, UK (2019). Looking back at the project from within the pandemic’s viral choreography – with the forced distancing of bodies and further silencing of already marginalised voices, alongside the simultaneous performative enactment of transnational solidarity – the contributors respond to the ongoing crisis within a broader and topical context. The publication includes texts by Susanne Clausen, Susan Gibb, Edgar Schmitz, Maayan Sheleff and Dr Sarah Spies, and a transcription of a conversation between Florian Malzacher, Maayan Sheleff and Jonas Staal.

André Lepecki, PhD, is a writer, independent curator, and Full Professor and Chairperson at the Department of Performance Studies, New York University.

 

Corona / Spectacle / Conspiracy Theories.

Lecture by Johan Frederik Hartle, professor of art science & media theory and aesthetics.

The aesthetico-political implications of the COVID-19 pandemic (and the measures taken against it) reinforce general tendencies of late capitalist societies. They atomise, dematerialise and virtualise social practice and inscribe fear and social antagonism into people’s daily interactions. Also, they increase phantasmic ideologies and collective irrationality, including wild and creative conspiracy theories. This talk discusses the relationship between COVID-19 and the spectacle, and attempts to draw aesthetic conclusions from it.

 

Berlin, before and after, Shanghai

Lecture by curator and gallerist Avi Feldman, joined by media artist, blogger, activist and programmer aaajiao.

The starting point for this lecture is a recent exhibition by media artist, blogger, activist and programmer aaajiao titled ‘I was dead on the Internet’, which was on view at the Sifang Art Museum’s exhibition space in Shanghai, China (September 2021). “I was dead on the Internet, where I once thought I was raised,” the artist writes from his home in Berlin, away from his studio and life in Shanghai. The bustling city of Shanghai is also where curator and gallerist Avi Feldman met aaajiao for the first time in August 2019. Feldman will discuss aaajiao’s exhibition, while recalling his two-month residency at Ming Contemporary Art Museum (McaM) in Shanghai, and his research on law and art in China at a time before a global pandemic – or was it already a post pandemic world?

 

The Changing Grounds of Value: Art between so-called online showrooms, acts of value-discrimination and a general atmosphere of increased mistrust

Lecture by Isabelle Graw, co-founder of Texte zur Kunst and professor of art history and art theory.

In this lecture, Graw will introduce a theory of the (specific) value of art, through a combination of theoretical propositions and case studies that highlight artistic practices. As social struggles intensify worldwide against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, Graw will address how the pandemic and recent protest movements such as Black Lives Matter and #MeToo affect the value of art.

 

On the tip of the tongue: art and politics between sound and sight

Curator Maayan Sheleff in conversation with artist, writer and curator Boaz Levin.

Looking at the role of the human voice in forms of commoning as well as methods of exclusion, Boaz Levin and Maayan Sheleff will discuss the agency and power of both the voice and the gaze, through their recent curatorial and research-based projects: Sheleff’s exhibition Voice Over at the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht, Holland, that dealt with exiled and silenced voices; and Levin’s Say Shibboleth! On visible and invisible Borders at the Jewish Museums in Hohenems and Munich.

Boaz Levin is an artist, writer and curator who lives and works in Berlin. Levin is the co-founder, together with Vera Tollmann and Hito Steyerl, of the Research Center for Proxy Politics.

 

Hosting Differences and Encouraging Space

Movement workshop with Liz Rech and Salah Zater, Schwabinggrad Ballett

How can we create a space where people can meet, where they can reflect, and where people can move freely? Liz Rech and Salah Zater, who are members of the artist-activist collective Schwabinggrad Ballett, are interested in embodied politics and the practice of being corporally present in space. What does it mean to inhabit space? What does it mean to create space? One of their main areas of research is experiencing togetherness as a tool for resistance, while celebrating differences within a group. They work in different formats, from direct action in the political field to temporary occupation of territory and choreographic practice in public space, to performances in ‘high culture’ contexts like Wiener Festwochen and Live Art Festival, kampnagel/Hamburg. In this workshop, they will facilitate a participatory movement improvisation informed by their activism and collective practices. https://schwabinggrad-ballett.org.

 

Petrified Conflicts. The Para-Museum and the Specters of Infrastructure

Lecture by Nora Sternfeld, art educator and curator.

Archival materials from the Art Workers’ Coalition and its actions at the MoMA in New York in 1969 are currently presented in a display case as part of the museum’s new installation of its permanent collection. A stylish glass box encases these materials, which outline thirteen demands made of the museum by the Art Workers’ Coalition – including free admission, a section of the museum devoted to showing work by black artists, and a public hearing on the topic of ‘The Museum’s Relationship to Artists and Society’. In this lecture, Sternfeld will address the role and responsibility of art institutions in engaging in self-critique. What are political demands addressed to a museum doing in a display case of the museum? What do the struggles against cultural institutions mean from the perspective of the institution? How can a museum be both critical of and faithful to the material it houses? Sternfeld will discuss how material can be preserved through the process of institutional change – in a way that it is capable of reactivation – and not just neutralised and immobilised.

 

Conflictual Aesthetics: Artistic Activism and the Public Sphere

Lecture by Oliver Marchart, political theorist and philosopher.

A new wave of artistic activism has emerged in recent years in response to the ever-increasing dominance of authoritarian neoliberalism. Activist practices in the art field, however, have been around much longer. As Oliver Marchart asserts, there has always been an activist undercurrent in art. In this talk, he traces trajectories of artistic activism in theatre, dance, performance and public art, and investigates the political potential of urbanism, curating and ‘biennials of resistance’. What emerges is a conflictual aesthetics that does not conform to traditional approaches in the field, and that activates the political potential of artistic and curatorial practice.

 

Mapping archival traces

Performative lecture by artist Dor Guez.

Dor Guez’s photography, video installations, essays and lecture-performances explore the relationship between art, narrative, trauma, memory and displacement. Guez was born in Jerusalem to a Palestinian family from Lydda and a family of Jewish immigrants from North Africa. Interrogating personal experiences and official accounts of the past, Guez’s lecture-performances raise questions about contemporary art’s role in narrating unwritten histories and recontextualising visual and written documents. In the past twenty years, his studies and artistic work have focused on archival materials and photographic practices in the Middle East and North Africa, as well as on mapping traces of violence in the landscape.

This workshop is a result of Dor Guez’s most recent work, developed in collaboration with the American Colony Archive in Jerusalem. Additionally, Guez draws insight from other archives, such as the Pinchas Lavon Institute for Labour Movement Research in Tel Aviv and the Christian Palestinian Archive, founded by the artist in 2006. In an intimate setting, Guez will narrate and animate the archival materials. Participants will be invited to share personal experiences and exchange knowledge, while the artist presents his research findings from different sources.

Workshop by Dor Guez

 

Permeable Exhibitions

Lecture by Paz Guevara, curator, researcher and author.

How can exhibitions create community rather than objectifying those that enter into the modern grid layout of the gallery? How can an exhibition be permeable to life through orality and reciprocity? How can an exhibition be related to geopolitical trajectories, struggles and potential alliances? In this talk, Paz Guevara invites us to reflect on the violence of the exhibition as a medium and an objectifying mechanism, while also presenting partly speculative and partly documentary propositions.

 

Hegemonies of Healing: Curatorial Governmentalities and their Discontents

Lecture by Nanne Buurman, researcher and lecturer.

Nanne Buurman will discuss how the dialectics of care and control manifest in what she calls “curatorial governmentality”, a concept loosely derived from Foucault’s elaborations on the birth of biopolitics. Based on her analysis of how certain curatorial practices, discourses and subjectivities relate to specific social conditions, she shares insight into her current research on Nazi continuities in the early history of documenta, relating them to the broader ambivalences of modernity and their uncanny hauntings in the present day.

The discourse of the project developed through a combination of workshops, talks, visits and night walks, as well as in the breaks, when all of the participants spoke with each other. The trust that was necessary for an open-minded encounter was developed mostly through the workshops and scores with a bodily involvement and encounter. In retrospect, this paved the way to understanding the contradictions and astonishing visual knowledges that emerged. So for me, the workshop delivered by Dor Guez, in which he showed photographs from his ancestry . We could turn over the old artefacts and see where the photo studies were based. For example, one image of a couple was taken in Berlin, in fantastic Middle Eastern clothes, dressed like Bedouins, or how one would imagine Bedouins in the early twentieth century in Berlin; the same couple was also portrayed in Tel Aviv in specifically Western clothes. In a way, one could say that it is not only femininity that is a masquerade, because attributions are imposed on us from outside, unfortunately often with very real consequences.[11] The Curating on Shaky Grounds project at least offered the opportunity to step back and see what lies beyond these attributions.

The project, delivered as workshops and a public symposium, invited participants to think about the role and responsibility of curators, theoreticians and artists as critical mediators at a time of crisis. Questioning traditional hierarchies of knowledge, critique and power structures, the programme provided opportunities to collaboratively consider ways in which curating can create possibilities for regaining differentiated and nuanced viewpoints.

Biographies of the curators of Shaky Grounds

Ronald Kolb, PhD, is the artistic director of M.1 Arthur Boskamp-Stiftung in Hohenlockstedt. He is a researcher, lecturer, curator, designer and filmmaker based between Stuttgart and Zurich. He was Co-Head of the Postgraduate Programme in Curating, ZHdK, and is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal On-Curating.org. His PhD research deals with curatorial practices in global/situated contexts in light of governmentality – its entanglements in representational power and self-organised modes of participatory practices in the arts.

Elena Levi is Deputy Director at Artis, where she oversees grant and public programs, supports curatorial programs, and works on organizational strategies and fundraising initiatives. Elena co-creates the podcast Audio Interference, produced by Interference Archive, a volunteer-run exhibition space and community archive of social movement history. In this context, she co-organized the exhibition Resistance Radio: The People’s Airwaves (2019). Previous positions include Program Assistant at Triangle Arts Association in New York (2014–16) and Weitz Family Intern at Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, NE (2012–13). Elena received her B.A. in Art History from Carleton College in 2012.

Rotem Ruff is Associate Director of Artis, Tel Aviv, and Head of the Office of International Academic Affairs at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem, where she is also a lecturer in the Visual and Material Culture Department. Previously, Rotem held positions in various institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, NY, and the Haifa Museum of Art, Israel; she has also organized public programs and curated numerous exhibitions in leading museums and institutions globally. Rotem is the co-founder and co-director of REACTIK, an International Erasmus+ Jean-Monnet Network researching EU perception and implementation of cultural diplomacy and policy.

Dorothee Richter, PhD, is Professor in Contemporary Curating at the University of Reading, UK, where she directs the PhD in Practice in Curating programme. She previously served as head of the Postgraduate Programme in Curating (CAS/MAS) at Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), Switzerland. Richter has worked extensively as a curator: she initiated the Curating Degree Zero Archive and was artistic director at Künstlerhaus Bremen, where she curated various symposia on feminist issues in contemporary arts, as well as an archive on feminist practices entitled Materialien/Materials. Together with Ronald Kolb, Richter directed a film on Fluxus: Flux Us Now, Fluxus Explored with a Camera. Her most recent project was Into the Rhythm: From Score to Contact Zone, a collaborative exhibition at the ARKO Art Center, Seoul, in 2024. This project was co-curated by OnCurating (Dorothee Richter, Ronald Kolb) and ARKO (curator Haena Noh, producer Haebin Lee). Richter is Executive Editor and Editor-in-Chief of OnCurating.org, and recently founded the OnCurating Academy Berlin. 

Maayan Sheleff, PhD, is a curator based in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and the Cultural Programs Coordinator in Jerusalem at Goethe Institute, Israel. Her thesis explored the agency of the voice in participatory, performative and political practices. She has curated projects at the Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht; the Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo; Madre Museum, Naples; Herzliya Museum, Israel; and the Bloomfield Science Museum, Jerusalem, among other venues. Sheleff was co-curator of the first Tel Aviv-Jaffa Biennial. She is the co-editor of (Un)Commoning Voices and (Non)Communal Bodies (with Sarah Spies, PhD, ONCURATING, 2021) and is the author of ‘Fear and Love in Graz’, published in Empty Stages, Crowded Flats. Performativity as Curatorial Strategy, Performing Urgency #4, edited by Florian Malzacher and Joanna Warsza (Berlin: House on Fire, Alexander Verlag and Live Art Development Agency, 2017).

Hillit Zwick is Deputy Director for Public Engagement and Partnerships at the Jewish Museum in New York, where she is responsible for audience development, digital initiatives, communications, and institutional partnerships. Prior to this role, Hillit served as Executive Director of Artis, where she developed and managed a dynamic portfolio of grantmaking and public programs, and worked closely with artists and curators internationally to support exhibitions and residencies.  An arts and philanthropy professional, Hillit began her career at the Metropolitan Museum of Art followed by a decade working at foundations supporting the arts and progressive politics. Hillit holds a master’s degree in Modern Art and Critical Studies from Columbia University.