The risk of global catastrophe and ever-growing inequality characterize the conditions of living with a broken and infected planet. More than ever, curating is challenged with developing new modes of practice that will enable meaningful social and environmental encounters and create lasting and transformative relations. What examples can we learn from? How do we avoid greenwashing and carewashing, and instead establish meaningful and effective ecologies of curating? What do we need to make that happen?

This two-part workshop creates a space for discussing these difficult and urgent questions as they present themselves in curatorial practice. It will create a space for sharing practices with each other, engaging in collective writing exercises and generating ideas for the possible future collaboration. Focusing on caring and healing as well as environmental justice, the two work sessions will allow us to exchange experiences and ideas on emerging modes of practice as well as explore the possibilities of establishing a long-term platform for mutual exchange and collaboration dedicated to practice, collective reflection, and the ethical and political dimensions of new ecologies of curating.

Elke Krasny, Professor for Art and Education and Head of the Department of Education in the Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Krasny’s scholarship, academic writings, and curatorial work explore questions of care at the present historical conjuncture with a focus on emancipatory and transformative practices in art, curating, architecture, and urbanism. The 2019 exhibition and edited volume Critical Care: Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet, curated and edited with Angelika Fitz and published by MIT Press, introduces a care perspective in architecture that addresses the Anthropocene conditions of the global present.

The workshop was organized by the Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory in partnership with Maribor Art Gallery’s EKO 8 – International Triennial of Art and Environment.

Supported by: ERSTE Foundation.