#8 Carolina Rito

Radical Surface: Curatorial Methodologies and Epistemic Praxis

This seminar explores the epistemic capacities of the curatorial in the expanded field of exhibition-making. How does the curatorial offer new ways for the understanding of knowledge production in contemporary practices? The seminar draws on the new aesthetic meanings, material operations, and decentred readerships that emerge from the curatorial juxtaposition of materials and ideas. We will explore how these operations challenge inherited regimes of knowledge production premised on colonial episteme of essentialised differences and formalist capture. From this perspective, ‘surface’ is animated as an epistemic proposition that refuses fixed ontologies, disciplinary boundaries, and essentialised categories. Surface is mobilised as a platform of ecosystemic exposures of tensions and intensities between forms and materials, affects, and ideas; a curatorial function premised on the radical impossibility of depth.

Professor Carolina Rito is a researcher and curator whose work explores ‘the curatorial’ as an investigative practice, expanding practice-based research in the fields of curating, visual arts, visual cultures and cultural studies.