The Curating & the Curatorial lecture series, established in 2018, aims to reflect on recent challenges to curatorial practices, by inviting prestigious curators, scholars, and educators worldwide to give lectures. The Lecture Series 2020-21 encapsulates five lectures on a diverse range of topics, key questions will be addressed as points of departure for a broader theoretical and practical analysis of the field.

Note: The number of participants for the lecture is limited, and there is no public broadcasting channel, further reports will follow soon.

Guest Speaker

Jean-Paul Martinon

Jean-Paul Martinon is Reader in Visual Cultures and Philosophy at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He has written monographs on a Victorian workhouse (Swelling Grounds, Rear Window, 1995), the idea of the future in the work of Derrida, Malabou and Nancy (On Futurity, Palgrave, 2007), the temporal dimension of masculinity (The End of Man, Punctum, 2013), and the concept of peace after the Rwandan genocide (After “Rwanda”, Rodopi, 2013). He is also the editor of The Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating (Bloomsbury, 2014). His latest monograph is a philosophical investigation into curating as an ethical endeavour (Curating as Ethics, 2020). www.jeanpaulmartinon.net

Alison Green

Dr Alison Green is Course Leader of MA Culture, Criticism and Curation at Central Saint Martins. She is a researcher, scholar, writer and academic leader of international standing in the history and theory of art, and curating as creative and social practices. Her scholarly work is in two main areas: the 1960s as a decade of change that shifted the nature of art, its social purpose and how artists work; and the history of exhibitions and curatorial practice. Current research projects include a history of exhibitions through a critical examination of themes of time. Two recent publications include When Artists Curate: Contemporary Art and the Exhibition as Medium (Reaktion Books, 2018) and ‘Why Practice?’ in P. O’Neill, L. Steeds and M. Wilson, eds., Curating after the Global. Roadmaps for the Present, (MIT Press, 2019). She holds a PhD from Oxford Brookes University and an MA from the University of Texas at Austin, both in the history of art. Her BA, from Princeton University, was in visual (studio) art and art history.

Paul O’Neill

Dr. Paul O’Neill is an Irish curator, artist, writer and educator. He is the Artistic Director of PUBLICS, a position he took up in September 2017. PUBLICS is a curatorial agency and event space with a dedicated library, and reading room in Helsinki. Between 2013-17, he was Director of the Graduate Program at the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS), Bard College, New York. He is author of the critically acclaimed book The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s), (Cambridge, MASS., The MIT Press, 2012), which has been translated into many languages. His most recent coedited book is Curating After the Global: Roadmaps to the Present is published with MIT Press, 2019.

Paul is widely regarded as one of the foremost research-oriented curators, and leading scholar of curatorial practice, public art and exhibition histories. Paul has held numerous curatorial and research positions over the last twenty years and he has taught on many curatorial and visual arts programs in Europe and the UK. Paul has co-curated more than sixty curatorial projects across the world including amongst recent others:  We are the (Epi)center, P! Gallery, New York (2016), and the muti-faceted We are the Center for Curatorial Studies for the Hessel Museum, Bard College (2016-17), and the symposium Curating After the Global, at LUMA Foundation, Arles 2017 including a sited new commission with Emmanuelle Lainé.

He was visiting tutor on the de Appel Curatorial Program, Amsterdam from 2005-17, and was international research fellow with The Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media, Dublin between 2010-13. From 2007-2010, he was responsible for leading the major international research program looking at durational appraches to public art; Locating the Producers at Situations, University of the West of England, Bristol. He has previously held lecturing positions on the MFA in Curating, Goldsmiths, University of London and Visual Culture, Middlesex University amongst others. Between 2001-03, he was the Curator of London Print Studio Gallery. He was Artistic Director of Multiples X from 1997-06; an organization that commissioned and supported curated exhibitions of artist’s editions at Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin.

Paul’s writing has been published in many books, catalogues, journals and magazines. He is reviews editor for Art and the Public Sphere Journal and on the editorial boards of The Journal of Curatorial Studies and FIELD – A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism and The Journal of Curatorial Studies. He is editor of the curatorial anthology, Curating Subjects (2007), and co-editor of Curating and the Educational Turn  (2010), and Curating Research (2014) both with Mick Wilson, and co-published by de Appel and Open Editions (Amsterdam and London); Locating the Producers: Durational Approaches to Public Art (Amsterdam, Valiz, 2011), co-edited with Claire Doherty and author of the critically acclaimed book The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s), (Cambridge, MASS., The MIT Press, 2012). His series of three curatorial anthologies, The Curatorial Conundrum…, and How Institutions Think, Curating After the Global…,  are co-edited with Lucy Steeds and Mick Wilson, and published with The MIT Press, CCS Bard College and Luma Foundation, in 2016, 2017 and 2019 respectively.

Victoria Walsh

Victoria Walsh is Professor of Art History and Curating and Head of the Curating Contemporary Art Programme at the Royal College of Art in London. Before joining the RCA she was Head of Public Programmes at Tate Britain. Her research and exhibition work spans from the post-war period to the contemporary with a particular interest and focus on interdisciplinary collaborations. She has published and lectured widely on her curatorial and research projects including ‘New Brutalist Image’ (Tate Britain, 2016; co-curated with architecture historian Claire Zimmerman); ‘Richard Hamilton: Growth and Form’ (Tate Modern, London 2014), ‘Transfigurations’ (MACBA, Barcelona) and ‘Cultural Value and the Digital’ (Tate Research 2014). She is particularly interested in collaboration as a form of curatorial practice and research; the impact of the internet and digital technology on museums; and the role of the arts and culture in global cities.

Beatrice von Bismarck

Beatrice von Bismarck is a professor of art history at the Academy of Fine Arts (Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst) Leipzig, where she also teaches visual culture and cultures of the curatorial. Previously, she worked as a curator of the department of 20th-century art at Städel Museum, Frankfurt, taught at the Leuphana University in Lüneburg, and was co-founder and co-director of the Kunstraum der Universität Lüneburg. In Leipzig, she was co-founder of the project-space /D/O/C/K and initiator of the M.A. Program Cultures of the Curatorial, which started in autumn 2009. She also co-conceived and co-directed the itinerant TRANScuratorial Academy that has been touring from Berlin to Mumbai and Phnom Penh (2017-2018). In 2018 she was Philippe Jabre Visiting Professor of Art History and Curating at the American University of Beirut.

Publications include Cultures of the Curatorial (ed. with Jörn Schafaff and Thomas Weski), 2012; Timing - On the Temporal Dimension of Exhibiting (ed. with Rike Frank, Benjamin Meyer-Krahmer, Jörn Schafaff, and Thomas Weski), 2014; Hospitality - Hosting Relations in Exhibitions, (ed. with Benjamin Meyer-Krahmer), 2016 (all Sternberg Press, Berlin); Now–Tomorrow–Flux: An Anthology on the Museum of Contemporary Art (ed. with Heike Munder and Peter J. Schneemann), JRP|Ringier, Zurich 2017; Curatorial Things (ed. with Benjamin Meyer-Krahmer), Berlin 2019, and O(f)f Our Times: Curatorial Anachronics, (ed. with Rike Frank), Berlin 2019. Her monograph The Curatorial Condition will come out in spring 2021. For her research project on the “Curatorial”, she was awarded the Opus Magnum fellowship of the VolkswagenStiftung, Hannover (2015-2017).

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Academic Advisor

Xiewei Song

Dean, School of Design, Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA)

Academic Convenors

Naiyi Wang

Lecturer, Curating Contemporary Design and Design Criticism & Curatorial Studies

School of Design, Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA)

Tianchong Xue

Lecturer, Curating Contemporary Design and Design Criticism & Curatorial Studies

School of Design, Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA)

This lecture series will take place online on a Zoom platform, more details will be announced soon. For more information, please contact curatorial@cafa.edu.cn.