Preface

None of the Above departs with the text Complexities of Complexity – Practicing Criticality and Narrative Through Curatorial Models, or Where is the Exit?, focussing on curatorial practice, and more specifically, exhibition making as a being-in-process. This process, rather than a model, favors the oblique over the categorical and the anecdotal, the summoning of ghosts over the analysis of bullet points and singular perspectives; in order to more meaningfully address the complexities of daily life within the parameters of the exhibition format. Both The Curator as Ventriloquist and Show me, don’t tell me further extend this text and intend to consider certain attitudes and positions in curatorial practice more elaborately. The Curator as Ventriloquist takes the form of a manifesto and is employed to rigorously consider the curator’s position in the key of 'voice' and 'speech acts'. The interview Show me, don’t tell me examines notions of fiction writing and storytelling in relation to the visual arts and curatorial practice, considering subsequent issues that rise with exhibition making (taking fiction as its central mode), the artwork as curator and ghost, and the viewer as narrator and eyewitness – informed by the exhibition Hindsight Bias. The works in the exhibition Hindsight Bias consider a diverse range of the complexities of daily life by means of making an inquiry into different narrative modes. At the heart of the exhibition lies a concern with the elusiveness of meaning and the (in)adequacy of language. The Event of Reality Applied Knowledge / Fiction, consisting of the two concepts Hindsight Bias and To Tell the Truth, an Assembly of proposed artists and artworks, a Bibliography, and an Endnote, balances between the theoretical, the theories of curating (discourse), and 'the curatorial' (knowledge-production of curating and the engagement with knowledge, curatorially) on the one hand, and the practical, the practicality of a curated project and curatorial practice on the other hand. The Event of Reality Applied Knowledge / Fiction explores two interrelated readings or trajectories: the first would be in the key of 'the curatorial', the second in the key of 'fiction'.

In the end, None of the Above intends to generate an understanding of and come to terms with different modes of operation and ways of thinking and knowing. These modes are inherent to, but also go beyond the ‘material’ reality of curating itself, and the subjects it utilises for the conceiving and dissemination of projects and curatorial work in general. In that sense None of the Above is employed to consider curating as a practice, in which making is seen as a form of thinking, and where information is treated as a form of material. Secondly, a consideration of curating as a form of knowledge-production (‘the curatorial’), which does not (directly) feed into practical work, but instead intends to open a space for theoretical reflection and speculation for the active production of and engagement with knowledge; to further inform curating theoretically and philosophically and to add to its discourse, beyond context and illustration. Consequently, None of the Above takes its title from the idea that both curatorial acts of making-as-thinking (‘curating’) and thinking-as-making (‘the curatorial’) first of all require a consideration of the formable preconditions and the adequate and apt prerequisites - methodologies, knowledgeability (information and material), knowledge (i.e. ways of thinking, both practically and theoretically), context, etc. - as a key for understanding curating more dimensionally and the necessity of and the possibilities to constitute and attribute to acts of differentiation and distinction.

Click here to download Complexities of Complexity – Practicing Criticality and Narrative Through Curatorial Models, or Where is the Exit?

Click here to download Show me, don't tell me