Curating ~ Care

Curating and the Methodology of Intersectional Care

A thesis submitted to the faculty of

California College of the Arts
in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree

Master of Arts
In
Curatorial Practice

by

MAGDALENA JADWIGA HÄRTELOVA

SAN FRANCISCO, CA

MAY 5, 2016
 Copyright by
MAGDALENA JADWIGA HÄRTELOVA
2017
 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL

We certify that this work meets the criteria for a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree: Master of Arts in Curatorial Practice at the California College of the Arts.

___________________________________ ____________
Julian Myers-Szupinska DATE
Primary Thesis Advisor

___________________________________ ____________
Michele Carlson DATE
Thesis Mentor

___________________________________ ____________
James Voorhies DATE
Chair, Curatorial Practice
 Curating and the Methodology of Intersectional Care

MAGDALENA JADWIGA HÄRTELOVA

California College of the Arts

2017

Curating ~ Care. Curating and the Methodology of Intersectional Care examines care as an
intersectional, complex praxis and lays it in proximity to the practice of curating. The introduction
discusses the discourse of care in contemporary writing on curatorial practice and identifies a lack of
coherence in the use of the word care in that context. Subsequently, the body text of the thesis takes the
form of a brief theoretical glossary that, in the practice of speculative feminism, draws on writings by
Donna J. Haraway and Hannah Arendt. Four practices in the vicinity of care are outlined: Going
Visiting, Empathy, Rendering Capable, and Hollowing Out.

Thinking in this way allows the writer to solidify premises and outcomes of care in the vicinity of
curating. The conclusion resolves on the metaphor of the curator as mother figure, suggesting some
tools to curators hoping to enact a practice of intersectional care. The essay includes artworks curated
to stand in proximity to the language presented.
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND DEDICATION

This thesis is dedicated to Leigh Markopoulos, who demonstrated, to all of us lucky enough to come
into her proximity, the radical ways of caring every day. She made so many and so much cared for.

Furthermore, my thesis is dedicated to the women who keep inspiring me: Hannah Arendt, Donna J.
Haraway, Frances Richard, Ella Schoefer-Wulf, Sofie Tucker, and Virginia Woolf.

This work would not be possible without the support of my family, whose care made me, and everyone
back home who helped me be here.

I also want to thank my thesis advisor Julian Myers-Szupinska, my thesis mentor Michele Carlson for
understanding what was still taking shape, and James Voorhies for stepping in so caringly.
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword 1

Introduction: Loving Care 3

Body: Glossary 10

Going Visiting 10

Empathy 12

Rendering Capable 14

Hollowing Out 16

Conclusion: Curator as Mother 19

Bibliography 24
Foreword:

This essay doesn't stand on its own. It is not supposed to. It's specific form was shaped by the

requirements of the state of California for Master degree thesis. And I'm very excited to be able to

present my thoughts on such platform. It also existed as a twenty-minute talk, and it lives as a hypertext

on my personal website. In the future, I am planning on facing the words to different, more specific

aspects of curating such as funds and the market, or the relationship between curator and an artist. All

of it is and will be the same text, hopefully never stagnant. But most importantly, this essay exists

with/intertwined/alongside/within/next to my curatorial praxis. It takes physical forms, it creates and

re-creates the patterns I'm tied in.

1
FIGURE 1.

Figure 1. Janine Antoni, Loving Care (1993).

2
Introduction: LOVING CARE

“The word curator comes from the Latin verb cūro, cūrāre, which means to
care for. Cūrator, in ancient Rome, was an official in charge of public duties.
In the Middle Ages, “curator” was used as a term for guardian to minors or
lunatics. In the 17th century, it began to signify people in charge of public
institutions of display, such as museums, libraries, or zoos.”1

This etymological origin of the word curator is pointed out in numerous writings on curating practice,

solidifying what is mentioned very often: a curator is someone who cares.

Thinking about care in curatorial practice, the first question usually is: What is it that curators care for?

The multitude of answers—from public, to artworks, to artists, to ideas, to culture—shows the matter is

complicated. For all the mentions and care for different aspects, the history and presence of curatorial

practice is also interwoven with incidents that show lack of care.2 I came to think that such situations

keep recurring not because there isn’t enough care in curatorial practice. But perhaps it is because we

curators don’t know how to care.

1 Kate Fowle, “Who Cares? Understanding the Role of the Curator Today,” in Steven Rand and Heather Kouris, eds.,
Cautionary Tales: Critical Curating (New York: apexart, 2007), 26. Michael Lee, “Introduction: Who Cares?” in Alvaro
Rodríguez Fominaya and Michael Lee, eds., Who Cares? 16 Essays on Curating in Asia (Hong Kong: Para/Site Art
Space, 2010), 6. Charles Esche, interview with Carolee Thea (2005), in On Curating: Interviews with Ten International
Curators (New York: D.A.P., 2009), 60. Slightly differently, with mention of priests as “curati” in Middle Ages, in Hans
Ulrich Obrist and Asad Raza, Ways of Curating (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), 25.
2 They keep reappearing with striking accuracy and bear sometimes disturbing resemblance, from the exhibition
“Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, at Museum of Modern Art, New York,
September 27, 1984, to January 15, 1985, curated by William Rubin in collaboration with Kirk Varnedoe, to last year’s
retrospective of Kelley Walker at the St. Louis Museum of Contemporary Art (Kelley Walker: Direct Drive, September
16 to December 31, 2016, curated by Jeffrey Uslip), to Dana Schutz’s painting Open Casket at the Whitney Biennial
(2017 Whitney Biennial, March 17 to June 11, 2017, curated by Christopher Y. Lew and Mia Locks). I believe that none
of them come from a total lack of care. I trust that the curators involved cared about many things, such as their
institution, the artworks as objects, and I imagine about what they think of as culture. However, because of their actions
and choices, a big part of the public ended up feeling oppressed, not heard, not cared for.

3
Often, when words and action don’t add up, the imbalance is created by a lack of discourse and a lack

of analysis of the words used in it.

The rapid growth of writing on foundations, issues, and strategies of curating in the twenty-first century

is caused by awareness of its imbrication within society and the art world—in the market, history, and

politics. There has been an urgency not only from curators and artists but also visual theorists,

historians, and journalists to set norms of responsibilities, ethics, and hierarchies to the field of

curatorial practice.3

When researching mentions of care in writing on curatorial practice, I have found the use of the word

varies significantly. Sometimes care is equated to the preservation of objects. Surprisingly often, when

analyzing the “curatorial turn” from caretaker of objects in museums to the roots of contemporary

curating in the 1980s, care for objects is interpreted as a lesser job in comparison to the “creative

curator.”4 I would assign this to the motherly connotations and subsequent implications that “care” has

in patriarchal systems of thought. Certainly, feminist thinkers are the ones who consider care in

curatorial practice in more depth.5 Another, different discourse considering care and curating is

emblematized by Anthony Huberman’s essay “Take Care.” 6 This line of thought aims to reinvent the

3 Symptomatically, the new Committee on Audience Research and Evaluation of the American Alliance of Museum,
focusing on so-called audience development, uses the acronym CARE when referring to itself.
4 Explicitly, for example, see Paul O’Neill, “Curatorial Turn: From Practice to Discourse,” in Elena Filipovic, ed., et al.,
The Biennial Reader (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2010), 243.
5 Sparked definitely by artists such as Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Her proposal for exhibition titled “Care,” where the artist
offered to live in and take care of gallery rooms as if it were her own house, position care, maintenance, and
preservation as a form of high art. See Helen Molesworth, “House Work and Art Work,” in October 92, no. 102 (Spring
2000), 78.
6 Discussing care, Huberman departs from Jan Verwoert’s “Exhaustion & Exuberance,” an essay on reclamation of social
performance. Jan Verwoert, “Exhaustion & Exuberance: Ways to Defy the Pressure to Perform,” in Dot Dot Dot 15
(December 2007). Verwoert is one of the sources to the Glossary in the body of my thesis. When reading “Take Care,” it
was of notice to me that the literal subject of the verb “care” in the essay is not predominantly a person but an
apparatus, whether it is an “institution” or “exhibition.” Anthony Huberman, “Take Care,” in Circular Facts (New York:
4
responsibility of caretaker of exhibits and therefore emphasizes care for artworks, artists’ legacies, etc.

It comes from modernist obsession with the persona of the artist, following in the lineage of solo

exhibitions rather than group shows.

My thesis comes from a core belief that there is no separation between language and practice, and that

what we say constitutes us and our world. That it matters what stories tell stories, what descriptions,

describe descriptions.7 That we need the right words to be able to think critically and in depth.

Therefore, I decided to invest my time into writing about the practice of care and how it can manifest in

curating. The foundation of this thesis could be phrased as such: Care is a practice. As thus, care for

one, or several, things is never a reason to disregard something else. Care is a methodology that

provides the ability to think critically, even matters that extend beyond our own life experience—and to

take subsequent action. Care is a practice as complicated and complex as curatorial practice.

To think care in curatorial practice, I have developed a system of practices tied to care. To introduce

them, it seemed most appropriate to make the body of this thesis a descriptive glossary. The featured

practices discuss different facets of relating to the world, and when applied together should provide the

Sternberg Press, 2011).

7 “It matters what we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters
what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It
matters what stories make worlds, that worlds make stories.” A quote by Marilyn Strathern rephrased by Donna J.
Haraway in several places in her book Staying with the Trouble to emphasize the importance of constant criticality, of
taking the extra step to examine how one’s experience within intersectional position forms one’s ideas about the world.
Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 12. As taken from Marilyn
Strathern, Reproducing the Future: Anthropology, Kinship, and the New Reproductive Technologies (New York:
Routledge, 1992), 10.

5
curator with a guide to fundamental care.

The reason for their development originated in examination of the contemporary curatorial practice

discourse that, to me, did not seem to offer vocabulary and methodology to investigate the notions of

care within it. Such emptied language has been pointed out in a number of writings, most famously by

the collective Triple Canopy in their article on “International Art English.” 8 More recently, the misuse

of words such as “freedom” and “safety” has been very accurately pointed out in an article by Eunsong

Kim and Maya Mackrandilal, “The Freedom to Oppress,” published in Contemporary. In it, the authors

point out how such words are used to enact an oppressive dismissal of marginalized people’s life

experience, and to justify lack of care, critical thinking, and awareness. Their approach, which they call

“Art Criticism for Angry Women,” identifies this phenomenon as “Dominant Culture Persecution

Complex.”9

I agreed with Kim and Mackrandilal, and therefore decided to search for new words (and to emancipate

some with established meanings) in order to find a new logic of agency for curating outside of a

mainstream discourse that operates in words that allow careless or outright oppressive behavior to

happen. The practices introduced in the body of this thesis draw those new or emancipated words

largely from the critical philosopher Donna J. Haraway, specifically, in her 2016 book Staying with the

Trouble. Although she is concerned mostly with broader, eco-critical questions of ethics and response-

able living on a damaged planet, the speculative feminist thinking demonstrated in the book is a unique

example of trying to repattern one’s relation to the world, often exactly through a deep examination and

reinvention of language. Especially inspiring to me are the methodologies used and devised by

8 Alix Rule and David Levine, “International Art English: On the rise—and the space of the art-world press release,” in
Triple Canopy; https://www.canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/international_art_english.
9 Eunsong Kim and Maya Mackrandilal, “The Freedom to Oppress,” in Contemporary (April 11, 2016);
contemptorary.org/the-freedom-to-oppress/.

6
Haraway that enable her to think relationships outside of hierarchies and apparatuses that constitute

most of the mainstream contemporary discourse, such as Capitalism, Patriarchy, Postmodernism, or

Futurism.

I’m also building on Hannah Arendt, especially her work on thoughtlessness and evil following her

report from Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem for the New York Times.10 I see Arendt as a direct predecessor

to Haraway in their willingness and ability to think matters that are contaminated, and not binary. 11

The practices in the Glossary of this thesis create a sympoietic system. This means it is a collective

system with no boundaries or set power hierarchy. The practices influence each other and are

dependent on each other. The responsibilities in them are fluid. 12 We can imagine them as a string

figure.13

Lastly, I want to make clear my academic role in this essay. It will be that of a curator of a text, not an
10 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, originally published 1963, revised (New York: The Viking Press, 1964).
11 “Truly nothing is sterile; and that reality is a terrific danger, basic fact of life, and critter-making opportunity.” Haraway,
Staying with the Trouble, 64.
12 Sympoiesis, as defined by Beth M. Dempster, is “creating collectively producing systems that do not have self-defined
spatial or temporal boundaries. Information and control is distributed amongst components,” and used in Haraway as a
system of establishing non-oppressive relationships. Beth M. Dempster, “A Self-Organizing Systems Perspective on
Planning for Sustainability,” MA Thesis, Environmental Studies, University of Waterloo (1998), 27.
13 Defined by Donna Haraway under “SF” as “string figures in a triple sense of figuring. First, promiscuously plucking out
fibers in clotted and dense events and practices…in order to track them and find their tangles and patterns crucial for
staying with the trouble in real and particular places and times…. Second, the string figure is not the tracking, but rather
the actual thing, the pattern and assembly that solicits response…. Third, the string figure is passing on and receiving,
making and unmaking, picking up threads and dropping them. SF is practice and process; it is becoming-with each
other in surprising relays.” Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 3.

7
art critic.14 The writing put forth here originates from, is influenced by, and returns into my own

practice.15 As with an exhibition, I will be putting things in spatial relations on the page and in between

the pages rather than separately, linearly vivisect them. There are many possibilities for how to interact

with a text, even though it is bound and in the form of a book, and I would like to encourage them.

Lastly, the flexibility as well as the discourse used, associated often with theory and therefore

abstraction of ideas, is not to argue for relativism. I am discussing praxis. What might seem as a

generalizing discussion on language is a practical attempt to offer words allowing us to think

intersectionally. It is to think contagious, infected, and involved matter. It is to step out of the

discussion of a field trying to normalize itself. It is to allow our mind to go visiting, to render capable

rather than visible.

FIGURE 2.

14 As David Levi Strauss explains the difference, an art critic “makes finer and finer distinctions among like things.”
David Levi Strauss, “The Bias of the World: Curating after Szeemann and Hopps,” in Rand and Kouris, Cautionary
Tales: Critical Curating, 19.
15 Here, I would like to acknowledge one important source of my thinking that is present only in one footnote for the sole
reason that she has yet to publish most of her writing and thinking, Ella Schoefer-Wulf. Ella Schoefer-Wulf, “Language
Structures and White Walls: Praxis on Consideration and Movement,” in Ella Schoefer-Wulf and Magdalena J.
Härtelova, eds., Book about The Room (San Francisco: California College of the Arts, 2017).

8
Figure 2. “Ribs and Bones” string figure (as documented in Joost Elffers and Michael Schuyt, Cat's

Cradle And Other String Figures (1979)).

9
Body: GLOSSARY

GOING VISITING

Going visiting is a practice that Hannah Arendt proposes as a tool of critical thinking that expands our

own life experience and therefore allows us to understand matters that are not ourselves.16

Going visiting, becoming aware of one’s own ideology, is the one thing that prevents beings from

thoughtlessness. Thoughtlessness, for Arendt, is the foundation of evil.

One of the aspects of curating this practice applies to is, for instance, the normative gallery setting. We

take a lot of things as given: the gallery walls are white, eye level is about 5' 6" above the floor,

freedom of speech means one can say whatever they want to say, and being safe means one is not in

physical danger. But all of this was given to us by the ideology that we are part of depending on our

class, race, gender, education, and geographical space. White walls are a postmodern invention. 17 The

approximation of eye level is a norm favoring white males. And there are many things besides physical

danger that still make me, as a woman, foreigner, and queer person, feel unsafe.

If one does not want to oppress others, one must practice going visiting. Because practicing going

16 “To think with an enlarged mentality means that one trains one’s imagination to go visiting.” Hannah Arendt, Lectures
on Kant’s Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 43. When Haraway quotes this line from
Arendt, it ensues analysis of relational approaches that think-with and move beyond the roles of observer-object.
Namely, Haraway mentions the anthropologists Isabelle Stengers and Vinciane Despret who both invent strategies of
“enlarged thinking.” (Haraway explaining Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitics I. and II., and Stengers’s insistence on
“maintaining that decisions must take place somehow in the presence of those who will bear their consequences,” in
Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 12.)
17 Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1999).

10
visiting naturally debunks the assumption that beings have an established nature, or that people do not

change. Such an assumption is a condition for any norm-forming or creation of universal policies.

When we go visiting, we approach the subject with knowledge that they are not who/what one expected

—and, at the same time, that I am not who/what was expected.

Going visiting is a demanding practice. It requires investments of time in preparation and rigor. It

requires a lot of labor in finding others actively interesting, keeping curious even when the other has

been determined mastered by authorities.18

18 Hannah Arendt points out the danger of positivist friend-enemy evaluation of the world in common thoughtlessness of
Eichmann. See Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought
(New York: Penguin, 1977), 241. In the same vain, Jan Verwoert appropriately points out a common tactic of social
control by regimes that presents the public only binary choices fitting a specific ideology, in Verwoert, “Exhaustion &
Exuberance,” 91.

11
 EMPATHY

However well-worn and understood the word empathy might seem, when we think about its essence, its

practice is not mere “feeling with other people.” Once again, we need to think. Think we must.

Knowing what we are calling for when we say, “I have so much empathy towards this issue,” it is

useful to define the distinction between sympathy and empathy.19 20

Empathy: Sympathy:

thought disciplinary knowledge

thought fact/opinion, judgment

making present, living in consequences position

“communicative action” “instrumental action”

complexity positivism

specificity abstraction, mechanism

In sympathy, I project myself on the surface of the other. In empathy, I try to visit the specific

intersection where the other is standing.

19 As Lauren Wispé, the author of The Psychology of Sympathy, defines the distinction: “In empathy one substitutes
oneself for the other person; in sympathy one substitutes others for oneself.” Lauren Wispé, “The Distinction between
Sympathy and Empathy: To Call Forth a Concept, a Word Is Needed,” in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
50, no. 2 (February 1986), 314.
20 It occurs several times in this essay that to clarify the nuances of a word, I use a distinction between it and another
affiliated word (empathy ~ sympathy, rendering visible ~ rendering capable, “good enough” mother ~ commercial
mother). This is not to put them opposite to each other and disregard the ways they are connected, where they touch.
And although this essay prefers one of the two practices described by the words over the other, it is not to play to the
good/evil binary. In other words, these distinctions are not a call for harmony in choosing one over another but a call for
conscious, critical use of words and, therefore, conscious, critical choice of praxis.

12
When we perform sympathy, we hold our knowledge firmly and without change.21 When we want to

empathize, when we want to understand and come close to somebody/something, we cannot stand

where we are. We must move from our position and make present for ourselves as best as we can the

reality of the other. When Valerie Hartouni writes about Hannah Arendt’s writing on thoughtlessness,

she insists that thought is distinctively different from disciplinary knowledge. Where disciplinary

knowledge necessitates judgment and understanding, thought presumes specificity of information.22

I find an analogy between the difference of empathy and sympathy with Jürgen Habermas’s

communication oriented on understanding—a communicative action—and communication oriented on

success: an instrumental action. While in a communicative action, the participants are prepared to have

their opinions, and therefore themselves, altered by the interaction, whereas an instrumental action is

entered by one or both participants with a set goal for the outcome.23

The role of the curator comes with certain privileges of power and space. We must be aware that it is

not the job of the subject to educate the one in power. On the contrary, power gives the curator the

responsibility of educating themselves, over and over again: the responsibility of empathy.

There are also no shortcuts for this learning process. Only in sympathy can one think that there are

universal truths—to which one can devise universal, abstract solutions, mechanisms to create relations.

Empathy, on the other hand, knows the need for specific solutions in specific times and places.

21 Coming back to the Whitney Biennial, Dana Schutz thought she knew what it means to be a mother. If she gave the
matter more thought, if she empathized instead of sympathized, she would see that Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie Till-
Mobley, came from a very different place than she can ever visit with her specific life experience.
22 Valerie Hartouni, Visualizing Atrocity: Arendt, Evil, and the Optics of Thoughtlessness (New York: New York
University Press, 2012), 64–91.
23 Jürgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 86 and 95.

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 RENDERING CAPABLE

“Rendering capable” is a term used by Donna J. Haraway to talk about strategies that surpass the

patriarchal hierarchies of anthropocentric exploitation. According to Haraway, we should all know that

any power we have has been given to us by someone else, and therefore, we should hold it responsibly,

but also loosely, always ready to pass it on when needed. If we are able to do anything, it is because we

have been rendered capable by others, by the sheer act of acknowledging our existence. We are part of

a string figure.24

Rendering Capable: Rendering Visible:

distribution of power, entanglement linear, hierarchical

providing tools predefined options

potentiality display

There is another term often used in writing on and around curatorial practice—rendering visible.

Although it sounds as emancipating as rendering capable, I would like to demonstrate their significant

differences.

Rendering visible assumes that someone decided who or what is worth being seen and then pointed the

spotlight on them. It keeps the power and hierarchy strictly in line. On the other hand, when practicing

rendering capable, I constantly distribute the power as to who decides what is seen.

24 “Shaping response-abilities, things and living beings can be inside and outside human and nonhuman bodies, at
different scales of time and space. All together, the players evoke, trigger, and call forth what—and who—exists.
Together, becoming-with and rendering capable invent n-dimensional niche space.” Haraway, Staying with the Trouble,
16.

14
Because rendering visible keeps linear, hierarchical power structure, it offers only limited options. The

spotlight only reaches certain space where the subject can move and be visible. If they make a gesture

that reaches past the spotlight, that is not included in the vision of them that the person operating the

light has, they become invisible again. Rendering capable, on the other hand, distributes tools alongside

power. It teaches the partner how to operate the spotlight system, so they themselves can decide what is

seen.

I think about the difference between rendering visible and rendering capable the same way as the

difference between a display and offering space. They can both end up with an artwork hanging on a

wall. But sometimes, rendering the artist capable can manifest in an empty space.

What is lost with only rendering visible is the potential for surprise. 25 Rendering capable expects the

unexpected. When the unexpected comes, it acknowledges that it has surprised the participants yet

again, that it truly was what nobody expected, and takes that moment as the origin of action.

25 Potential for surprise is also one of the key elements defining a sympoietic system in Beth M. Dempster’s theory. “The
systems are evolutionary and have the potential for surprising change.” Dempster, “A Self-Organizing Systems
Perspective on Planning for Sustainability,” 33.

15
 HOLLOWING OUT

The ethic of rendering capable ties a string to a practice I define here as hollowing out.26

Hollowing out is a practice that contradicts positivism. Positivism, as one of the foundations of

patriarchy, says in its premise that everything can be put into data and into a chart. When Arendt

analyzes Eichmann’s thoughtlessness, she notices that all that mattered to him was function and duty,

apparatuses that helped him fill in what was outside of his life experience with evaluated information of

friend-enemy. He was unable, in thinking and in speech, to access the world that he didn’t immediately

understand.27

Not every thought is a data unit. And when we do not understand, it does not mean that there is nothing

there. It does not mean that a space that looks empty is up for occupation (that is colonialism). Too

often, exhibitions colonize places that, to the institution, seem unoccupied, without voices. There is a

visible thought pattern, driven by the spectacle economy, of “discovering” new potential fields of

discourse and display. Instead of approaching those seemingly empty fields with empathy, openness,

and awareness, it often happens that curators fill them with their own thoughts on the matter, with their

own explanations of what that particular field is. This behavior can be defined as a white, patriarchal

tendency to occupy the void in order to commodify it.

When Jan Verwoert speaks about “empty moments full of awareness,” created by the process of

convalescence from exhaustion, he notes that “the meaning of something that cannot be forced into the

26 Term coming from Hartouni’s reading of Arendt (Hartouni, Visualizing Atrocity, 75), used in Haraway, Staying with the
Trouble, 36.
27 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 253–62.

16
open must not be understood as denial of agency.”28 In other words, that emptiness is not a proof of

inability or incapability. For Verwoert, as well as for Arendt, it is actually a crucial part in the process

of thinking and acting. Encountering a seemingly empty space should then initiate the practice of going

visiting, of critical thinking trying to find out what makes the space appear empty to us. When we

practice hollowing out, we know that it is important to overcome the fear from not understanding.

Emptiness creates awareness. Emptiness is a necessity to critical thinking. However, emptiness is not

nothing. Emptiness is a potentiality not yet (or ever) actualized. Emptiness is not a denial of agency.

28 Verwoert, “Exhaustion & Exuberance,” 94.

17
FIGURE 3.

Figure 3. Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled (from Kitchen Table series) (1990).

18
Conclusion: CURATOR AS MOTHER

The language put forth in the Glossary is aiming to imagine a different logic of agency.

Of course, faced with curatorial practice, there are many questions left burning. For example, how do

we show process, constant movement, and constant reevaluation in an exhibition, with objects in

space? How do we speak about recuperating pluriverses of encounters and identities in a practice that

seems to have as its main goal presentation and creation of displays? How do we operate in the

entangled time of sympoiesis in a practice that has very time- and space-specific outputs? How do we

give out power when, as curators, we still need to make decisions and tell different people what to do?

My thesis is not a call for a perfect or harmonic practice. After all, perfection is a type of norm. And all

the practices put forth here are trying not to operate in the logic of normativity.

Thinking back to the word care. Historically, care comes with motherly connotations. The mother

figure, I’m thinking here, is not the mother from TV commercials. They are not a robot; they are not a

superhuman. They are a human. They are psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott’s “good enough mother.” 29

They are our real mother, the one we consider such, and they are us as mothers.30

Care renders them capable. Our mother makes do with the resources they have. Because they care, they

can. Because not to act is out of the question when care is needed. Because of their love, and care, their

capability to act is unconditional. However, it does not mean that they always say “Yes.” Caring for
29 D. W. Winnicott, The Child, the Family, and the Outside World (London: Penguin, 1973), 10.
30 I decided to use the pronoun they, them to signify that the mother is not of a specific gender. And to indicate that her
appearance here is not to contrast her in binary to the father figure.

19
someone/something can mean, in certain situations, holding out.31 Our mother say: “No,” “You can’t,”

and “You better not…!”

Our mother is not a TV commercial mother. First, because their fundamental care is, by nature,

anticapitalistic. It is inefficient from an economical standpoint. It constantly gives extra time, extra

attention—a surplus unjustifiable by the standards of efficiency. 32 Secondly, our mother also does not

have time to give their life to abstraction or norm of ideals because their world is full of the real

urgencies of those that need them. So, mother thinks with them. In specific situations.33 They know that

care is complicated and ambiguous; they do not strive for a so-called harmonic family. Their goal is to

keep caring.

They also knows that they are a mother, although they might not have given birth to a human. They do

not limit their love to blood relatives, they make kin. They care for the un-familiar, for those who

rendered them capable by pointing out their potential to act.34 They are entangled in a string figure.

31 As Jan Verwoert says, “I Care implies an unconditional I Can and an unconditional I Can’t.” Verwoert, “Exhaustion &
Exuberance,” 102–3.
32 Ibid.
33 “However, the doing of situated, actual human beings matter. It matters with which ways of living and dying we cast
our lot rather than others.” Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 55. Similarly, Verwoert points out the need for
particularity and specificity implied in care. “There is a fundamental problem [in organized solidarity]: when we fully
realize the implications of the I Care, we are forced to acknowledge that the potentiality of care can never be
collectively organized, because the debt to the other implied in the I Care is always radically particular.” Verwoert,
“Exhaustion & Exuberance,” 103.
34 “I think that the stretch and recomposition of kin are allowed by the fact that all earthlings are kin in the deepest sense,
and it is past time to practice better care of kinds-as-assemblages. Kin is an assembling sort of word…. Ancestors turn
out to be very interesting strangers, kin are unfamiliar (outside of what we thought was family and gens), uncanny,
haunting, active.” Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 103.

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I hope you are suspecting by now that they are a curator.

What, then, does their specific care mean for their curatorial practice?

Through their care, they aim to render capable rather than visible. In other words, they are making

space. They do not aim to parade their children around; they give them tools to use outside or inside of

the space they have provided.

They are aware of the privilege of occupying space, especially, a certain kind of publicly visible space.

As a mother, they can never stop thinking about being responsible for it. What is theirs is those whom

they cares for. As Helen Molesworth, curator at MOCA, says in her writing on feminist curating, the

gallery walls should strive to reflect the composition of the world. The world is not 90 percent white

men. Neither should be the gallery—in its artists, in its staff, in its collection.35

The mother's care is a practice, it is constant. In other words, any so-called freedom that the curator

might have priorly possessed to not be bothered by racism or homophobia, by colonialism, or rape

culture, any privilege of not being aware of issues of marginalized people, capitalism, or war,

disappears when they get a space, when they become a curator.36

The curator also knows that the world is ever changing. Their children grow up; they change, and they

do not always understand their kin. They know that there are no books, no data, no teachings that can

35 Helen Molesworth, “How to Install Art As a Feminist,” in Connie Butler and Alexandra Schwartz, eds., Women Artists
at the Museum of Modern Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art Press, 2010), 507.
36 Eunsong Kim and Maya Mackrandilal, “The Freedom to Oppress,” in Contemporary (April 11, 2016);
contemptorary.org/the-freedom-to-oppress/.

21
capture the world’s shape as set. So, they practice going visiting. They can not stop trying to understand

their children.37

Lastly, they operate in empathy, not sympathy. They try to create a real “safe(r) space” for their

children. In doing so in the gallery, the curator is aware that place defines us in intersection the same

way as race, gender, or class do and therefore should be examined the same way. They are aware of the

ideology of white, Caucasian walls and thinks actively about what it means for the specific artworks to

be displayed on them and for the audience to encounter them. They know that no whiteness is a neutral

position. And the curator knows that what they think is safe or feels free is based on their specific life

experience and does not have to feel that way for others.38

Such a call for awareness is not an argument for caution in the sense of passivity. It is a call for

constant reevaluation.

When the curator knows that their knowledge is limited/determined, they also know that they will fail.

At some point. And fail repeatedly. That they won’t ever understand their children fully. They won’t be

always able to protect them. Again, this call for care is not a call for a perfect practice.

However, our mother-curator is not going to stop trying just because failure is inevitable. Because they

care, they can move despite this fact.

37 As a side note: “To speak amorously is to expand without an end in sight, without a crisis, it is to practice a relation
without orgasm.” Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 73.
38 Here, she can learn a lot from the contemporary discourse on safety of Safe Spaces, how they have been determined by
a very limited section of the LGBTQ community, and the idea of safe(r) space. Catherine Fox, “From Transaction to
Transformation: (En)Countering White Heteronormativity in “Safe Spaces,” in College English 69, no. 5 (May 2007),
496–511.

22
Curating with fundamental care is a call for staying in process. It is a constant attempt to devise ways to

think, even when our bodies, our identities, are implicated and being changed. What I’m proposing as

the work of curator is a constant struggle. If seen through the lens of efficiency, it might seem as a quite

hopeless practice. However, care also reevaluates the way we see failure. The only time care fails is

when there is lack of thought and connection.

Part of the practice of curating with care is not only a deep approach to the subject matter, artists,

resources, all the bodies that will be influenced by one’s actions, but it is also coming to peace with

putting up and letting fail, putting up and letting fail, putting up and letting fail, putting up and letting

fail, putting up and letting fail, putting up and letting fail, putting up and letting fail, putting up and

letting fail, putting up and letting fail.

And not only coming to peace with it but to see that as the meaning of curating.

23
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