ROOM 5. THE ROLE OF THE CURATOR

 “Personally, I believe that the role of the curator should certainly be scaled back, especially when one considers the egocentrism with which some of the major exhibitions of recent years have been conceived.”
Roberto Pinto

A reflection on the role and power of the curator today is advanced in MoRE by Roberto Pinto, curator of the exhibition Salon des Refusés (29 March–25 May 2003, Palazzetto Tito – Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Venice), which presented unrealised public-art projects by Maria Thereza Alves, Minerva Cuevas, Carlos Garaicoa, Alberto Garutti, Kendell Geers, Eva Marisaldi, Callum Morton, Antoni Muntadas, Jorge Orta, Lucy Orta, Nedko Solakov, Bert Theis, and Sislej Xhafa.

Drawing on the reflections of one of the invited artists, Kendell Geers, Pinto identifies the curator’s power as one of the problems of the contemporary art system and goes so far as to present in the exhibition a project that he himself had refused: Bert Theis’s proposal for the exhibition Subway: “His work addressed the problem of ownership of time: each of us is, in some way, imprisoned within a system subordinated to production. Wanting to stop the functioning of the underground in order to offer a coffee (creating a playful and social moment) to all the passengers is a magnificent project that can encourage those involved to reflect precisely on the need to reclaim it. Obviously, however, the company operating the underground would never have accepted such a proposal (…). And had it accepted (…) we would have risked being lynched by the very passengers whose priority was to reach their destination or their home as quickly as possible, rather than share a coffee with their fellow passengers or with us.”

A second strand, meanwhile, concerns curators who in recent years have organised exhibitions and undertaken research devoted to the theme of the unrealised, such as the aforementioned Hans Ulrich Obrist, who published Unbuilt Roads: 107 Unrealised Projects in 1997 and has for years worked on his Agency of Unrealized Projects with Julia Peyton-Jones, Julieta Aranda, and Anton Vidokle. He has also presented a selection of projects—following several calls for submissions—first at the e-flux gallery in New York (April–May 2009) and subsequently at the DAAD Galerie in Berlin (September–October 2012). Other examples include Filipa Ramos and Antonio Contador, with the performance exhibition held in Lisbon in 2011, Agora não. Not yet, and, more recently, the museum within the exhibition Between Miracles (CCA, Tbilisi, Georgia) by Elin Wikström and Denis Romanovski, featuring works by more than 100 Georgian and Northern European artists.