Tuesday Morning—Opening Address
“When art becomes public: Exhibiting as a form of escape”
To mark the beginning of the workshop we have invited Dr. Paul O’Neill to help us begin our four days of study together by thinking about the exhibiting, and specifically helping us to depart from the question of how we might re-think exhibition as genre, as apparatus as poetic… And so we begin with exhibiting as a form of escape.
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 The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s),(2012) now translated into several languages. His most recent coedited volume is Curating After the Global: Roadmaps to the Present (2019), following on from the The Curatorial Conundrum… (2016), and the How Institutions Think (2017), (all MIT Press.)
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); co-editor of Curating and the Educational Turn (2010), and Curating Research (2014) both with Mick Wilson; and co-editor of Locating the Producers: Durational Approaches to Public Art (2011) with Claire Doherty.
See recently published interview in Floorplan “online platform for those whose practices are based in contemporary art to stand in solidarity with diverse voices.”
exhibition.school 