Turba

After a virally enforced stasis, history's momentum toward the migration and displacement of people, ideas, and cultural practices has once again quickened. Even as refugees and migrants are once more being driven across the globe by war, human rights abuses, socioeconomic issues, and climate changes, live arts audiences, too, flood back into theaters and outdoor/site specific performance events to witness the artistic and aesthetic developments resulting from the influx of the ideas and questions even the most destitute of these refuge-seekers weightlessly carry with them. This rich intermingling and fluctuating co-presence of culturally diverse artistic and aesthetic concepts and practices, however, all too often collides with identitarian notions of cultural heritage as a criterion that, not unlike the equally elusive idea of race, defines clear boundaries between—and articulates one's belonging to—social entities (communities, classes, regions, nations, or even continents).

Frakcija No. 55, 2010: At Least One-Third of the Subject

We as artists usually receive invitations from abroad (or locally) to present our work there (or here) by way of individuals who represent organizations or artistic and cultural institutions or who do not represent anyone but themselves. They come to us, they contact us, they meet with us, and they leave . . . what are they looking for? I have no idea. Maybe for something new, something different, alternative, a new language, new blood . . . Or rather, to create some ideas, to pose some questions related to certain problems such as the artist's relationship to power, or similar. I have no idea. Maybe they are on the lookout for new commodities for their respective markets, or for an Orient they have heard so much about, an Orient they have missed greatly, or . . . I really have no idea. My belief is that they all have their own motivations and purposes. Each one of them has his or her own reasons, desires, and objectives. Really, I have no idea.

Frakcija No. 55, 2010: Never Explain

Marta Keil: We are invited to revisit your text, “At Least One-Third of the Subject,” which was published thirteen years ago and has become kind of a classic since. I have to confess: I come back to it regularly with my students to discuss the figure that you drew of the artist's bittersweet innocence. Is this figure still recognizable to you today?

Configurations in Motion: Performance Curation and Communities of Colour (1–2 June 2017): Preview to an Introduction

I met with Thomas F. DeFrantz and Seika Boye in early 2023 to talk about Configurations in Motion: Performance Curation and Communities of Color—the gatherings, booklets, and the curatorial work—to ask how and if the work remains necessary. To think this through, we looked back at the 2017 conversation and the question posed about how we might cultivate a livable future. This brief essay is part of what resulted.

Configurations in Motion: Performance Curation and Communities of Colour (1–2 June 2017): By Way of Introduction

As curators of the third iteration of Configurations in Motion: Performance Curation and Communities of Colour in Montréal at Concordia University, in Québec, Canada, from 1 to 2 June 2017, we decided to begin with a few questions to set a frame for the essays that follow in this booklet of conference presentations. Here are our reflections.

Visible Assemblages: Six Affordances of Curating from the Peripheries

In this article, the author offers a rationale of her understanding of self-curation. From her position as a native culture-bearer singer of Karnatik music from Southern India, now settled in Australia, a settler colonial country, she elaborates on the characteristics of curation that emerge as important from her perspectives on being and knowing. The key line of inquiry in this article is the role of artist-curators in giving voice to culturally diverse perspectives. Drawing on correspondences between theory and praxis, she proposes that curation is a transactional and interactive sphere of operation where the everyday lives of artists intersect with their roles as transnational creatives who must negotiate their migrant identities, cultural strengths, and multiple belongings.

Curating Art/Archaeology: Excavating Through/With Material and Artistic Performativity

The transdisciplinary practice of art/archaeology has created a new relationship between post-processual archaeology and contextual arts, allowing archaeologists and artists to strengthen their investigative and performative work. Curating art/archaeology presents new possibilities for experimenting with the present and the past. The performative gestures in art and archaeology challenge hegemonic perspectives and expand tools for surfacing narratives, presences, and absences. This essay presents an experiment in which curating art/archaeology methodologies were used to (re)interpret the archaeological spatiality, narratives, and artifactual records of the Ovil Mount, a proto-historical village in the northern region of Portugal. Through contemporary art formats and gestures, the static fixation of the past is resignified and mediated in dialogue with the present. The article serves to question the definition of artifact, archaeological objectivity, and the ways we relate to the creation of narratives in the past. It assumes the material and artistic performativity of the site and enacts its immaterialities.

Curatorial Contemplations on the Conditions of Sound Arts in Diaspora

This article is a revised version of an assessment I wrote before (Tabandeh 2022) in response to the conversations, debates, and shared concerns circulated among the participants of a music forum entitled Soundings: Assemblies of Listenings and Voices across the Souths that took place in August 2022 at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. A few weeks after the forum, the outburst of urban manifestations and civil upheavals in Iran in search of gender equality and social justice, followed by the sustained resistance of the Iranian people against oppression, stunned the world. The events of the consecutive months, alongside the ongoing war in Ukraine and several other concurrent conflicts around the globe, support the conjecture that more and more artists will probably keep crossing borders to end up in diaspora. In contrast, many others struggle to avoid becoming strangers in their homelands. In this text, I describe the sounds and voices of both groups as migrant sounds: those who have actually migrated and those who manage to project their voices beyond the border, even if they have never physically crossed it. This predicament is, of course, common to all live artists who need the presence of performers who must deal with real dangers to themselves and others. Nevertheless, the sociopolitical complexities of our time and the many ambivalences in the art of migrant voices, especially those of sound artists and composers, still invite further inquiry. In this article, I aim to reformulate the arguments of my earlier report to investigate the subject matter from a curatorial standpoint: What can event organizers and curators learn from gatherings of artists and researchers such as the Berlin forum? What can such events tell us about the challenges of survivance in diasporic conditions? And finally, how might this knowledge help us to encourage and facilitate similar “intercultural” encounters between sound artists from different ethnographic backgrounds in a community of new audiences and collaborators?

Hybridity within an Expanding Field: Entry Points To Curating Contemporary Music And Sound Art

In this article, we take a closer look at the issue of (dis)placement from both the spatial and a symbolic point of view introducing to the contemporary music and sound art curatorial field the term “entry point,” broadly used in migration or border studies. This term, both spatial and symbolic, illustrates the Other entering the porous borders between countries and cultures, or borders between disciplines, genres, media, communities, practices, and forms of artistic expression. In our study, we use the term “entry point” to analyze the variety of the backgrounds (both professional and artistic) of the young curators entering the field, the participants of two Sounds Now Curating Diversity Courses taking place in Athens, Greece, and Viitasaari, Finland. We are particularly interested in their personal and professional motivation, responsibilities, and reasons to enter the field of curating as well as the challenges and issues they face.

Decolonization and the Invasion of Ukraine (Excerpt)

Arguments about decolonization rest upon an understanding of the identity of the colonizer. A nuanced historical analysis can critically distinguish between British, French, Spanish, Russian, and other forms of colonial, as well as imperial, power. A less nuanced, but more globally palatable, understanding typically takes aim instead at the broad and loose category of “the West,” while placing itself ostensibly in the service of the non-West, that is, “the rest.” Each of these approaches has its virtues (Europe, speaking generically, did indeed colonize the world), but each also carries risks.

The Degree of Fault of Every Citizen of the Russian Federation (drawing)

The Degree of Fault of Every Citizen of the Russian Federation. Drawing by Alevtyna Kakhidze (Ukraine) 2022. Based in Muzychi, Ukraine, twenty-six kilometers from Kyiv, she grew up in the Donetsk region of Ukraine, known for coal mining, and has experienced Ukraine's abrupt and chaotic changes from the days of the USSR to the imbalanced environment after, including the undeclared war between Russia and Ukraine that is going on today.

Whose Dance? Who is Dancing, Who is Watching, Who is Framing?: Some Questions on Gatekeeping and the Production of Dance

The two curators, Sigrid Gareis (from Berlin) and Jay Pather (from Cape Town), were asked for a short interview about working in a global context in the field of dance for the publication Gegenwart Choreografieren of tanzhaus nrw/Dusseldorf in 2022 (Gareis and Pather 2022). In order to achieve an exchange of thoughts that would be as equitable as possible, they chose a different format for this North–South dialogue. Each brought two questions to their colleague that they considered the most urgent in the context of the current situation. In a second round, mutual additions and comments were made.

A Garland of Languages: Curating Liveness One Moment at a Time

As a singer-researcher, I have been performing and curating live arts for around two decades. Over that time, I have come to understand that through curation we can transmit not only stories and songs into the realities of a physical space but also embodied memories into visible frameworks of time and action. Curatorial approaches that project the memories and vignettes of lived experiences onto backdrops have also fascinated me in recent times due to their visual appeal. These experiments have affirmed my belief that a multimodal activation of spaces is a good vehicle for narratives that are by nature experienced in multisensorial modes. Moreover, when such multimodality actively foregrounds the cultural strengths of voices from artists and populations that reside at the margins, the narrative arc is able to tell a story of and for equity. Like a house of cards, a live act resides in the precarities of the moment. However, unlike a house of cards, the thoughtfulness that informs the liveness lives on as the “curated design,” an instantiation of the residues arising from a series of decisions that were taken for and with a group of performers and audiences at a given time and place in history.

A Scandal of European Iconography: On the documenta fifteen Controversy

If art does not just show objects and bodies, but renders visible the regime of perception, the politics of aesthetics—then this year's documenta was a work of art. This art exhibited its power by suppressing the work of the artists. It was this failure of representation, the prohibited show, which revealed a horizon of sense that documenta fifteen set out to challenge.

Entertainment Forbidden!

According to a study on Generation Z by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation published earlier this year (Hoffman 2022), 87 percent of young people in Turkey complain about unemployment, 83 percent about the prevailing income disparity, and 76 percent of those surveyed do not trust politicians. The percentage of young people who have hope for the future of the country is just 10 percent. The most important finding, however, is that 73 percent of respondents say they would like to live in another country—most of them want to live in Germany.

Social Booking: Curation as Co-creation and Stimulation of Social and Musical Situations and Processes

I encountered the term “music curator” for the first time in the context of a request: my brother Hannes and I were asked to curate the opening event of a festival. I had known the term “curation” from the visual arts, in galleries or museums. As a musician, I had previously dealt with bookers, program directors, operators of clubs and venues or—in the record label context—with A&Rs. These terms also refer to recognized professions. “You must decide whether you want to be a musician or a label manager,” a boss and A&R of a Hamburg-based indie label had told us about twenty years ago, when we signed our first record deal as part of our rock band beigeGT. We did not want to decide, even though at the time it was not entirely clear to us why. The music we were passionate about was always part of a specific scene and happened in specific places. We wanted to be part of these places and spaces and help shape them, sonically as well as spatially. We had for some time already been running a small record label, a platform for our music and for electronic musicians who mostly were friends of ours. We organized and initiated techno parties, we DJed, and played in the aforementioned indie rock band. A little later, we came into contact with contemporary and experimental music. We always felt the need to exchange music and ideas with these “other” scenes. How cool would it be to learn with and from each other?

Quaint Questions on Curating in the Live Arts

This questionnaire is neither systematic nor exhaustive but works according to the acupuncture principle: small pinpricks positioned at the nodes of cultural energy flows! It is not primarily meant to stimulate public discourse—rather, it invites a very personal reckoning. Further questions may be added.

Tröndle, Martin, ed. 2021. Classical Concert Studies: A Companion to Contemporary Research and Performance. New York: Routledge.

Tanurovska-Kjulavkovski, Biljana, and Slavcho Dimitrov, eds. 2021. Curating in Context: Political and Performative Imaginaries. Skopje: Lokomotiva-Centre for New Initiatives in Arts and Culture.