Moving sites: questions of site specificity in current curatorial practice

The workshop is part of the project "Art, Space and Mobility in the Early Ages of Globalization: The Mediterranean, Central Asia and the Indian Subcontinent (MeCAIS) 400-1650", sponsored by The Getty Foundation

organized by Hannah Baader, Avinoam Shalem and Gerhard Wolf

with Cuauhtémoc Medina

Chief curator of MUAC - Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo-UNAM

Evening Lecture

Moving sites: questions of site specificity in current curatorial practice

Site specificity has become a standard feature of current curatorial practice. Biennials in particular are currently presumed to be always involved in questions of locality, and site specific works have become a genre related to the commissioning of works related to biennial practice. This lecture will discuss both the expectation of site reconstruction in exhibitions such as 'When Attitudes Become forms' in the Prada Foundation in Venice 2013, with a number of cases where the transference of site is involved in a number of contemporary works relating to questions of monumentality. Cuauhtémoc Medina will also explore the question of site in the production of 'The Deep of the Modern', in the Manifesta 9 Biennale in Genk, Belgium, in 2012, as an attempt to relate an explicit commitment with the cultural identity and politics of locality, with a world history outlook.

Seminar

In a one day seminar, Medina will present and discuss with the participants both Manifesta 9, with other curatorial projects related to site specific intervention, including 'When faith moves mountains' (2001) by Francis Alÿs, and Teresa Margolles' project for the Mexican Pavillion in the Venice Biennale of 2009: 'What else could we speak about'?