Situationist Duration Reading Group: The Curatorial as Social Intervention
As curators, how might we respond to pressing social realities through contemporary curatorial practices while preserving the exploratory potential of artistic language, rather than reducing art to a purely political instrument? What can we learn from curatorial practices developed across heterogeneous cultural and socio-political contexts? And, in contrast to institutionally supported curating, what possibilities remain for self-organised curatorial practice? As the inaugural session of the Situationist Duration Reading Group, this discussion will focus on “The Curatorial as Social Intervention”, exploring the questions that drive curatorial practice and the strategies through which curators engage with the social.
The reading group will first draw on Exhibition Histories, the book series published by the Afterall Research Centre, as a shared point of reference for collective reading, discussion, and critical exchange. The Exhibition Histories series focuses on curatorial experiments and examines what happens when art enters the public sphere, while interrogating contested understandings of both the “global” and the “located”. Through its research, publications, seminars, and public programmes, the series brings together diverse voices and critical perspectives to explore situations that challenge and reshape our understanding of art, exhibitions, and history—and to consider what these terms might mean in the present.
Dr David Morris, Co-Leader of the CSM MRes Art: Exhibition Studies programme and Research Fellow and Editor at the Afterall Research Centre, will join the discussion and respond to participants’ questions. Other Afterall researchers and editors may also take part in the conversation. By bringing exhibition studies and criticism into conversation with curatorial imagination and practical experience, this reading group invites participants to collectively explore what contemporary curatorial research can be and how we take action through dialogue, critical exchange, and the productive encounter of different perspectives.
About
The Situationist Duration Reading Group forms part of the curatorial research project Bordered Lives, Wayward Lines, initiated by Nicole Zihua Zhang, which is a practice of curatorial activism and social intervention through dispersed, performative art events and co-walks. It refers not only to the calculated drift in psychogeographic perspectives and art-historical discourse, but also to lived situations and embodied experiences shaped by racialised borders, gendered borders, and spiritual boundaries. Inspired by Saidiya Hartman’s notion of the “wayward,” it approaches walking not as an aesthetic drift through urban space, but as a practice of moving otherwise. It further explores the political imaginaries of these individuals and communities, alongside their past, present, and speculative forms of resistance.
By allowing action to bleed into walking, and walking to become a form of situationist action with a critical reorientation towards diasporic, transnational, decolonial, queer feminist, more-than-human, and even collective modes of world-making, we try to reframe walking as a situated and materially mediated practice—one that forges social connections, negotiates spatial governance, traces often invisible boundaries, and enacts minor yet resonant forms of refusal and care. The contemporaneity of walking lies not simply in its capacity to engage critically with built environments and socio-cultural conditions, but in its potential to reconfigure relations: between bodies and territories, self and others, memory and movement, borders and lines, care and resistance. It offers a way to re-examine artistic intervention today, alongside what Maura Reilly has termed “curatorial activism.”
