The Curatorial as Social Intervention
Situationist Duration Reading Group in collaboration with Afterall Research Centre
Guest: Dr David Morris (Co-leader, MRes Art: Exhibition Studies; Research Fellow and Editor, Afterall Research Centre)
Moderator: Nicole Zihua Zhang
Graphic Designer: Momo Ye Mu
Date: 2-5 pm, 23 July 2026 (Thu)
Location: Afterall Research Centre, Central Saint Martins, Granary Building, 1 Granary Square, London N1C 4AA
Supported by Afterall Research Centre.
The event is free, but advance registration is required.
Description
What is the curatorial issue you are most concerned with at the moment? Would you consider curating that combines socio-political observations and insights with art research? 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 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.
In this reading group, we will collectively reflect on the curatorial concepts in the fifteen exhibition history volumes published by Afterall to date, and consider the continuing relevance of these exhibition histories to contemporary curatorial research and practice. Then, we will explore how curators might develop experimental curatorial practices by responding attentively to the socio-political situations of their time through artistic research.
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.
Before signing up, we encourage participants to read through the 15 Exhibition Histories publications and tell us which one you are most interested in and why. We also encourage participants to share their thoughts and questions during the reading group. You can find the full book list and introductions here:
https://www.afterall.org/publications/?publication-type=exhibition-histories
Selected books and readings:
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How to Pin Down Smoke: ruangrupa since 2000 (Edited by Wing Chan, Arianna Mercado, David Morris, Afterall, 2025)
How to Pin Down Smoke is an expansive guide to ruangrupa and their singular and multifaceted practice. Formed in Jakarta in 2000 against a background of authoritarianism, economic crisis and youth movements, ruangrupa is an art initiative whose work playfully subverts traditional art- and exhibition-making, offering a living model of collective organisation, sustainable institution-building and ways of relating to one another. Through new commissions, interviews and extensive archival documentation, this publication explores how ruangrupa’s 25-year history expands understandings of ‘art’, ‘exhibition’ and ‘publics’, integrating elements of popular culture, media technology and contemporary urban life.
"Introduction: Happy Birthday," Co-written by Wing Chan, Charles Esche, Arianna Mercado and David Morris (Afterall, 29 Sep 2025)
https://www.afterall.org/articles/introduction-happy-birthday/
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Precarious Solidarities: Artists for Democracy 1974–77 (Edited by Wing Chan, David Morris, Afterall, 2023)
Artists for Democracy formed in London in 1974 to give ‘material and cultural support to liberation movements worldwide’. Precarious Solidarities addresses the far-reaching actions of this group of cultural workers – whose personal/artistic trajectories span Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas – and the entanglement of artistic practice with transnational solidarities shaped by migration and political mobilisation. Through a range of new commissions, contributions from AFD members, and extensive archival documentation, Precarious Solidarities highlights the group’s multiple agencies and conditions of possibility – artistic, social, political, historical and geographic – and the potentials of these histories today.
https://www.afterall.org/publications/precarious-solidarities-artists-for-democracy-1974-77/
David Morris, "Precarious Solidarities: Artists for Democracy in Historical Perspective, Part 1," e-flux Journal, Issue 140, 2023.
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Reshaping the Field: Arts of the African Diasporas on Display (Afterall, 2022)
The 268-page publication expands the field of exhibition histories through a selection of pioneering exhibitions that have shaped Black art today. Emphasising how Black artists have organised, networked and created space for their work, it is the first publication to focus exclusively on African diasporic art in the US and UK through the histories of Black art exhibitions. Through a range of contributions by artists, art historians, curators and theorists, this publication reflects on the sociopolitical circumstances that were essential to the emergence of a field of study and mode of exhibition that is constantly reshaping itself and challenging normative orders.
https://www.afterall.org/publications/reshaping-the-field-arts-of-the-african-diasporas-on-display/
Nana Adusei-Poku, “Introduction: Reshaping the Field,” Reshaping the Field: Arts of the African Diasporas on Display, Afterall, 2022
https://www.afterall.org/articles/introduction-reshaping-the-field-nana-adusei-poku/
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Anti-Shows: APTART 1982–84 (Afterall, 2017)
A collective of artists, a gallery and a movement, APTART was a series of self-organised ‘anti-shows’ that took place in a private apartment and outdoor spaces in Moscow between 1982 and 1984. These covert and anarchic actions, which soon came into conflict with the Soviet authorities, represent a collective attempt to rethink the politics of exhibition-making and the practice of making public in the absence of a public sphere. The first comprehensive publication on APTART, this book presents extensive photographic documentation of their activities alongside archival texts from contributing artists and documents from the time.
https://www.afterall.org/publications/anti-shows-aptart-1982-84/
David Morris, “Introduction: Anti-Shows,” Anti-Shows: APTART 1982–84, Afterall, 2017
https://www.afterall.org/articles/introduction-anti-shows-david-morris/
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Exhibition as Social Intervention: ‘Culture in Action’ 1993 (Afterall, 2014)
A show challenging conventional understandings of public art, ‘Culture in Action’ in Chicago had a new social agenda, and reworked what an exhibition of contemporary art might be. Through eight projects by artists, initiated in the early 1990s and developed in collaboration with local people, the intention was to engage diverse groups over time, in addition to the visiting public in 1993. In the fifth book in Afterall’s Exhibition Histories series, the course of these projects is illustrated and described, with critical reappraisal of this important exhibition in newly commissioned essays and interviews. In the core text, Joshua Decter reflects on how we might evaluate this controversial curatorial project now. Critical responses and reviews from the time reflect the contemporaneous reception, and a new essay by Helmut Draxler elaborates on the expanded context for art-making and display in those years, bringing European perspectives to bear. The introduction by David Morris and Paul O’Neill frames the whole, which further includes contemporary responses from the curator and three of the participating artists.
https://www.afterall.org/publications/exhibition-as-social-intervention-culture-in-action-1993/
David Morris and Paul O’Neill, “Introduction: Exhibition as Social Intervention,” Exhibition as Social Intervention: ‘Culture in Action’ 1993, Afterall, 2014
https://www.afterall.org/articles/introduction-exhibition-as-social-intervention/
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From Conceptualism to Feminism: Lucy Lippard’s Numbers Shows 1969–74 (Afterall, 2012)
Four exhibitions of contemporary art curated by Lucy Lippard have become known as her ‘numbers shows’. Each took the population of the city in which it was shown as its title: ‘557,087’ in Seattle, ‘955,000’ in Vancouver, ‘2,972,453’ in Buenos Aires and ‘c.7,500’ in Valencia, California, before touring the US and to London. This third title in the Exhibition Histories series examines the numbers shows and follows Lippard’s trajectory as critic and curator, tracing her growing political engagement and involvement with feminism.
Sabeth Buchmann, “Introduction: From Conceptualism to Feminism,” From Conceptualism to Feminism: Lucy Lippard’s Numbers Shows 1969–74, Afterall, 2012
https://www.afterall.org/articles/introduction-from-conceptualism-to-feminism/
Cornelia Butler, “Women – Concept – Art: Lucy R. Lippard’s Numbers Shows,” From Conceptualism to Feminism: Lucy Lippard’s Numbers Shows 1969–74, Afterall, 2012
https://www.afterall.org/articles/women-concept-art-lucy-r-lippards-numbers-shows-cornelia-butler/
About
The Situationist Duration Reading Group forms part of the curatorial research project Bordered Lives, Wayward Lines, 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.”
Partner
Afterall is a Research Centre of University of the Arts London, located at Central Saint Martins. Founded in 1998 by Charles Esche and Mark Lewis, Afterall became a UAL Research Centre in 2016. Afterall originated as a publishing project, launching Afterall journal in 1999. The journal offers in-depth analysis of artists’ work alongside contextual essays.
It is published by Central Saint Martins in partnership with M HKA, Antwerp; the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, University of Toronto and in association with The University of Chicago Press. It was previously produced in association with California Institute of the Arts (2002–2009); Universidad Internacional de Andalucía arteypensamiento (2011–2014); the Smart Museum of Art and the Department of Visual Arts–Open Practice Committee, University of Chicago (2012–2015), the Art Gallery of Ontario (2016–18), and NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (2017–2020).