Affect and Curating

What is the feeling of an exhibition? How do curators deploy, stimulate and mobilise emotional states?

If ‘affect’ operates independently from meaning, identity or thought, on the level of pre-conscious physical responses and resonances, how might focusing on it challenge and complicate understandings of curating and curatorial approaches?

Marking the publication of a two-part issue on affect and curating in the Journal of Curatorial Studies, this event brings together a range of speakers to consider how museums, galleries, art world events and artworks function as sites for the transmission of affects.

Discussing the ‘affective turn’ in curating and society more broadly, speakers include Journal of Curatorial Studies co-editors Jennifer Fisher (curator with DisplayCult, Professor of Contemporary Art and Curatorial Studies, York University, and editor of Technologies of Intuition) and Helena Reckitt (curator, Senior Lecturer in Curating, Goldsmiths, and editor of Art and Feminism); alongside Lisa Blackman (author of Immaterial Bodies: Affect, Embodiment, Mediation) and Nina Wakeford, artist and sociologist.

In association with Helena Reckitt, Senior Lecturer in Curating, Goldsmiths and Jennifer Fisher, Professor Contemporary Art, Canadian Art History, Curatorial Studies at York University in Toronto.