remembering forward

Remembering forward.

 

An oxymoron that holds the space of ‘the curatorial’ as an artistic practice fully rooted in the contemporary as a condition of disjunction and anachronism*.

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Bridging times, spaces, and species – in full awareness.

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Pasts, presents and futures emerging as parallel, coexistent and co-present narratives, re-narrated in the fluidly bound encounter of embodied memories.

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Hosting spaces where the potential becomes form, shaped by support structures, relationalities, situatedness, care.

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Cultivating alternative territories of thought, emerging across cross-pollinated flowers of knowledge.

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Be/longing – where one’s own identity is anchored in the present, though unfolding through the potentialities of the future.

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The curatorial as a condition of being-with and being-within – a/synchronous blossoms of change to hold and unfold the complexities of the world, while imaginatively illuminating new scenarios. 

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* Giorgio Agamben, What is the Contemporary?, 2008

 

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The MLitt Curatorial Practice (Contemporary Art) degree show presents an archival overview of the rich array of curatorial projects and reflections from this year’s cohort that have animated the Glaswegian summer season through July and August.

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The exhibition unfolds across three rooms, each is placed under the guiding star of an anchoring concept – The Friend, Care, and Imaginary, theorised respectively by Giorgio Agamben, Joan Tronto, and Édouard Glissant. Each term supports an aspect of the creative and conceptual space of ‘the curatorial’, while loosely functioning as a framing device for the projects presented. Each project, although embodying all three terms, inclines more towards one.

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The Friend frames the programme and the School’s sense of community, while revealing the importance of the conversation between an artist and a curator. Within this dialogue, the relationship between friendship and philosophy, as highlighted by Agamben, is uncovered. A discipline that questions, thinks, and reimagines the world, philosophy happens here most actively between friends.

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As a practice of repair, Care requires active listening, attentiveness beyond words. It re/lates and be/longs. It embeds both the being-with and the being-within as spaces of empathy and generosity. It is a field of simultaneous hosting and being hosted, unfolding through the gestures, conversations, and makings of a collective body.

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Imaginary generates new spaces for thought, adventuring beyond the institutionalised structures of the real to the open doors of change. The space of the imaginary, Glissant notes, is not just within, but very much without. Encounters and relations shape its poetics; the individual thought is tested and its boundaries pushed in the meeting with the other.

The Class of 2026 who pursued the Master of Letters in Curatorial Practice (Contemporary Art) generated projects that serve as vessels for new relationalities and ways of thinking. They engage with forward remembrances as prospective acts of worlding and prospective re-memory. We invite you to enter this space with an open philosophy and care, better still, with a friend. To slow down and make yourself comfortable; to open up to the relational space of your own imagination.