Issue 50 / June 2021 Notes on Curating www.oncurating.org June 2021 / Issue 50 Edited by Hadas Kedar Contributions by João Pedro Amorim and Nuno Crespo, Anastasia Chaguidouline, Sebastian Cichocki, Dennis Dizon, Galit Eilat, Ronny Hardliz, Carla Gimeno Jaria, Hadas Kedar, Jacqueline Kok, Renan Laru-an, Johanne Løgstrup, Park C. Myers, Laura Netz, Helene Romakin, Nadim Samman Contents Extreme 2 Editorial Hadas Kedar 1 3 Art and Curating Art and Curating Celebrates Difference: in Conflict Zones Turning Towards Local and Subjugated Knowledge 91 What Borders Can Do 11 Carla Gimeno Jaria Art as Expanded Rationality João Pedro Amorim and Nuno Crespo 100 Errant Curating 30 Nadim Samman Tracing Resistance Jacqueline Kok 111 “and here I am”—De-Colonial Aspects 38 of Advanced Curatorial Work (of Art) General Nourishment: Ronny Hardliz The Aga Khan Museum of Islamic Arts in Marawi 120 Renan Laru-an “If You Want To Run Fast, Run Alone. If You Want To Run Far, Run Together.” * African proverb 2 Galit Eilat The Ecology Crisis: 129 Can Art Fill Museums as Contact or Conflict Zones the Communication Gap? Johanne Løgstrup 57 139 Wonders in the Heavens and in the Earth: Borders and Forms Notes from the Dormant Exhibition Anastasia Chaguidouline Sebastian Cichocki 64 4 Toward an Ecological Singularity Free Culture: Post-Humanist Dennis Dizon Technologies and Algorithms 78 as Alternatives to Techno-Capitalist Extremely Unagitated—A Closer Look Industrial Society at the Artistic Practice of Lara Almarcegui Helene Romakin 159 Vitalist Materialism—Life Mining Laura Netz 170 Algorithmic Extremes in Terram in Aspectu Park C. Myers 1 Issue 50 / June 2021 Editorial Extreme Editorial Hadas Kedar The essays published in this issue of OnCurating under the title Extreme have been assembled and appear as a result of my ongoing exploration of art and curating in the margins of the globe. They relate to my curatorial research into artistic and curatorial methodologies that revisit subjugated, local, situated knowledges, specifically sup- porting local communities of the Naqab Desert in Israel. The investigations that have been undertaken and presented in this issue by my colleagues from around the world are all, in many ways, tied together by specific circumstances that have continuously and mutually affected marginal areas and are rooted in a world dynamic based on the historical division of labour and the exploitati- on of certain countries by Western agents. The manifestations of the inequality of our world model in our everyday reality have brought about austere societal, territorial, and climate conditions that are experienced ever more harshly on the margins. The issue begins with a section titled Art and Curating Celebrates Difference: Turning Towards Local and Subjugated Knowledge, which provides the basis for the issue. The term situated knowledges developed by the American professor of the history of consciousness and feminist studies Donna Haraway1 explains currents in feminism that build on vantage points of subjugated and embodied knowledges developing a feminist objectivity. The practice of developing ideas from local conditions is at the root of this section demonstrating how artists and curators turn to situated knowledges in order to develop a set of creative tools in the face of global crises. In their contribution, “Art as Expanded Rationality,” the visual artist João Pedro Amorim and philosophy and aesthetics scholar Nuno Crespo demonstrate how colonial and globalizing processes define Western relativism and how the positivist mission of the colonization of knowledge is a driving force that abandons experimen- tal and open-ended forms of knowledge including what is unknown and unresolved. In order to better understand how the driving force of the colonization of knowledge works, the writers explore a number of artists and collectives. These include the Karrabing Film Collective—an indigenous collective from the Belyuen community situated at the edge of Anson Bay in Northern Australia. By giving presence in their films to past lives in the present, Amorim and Crespo demonstrate how the situated knowledges that the Karrabing Film Collective bring into their films create a break within the value system of Western representation. Celebrating a shift within the Western system of value is central to curator Jacqueline Kok’s contribution to this issue. In “Tracing Resistance”, Kok argues that the “Miss First Nation Taiwan”, the very first drag show in Taiwan (2018), serves as an effort to reconcile not only the gender binary in Taiwan but also a discriminatory tendency towards the indigenous population. Although Taiwan has proved to be one of the most progressive East Asian countries, recognizing same-sex marriage in 2019, Taiwanese individuals who identify as trans or intersex are required to undergo sex reassignment surgery to change their legal gender on official documents, and they are often the targets of sex-based discrimination. By reappropriating a longstanding form of Western 2 Issue 50 / June 2021 Editorial Extreme institutionalized culture, Kok asserts that the beauty contest titled Miss First Nation encourages cross-cultural collaboration that allows visibility for non-binary identities and indigenous people to meet, engage, and create. In “General Nourishment: The Aga Khan Museum of Islamic Arts in Marawi,” the curatorial researcher from the Philippines, Renan Laru-an, examines the country’s first Islamic arts institution, The Museum of Islamic Arts of Marawi. Through attribu- tes of the science of limnology, the study of lakes, Laru-an embarks on a poetic investigation into the museum’s curatorial ethos by reflecting on the museum via the study of bodies of water. Analyzing the activities of the lake and its rivers, along with its ecological efficiency, Laru-an considers the museum lying on the shores of the large ancient Lake of Lanao, overlooking the city of Marawi, as neither central nor peripheral with regard to its geographical location and its activities. Through the notion of the tributary stream, a stream that flows into a larger river, Laru-an considers the museum as a drifting entity, a curatorial force of turbidity of tributaries that revitalizes curatorial ideas based in Western thought to which we continuously refer and which we uphold. The issue continues with the second section, The Ecology Crisis: Can Art Fill the Enviromental Communication Gap?, which investigates how art and curating may create the means to pull the audience back towards the everyday reality of global crises and to interrogate actual environmental damage. Based on the notion that the increasing environmental catastrophe is based on a failure of communication, this section explores art as a means to communicate the depoliticization of the catastro- phic dimensions of the climate crisis and to reveal the growing normalization of its effect on subjectivities in susceptible areas of the globe. “Wonders in the Heavens and in the Earth: Notes from the Dormant Exhibition,” Sebastian Cichoki’s contribution to this section, is titled after a book that tells the story in which protagonists. The book tells a story in which protagonists from the future see in our era the shadow of anti-intellectualism that fell over the techno-scien- tific nations of the Western world, preventing us from acting on the scientific know- ledge regarding the climate crisis that was available at the time. One of the key historical references in the exhibition The Penumbral Age is the Slovenian OHO Group, which began to operate in the mid-1960s. With a philosophical and artistic non-anth- ropocentric outlook, the group created interventions in nature using readily available materials. After a few decades of activities, members of the group collectively left the art world, continuing to operate through an esoteric and ecological approach. Accor- ding to Cichoki, the positioning of OHO Group’s activities demonstrates a need for the art world to conduct a deep systemic transformation in the face of the environmental crisis; otherwise, according to Cichoki, we may end up in the scenario as described in the book The Penumbral Age. In “Toward and Ecological Singularity,” the researcher, artist, and curator Dennis Dizon draws on a personal historical connection with the climate. Growing up in Manila, the summer monsoon season was always a period of a mild climate catastro- phe. Dizon conducts a techno-ecological inquiry that re-imagines the potential of communicating through difference and by destabilizing existing logics through queer sensibilities—among humans, with nonhumans. By practicing thought-queering as a tactical exploitation of delusion, Dizon visualizes ecology of communication as an infrastructure that maps existing pathways to look for possibilities beyond a linear transmission of information. According to Dizon, by analyzing communicating as matter-ing, we may arrive at the concept of an “ecological singularity” as an experimen- 3 Issue 50 / June 2021 Editorial Extreme tal and experiential repositioning to transcend human exceptionalism. The artistic practice of the Rotterdam-based Spanish artist Lara Almarcegui is the focus point of “Lara Almarcegui and Extreme Unagitation” by cultural scientist and curator Helene Romakin. Over the last fifteen years Almarcegui has invested in the long process of acquiring underground iron ore deposits in order to prevent large companies from mining the land. She investigates the origins of construction materials by looking for their