2004

“A Self of One’s Own: Curatorial Essay.” In I. Aristarkhova and A. Kueh (eds.) A Self of One ’s Own. Singapore: LASSALLE-SIA College of the Arts, 2004. Pp. 1-8.

On many occasions in the past few years I have been referred to as being "not personal enough" in my approach to teaching and curating: as someone who builds up a distance rather than tries to destroy all boundaries and limits. These remarks were especially numerous when I was teaching women-students and working with women-artists. I prefer to call it not distance, but mediation, not border, but a spacing (or creating a space) - to breathe and create. Not to become like "one" group-team-circle, identifiable by its very image, not to think, speak or act in the same voice and out of the same convictions. Unfortunately this goes against the grain of what "education" has become - even in an art institution. How to make a space, to leave an opportunity, to disagree, without betraying some "code"? Some "Brotherhood" or "Sisterhood"? I strongly believe in creating and allowing distances to negotiate themselves in the process of teaching and curating. In this sense, the personal is not taken out but redefined, redistributed, transferred.

I am more interested in the effect—the unpredictable effect—of demarcated collaboration, rather than resorting to the shelter of common beliefs, the undisputed authority of ignorance and the bliss of the closed circle of "us", sustained by a clear definition of "them", whoever this "them" may be: a theory, a movement, a structure, a discourse, a society, a culture, a tradition, a certain group of people. The more unified and undifferentiated "them" makes it easier to sustain "us". In an educational institution it all comes down to A Politics of Teaching. That’s why studying, differentiating, knowing what we actually mean by a certain "them" and especially what "them" thinks of itself becomes a crucial point of departure if we are to create some other effect than constructing a comfortable swamp of "us".
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