Events
Kalokagathia: On the Possibility to Think Together the Aesthetical and Ethical in Curating | WCSCD 2020/21 Annual Lecture Series
The curatorial program What Could/Should Curating Do 2020 is proud to continue in 2020 with public program through lecture series
The second talk in the 2020 series is titled:
Kalokagathia: On the Possibility to Think Together the Aesthetical and Ethical in Curating
By Suzana Milevska
Date: November 28, 2020
Time: 12:00 pm Belgrade/ 10:00 pm Melbourne/ 07:00 pm Shanghai/ 6:00 am New York
Venue: zoom link ID: 985 237 3109
Live stream/Facebook link
In the lecture “Kalokagathia: On the Possibility to Think Together the Aesthetical and Ethical in Curating” Suzana Milevska will focus on the ongoing debate about the reciprocal relations and tensions between the categories of beautiful and good, between the form and content, and between other perpetual and artificially distinctions and dichotomies that emerged in art theory during modernism.
This lecture will address the questions of whether such dichotomies are and have ever been viable and how curating helps different art practices in overcoming the hierarchy between aesthetics and ethics over time. More specifically, this lecture explores the ways in which theories of curating brought back to mind the ancient Greek notion of kalokagathia, the intertwinement of aesthetics and ethics and with it, other ethical responsibilities, principles, and values that art forgot to address while giving privilege to its formal aspects.
Milevska argues that curating helps activating the catalyst potential of art without having to compromise its formal aspects, as a kind of leverage that redresses the otherwise imbalanced relationship between aesthetics and ethics. Curating in her view lends out to art its innocent and aspirational belief in such a balance because the ethical concerns in art theory and art criticism have long been toned down while form was prioritized over content. To discuss such critical position towards the phenomenon of curatorial – and to distinguish it from the curating as a profession – becomes ever more urgent in the precarious and dire pandemic period when the tensions between aesthetics and ethics, care, and self-care dominate our professional and everyday lives.
Portrait credit “photo Corn, Der Standard”
About Speaker
Dr. Suzana Milevska is a theorist and curator of visual art and culture. From 2016 to 2019 Milevska was Principal Investigator of the Horizon 2020 project TRACES, Polytechnic University Milan, and she curated its final exhibition Contentious Objects/Ashamed Subjects. She was Endowed Professor for Central and South Eastern European Art Histories at the Academy of Fine Art Vienna (2013 – 2015). She holds a PhD in visual cultures from Goldsmiths College London and in 2004 she was Fulbright Senior Research Scholar. She curated numerous international exhibitions such as; The Renaming Machine (2008-2011), Roma Protocol, Austrian Parliament, Vienna, and Call the Witness, BAK Utrecht (2011). She initiated the project Call the Witness–Roma Pavilion, Venice Biennale (2010-2011). In 2015 she curated the exhibition Inside Out: Not So White Cube, City Art Gallery, Ljubljana (with Alenka Gregorič). In 2012 she won ALICE Award for Political Curating and Igor Zabel Award for Culture and Theory. She published the books Gender Difference in the Balkans, 2010, The Renaming Machine: The Book, 2010, and On Productive Shame, Reconciliation, and Agency, SternbergPress, 2016.
WHAT COULD/SHOULD CURATING DO? (WCSCD)
WHAT COULD/SHOULD CURATING DO? (WCSCD) was initiated and funded in 2018 in Belgrade as an educational platform around notions of curatorial. From 2020 WCSCD started to initiate its own curatorial inquiries and projects that should unpack above -mentioned complexities keeping educational component as a core to the WCSCD.
The WCSCD curatorial program and series of public lectures have been initiated and organized by Biljana Ciric.
WCSCD 2020/2021 public program series has been done in collaboration with Division of Arts and Humanities, Duke Kunshan University and they co-stream all public lectures.
Strategic media collaboration is done with Seecult and they will co-host all public lecture series.
Project Partners
Media Partner
For more information about the program, please refer to www.wcscd.com
Project contacts: what.could.curating.do@gmail.com
Follow us:
FB: @whatcscdo
Instagram: @whatcouldshouldcuratingdo