Livable Futures

Biography

The Task of the Curator is a student organization at the Ohio State University. Since 2015, the cross-disciplinary group of students has curated an annual exhibition of contemporary artworks and organized corresponding public lectures and artist talks.

We strive to create a productive space that generates enriching dialogues between the audience and young emerging artists. In the past, we’ve worked with artists such as Cole Lu, Ann Hirsch, Kara Gut, Lyndon Barrois Jr., Basma Alsharif, Ismaïl Bahri, and Ayman Nahle.

Q & A

What makes more livable futures for you?

At once, contemporary art curating challenges and celebrates modes of making, visual culture, and historical narratives. This idea is what The Task of the Curator seeks to address in our exhibition practice. We believe that encountering our world’s myriad of historical, social, and political issues through exhibitions make more livable futures. With that in mind, we aim to create spaces where we can engage with larger community in a dialogue of history and culture through art. In our exhibition this year, we respond to a set of pressing questions about the construction of historical narratives: how does one study, document and remember such histories while avoiding the reproduction of a colonial gaze? How does one navigate the politics of formulating and rendering history, while consciously acknowledging one’s position as an in/outsider? How does one disrupt the dominant history and represent the complex and multi-dimensional past? We believe livable futures – in consideration of the idea that the past, present, and future always dialectically inform one another – can be achieved by constantly questioning the way we understand the past, positing the notion of history as inherently unstable, constantly evolving, and sometimes even uncertain.

What are you reading, viewing, listening to right now?

In preparation for our Spring 2020 exhibition, we are viewing works that question the formation of history. The works of Sky Hopinka and Jonathan Herrera Soto, artists who will be in our show, expose the fragility of history, emphasizing contradictions and disjunctions all too often disavowed by official accounts. Sky Hopinka, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation, creates visually abstract yet compelling videos, which draw together personal and collective histories, rejecting the ethnographic gaze while negotiating his own relationship to the past. Jonathan Herrera Soto’s print works and installations investigate the relationship between collective memory and historical instances of state-sponsored violence and trauma. We’re also reading Hopinka’s Around the Edge of Encircling Lake - a collection of essays that explores complicated relationships of family, identity, and their intersections - along with other writers, such as Marjorie Agosin and Shailja Patel, whose work methodologically intervenes in how we think about and frame history as evolving questions and stories.

What practices are sustaining you?

As an organization, our exhibition practice is sustained by the intersection of our collective experiences and academic interests. We come together as a group with the common drive to critically think about the role of contemporary art and curatorship and to engage with art in a way that allows us to create new dialogues surrounding it. As such, collaboration and dialogue are at the core of our group’s curatorial method. The practice of acknowledging unknowability prompts us to question and imagine our place in establishing a new discourse in contemporary art, as we attempt to formulate alternative histories and new political subjectivities. Sky Hopinka writes,“I’m beginning to understand how to be a listener, without being a spectator, and knowing that it is a pursuit of process rather than certainty. […] A difference between learning and knowing is little more than asking questions without the entitlement of an answer and honoring the vulnerability in saying and hearing “I don’t know.””We believe the pursuit of process is at the core of our growth and sustainabili