From curating contingency to curating disaster

Abstract

Dear Sonja

This is Jonida Gashi writing, Chair of the Department of Art Studies at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and the Study of Art in Tirana, part of the Academy of Albanian Studies. […] kindly gave me your email address. First of all, I hope you are doing well in the face of this pandemic. We are slowly beginning to emerge from a very strict and very nerve-wracking lockdown here in Albania. I mention this also because it connects to what I am writing to you about today. I'll get to the point without further ado. I am in the process of finalizing the list of contributors & contributions for the forthcoming issue of the Art Studies journal, which is one of two journals published by the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and the Study of Art (the other one being Anthropology). This will be the first issue of the journal under my editorship, with the thematic section focusing on the relationship between post-socialist/contemporary art and the archive, broadly understood. I would like to warmly invite you to be one of our contributors for the non-thematic section of the journal, which given the current situation will focus on the COVID-19 pandemic and the post-COVID-19 world. Specifically, I would like to invite you to further expand on your idea of "curating contingency", only this time beyond the scope of a single exhibition and in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. In your review of the Tirana Patience exhibition you define "curating contingency" as being akin "to arrang[ing] a situation in such a way that it is allowed to speak for itself". I must say that I like your definition very much, however, even as I was reading your review it struck me that a disaster, be it a 6.4M earthquake or an outbreak of a hitherto unknown virus that turns into a pandemic, defies or at least goes beyond being a mere contingency. (For instance, had the magnitude of the 26 November 2019 earthquake been a little bit higher and/or had its epicenter been slightly nearer to Tirana, there could have easily been no exhibition left to review.) To put this another way, while it is absolutely true that artists, curators, galleries and museums, etc., operate under increasingly precarious conditions, a disaster, as the COVID-19 pandemic has shown, will "quickly come crashing in" on anything and everything in its path. Incidentally, I think that this pandemic will give rise to what I am going to call "curating (the) disaster". My question to you is, what is the difference between "curating contingency" and what I have just called "curating disaster"? Or, when does "curating contingency" become "curating (the) disaster"? Also, what (if there is any) is the political usefulness of a curatorial approach that has the disaster as its horizon? Do let me know if pursuing this topic is of any interest to you. Alternatively, if there is another topic that you are dying to cover, do let me know about that as well!

Looking forward to hearing from your soon

Best wishes Jonida