“I don’t believe curatorial or artistic practice is immediately a political act. I’m interested in how knowledge is constructed—to observe art on the micro level of a single artwork and see how it’s negotiated in the world. At the same time, everything we do, including art, is political, one way or another…
“Some [art fairs] are based on a naïve idea that if you get a large audience you can achieve more of a cultural impact… I think that in international exhibitions, more depth is needed—these exhibitions are usually researched and prepared too quickly for that depth to be achieved…
“I’m intentionally moving attention away from the auteur-curator… The group exhibition is in crisis because of too much attention paid to curatorial practice… I believe in intuition. Thinking about process is overly self-conscious, and analyzing everything contributed to the failure of post-modernism…
“In this age where everything is revealed, the only interesting sphere is what is invisible.”
— from Carolee Thea, interview with the curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, in On Curating: Interviews with Ten International Curators, ed. Thea and Thomas Micchelli (New York: D.A.P., 2007), 68–79.
See Christov-Bakargiev on Documenta 14: news.artnet.com/christov-bakargiev-on-documenta-14
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev.
