(            ) What Cannot Be Omitted by Parenthesizing

Sunjoo Choi (DCW 2021)

At the second seminar of the 2021 DOOSAN Curator Workshop, we engaged in a multifaceted conversation with Jiyon Kim, the director of d/p, and revisited the role of the curator with “curation,” “commission,” and “mediation” as keywords. Kim opened the seminar by introducing and defining various “mediator” roles that exist in the world of art and culture, including that of the curator, by presenting a case from the research group Creative Mediators, abbreviated as CM. The term curator today has expanded from the more traditional and academic concept of someone in charge of objects or works of art in a museum or art gallery to refer to someone who captures certain phenomena and selects and restructures diverse questions. We discussed the definition of “mediator” by asking if the term curator, falling under the category of mediator, is not a noun with a concrete definition but rather an adverb, enriching the meaning of a sentence by modifying different parts of speech.

An introduction of the curator’s various abilities, centering on a variety of cases, followed. First, Kim addressed the skills required in commissioned curating by discussing the examples of Haein Art Project (2013), Gtummo in Nakwon (2015), World Script Symposia 2016: Haengnang, and the Jeju Biennale 2017. She discussed how different agents including state institutions, local communities, and commercial spaces should communicate and compromise with one another. She also used examples of independent curation to stress that a fundamental quality of the curator is to ask oneself whether one has stories to tell or questions to ask. Lastly, she wrapped up the seminar by emphasizing that a curator should always be cautious of one’s sense of what makes a good work being dulled.

Through this seminar, we were able to think about the role of the curator, which can neither defined singularly nor completely omitted, just as a good sentence always includes a suitable adverb.