Description
Curation is a political practice as much as it an ethical and relational one. In IR and politics, curatorial practices have been the focus of scholars interested in exploring its connections with militarism and war, as well as political violence and subjecthood, more broadly. In these analyses, curation is predominantly dealt with as an empirical phenomenon. In contrast, this paper asks what can be gained by engaging with curation as a methodological practice, building on insights from the turn to creative practice in aesthetic politics. This paper draws on practice-based (auto)ethnographic insights from curating a visual art exhibition in early 2024, in collaboration with an artist exiled from Myanmar. Through a feminist ethics of care framework, I consider how curation is both a political and relational practice with implications beyond art and culture alone. I explore how curation as method opens up wider questions of un-sitedness, further problematizing the constitution of fundamental aspects of ethnographic inquiry such as: participants/interlocutors, the field, and positionality. I argue that utilizing a reflexive, feminist approach to care as an ethical entry point to curation provides a unresolved framework for acknowledging the impossibility of fully embodying a practice of care in structures of violence, power, and hegemony - but an ethics that still centers the orientation to persist, as a political imperative.
