ABSTRACT

This chapter considers how participation and collaboration, in becoming familiar tools to make connections in informing curatorial work and building communities, prompt a discussion of what an individual’s role might be within such practices. It focuses on the breaking down of a binary contrast: that between curator as author in generating the idea of the exhibition and overseeing its delivery; and the subsequent work of the learning and engagement curator in sharing this with audiences. The chapter compares ideas generated in socially-engaged art practice with their general applicability. The testimony of participants has been both affecting and powerful, and making meaningful connections with individuals through participative curating can lead to the possibility of a new social body. A curatorial enterprise requiring different skillsets, from managing buildings to fundraising, from commissioning artists to developing interpretation, from handling loans to maintaining AV and digital hardware, requires collaboration.