ABSTRACT
This chapter starts from the observation that merely pointing out the broadening scope and prevalence of curating as a practice, the curator as a professional role and ‘the curatorial’ as a theoretical discourse, overlooks some of the nuanced differences and shifts that occur in different exhibition constellations and curatorial fields, and fails to address reasons for the contemporary allure of the curatorial. It refers to a particular understanding of curatorial practice, less as an object-based and visual form of showing than as a reflection on curating itself as well as on its infrastructures, epistemologies and power relations. The chapter discusses two central conceptual phenomena indicated in the title of this contribution: recursivity and the curatorial, before analysing the ways in which these theoretical distinctions can be made sense of with respect to the ethnographic field-sites in Berlin. These sites are themselves overlapping and expanded fields of curatorial practice, crossing the precarious membranes of museums, heritage and contemporary art.
