Kl. 13.00–14.00 Stofa 55 (3. mars) (EN)
Alexander Roberts 
Ásgerður G. Gunnarsdóttir  
Curating as a practice in the visual arts is not short on discourse and history. It is a field of activity that permanently sits under the critical microscope unfurling fold after fold of political, philosophical and ethical discussion points. Curating, as an expanded practice, has also become no less applicable in daily life. One can curate anything from the process of selecting images for an instagram feed to the process of choosing what beers should be available at a local bar. Curating in the performing arts however remains largely under theorized as a practice.
 
There are some texts written on the topic from writers such as Corina Opea, Florian Malzacher and Tea Tupajiç, there was also a performance entitled The Curators’ Piece by Tea Tupajiç dealing with curation in the performing arts, and at least within the Nordic region there are an increasing number of PhD candidates writing their PhDs on curating, programming, and festival-making within the performing arts. Still, it is a field of discussion that remains in its infancy around the world – and in Iceland the discussion is nearly non-existent.
 
We – Ásgerður G. Gunnarsdóttir and Alexander Roberts – have been curating various programmes and platforms together here in Iceland since 2009 (artFart, The Public Space Programme, Choreography Reykjavik, Artist-on-Loan, Reykjavik Dance Festival, Everybody’s Spectacular, Super Social Space, A! Performance Festival in Akureyri, among others), with a number of interrelated curatorial goals recurring throughout. We are now ready to reflect on this work with more rigour and we would like to use this platform as part of that process.  
 
For this talk specifically – we will focus on Iceland’s relationship to ‘second-hand-knowledge’ (imported ideas and practices) and how this phenomenon has informed the ways in which we approach curating. Specifically this talk will reflect upon how ‘second-knowledge’ as a phenomenon has informed our conceptual and methodological approach towards ‘localising the international’, our ‘insistence on repetition’ and our recurring ambition to make marginalised voices and practices ‘pop’.