ECH Blog 2025

As we settled ourselves in for day two of the Experimenter Curators Hub, Rattanamol Singh Johal helped us gather thoughts and provocations from the previous day. Amongst these were Sharmini’s “the what if, how about, why can't we” approach to curating and Akansha Rastogi’ reminder that “institutions for all the wholeness and solidness that they project are volatile and unstable terrains”. That volatility must not read as a weakness but as the very condition that makes imagination and intervention possible. Institutions could be hosts rather than gatekeepers, holding people instead of holding power. The curatorial then is not fixed but felt, not procedural but personal. This spirit of attunement extended to Amal’s reflections on pedagogy as a spiral of listening. Amal described a methodology of return, “It’s a really simple set of ideas, but what it really shows is this endless space of listening; always coming back to the listening again.” Time appeared repeatedly - as a measure, as an ethic of care and commitment, a willingness to dwell and to return. Projects that “can last ten years,” Amal said, are not long because they are inefficient but because they are listening”.

Puja Vaish opened the day by speaking not of confrontation but of subtle negotiation within inherited systems. Her work at the Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation in Mumbai tests how the most colonial of institutions can become sites of speculative participation and minor histories. Drawing our attention to the importance of cultivating audiences through propositional encounters, she suggested that meaning is not bestowed but co-created. “We find ways to change how we write about it, how we present it”.

“I like looking at it as going through different portals of time, place, and context,” she says, describing the museum as a layered terrain that needs remapping. Vaish often begins with modest discoveries like a single tile, an archival label, or a gap in the narrative. A recent project began with a nondescript tile and unfolded into an investigation of Vitrum Studio, a radical 1950s glass and mosaic initiative. “We started digging further and found several clues that then put this story together,” she explains. The project opened up neglected histories of post-independence public art and its intersection with modern architecture and progressive ideals. She reflects on the collection not as static inventory but as a source of revelation where “even one work could unlock how we look at that time.”

Anne Barlow recollected her time at the New Museum in New York and its radical founding by Marcia Tucker, who sought to create “a more independent contemporary art museum” when existing institutions excluded certain kinds of experimental work. This history shaped Anne’s own outlook, especially her work with Museum as Hub, an
initiative that redefined curatorial space as collaborative and dialogic. “The hub,” she explained, “was to investigate new ways of connecting with other organizations, and engaging with audiences in ways outside traditional exhibition-making.” Barlow consistently returned to the notion that institutional growth is not necessarily expansion. “It can be about editing,” she stressed. “You’re going to leave at some point,” she said, “and the question becomes, what possibilities are you leaving behind?”

Fatima Bintou Rassoul Sy’s presentation was both a tribute and a testimony; an embodied curatorial reflection shaped by care, legacy, and collective knowledge. Speaking from Dakar as Program Director of RAW Material Company, she repositioned curation as a deeply relational, community-rooted, political practice. “People are more important than things,” she repeats, as a guiding philosophy inherited from RAW’s founder, the dear departed Koyo Kouoh.

Fatima traced RAW’s trajectory from its emergence in 2008 as a “mobile concept” to a critical institutional anchor in global contemporary art. RAW is not just a space for art but a platform for “symbiosis between its existence as an institution and its curatorial practice.” Curation here means education, archives, and public discourse. It means making room for stories “silenced in different ways,” particularly histories of African geographies, diasporas, and displacement.

On trust, she reminded us how “communities are organized and they actually know how to handle the challenges they are facing. The learning system is the other way around” in the reversal of curator as learner and not the knower. Rather than hoarding resources, RAW re-distributes opportunity as a political act. The structure is circular, not hierarchical.

Opening with a gesture of vulnerability, Justine Ludwig said “Maybe I need to talk about curatorial practice in a different way, who I am, how I exist in the world. I usually sit as a representative of the institution I serve.” Tracing her path from a DIY artist collective in Cincinnati to her current role as Executive Director of Creative Time in New York, she emphasizes the tension between center and periphery, formality and experimentation. Her early projects at CS13 were built on resource pooling and community care. “We pooled what little money we had together to make shows happen often in abandoned spaces.”

At Creative Time, Justine stewards an ethos of responsiveness and radical imagination. “We start with the provocation. What is your dream project that nobody else is crazy enough to take on?” Projects like Tender by Jill Magid exemplify this audacity where pandemic-era pennies with the phrase “The body was already so fragile” and circulating them through bodegas embedding art in the infrastructure of crisis. She positioned art as both “burn and balm,” asserting its role in collective healing, and counter imagination. “Art holds us in our humanity,” she concluded. “It allows us to practice a future that perhaps we hope to be a part of.”

As we headed into the final segment with an open discussion, Rattanamol invited us to reflect not just on the presentations, but on what may have remained unsaid: “I wanted to just hear about perhaps what this experience and this thinking back has changed for you in some ways; things that you want to say differently than in your presentations.” Anne responded by reflecting on the shifting notion of “peership” across her institutional experiences. “You can think together, you can be more adventurous. Those taught me that you really interrogate what you're doing.” Amal emphasized the value of invisibility: “There’s always a demand for spectacle even when you have nothing to give. But the power of not being surveilled allows for many things.”

To a question on, “How can we decompose the violent systems we’ve been trained to inhabit, and work in liberatory ways in spite of?” Justine called failure “a beautiful and generative space,” and reminded us that “Sometimes grief is perpetual but it’s what allows you to do the work you do.”

Fatima offered the Wolof concept of “mbokk” which “is not just your neighbor. It’s everyone you hold space for even beyond your geography,” she explained. The hub, as with each edition, ends with an invitation to think with each other, and “to carry”. To not know and yet continue. To hold the speculative alongside the situated. To make room. And in making room, to imagine a future unfinished, urgent, audacious and shared.