Co-presented by the UBC Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory and to
elaborate: discentre for curatorial projects
Monday, December 4, 2017 @ 5:30 pm
Room 102, Frederic Lasserre Building
6333 Memorial Road, University of British Columbia
ahva.ubc.ca    toelaborate.org

Through this performative lecture, Paul ONeill reflects upon his curatorial practice,
collective exhibition-making, and the public as a constructed readymade. Taking his
recent multi-year exhibition project We are the Center for Curatorial Studies, Hessel
Museum (2016″18) as its starting point, this lecture reflects upon curatorial studies and
extends a conception of the curatorial to account for multiple sites of contact,
assemblages and gathering of diverse bodies and subjects as well as their discursive
connections. In doing so, it opens up a concept of the formation of the exhibition itself
as a potential mode of research action in its own process of becoming.
ONeill explores how different points of contact are made possible when exhibiting
becomes a form of escape for the artwork as much as for the viewer. Here, ONeill
identifies escape as a key concept for the curatorial, which defines itself as an act of
release”from something, somewhere, someone”accompanied by the wish to be
transformed. Escape implicates language itself as being complicit with our need to be
able to, at least, imagine ourselves elsewhere. How can a language of exhibitions,
therefore, enable us to think attentively about escape as a curatorial form?
Dr. Paul ONeill is an Irish curator, artist, writer, and educator. He is Artistic Director of
Checkpoint Helsinki. From 2013 until July 2017 he was Director of the Graduate
Program at the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS), Bard College. ONeill is widely
regarded as one of the foremost research-oriented curators and a leading scholar of
curatorial practice, public art, and exhibition histories. ONeill has held numerous
curatorial and research positions over the past twenty years and he has taught on many
curatorial and visual arts programs in Europe and the UK. ONeill is one of the most
widely published authors in the field, most notably with The Culture of Curating, the
Curating of Culture(s), published by MIT Press in 2012. He received his doctorate in
visual culture from Middlesex University, London, in 2007.