Overview

The group exhibition-form has become the primary site for curatorial experimentation and, as such, represents a relatively new discursive space around artistic practice. Paul O’Neill will describe how cumulative and expanding exhibition-forms can constitute an investigation into how the curatorial role is made manifest, through cohesive and cooperative exhibition-making structures applied through close involvement with artists during all stages of the exhibition production. This lecture will look at how a series of exhibitions create spatial relations between different planes of interaction for the viewer, and how three spatial categories of organisation upon which the group exhibitions can represent this in the final exhibition-form.

Paul O’Neill is an independent curator, artist and writer based in Bristol. Until recently, he was the Great Western Research Alliance (GWR) Research Fellow in Commissioning Contemporary Art with Situations at the University of the West of England, Bristol. Paul has curated or co-curated more than fifty exhibition projects. He is an associated visiting lecturer on the de Appel Curatorial Programme and on the MFA Curating, Goldsmiths, London. His writing has been published in many books, catalogues, journals and magazines and he is a regular contributor to Art Monthly. He is reviews editor for Art and the Public Sphere Journal and on the editorial board of The Exhibitionist and The Journal of Curatorial Studies. He is editor of the curatorial anthology, Curating Subjects (2007), and co-editor of Curating and the Educational Turn with Mick Wilson (2010), both published by de Appel and Open Editions (Amsterdam and London), and Locating the Producers: Durational Approaches to Public Art (Amsterdam, Vaiz, 2011) edited with Claire Doherty.