Cristina Vasilescu

I am drawn to the potential of the curatorial to explore new ways of thinking, working and mapping and am particularly concerned with developing collaborative models of practice between different fields of knowledge. My projects at the Royal College of Art demonstrate my commitment to collaborative working that emphasises on communal, critical and agonistic knowledge. These projects have also had at the core programming, which aims to blur the boundary between the audience and artists/practitioners by fostering non-hierarchical working structures and exchanges. One example is the collaborative Graduate Project Turn The Tide which brought together exhibition making and programming by questioning them and thus bringing to the fore the role of the audience, as such the project is at its full potential only if its ownership is collectively shared. 

I am also interested in the overlaps between the curatorial as practice and the theoretical frameworks that could be applied to it. My recent research -A case study of three independent art spaces in Bucharest and how they approach the precariousness of of the contemporary art context- investigates the under-addressed perspective of contemporary art and the curatorial of the Romanian setting, one of the former Soviet bloc countries. It advances connections between the precarious funding conditions alongside the emergence of curating as short-term generative curatorial nodes amidst a not yet existing infrastructure.