Hang Li

The research sets up a value-sensitive exploration of the links between, first, curating as epistemic practices that involve creative co-working, and second, the questioning of neoliberal and modernist subjugation of science, technology and art on transnational scales. The research is driven by an awareness of curating's ill-equipped epistemic conditions, which hinder creative practitioners from identifying valuable questions to ask and address, especially when considering technoscience as a constituent of contemporary conditions. This research asks: How to envision a curating-in-formation that does justice in its epistemic practices if we identify technoscience as a key cultural, political and economic subject to understand and reshape translocally?

This practice-based research consists of four projects taking place in Britain and China and connecting with translocal agencies. They each attend to curating as knowledge territories manifested through pedagogy, curatorial practice, or the curators’ involvements in organisational on institutional planning. The research sees collectives and communities as epistemic agencies and takes situated and collaborative knowledge-making as the basis of the research method. Each project is actualised through collaborations with college students, independent curators, creative practitioners, small-scale organisations, larger-scale art institutions or higher art education departments. The main focus is to articulate and problematise the intersecting powers of domination that are shaping curating’s communal epistemic resources, which tend to prioritise particular groups of knowledge and knower and transfer misconceptions and violence beyond disciplinary and national borders. In particular, the practices seek to examine some proliferate approaches in curating, such as neoliberal entrepreneurship, tech-related innovation, and scientific and logistics management. The projects also scrutinise the ideas curating has borrowed from technology industries, such as Silicon-Valley-exemplified technological optimism and design thinking, and the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) industries’ top-down problem-solving mindset.

Weaving together feminist epistemologies, science and technology studies, social movement organisation and curatorial study, the research asks the following questions:

-   How to make tangible the link between curating as knowledge practices and curating's involvement in power and domination when intersecting with science and technology?

-  To untangle curating from the modernist and neoliberal science and technology, what it is to be negotiated and retooled in the epistemic resources of curating, and what knowledge should we take into account during a collective revisioning of curating? During the reenvisioning of curating, through what means can people from different knowledge terrains and localities work together justly?

-  Lastly, what art-ecological enabling conditions are needed for revising curating as knowing well together across differences, and what risks will these art-ecological changes generate?

The research will provide a groundwork for understanding the creative practices in China and the UK from translocal perspectives by considering their links with technoscience, knowledge and ethics. It will be of value to those who practice, teach, organise and fund the multidimensional terrains interlacing art, science and technology. It will also be of interest to those seeking creative and value-sensitive approaches to co-working across disciplines and nations.

For the Time Being is an experimental programme of photo-performance, conceived as a response to the everyday presence of social media. The project invites five international contemporary artists – Agorama, Agil Abdullayev, Feng Mengbo, Max Grau and Tamara Kametani – to reflect on the role of image sharing networks in their personal lives. Through a series of on and offline events and performances, the artists will interrogate the way in which popular apps like Snapchat, Whatsapp and Instagram have affected an understanding of intimacy, digital connectedness and notions of personal and collective memory.