The Norient Special Politics of Curatorship is based on the book of the same name. It gathers essays, academic articles, poems, interviews, and photo essays seeking to disentangle the ubiquitous term curation from any formalized definition and to overcome the idea of having centralized control over an artistic product. The 32 contributors attempt to open up the term from a linear and often single-voiced method, offering to understand curating also as a queer, non-binary, or a mundane, individual activity (tabs on the browser, personal YouTube channel or radio channel switching, TV zapping) that includes one’s own experiences and perceptions. Edited by Philipp Rhensius and Monia Acciari.

  • Academic Text by Thomas Burkhalter
    What role and methods can a Western person adopt when curating contemporary music from a global perspective? In his ongoing endeavor to understand the world through music and sound, Norient founder Thomas Burkhalter suggests 13 curatorial principles. Read the first six here.
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    Book
    What happens to curatorial practices when treated as multi-voiced, pluralistic, and process-based? The 32 contributors from all over the world, ask what curatorship could be when it is freed from its elitist notions.
  • Short Essay by Basak Senova
    Curating exhibitions has often been a one-dimensional endeavor. Here, the curator Basak Senova suggests an approach that prioritizes constant feedback between artists and audience, as well as improvisation.
  • Photo Essay by Monia Acciari
    In this photo essay, Monia Acciari visualizes a curatorial process attempting to reconcile intimate and public absences, loss, and creativity.
  • Short Essay by Gisela Swaragita
    As a child, our writer made mixtapes out of recorded radio shows. In this personal essay, she explains how she disobeyed the station’s official music curation.
  • Essay by Philipp Rhensius
    Even at a time of fragmented digital selves, people often align with a single self-description, suppressing their multiplicities. In this essay, the writer and musician Philipp Rhensius attempts to re-sample the embattled term (self-)curation, in search of its supposed emancipatory potential.
  • Essay by Monia Acciari
    How can we decentralise the power of curatorial spaces? According to our writer, we need to take into account irrationality as a creative process.
  • Essay by Rebecca Salvadori
    What happens when curation resists any form of guidance? For Rebecca Salvadori, one of the curators of Norient Festival, this led to a silent rush of creativity. A claim for positive disorientation.
  • Short Essay by Sulgi Lie
    How does sound shape visual perception in a movie? Watching «Memoria» by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, film scholar Sulgi Lie is shaken by a heavy bass that has no visible source.
  • Short Essay by Radha Mahendru
    How does a body-self express itself in a digital sphere? In her reflection on a 12th century poem and the singing at anti-CAA protests in India, our writer reassesses the body in pandemic times.
  • Essay by Chafic Tabbara
    Selecting a film for a festival requires us to look beyond pure preference. In this essay, Chafic Tabbara, film critic and co-artistic director of «NFF 2022», shares his thoughts on curating films for cinema in the age of online streaming.