Curation as a Social Practice: Counter-Narratives in Public Space

Abstract

The term “curation” has taken on a host of meanings beyond the museum context. While there are marked differences between its meanings – including the specific act of exhibition-making as well as the act of keeping and tending to an existing collection in a museum – we here specifically foreground curation as a social process of selecting and negotiating various forms of (embodied) performances in public, transcending institutionalized contexts such as museums. We argue that, when combined with the idea of counter-narratives, the concept of curation can elucidate aspects of social practices and open up a useful heuristic for the analysis of representations and performances in the public sphere. Since these practices make extensive use of imaginaries of the past, this approach is suitable for combining perspectives from public history and anthropology.