The Curators Academy 2018 was held at 72-13 from 24 to 28 January 2018. It brought aspiring curators together in Southeast Asia. Apart from participants who engaged directly with the trainers and artists, there were also spots for observerships.

MECHANICS

The participants who will be engaging in dialogue with trainers will be European curators as well as curators from the Arab world, the Americas and Africa. The trainers will bring specific perspectives based on their research and practice.

The Curators Academy will also curate a series of artistic processes/works presented by the artists themselves, articulating their perspectives through gestures, words, sounds, images etc. This provides a practical intense frame for reflection by the participants during the 5 days.

As The Curators Academy is interdisciplinary with a focus on performance, it will happen alongside different festivals of various genres every two years. The Curators Academy will be mobile in space and time, harnessing its itinerant and transient happening, as an advantage. In 2018, we start with ArtStage Singapore (contemporary art) but in time, we will synergize with other genres, performing arts, films, literature etc. This is important, as The Curators Academy will also need to be embedded in a larger context, to learn, to critique and to depart from.

SUSTAINABILITY

Every cycle of the Academy will be two years. The second year in each cycle will be focused on sustainability. Three projects from the best proposals of the participants will be produced into three local festivals of processes in 2019. As a start, Arts Network Asia will fund these three local festivals with a small grant. It is the hope that in the second year, the sharing process continues, harnessing these three local festivals as multiple epi-centres of doing, learning and discussing in the second year.

IN SUMMARY

The Curators Academy will focus on four different platforms:

– The inter-relationships amongst participants and trainers,

– A series of artist processes and works curated by The Academy to provide practical reflection for the participants

– The existing ecosystem which the Academy is embedded in during the first phase of the two-year cycle, eg Artstage Singapore in 2018 (contemporary art)

– Sustaining through local practice in the second phase of the two-year cycle, bringing the experience of the Academy into specific contexts to engender conversations between site, politics and art.

For details, visit The Curator Academy 2018.