Søren Andreasen: ontotech/supermarket ceiling, 2009.
Join us for a symposium around and about transparency - a contested norm and an historical, yet undead, notion.
On Friday 16 May 2025, we invite the public to debate the dynamics and relationality of the concept together with a group of specially invited curators, artists and scholars. Through this lens, we will share experiences and analyses of contemporary art, its conditions and presuppositions.
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ABSTRACT
As a promise of accountability and openness, transparency is fundamental to institutionality and democratic reason: it carries or signals universality and equality. In the field of culture, it designates inclusion, audience access and participation.
In visual art, the emerging profession of curating embraced transparency as a central value in the 1980s and ‘90s, reflecting its broader ascent in the language of business and public administration. In hindsight, it already played a role to ‘demystify’ exhibition-making in the late 1960s, when a shift away from traditional museological approaches made the curator and (other) relations of production behind art exhibitions actively appear.
If transparency is understood as self-explanatory, a given, it is at the same time coloured by context. The promise of transparency is entangled with social processes and dialectical tensions that may contradict it. For instance, it is a staple of decolonial theory that the oppressed subject has a right to opacity. Seen from the point of view of the ethics and poetics of difference, deferral and embodiment, enactments of transparency often gravitate towards totality and that which is expedient, already said and done.
In this way, the symposium does not propose transparency as a conclusive or singular theme, but as a focal point that comes and goes to address some of the cases and histories, practices and situations that are relevant to the current state of contemporary art.
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PROGRAMME
10.00: Welcome and introduction by Lars Bang Larsen and Amalie Brandt
10.30: Keti Chukhrov: “From the crisis of emancipation theories to contemporary art’s demise”
11.05: Andrea Büttner: “On shame”
11.40: Break
12.00: Paz Guevara: “Unsettling the foundations of curatorial discourse”
12.35: Stéphanie Bertrand: “Curating, transparency and impact in a polarized world”
13.10: Lunch Break
14.15: Francesco Manacorda: “The cybernetic museum: experiment or hubris?”
14.50: Laurence Rassel and Signe Frederiksen: “Polyphonic instituting – dialogue within and outside institutions”
15.25: Break
15.45: Carolyn Lazard: “Access as the means against the ends”, with response from Anne Kølbæk Iversen
16.20: Søren Andreasen: “The anarchic mist”
16.55: Break
17.15: Awa Konaté: “Towards another Nordic curatorial practice”
17.50: Closing reflections by Lars Bang Larsen and Amalie Brandt
18.00: End of symposium
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PRACTICAL INFO
Symposium: Transparency and Its Shadows
Curated by PhD Fellow at AHC and Aarhus University Amalie Brandt, and Lars Bang Larsen, Head of Art & Research at AHC.
16 May 2025
10.00 – 18.00
Art Hub Copenhagen
Thoravej 29
2400 Copenhagen NV
Tickets for the symposium are 50 kr. and include lunch, coffee and tea. They can be bought through Billetto here.
Please notice that the seminar will be in English.
Accessibility at Thoravej 29 can be found here. We will update the program as soon as possible with information about accessibility for those who are deaf and hard of hearing.
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The symposium is supported by the Danish Arts Foundation.
