Symposium: Transparency and Its Shadows
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Name:
Signe Frederiksen , Søren Andreasen , Stéphanie Bertrand , Paz Guevara , Laurence Rassel , Keti Chukhrov , Francesco Manacorda , Carolyn Lazard , Andrea Büttner , Amalie Brandt , Lars Bang Larsen , Awa Konaté , Anne Kølbæk Iversen
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Date:
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Format:
Billeder
On Friday 16 May 2025, we invited 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.
Contributors: Keti Chukrov, Andrea Büttner, Paz Guevara, Stéphanie Bertrand, Francesco Manacorda, Laurence Rassel, Signe Frederiksen, Carolyn Lazard, Anne Kølbæk Iversen, Søren Andreasen and Awa Konaté.
The symposium was curated by PhD Fellow at AHC and Aarhus University Amalie Brandt, and Lars Bang Larsen, Head of Art & Research at AHC.
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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.
