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The Care Turn and Its Entanglements: Redefining Institutional Practices

I hold the table with my hands instead of the broken legs, exhibition view, Trafó Gallery, Budapest, 2022. Photo by: Dávid Biró

In the past decade, the number of exhibitions and public programmes focusing on the notion and practices of care and caring has multiplied[1]—we refer to this as the ‘care turn’. This tendency (or trend) has refocused the attention of institutions towards the politics of their procedures, their spaces, the language they use, and further, seemingly peripheral and minuscule, but, in fact, deeply political choices and solutions.

This shifted attention has contributed to a long and slow process of redefining certain art institutions and spaces, their relationship with their former and future audiences, as well as their role in the cultural and ecological ecosystem. This has entailed a heightened awareness of routines and practices to unlearn, in order to accommodate previously unmet needs both from the side of the audience, the artists, and other collaborators, as well as the employees of the institutions themselves. This has led to the adjustment of daily and long-term operations to different capacities, resulting in new institutional realities/imaginaries, in a new normal.

In this essay, we find it important to underline that even though the theme of care has become widespread in recent years[2]—especially since the pandemic—it is equally crucial to focus on the question of care methodologically. This second aspect highlights how institutions are structured in the present and how we can develop new ways of care-ful strategies, as curators and cultural workers. While shedding light on invisible, marginalized stories and untold narratives is still important, it is not possible to ignore the frameworks and structures in which they are taking place.

We look at these questions from three main directions: 1) the role of the curator and the institution; 2) the importance of rethinking who the audience is; and 3) the artists and other collaborators the institutions are working with. These three aspects obviously entangle with each other, but it can be fruitful to examine their main characteristics in order to establish a more inclusive and careful working environment.

Within the framework of the so-called ‘care turn’, the main question is how can the curator and the institution become a solidary partner, an ally? How can the notion of care be not just an empty buzzword or a simple topic, but something which is present on every level of collaboration with all the partners within the cultural sphere? We would argue that curating exhibitions and public programmes merely reflecting on the politics of health, illness, care, and vulnerability is not sufficient anymore. Understanding care in an expanded sense includes methodologically and holistically reconsidering the ways we work on every possible level.

We are also aware of the fact that often the lack of care-ful considerations is not a question of good intentions but of challenges concerning the social, economic, and class context. It is rather demanding to advocate and amplify voices while working in the cultural sphere, with the strong presence of precarious conditions (existential instability, working on projects without contracts, low income, self-exploitation, anxiety). This means that from the point of view of institutions, scarce resources and low funding may result in not being able to prioritize these matters accordingly. Hence, in many cases, there are no specialists dedicated to accessibility matters in-house, meaning it is often only one or a few people who take it on themselves in an institution to change the way the museum/space operates. Stepping away from this model, if capacities enable it, incorporating tactics of self-organization, unionization, and forging networks and partnerships can have the potential for a more sustainable and long-lasting effect in this domain, too.[3]

Finnegan Shannon, Do you want us here or not, Baltic birch, poplar wood, plastic laminate, School of Architecture, Carleton University, Ottawa, 2020. Photo by: Justin Wonnacott

According to curator Nataša Bachelez-Petrešin, “the curatorial and the institutional should meet in that caretaking endeavor, on the basis of inclusive and ethical understanding of their practices”.[4] Thus, she emphasizes the constant process of (self)-reflection within the institution: between colleagues, between all kinds of partners, highlighting the mediating role of the curator. This can be seen as a continuation of the institutional critique of the 2000s: besides investigating the role and function of the museum, the current focus is on examining its inner structures and work environment, its entanglements with not only the economic environment (sponsors, funding bodies), but most importantly with the audience as active and equal participants.

This should result in a thorough understanding of the complexities of inclusion and exclusion, on many—physical/spatial, mental, and metaphorical—levels. We propose that the term ‘radical hospitality’ is a strategy that describes this good practice in institutions, when it is not the institution which is at the top of the hierarchy anymore.[5]

This previously mentioned caretaking endeavour is directly connected to understanding our audiences: in the past decade, huge efforts have been made to create in every way (physically and mentally) more accessible institutions. Museums strive to appear as socially engaged venues hoping to extend their outreach, to invite and involve a more diverse public with different backgrounds, interests, and capacities. The curator has become the facilitator of this process, as a so-called ‘infrastructural activist’[6] who bridges the institution with the artists and the audiences. This also means that museums do not consider their audience anymore as ‘body-less’ or necessarily able-bodied, neuronormative masses of entities, but as mixed-abled individuals with various needs and capacities. This framework is also heavily influenced by decolonial theory, gender studies, and crip theory in order to deconstruct the young, healthy, male body wrongly and ableistically understood as the ‘typical’ representative of our society.

An institutional commitment towards accessibility can start with a thorough analysis of the characteristics of the online and physical spaces of the institution from a multitude of viewpoints, with the involvement of all the stakeholders and affected groups. Parallelly, a collection of applicable best practices and the creation of a short- and long-term plan of changes can occur. ​​It is important to communicate these planned changes and results towards the broader community around the institution, albeit without falling into the traps of carewashing[7]. Examples include: 1) providing access information about the given building and trying to make it more accessible. The latter can be quite challenging in the case of heritage buildings, where, for example, it is not possible to build a lift due to preservation issues. With the Budapest History Museum—Budapest Gallery team (being such a heritage site and older building)[8], we commissioned ÉFOÉSZ (the Hungarian Association for Persons with Intellectual Disability) in 2023 to conduct research into the institution and suggest even small changes (e.g., the removal of door thresholds) which could make our spaces more accessible.

Sensory room, Royal Alberta Museum, Ottawa. Photo by Julia Wong / Global News

Further examples include: 2) low-stimulus environments or specific timeframes for adjusted sounds/lights[9] (as opposed to immersive and loud installations which might be difficult to perceive by neurodivergent people) and 3) comfortable seating options (or the introduction of seating). 4) Using captions for videos is not only advantageous for people with hearing disabilities, but also for those who do not speak the language so well. In Hungary, where many people still do not speak English, we consider it a basic strategy to translate all video works into Hungarian. 5) Haptic guides/objects and the usage of Easy Language texts (a type of intra-linguistic translation to aid with easier understanding) for descriptions of works can also serve a broader public[10] that we primarily think of as challenged in any sense.[11]

Even though we think curatorial language and its vocabulary has legitimacy, we also argue that the implementation of Easy Language (EL) texts can soften the epistemic hierarchy between the closed bubble of the professional art world and the audience.

In the following section, we will shed light on some recent examples of the application of EL.

In recent years, a growing number of institutions and biennials have put emphasis on creating EL exhibition texts and provided thorough information in the form of sensory and access maps as well as visual stories on the online channels of the institutions, thus easing the planning of a visit. Examples include, among other events, documenta14 and documenta15 in Kassel, the 2024 edition of the Venice Biennale, and in the Central and Eastern Europe region the Kunsthalle Wien and the 2022 edition of the Matter of Art Biennial in Prague.[12] Hungarian examples include the exhibition Handle with Care (curated by Viktória Popovics and Rita Dabi-Farkas) at the Ludwig Museum in Budapest[13]. Here, the museum prepared an EL version of the curatorial concept and descriptions of some of the works on display, which was reviewed by accessibility expert and researcher Dr. Péter László Horváth, as well as Ilona Éva Sallai and Zsolt Cziráki, experts in intellectual disability. According to curator Viktória Popovics, the initial plan was to create an EL version of all the artworks, but due to the lack of time and financial resources, they could only prepare EL texts for a limited number of works. This suggests that in the case of temporary exhibitions on view for a few months, the thorough and time-consuming—as well as financially demanding—process of adapting texts to EL still happens rather sporadically.

Thus, in a growing number of institutions, specific teams and/or access advisers are working together, co-creating projects with the institution’s curatorial department to focus on the above questions and strategies. However, globally it is still not a very common practice. It usually falls back on the curator of a specific exhibition, the exhibition architect, or more commonly the organizer of the public programme (who is often the curator) to take care of these matters. Despite the fact that it is crucial to incorporate this mindset not only in the framework of specific thematic events but to the whole philosophy of the institution, whether someone embarks on this path is often a question of capacity.

The act of hospitality and solidarity can and should obviously target the participating artists too. Besides balanced collaboration with institutions (sufficient fees, copyright credits, and fair working conditions), it is also important to take into consideration the special needs of artists who, for example, experience chronic illness or other physical/mental challenges. The appearance of access riders in recent years—originally common in the music industry—serves precisely this function of articulating the conditions of the collaboration and the needs of the partners. The use of such access riders could lead to a stable and safe working situation, while also fruitfully challenging the hierarchy between the institutions and its partners by opting for a more flat hierarchy.[14]

How do you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can’t get out of bed?, exhibition view, Trafó Gallery, Budapest, 2022. Photo by: Dávid Biró

According to Mia Mingus, this creates a so-called ‘access intimacy’ between partners. As she summarizes: ‘Access intimacy is that elusive, hard to describe feeling when someone else “gets” your access needs. The kind of eerie comfort that your disabled self feels with someone on a purely access level. … It could also be the way your body relaxes and opens up with someone when all your access needs are being met.’[15]

These new types of collaborations might challenge the fast-paced institutional production system as well as the capitalist working environment. Yet, as these exhibitions often offer a different perspective towards temporality, this discrepancy should already affect the preparation of the project. Needless to say, this way of thinking also opens up the doors for curators who themselves live and work outside of the able-bodied and neurotypical society.

Flóra Gadó is a curator, researcher, and art critic. She has been curator at the municipal contemporary art centre Budapest Gallery since 2018. She holds a PhD in Film, Media & Cultural Studies from Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest (2021), and graduated in spring 2023 from the MA Curatorial Practice programme at the University of Bergen in Norway. She has curated exhibitions at MeetFactory (Prague), Július Koller Society and tranzit.sk (Bratislava), Trafó Gallery (Budapest), and as part of the OFF-Biennale Budapest. Her field of interest is centred around the politics and poetics of care, where she examines artistic practices which reflect on how our image of care—including care for ourselves, for others, and for our environment—has changed in recent decades. She is based in Budapest.

Photo by Barnabas Neogrady Kiss

Judit Szalipszki is a curator and cultural worker. Following her studies at Eötvös Loránd University and the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, she began working for contemporary art galleries alongside organizing art projects as a freelance curator. She has been a member of the curator collective BÜRO imaginaire since 2012. In 2017, she worked on the launch of the Neofuturist Dinner Series at Mediamatic in Amsterdam. As a curator, she is interested in the practice of regarding food as a medium in the frontiers of art/design and gastronomy, as well as practices centred around concepts of care, repair, and healing, and their interrelations with ecology. She currently works at Trafó Gallery in Budapest.


 

[1] See, for example: YOYI at Martin Gropius Bau, Crip Time at MMK Frankfurt, Handle with Care at Ludwig Museum—Museum of Contemporary Art Budapest.

[2] We as curators also work with this theme in our individual and collaborative projects, see for example: I hold the table with my hands instead of the broken legs,

How do you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can’t get out of bed?

[3] See, for example, Casco’s Unlearning Exercises.

[4] N. Bachelez-Petrešin: ‘Caretaking as (Is) Curating’ in: Radicalizing Care, Feminist and Queer Activism in Curating, eds. Elke Krasny, Sophie Lingg, Lena Fritsch, Birgit Bosold, Vera Hofmann. Publication Series of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, vol. 26, Sternberg Press 2022.

[5] Frame Contemporary Art Finland’s ‘Rehearsing Hospitalities’ project was a big inspiration for us regarding this term.

[6] A. Cachia, ‘“Disabling” the museum: Curator as infrastructural activist’, Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, vol. 2, no. 4, pp. 1–39.

[7] The Care Collective, The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence. Verso 2020, p.15.

[8] Where Flóra Gadó has worked as a curator since 2018.

[9] See, for example, the Wellcome Collection’s Relaxed Openings and Lights Up sessions.

[10] ‘The target group of Easy Language is a highly debated topic both internationally and in Hungary. The primary target group includes people who need assistance for completing intellectual tasks, for example, people with intellectual disabilities. … The target group could also include deaf people who use Sign Language as a first language and in practice learn the national language as a second language. Easy Language could also be useful for people with low language competence, for people with a different native language to the language of the Easy Language information source, or for children and elderly people” or for visitors with visual impairments, language learners or visitors who are less comfortable with lengthier, more detailed and academic wording.’ (P. Horváth, L. Ladányi, ‘Easy Language in Hungary’, Handbook of Easy Languages in Europe, eds. Camilla Lindholm, Ulla Vanhatalo. Frank & Timme, Berlin 2021, p. 229).

[11]See, for example, documenta 15’s Easy Read texts.

[12] See, for example: documenta14, documenta15, Tate Britain, the Venice Biennale, the Matter of Art Biennial, Kunsthalle Wien.

[13] Judit Szalipszki also adapted her exhibition concept and the handout to a more accessible version at Trafó Gallery, but there was no possibility of an expert review, which highlights the financial limitations of the endeavour.

[14] See, for example: Access Doc for Artists, Frame Finland’s access riders programme.

[15] Mia Mingus, ‘Access Intimacy: The Missing Link’.

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