Gürsoy Doğtaş

Media
Curating

Requirements
None

Who talks at exhibitions: who with whom, who about what? In times of cultural schism, this question is more relevant than ever. At any rate, it has accompanied Curatorial and Exhibition Studies from the very beginning. This is the starting-point, focusing on autobiographical research as part of curatorial praxis and supportive strategies. Students will learn self-empowerment practices in the visual arts and its archives – familiar from (post-)migratory literature.

Gürsoy Doğtaş, who grew up in Germany as a child of "migrant [or guest] workers", has worked for many years a guest curator for art exhibitions, festivals and other events. The concept of "guest", from the time of the German labour recruitment agreement (1955), has undergone change with this appropriation in the cultural context, passing under different circumstances into curatorial praxis. Cultural institutions have failed several generations of people with a history of migration – whether in their programme, as public or as personnel. Working together with these people means to recognise their suffering and at the same time to highlight alternatives.

Resistance to institutionalised forms of memory and their gaps is forming; solidarity is finding expression. From this perspective we will look at the archives of migration and develop strategies for engagement and research for artists who are still hardly known in the institutional mainstream. How can these artists be associated with the anti-racist struggles of the so-called migrant worker generation or present refugees? How does this legacy persist in contemporary cultural alliances? What is our role as curators and cultural workers?

On the basis of historical and contemporary exhibitions, students will learn to reflect on their own role as guest or host, as well as to translate knowledge of migrant situations into exhibitions, festivals or other cultural programmes for often "white-standardised" art institutions. How can I, as an "ethnologist of myself" (Annie Ernaux) recognise, name and reject the excluding structures of the art world? In this course, we will learn from other protagonists, initiatives for minorities, movements for solidarity – and above all, from one another. The course includes a trip to Vienna, to  visit various exhibitions and archives of migration.