Işın Önol

Işın Önol is a curator and writer based in New York. Until recently, she served as Director of Curatorial Research at the School of Visual Arts, Curatorial Practice MA Program. Since 2009, she has worked as an independent curator, primarily in the United States, Austria, and Turkey. From 2006 to 2009, she was Director and Curator of the Elgiz Museum of Contemporary Art, Istanbul.

Between 2014 and 2023, Önol was a research scholar at the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University and a member of Women Mobilizing Memory, a multiyear feminist collaboration uniting scholars, artists, and activists from Chile, Turkey, and the United States. As part of this initiative, she co curated exhibitions including Collaborative Archives: Connective Histories (New York) and Mobilizing Memory (Istanbul, Vienna, and Madrid). Her research explores the intersections of archival knowledge and oral histories through collaborative art practices.

Önol is the co founder and director of the Nesin Art Village, an independent art school in Şirince, Turkey. She has organized more than 60 exhibitions internationally, including Bilgé: Lifespan of a Horizontal Line (Sapar Contemporary, New York), Imagine Repair (Zip Code Memory Project, New York), A Knot in the Throat (Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna), and When Home Won’t Let You Stay (Vienna). She also co curated editions 4, 5, and 8 of the Sinopale International Sinop Biennial and most recently co curated the main exhibition of Vienna Art Week 2025.

Önol has taught at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and Montclair State University and has lectured at institutions including Columbia University, Parsons School of Design, New York University, and the School of Visual Arts. She is currently a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

What the Exhibition Cannot Archive: Learning Through Curatorial Engagement

Curatorial practice, particularly when grounded in sustained engagement with artists, collaborators, and communities, can give rise to forms of learning that rarely become part of curatorial discourse, archives, or pedagogy. Rather than emerging solely through research or professional expertise, this learning develops through relationships, conversations, negotiation, and direct engagement with lived experience. It unfolds gradually, often unpredictably, as collaborative processes reshape not only exhibitions but also curators’ understanding of the people, histories, and realities with whom they work.
A particular mode of learning becomes possible through sustained curatorial engagement with others. What kinds of understanding emerge through long-term relationships, and why do they so rarely become part of the ways curatorial knowledge is shared and transmitted? While exhibitions are carefully documented and interpreted, the relationships through which they come into being often remain invisible. What is most often preserved is the exhibition itself, rather than the relationships, decisions, uncertainties, and negotiations through which it came into being. As projects conclude, exhibitions and their outcomes enter institutional memory, while the relational processes that shaped them, and through which new understandings emerged, often do not.
Rather than proposing a universal methodology, the discussion considers whether this relational learning can, or should, be articulated without reducing it to a fixed set of methods. It asks whether the understandings that emerge through sustained engagement with lived experience constitute a form of knowledge, understanding, or something else entirely that sits alongside, rather than in opposition to, disciplinary research. Ultimately, it asks what possibilities are lost when the conditions through which learning emerges remain far less visible than the exhibitions they make possible.