Mick Wilson

Prof. Mick Wilson is Professor of Art and Director of Doctoral Studies, HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg, Sweden; Co-Director of the Centre for Art and Political Imaginary (CAPIm, 2024-2028), at KKH, Stockholm and HDK-Valand; and Guest Professor at Latvian Academy of Art and SVA, New York. He is the author of On Discourse and the Curatorial (Berlin: Floating Opera Press (2025). Recent articles include "Publicness as problematic", Art & the Public Sphere 13.1, (2025); and "Disagreeable Inquiries: Curating as Knowledge Work", The Curatorial, (2025). Current collaborative research includes: L’Internationale: Museum of the Commons, (EACEA); “We that swarm among the living and the dead” (CAPIm); and The Fountain: An art-technological-social drama (FORMAS 2020). Recent co-edited volumes include: with Cătălin Gheorgh (2025) Curating beyond Exhibition: On the post-exhibitionary condition in a post-political; with Gerrie van Noord & Paul O'Neill (eds.) Kathrin Böhm: Art on the Scale of Life, Sternberg (2023); with Henk Slager (eds.) Expo-Facto: Into the Algorithm of Exhibition, EARN (2022), with Cătălin Gheorghe (eds.) Exhibitionary Acts of Political Imagination (Editura Artes/ArtMonitor, 2021); with Nick Aikens et al. (eds.) On the Question of Exhibition (PARSE, 2021) and with Paul O'Neill, Lucy Steeds, and Simon Sheikh (eds.) Curating After the Global (MIT, 2019).

Educational Impositions: From Curatorial Discourse to Imaginaries of the International

The presentation opens with a reflection on curatorial educations located in different national contexts. I will consider the way that teaching on these, my own and that of colleagues, often becomes a vector for certain discursive norms, reproducing and transferring speaking-writing habits characteristic of the international (anglophone) art system. This reflection will build partly on some ideas rehearsed in the (2025) essay On Discourse and the Curatorial. This leads to a consideration of how the key trope of internationalism is variously constructed in contemporary curatorial discourses. The question is anchored with specific reference to curatorial education and practice. I will then proceed to describe some of the multiple imaginaries of internationalism that criss-cross the contemporary curatorial field (ranging from regional constructions of the Nordic and the Baltic — under which we convene—to vast transnational constructions of the planetary and the post-Global; from renewed engagements with Pan-Africanism to excavations of Soviet internationalism and the Non-Aligned Movement; from partitioning of the world into Global South and North to transhistorical and trans-spatial figurations of indigeneity.) The wider backdrop to these developments is the destabilisation of older constellations of international relations and alliances in an era of increasing resource competition, militarisation, war, genocide, and climate collapse. The presentation asks what might be at stake in this distribution of internationalist imaginaries across the curatorial field, and specifically how these stakes manifest across different curatorial educations.
This research is based on collaboration with Dr. Nick Aikens at the Centre for Art and the Political Imaginary, supported by the Swedish Research Council.