Serubiri Moses

Serubiri Moses is a Ugandan-born curator, editor, and teacher known for his rigorous engagement with global art history. Moses’s work as a curator draws on alternative methods of collective teaching, listening, and loitering, and engages with the notion of “artists without art”—artists who have been censored. His career between 2011 and 2017 consisted of travel for conferences, residencies, and fellowships to Asia, Europe, Africa, and Latin America.

Travel as Method

Looking at this topic of curatorial thinking in our post-global moment, from the point of view of where we are today, that is, with the ongoing attack against international students at American universities, and the active destruction of DEI or diversity, equality and inclusion initiatives, or similarly the questioning of African countries’ autonomy over mineral resources, it is clear that we need to rearticulate the role that curating and art administration in art markets and ecosystems plays to reinforce what I view as the politics of privatization at this juncture. In this presentation, I borrow from curator Bisi Silva’s lecture at Creative Time Summit in 2012, as well as Okwui Enwezor’s essay “Travel Notes” from 1997, to speak to both these curators’ thinking on questions that concern privatization as a model of operation within art markets, and ecosystems. It is my view that neither Silva nor Enwezor were invested in the cheap multiculturalism that emerged in the 1980s, simultaneous to the rise of structural adjustment and privatization initiatives from the World Bank and IMF. The total privatization of the art markets and art ecosystems has led to the kind of changes we see today in which the rise of censorship and the establishment of art as a commodity on the international stage. Enwezor rejected specific multiculturally designed commodities of the Rainbow nation; while Silva, by focusing on the question of lack, rejected the illusion of progress that early globalization brought to Nigeria. It appears that the moment that we are in today is invested in shaping the market landscape according to clear divisions; and thus, what might learn from an approach to curating that was already resisting easy commodification and privatization as a model in the art ecosystems, art markets, including museums and art institutions.