Tom Holert

Tom Holert works as an in(ter)dependent scholar and curator with a focus on the politics and spatiality of knowledge in art and culture. He authored and co-authored various books and organized a number of exhibitions—such as Neolithic Childhood. Art in a False Present, c. 1930 (with Anselm Franke, 2018), and Education Shock. Learning, Politics and Architecture in the 1960s and 1970s (2021), both at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. In 2015 he co-founded the Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin (harun-farocki-institut.org). Recent book publications include Navigation beyond Vision (ed. with Doreen Mende, 2023) and ca. 1972. Gewalt – Umwelt – Identität – Methode (2024). An introduction to “art and politics” is upcoming. A selection of Holert’s writings can be found at https://independent.academia.edu/TomHolert

Curatorial Thought and Epistemic Politics

In an environment saturated with dehumanizing and supremacist articulations of conspiracy, lie and denial, with new late fascisms and their respective epistemologies not only on the rise, but in power, even a neutral-looking meta concept such as “curatorial thought” stands to be reassessed. How does “curatorial thought” fare when it is brought into novel relations with truth claims that are entailed under the pressure of autocratic rule, censorship and cultures of impunity? How can it be sustained when key premises of its aesthetic and cultural, let alone institutional politics are under siege, when equality and justice, feminist, decolonial, anti-racist, non-fascist and other modes of practice and living, art making among them, that have been pursued in its name, cease to be backed by even the most basic, if intrinsically problematic (neo-)liberal consensus regarding inclusion und diversity? The contribution will turn to elements of the epistemic politics (and policies) operating within the concepts of curating and the curatorial, starting with recent developments in the German context. This approach is bound to the expectation that looking into what the subjection to institutional, organizational, academic and other forms of (cultural) governance (conceived always in specific local, rather than global frameworks) may help to get a hold of the crisis—why the modes of intellectual reasoning and aesthetic practice that have been cultivated and taken for granted in the decades of mobilizations against (and collaborations with) neoliberal constituencies and infrastructures of state funding have come to appear even more vulnerable and discardable than before, i.e. in times when things haven’t been particularly great either. One of the guiding concerns of this inquiry is the role that an analytic of epistemic politics and epistemic disobedience could play in the reformulation of the “curatorial” and its “thought”.