Globetrotting curators

With the remarkable rise in the number of art fairs, biennales, art summits, museums and private galleries as well as ever evolving artistic practices, the role of the curator has become indispensible. In recent years, we have come to redefine the meaning of curating. Curatorial practices have become an art in their own right and curators today have come to occupy a far more important role in the production of exhibitions. 
This week I caught up with three curators Diana C Betancourt, Shanay Jhaveri and Birgid Uccia that never seem to sit still for too long. I talked to them about their individual approach to curating and more specifically about how travel influences their work. 

Diana C Betancourt 
Travel is important to my curatorial process. An interesting question raised by the Macarthur Foundation is - “Do highly creative people move more than others, or does moving make people more creative?” In the last four months, I have been to London, Berlin, Paris, Naples, Dijon, Brussels, Basel, Zurich, Stromboli, Orleans, and Tours doing studio visits and conducting research for sculpture parks and public commissions, the 2016 Dhaka Art Summit, some upcoming exhibitions in India, and for the Samdani Collection. I did over 100 studio visits this summer, and I’m excited to be bringing a show from Palais de Tokyo to India and to be bringing some of these artists to Bangladesh over the next two years. While watching a film screening at Wiels in Brussels, I had a breakthrough for an exhibition I’m working on about Los Angeles and Mumbai at Project88 in 2015. In the next six months, I will be in Oslo, Paris, Munich, London, Dhaka, Singapore, Madrid, New York, Sharjah, Dubai, Colombo, Jaffna, and Shanghai continuing this research.

Shanay Jhaveri 
My interest in travel and how it informs my practice as a writer and curator goes beyond my own personal itinerary of movements. Over the past five years, I have developed a body of sustained research, which concerns itself with travel yes, but also ideas of cosmopolitanism and global art histories. I have done this by investigating the journeys made by Western artists and filmmakers to India, and Indian artists abroad, but furthermore looking at the appropriation, transmission and exchange of ideas at another less obvious level, that is, through exhibition and institutional histories. These findings and cross cultural encounters have collected themselves in two books that I have edited Outsider Films on India: 1950 -1990 (The Shoestring Publisher, 2010) and Western Artists and India: Creative Inspirations in Art and Design (Thames and Hudson, 2013). I have further explored these notions in my 2013 exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo Companionable Silences and my film programme Questions of Travel for the first LUX/ICA Biennial of Moving Images in 2012. My current show, In Dialogue: Amrita Sher-Gil and Lionel Wendt at Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai continues this approach looking at the cosmopolitan lives of two artists who arbitrated between disparate cultural and geographical spaces. 

Birgid Uccia 
Travelling for me is like creating a dialogue between various cultures and deepening it further by curatorial interventions. One of my most recent projects includes the exhibition by Nalini Malani in a museum of local history in the Engadine valley in the Swiss alps. Nalini's practice, focusing on transcultural issues, responded perfectly to the vernacular architecture of this region and its rich cultural heritage. So did Subodh Gupta's site-specific installation in a church in the same region, an installation that signifies the widespread spiritual practice of relating the secular with the ritual. 
Reaching multi-cultural audiences outside of the white cube is a kind of traveling for me, for it is about crossing borders. A voyage is not so much about visiting places, but in the sense of Marcel Proust, beholding the universe through the eyes of another.