Workshop23. Oktober 2019 - 20. Juni 2020
Klaus Speidel Philosoph, Kunstkritiker und Kurator, Wien
Narrating narrativity
Über das Erzählen erzählen
What are political and social functions of storytelling? What happens when facts become narratives? How do narratives constitute identities and vice-versa? Could it be that exhibitions function like narratives themselves? Could there be several equally relevant curatorial narratives for the same set of works?These are some of the questions the exhibitions based on the workshop “Narrating narrativity” will address. At a time when stories of religious calling fuel radicalization, competing land ownership narratives lead to wars and narratives of lethal threat motivate extremism and even mass shootings, investigating the relationship of stories to facts and identities seems particularly important. But beyond an exploration of narrativity in terms of the content of the works, each show will also reflect its own status as a narrative. Curating will be considered a narrative which is not uniquely determined by the works each exhibition brings together. Different narrations around the works in the shows will exist in parallel, some of which may even contradict each other. After all, artworks (even more than other things or facts) do not uniquely determine their interpretations and are in principle compatible with a multiplicity of different readings. The project thereby hopes to deconstruct the fiction of curatorial narratives that are a unique match for the works in an exhibition. The exhibitions will critically reflect both the role of storytelling and the curatorial position, questioning the position of curators and storytellers of all sorts: Telling it like it is! – the promise of populists everywhere – is a contradiction, because to tell is to interpret.
Klaus Speidel ist Philosoph, Kunstkritiker und Kurator und Associated Researcher am Labor für empirische Bildwissenschaft der Universität Wien. Er schreibt kunst- und bildtheoretische Essays sowie Kunstkritik für die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Der Standard, Spike, Art Newspaper und Parnass, sowie in Katalogen, unter anderem für das Centre Pompidou, die Schirn Kunsthalle, die Kunsthalle Tübingen, das Belvedere 21 und das mumok. Er hat in München (LMU) und Paris (Ecole normale supérieure, Paris X Nanterre) Philosophie und Kunstgeschichte studiert und in Philosophie an der Sorbonne in Paris zum Thema der autonomen Bilderzählung promoviert. Lehraufträge hatte er an der Sorbonne, der Université Paris Diderot, an Design- und Kunstakademien sowie an den Universitäten Konstanz und Wien. Von 2015 bis 2018 hat er das FWF Projekt „Zur experimentellen Narratologie des Bildes“ an der Universität Wien geleitet. Einige seiner letzten Ausstellungskurationen waren Zeig mir deine Wunde (gemeinsam mit Johanna Schwanberg, Dom Museum Wien ), Fragile Narratives ( Kunstraum Memphis, Linz ), Drawing after Digital (XPO Gallery, Paris) und De l’écriture de l’écriture (Galerie Vincenz Sala, Paris). Im Dezember 2019 kuratiert er Bosch und Pitié: Visionen des Jüngsten Gerichts (Gemäldegalerie der Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien).
Ausstellung "Vom Erzählen erzählen: Kunst & Kuratieren als Storytelling"