Curating in a Changing Climate: Situated, Mediated, Dependent

Article Curating in a Changing Climate: Situated, Mediated, Dependent by Taru Elfving (CAA) is published in the anthology Why Exhibit? vol. 2 – On Curating Photography.

…Images can make visible and bear witness, while nurturing awareness of the complex interrelations between representations, image-makers, and viewers. However, they depend on contextualizations and interpretations to do so. For example, what has been called “shifting baseline syndrome” reminds us of how in nature conservation, alongside scientific knowledge, historical perspectives—composites forged of images, memories, and stories—on what are recognized as non-degraded environments direct determinations of what is worth protecting. It is therefore critical to seek out that which is disregarded by the dominant gaze and its narratives, so as to counteract the erasure and ignorance underpinning colonialist terra nullius logic and the extractivist violence it has sanctioned; and to be attentive to the backgrounds and edges of visibility, which can indicate the limits and biases of technologies and systems of knowledge. Someone deemed irrelevant may well look back at us from these shadows and voids of anthropocentric, heteropatriarchal, and racial techno-capitalist modernity (…)

Based on my curatorial fieldwork on the island of Seili, haunted by its myriad specters of care and consent, I would argue that such situated caring knowledge in curatorial practice calls for zooming in and out of the place, as well as focusing in and out on lens-based media. Like water and air as media, these technologies shape both conceptions of relationality and the actual relations of humans with and within a more-than-human reality, while mediating our senses of the world and of ourselves in the present. For my work, Seili has been a spectral prism and at times an unforgiving mirror, allowing me to notice that which haunts the periphery of vision, just beyond the edge of the frame, or blurs into the background…

The book Why Exhibit? vol. 2 – On Curating Photography is edited by Anna-Kaisa Rastenberger and Iris Sikking, published by Fw:Books & The Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts Helsinki, 2024.