Curating pandemic contingencies: Remote collaboration and display reconfiguration in practice

Abstract

Amid the restrictions on travelling and gathering imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic, exhibitions with international collaborations in Hong Kong experimented with curating across borders and time. This article examines recent curatorial practices in Hong Kong’s art institutions, particularly relating to site-specific installations and performances that had to cope with the artist’s physical absence and institutional restrictions. Two site-specific art commissions – Shirley Tse’s Negotiated Differences (2020), installed at the M+ Pavilion, and Eisa Jocson’s Zoo (2020), performed at Tai Kwun Contemporary – serve as cases in point illustrating how curatorial practices enabled remote collaboration and display reconfiguration to address authorial absence and institutional interventions during the installation and exhibition phases due to the pandemic. The former case study decentralized the authorial control of artistic criticality from the artist to a collective curation and installation process, while the latter evolved in accordance with protean institutional and social contexts by actively changing the display during the exhibition. Despite the pandemic-imposed separation and restrictions, these two case studies shed light on how curators collaborated with artists and participants across distance and time, actively and flexibly forging responsive and relevant connections between site-specific artworks and the immediate present. Their curatorial practices – as artistic mediation – complicated the conceptual framework of artworks and exhibitions through co-curation and co-production with artists, thus lending a collaborative dimension to the model of exhibition-making and the role of the curator as the ‘curator-as-artist’.