Suzana Milevska: Negotiations: Curatorial practice in the period of globalisation

WORLD OF ART
Laboratorium of Curatorial Practices
Season 12: 2008/09

Series of Lectures on Curatorial and Institutional Practices

Thursday, April 9, 2009, 7 p.m.
Project Room SCCA, Metelkova 6, Ljubljana

Negotiation is originally a specialised and formal procedure of conflict resolution, most frequently employed when important political issues must be agreed between disputed parties. The aim of negotiating in politics is to build a shared environment leading to long-term trust and often involves a third, neutral party to extract the issues from the emotions and keep the concerned individuals focused on the process. Negotiating requires knowledge of negotiation theory, expert skills and diplomatic experience in order to combine conflicting positions into a common position under a decision rule of unanimity. The negotiation theory can be interpreted in structural, strategic, integrative, or behavioural terms since it employs decision analysis, behavioural decision making, game theory, and integrative negotiation analysis.

All methods that have already been applied, consciously or intuitively, in various examples of international curatorial projects helped the curators in translating various cultural and political contexts while working on the world art scene. The concept of negotiation is important and urgent for the curatorial profession since in arts, particularly in the period of globalisation, there are many different parties (artists, art institutions, cultural policy makers, sponsors, etc.), that have to come to an agreement in order to achieve project’s main aims. I will exemplify this urgency through different examples of unrealised projects that failed exactly in the course of negotiation.

Suzana MilevskaSuzana Milevska is a curator and a visual culture theorist based in Skopje. Her research and curatorial interests include postcolonial critique of art institutions, gender studies of art and participatory art. She is a professor in Art History and Analysis of Styles at Accademia Italiana and New York University in Skopje.