The main aim of this lecture will be to address the urgency of an epistemological clarification of the position of the contemporary curator in contexts where the curatorial practice supplements the lack of theoretical education of the artists. More precisely, how can one define the difference between curatorially and academically informed artistic practices?

Contemporary curatorial practices have internalised the translational strategies when dealing with various theoretical, artistic, or cultural concepts. Throughout this lecture I attempt to address the questions why and how is such role of a contemporary curator more complex and more socially relevant than the populist concept of the curator as a mediator. The complexity of the translational demands on the curatorial strategies becomes neglected when limiting the curator’s role to the role of a mediator. However I want to argue that even mediating, a concept often supported by many curators, is never pure distant and neutral intervention. “Curator – mediator” is “always already” contaminated by inhabited and internalised preconceptions about different arts, cultures and the world in general.

The translation of various theoretical, cultural, and artistic concepts into projects entails certain pedagogical and epistemological responsibility. Simultaneously it inflicts questioning of the concepts of accumulation and production of universal knowledge and relativisation of their effects. The translational performance of the curatorial “event” resides between the two radical ends of the epistemological and the critical.