Workshop:Curating Georgia

I documented a 2-day workshops in Tbilisi and Batumi  organized by Lydia Matthews that focused on strengthening Georgia’s curatorial infrastructure. Lydia addressed what is often called the “educational turn” in contemporary curatorial practice: the co-creation of participatory platforms that aim to challenge conventional professional/ pedagogical assumptions to produce new forms of local knowledge.  Sponsored by the Open Society Georgia Foundation, GeoAIR residency program and the Curatorial Design Research Lab at Parsons The New School for Design, the workshops encouraged educational institutions (from multi-disciplinary universities to art academies), cultural organizations (from museums to contemporary art galleries to artist residency programs) and local creative practitioners to consider how to expand their methodologies, widen their audience reach and collaborate to create think-tanks/ “do-tanks” that respond to actual local conditions and urgent needs. Presentations were given by Lydia Matthews, Joanna van der Zanden and Roomservices (Otto von Busch and Evren Uzer) and participants were then challenged to co-produce their own proposals for socially-engaged projects and local curatorial platforms.

Curating as a Social Practice: Georgia is the website that I built to document both cities, and both workshops.