Post-global Exhibition: Towards a Possibility of Multiple Translations

During the period of active globalization (1980s–late 2010s), the curatorial task of organizing entanglements in time and space shifted towards authorial and managerial functions. Boris Buden compared a curator of the post-colonial period to a translator between the object and the audience, perceiving the ‘filtering’ approach to communication akin to curatorial authorship. However, the new definition of museums, debated by ICOM, places urgencies which demand revisiting these aspects of curatorial practices. To consider the potential of translation less as a linguistic practice or a mediation task, and more as a ‘site of inhabitation’, I turn to artistic projects by Nicoline Van Harskamp, the Slavs and Tatars collective, and Mirosław Bałka, that explored the creolization of names, transliteration and alphabetization, and translation of collective memory into the material. Taken into account the growing presence of technology, I propose that the questions of authorship and responsibility be positioned in connection with data, ownership, access and transliteracy across media.