November 25 – 27, 2016

CCA Kitakyushu, The Japan Foundation and National Museum of Osaka present ‘Curator Meeting’, a 3 days conference of curatorial practice. The curators who come from various backgrounds meet and stay together for 3 days, and exchange their ideas about key questions they encounter in their own activities.

Curator Meeting: Let’s Talk About Art has been held almost every year since 2010, with this year’s meeting marking the sixth such event. Each time with different participating curators, the main topics discussed in the last 6 years include distortions caused by globalization, changes brought by new technology and the Internet, meaning of art history, art based on locality, influence from the prosperity of the art market. The theme of this 6th meeting is ‘ART NEXT,’ aiming not only to examine the current situation, but also to explore challenges and possibilities for the future.

Nowadays, so many exhibitions and art projects are organized. It seems that we are observing the largest number of art exhibitions in art history. The West is not a center of the art world anymore. There are so many art museums, galleries and alternative spaces all over the world, but these are not only sites for art – in addition to exhibitions, the arena for art is widely expanded to temporary events, publications, and the online platform. The representation styles are diverse. Some works are not made for display, and there are works with restrictions on production.

We could say the number of artists and curators has also hit a record – and they used to mainly live and work in cities of Europe/US, but now they live and work all over the world. The contemporary art market enjoys such prosperity, strongly supported by the power of private capital. The economic situation has also made an impact on the art world.

It’s been a while since ‘The end of art history?’ was discussed. The shift that has occurred in curatorial practice has also been discussed for a while. Even if it is ‘the end,’ the future is always made on the extended line of history. Curator Meeting offers a platform to make connections with future challenges for the field.

This post is also available in: Japanese