A Way of Curating video (2005)
“A Way of Curating” was a performance made for video in collaboration with Emelie Chhangur, and was meant to be screened, since I was not attending in person, at the Ontario Association of Art Galleries’ Unspoken Assumptions—Curators in Context in Banff, July 16, 2005. The critique of curating came first, then the comedy, poking more fun at myself than curating, however. It was a “Five Shirts Productions,” referencing the five shirts from London’s Petticoat Lane market I changed into. But at the end of the one take (we were lent Vtape’s screening room for the shoot, but only for an hour), with the cuing of video and the changing of shirts—to mark temporal disjunctions—I realized I had changed into only four shirts. The coda was then made later to honour that fifth shirt. Cue to 29:58 to see the coda. The opening shot, of course, is an homage to the opening credits of Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising.
I wrote this text after Spirit Hunter. If, as I claimed writing led my curating, how would I now accommodate this book’s notions of haunting and hospitality in my curatorial practice?