Embodied Curating

As curators, who are we and where are we going? What drives our work? What motivates our practices of curation? What role does language, literature, writing, and storytelling play? And where do our bodies come into this work—when it comes to subjective embodiment and phenomenological leanings, but also to labor, race, class? How can we consider the place of our desires and drives in contemporary curatorial practice, rooted as we both are in intersectional, anti-racist feminist frameworks, and working as white women? Here, we reflect on autotheory in terms of curatorial strategies. We reflect on our own practices as curators through the framework of autotheory, or the bridging of autobiography, embodiment, and self-reflection with theory, philosophy, and criticism: autotheory as a practice that melds the more scholarly, academic, research-based mode with autobiographical and reflective work.