OnCurating Issue 32: In this Context: Collaborations & Biennials

Collaborative work is of a special interest because it raises complexities questions on the fundaments of curating and artistic work through questioning the exhibitionary complexes. These concerns extend through to the biennale form where the thematic and their aesthetics move from formalist, object-bound sensibility to practices based on experimentation and agitation, processes, ephemerality, political and social ideas that are locally embedded. The practices represented in this issue are not collectives and collaborations in the traditional sense, but practices that follow more self-instituting strategies grounded in their immediate socio-political contexts. This issue of OnCurating consists of two parts: the first part researches collaborative work with an emphasis on African collectives, and the second part offers an insight into the development of biennials on the African continent. While at first glance these two sections are both geographically and theoretically dispersed, they are held together by the fact that they are projects happening right now, and their immediacy requires engagement.