AMBIVALENT ORDERS
Symposium of the Austrian Association of Curators (AAC)

Sat 15.11. | MQ Barocke Suiten | Free entry

This one-day symposium brings together Austria-based curators and theorists to discuss the ethics and aesthetics of ambiguous orders.

In contemporary art, the notion of giving is more than a metaphor – it structures the relational economies of curating, institution-building, and artistic labour. Yet giving, as a seemingly benevolent act, is entangled in histories of extraction, systems of recognition, and economies of attention. To give, in art, is also to frame, to delimit, and to condition the terms of reception. The question, then, is not only what is given, but how, by whom, and under what institutional conditions.

This symposium asks what forms of giving might still interrupt rather than reinforce dominant systems – what it means to give without subsuming, to host without absorbing, to support without smoothing over contradiction. Can we still offer the aesthetic strategies of humour, irony, or opacity without their immediate assimilation into the attention economy? In a field where funding is tied to legibility and participation is framed as inclusion, curators must keep inventing grammars – ones that make space not only for the unspeakable, but for the unclear, the unoptimized, the unresolved.

The symposium Ambivalent Orders is conceptualized by the Austrian Association of Curators (Freda Fiala, Mirela Baciak, Laura Amann, Hana Ostan-Ožbolt-Haas, Mirela Baciak, Théo-Mario Coppola, Cornelia Lein, Andrea Popelka, and Jovanka Popova) and organized in partnership with MuseumsQuartier Wien, with the kind support of BMWKMS (Bundesministerium für Wohnen, Kunst, Kultur, Medien und Sport).

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Image: © AAC Austrian Association of Curators