Having been invited for a workshop around writing and editing with the first cohort of the MA Curatorial Practice at the University of Bergen several years earlier, course directorAnne Szefer Karlsen invited me to work with a subsequent cohort on a publication that would comprise a text by each of them. Following an introduction by me and my approach to working with writers, Anne and I both responded to drafts. For this project all students visited the same exhibition and collective thought about their individual responses, the exhibition ‘HARa!!!!!!hAaaRAAAAA!!!!!hHAaA!!!’ with work by Mohamed Bourouissa at Kunsthal Charlottenburg on Copenhagen, curated by Henriette Bretton-Meyers.
As all participants to the course have a real-life place of practice, working in museums, galleries and other art contexts which cannot but inform their views, we landed on the title and its strapline, Responses – Opinions Informed by Practice. The texts range in their approaches from poetic and experiential to critical and contextualising and variations in between. For me it was a great opportunity to work with Anne again, and to think about the place given to writing, editing and publishing as part of curatorial practice – a topic close to my heart and to some extent the focus of my PhD – within an education programme.
Gerrie van Noord 