Having worked with the students of the MA Curatorial Practice at the University of Bergen before, course director Anne Szefer Karlsen invited me again to co-edit texts for a publication in which they each individually respond to the same exhibition, titled Responses # 2 – Opinions Informed by Practice. While the previous iteration, Responses #1 (2022), comprised a range of different approaches to writing following a collective visit to a solo exhibition, this time authors each wrote a text in response to the Göteborg International Biennial (GIBCA) 2023 curated by João Laia.
The process was once again very iterative, with Anne giving feedback on an abstract, and us both giving feedback on three rounds of drafts, treating it as a process, in conversation with not only the show but also the curator’s statement and other sources, through which opinions slowly sharpened and deepened. Like previously, my suggestions very much focused on assumed conventions and traditions, trying to highlight what as a first external critical reader worked or not yet, and how certain ways of writing could be expanded on or reined in. The outcome is once again not only a range of different opinions about the same project, but also a set of writerly propositions.
Gerrie van Noord 