31. Curating as an Act of Translation

Since the late 1980s, the proliferation of global biennials and transnational curatorial projects – from Okwui Enwezor’s postcolonial constellations in Documenta 11 to Koyo Kouoh’s posthumous Venice Biennale in 2026 – has positioned curators as translators, moving across languages, borders, and sign systems. As exhibitions increasingly become one of the faces of globalisation and digital infrastructure, what curating translates, and at what or whose cost, has acquired new urgency.

This panel asks whether – and if so, how – curating is an act of translation. In its wider semiotic sense, translation is a creative, transformative process of transfer, bound by social and political consequences. Following Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s account of translation as a “necessary yet impossible act” (2000), we ask what is gained and lost as artworks, archives, and audiences move across institutional, linguistic, and epistemic borders. Bringing comparative literature into dialogue with curatorial and exhibition studies, we build on Homi Bhabha’s account of the Third Space (1994) and Barbara Cassin’s theorisation of the untranslatables (2014) to ask whether curatorial encounters, including those in which artists, artworks or meanings resist translation, can generate new languages and relationships that decolonise knowledge production. What new methodologies and meanings might emerge from this ‘mixedness’, opacity (Glissant) or interstice (Eva von Redecker, 2021; Maria Hlavajova)?

We welcome papers addressing curatorial projects, exhibitions, and institutions that use translation as a critical method. What might (mis)translation offer curatorial practice as a deliberate strategy to rethink socio-political relations? We are particularly interested in papers on modes of address in transnational exhibition-making, and on practices that sustain untranslatability and opacity rather than striving for equivalence.

Themes: Curating, translation, contemporary art

Additional format comment: Proposed format: three 20-minute papers, followed by a 15-minute panel discussion between the convenor and presenters, and a 5-minute audience Q&A.

Lead Convenor: Emily Butler, PHD in Practice in Curating, University of Reading / Teaching Fellow, Courtauld Institute of Art, United Kingdom

Co-convenors: Sophie Mak-Schram, Cardiff Metropolitan University, United Kingdom

To submit a Paper to this Session, please follow the guidance on our website and complete the AAH 2027 Call for Papers Proposal Submission Form.