Not-Knowing: Creating Spaces for Co-curation
Deborah Riding · Artwork scholarship · 2024
This chapter explores how this epistemological position was fostered and explored through a curatorial project Ideas Depot. The research I undertook explored the impact of institutional epistemology within the wider context of curatorial and education practice and developed a framework for the co-creation of knowledge between the gallery and its audiences. Four models of co-creation were constructed: The jigsaw; the reflective pool; the clash and the creative catalyst. All of these models have potential to build collaboratively-generated knowledge about artworks, but the creative catalyst has the most potential for creating new knowledge together, between constituent groups. Associated with the creative catalyst is the development of a new institutional epistemology of not-knowing; one which embraces and cultivates uncertainty, is more equitable and fluid, and retains a speculative space.